St Guthlac of Crowland

Guthlac was born around 674 into a noble Mercian family, spent his youth as a successful warrior-chieftain, and then, at the age of 24, underwent a sudden conversion so complete that he gave up everything and sought the most punishing solitude available: the fenland island of Crowland, a low, boggy, unreachable place deep in the Lincolnshire marshes that no other hermit had managed to inhabit.

He stayed for the rest of his life, and the demons that came with the territory were not symbolic. Felix's Life of Guthlac, written within living memory of the saint, describes physical attacks: being seized by crowds of howling, stinking demons and hauled into the freezing black water; being dragged bodily into the air and threatened; being assailed with voices in the British tongue — probably Welsh, suggesting these were the tormented souls of Britons dispossessed by the Anglo-Saxon advance. Guthlac repelled them all with psalm-singing, prayer, and a scourge.

After his death in 714 he became one of the most popular English saints, and the abbey built over his hermitage at Crowland (now Crowland Abbey) became a major pilgrimage site. The Guthlac Roll — a remarkable twelfth-century illustrated scroll depicting his life and miracles — survives in the British Library.