see you, that ye may in that respect hold you towards him as ye have done and do to all others,” i.e. remain veiled. “If he will anyway have a sight, look that it be full short; the veil anon down, and draw you behind.”
Now between 1225 and 1231 there was dispute between the Abbey of Westminster and the Bishop of London with regard to jurisdiction over the cell of Kilburn. It was settled in 1231 by a Commission appointed by the Pope. The bishop was given the right of hearing “confessio privata” at Kilburn.
It is clear that by this date the Kilburn community had also grown to a greater number than that of the original three anchoresses. Further, both the new Kilburn regulations and the revised Rule seem to point to the necessity of stricter supervision. If we identify the two, we get a very consistent picture. As Miss Allen says: “the writer of the new passages [in the Rule] would doubtless be on the side of the abbot in the controversy,” and this, she surmises, “perhaps accounts for the somewhat suspicious manner which he shows towards the bishop.” The Abbey resisted the bishop’s claims over itself, but had to sacrifice the Kilburn sisterhood, and left it to the anchoresses to put the bishop in his place: “ȝef he wule allegate habben a sihðe, lokið þet hit beo ful scheort.” As Miss Allen says, this is “perhaps the strongest piece of evidence for the identification, apart from the similarity in the circumstances of the original inclusæ.”[1]
On the other hand, there are grave difficulties in the way of the identification, and, with characteristic thoroughness, Miss Allen herself points them out.
There is a clear connection between the Ancren Riwle and St. Aelred’s De vita eremitica ad sororem liber. In one place our text of the Rule refers to this: “as Saint Aelred wrote to his sister.” Aelred was not canonised till 1191—yet the insertion of the word “Saint” might, of course, simply be the work of a scribe.[2] But any reference to St. Aelred’s letter would seem to make the connection with the three Kilburn anchoresses difficult. For Queen Maud, to whom the three Kilburn anchoresses had been “domicellæ cameræ,” died in 1118. The domicellæ may, of course, have been
