St. Wulfric of Haselbury

Who was St. Wulfric of Haselbury?

St. Wulfric of Haselbury was a country priest who loved hunting more than prayer, until a stranger asked him for a coin. He spent the rest of his life, twenty-nine years, enclosed as an anchorite in a small cell against the wall of the village church at Haselbury Plucknett in Somerset. There he prayed, did hard penance, and became one of the most sought-after holy men in twelfth-century England. Butler and Baring-Gould also call him St. Ulric or Ulrick.

An anchorite is not quite a hermit. A hermit lives alone in the wild; an anchorite is enclosed, usually for life, in a cell attached to a church, with a small window to the altar and another to the world. People came to that second window for advice, prayer and healing. Wulfric "always spoke to men with his window closed," Roger of Wendover says, and yet his words "sounded like celestial harmony to those who heard him."

His story was written down within living memory of his death and retold by the chronicler Roger of Wendover in the next century. We follow Wendover here.

The life of St. Wulfric

The hunting priest

Wendover says Wulfric "was born of an English family, in moderate circumstances," at Compton, "a village about eight miles from Bristol," usually identified as Compton Martin in Somerset. He was ordained a priest, but, Wendover writes, he received holy orders "in the careless levity of youth, rather than by the settled purpose of his mind." He "spent much of his time among hounds and hawks."

Two pieces and a half

One day, while he was out hunting, a poor-looking man asked him for one of the new coins that King Henry I had just issued and that were still hard to come by. Wulfric said he did not know whether he had any. The man answered, "Look into your purse, and you will find there two pieces and a half." Wulfric looked, found exactly that, and gave them away. The stranger said:

May he, for whose love you have done this, return you a proper retribution. I tell you in his name, that you will shortly remove from this place to another, and from thence to a third, where you will at last find repose: there you will persevere in the service of God, who will at last summon you away to join the communion of saints.

The anchorite of Haselbury

Wulfric gave up meat and attached himself to William, the lord of his village, who helped him go to Haselbury, "a village about thirty miles to the east of Exeter." There, "buried in a cell near the church," he lived for Christ. He fasted until "his skin hardly adhered to his bones." At night, Wendover says, he would "plunge naked into a bath of very cold water, and there offer to the Lord the psalmody of king David." Baring-Gould adds that once, troubled by impure thoughts on Easter Eve, he went into the church the next day, confessed it before the people, and asked for their prayers.

He died in his cell on February 20, 1154, and was buried in his oratory at Haselbury.

The miracles of St. Wulfric

None of these wonders has been formally examined by the Church. They come from his medieval life and from the chronicles:

• The coat of mail (traditional). He wore a coat of mail under his plain robe, sent by his lord, Wendover says, "dedicating an instrument of war to the service of the heavenly warfare." When it hit his knees and hindered his many genuflections, the knight offered to send it to London to be shortened. Wulfric handed him shears and went to pray. While Wulfric prayed, the knight "felt as if he was cutting cloth, not iron"; when Wulfric stopped praying, the shears stopped cutting.
• The healing rings (reported). Afterward Wulfric pulled rings from the mail with his fingers and gave them to the sick. Wendover says religious men of his own day still claimed to own rings from that coat.
• The man at the ford (traditional). A man from the north who had given himself to the devil set out to see Wulfric and was held fast in the river ford outside Haselbury. Wulfric, warned in a vision, sent his priest Brithric with a cross and holy water. The man was freed, confessed his sins, and received Communion from Wulfric's hands.
• Miracles at his grave (reported). Wendover says miracles were still performed at his burial place "even to the present time."

Symbols of St. Wulfric in art

Few old images of Wulfric survive, so his symbols come straight from his story:

• A coat of chain mail under a plain robe, his penance and the source of his healing rings.
• Shears, from the miracle of the mail coat.
• The window of an anchorite's cell, through which he counseled and blessed visitors.
• Hawks and hounds, sometimes shown to recall the life he left behind.

Feast day and where he is honored

We keep St. Wulfric's feast on February 20. Baring-Gould says he was kept in Wilson's Anglican Martyrology and in the Benedictine calendar. The parish church of St. Michael and All Angels at Haselbury Plucknett still keeps his memory, and his cell stood against its wall. You can find other saints of late February on our feast days page.

Praying with St. Wulfric

There is no traditional prayer to St. Wulfric that has come down to us. We ask his help simply: "St. Wulfric, pray for us." He is a good patron for priests who want to begin again, for anyone who has spent years on lesser loves and longs to give God the rest of life, and for the sick, who came to his window in such numbers.

Let us ask St. Wulfric to make us generous at the first knock of grace, as he was on the day a poor man asked him for a coin.