Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

270 JULIANA OF NORWICH.
wrote ill 1370, when she wras thirty years old, a book
which is to English piety very much what St. Catherine
of Siena's works were to her Italian contemporaries.
In Norwich, the second town of England in
f
mediaeval times, with its 60,000 inhabitants, dwelt
in the latter twenty years of Edward III. Juliana
the Anchoress. An author1 has well said that she
and her sisters set forth in their lives and whole
being the distinguishing mark of English piety, a
tender love for our Lord. The home of the anchor-
"
ess, that is, the cell in which she passed her days, was
attached to the church. From its narrow window
she looked upon the altar over which, in mediaeval
times, the Blessed Sacrament was reserved; and so
her heart, free from earthly ties, fed upon Him alone.
There was this essential difference between the her-
I
mit and the anchorite, that the one retired to solitary
*"
places away from the crowd, and that the 4 other
became a solitary amidst the abodes of men. The
hermit lived very often in the woods: the anchorite
attached himself to the tabernacle of the living God.
In Juliana's time the murmur
.
of the busy world
reached her cell attached to the church of St. Carrow.
i
The monetary struggles of Edward III. had a
deep echo at Norwich, as the great seat "of the
woollen manufactures, which produced no (incon-
siderable part of his revenues. Two questions, each
containing the germ of revolution, were agitating
men: the rebellion of labour against property, and
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1 Fr. Dakrairns in Preface to Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection.