Saint Vulfric

Saint Wulfric of Haselbury, also recorded as Vulfric, was an English priest and anchorite of the twelfth century. Almost everything that can be said of him with any confidence derives from a Latin life written within a generation of his death by John, abbot of the Cistercian house of Forde in Dorset, who collected testimony from people who had known the hermit, including a priest named Osbern who had served him. Wulfric was born at Compton Martin in Somerset; no contemporary source records an exact year of birth. He was ordained and for a time served as a priest at Deverill in Wiltshire. His biographer states that in those years he still took pleasure in hunting with hawks and hounds, until a conversion of life led him to a stricter priestly observance and then to withdrawal from the world.

In or about 1125, with the consent of William FitzWalter, lord of the manor, Wulfric was enclosed as an anchorite in a cell built against the church at Haselbury Plucknett in Somerset. He remained in that cell until his death nearly twenty-nine years later. He practised severe bodily austerities, among them the wearing of a hair shirt and a heavy coat of mail, and he devoted long hours to the recitation of the Psalter. Though physically enclosed, he received many visitors who sought spiritual counsel. Contemporaries credited him with prophecy, knowledge of distant events, and insight into the hidden thoughts of those who came to him. Kings Henry I and Stephen are both said to have consulted him, and medieval accounts attribute to him predictions touching the succession and the civil war of Stephen’s reign.

Wulfric died on 20 February 1154 and was buried in his cell. The burial place drew pilgrims and a local cult grew up around him. He was never the object of a formal papal canonization, a procedure that was only then becoming centralized; his veneration remained essentially regional, though his name appears in some later medieval calendars and he has been commemorated on 20 February. Surviving evidence does not record a wife, children, or profession in a monastic order: he lived and died as a diocesan priest who had become an independent anchorite. The parish church at Haselbury Plucknett has continued to be associated with his memory.