Among those who sought the help of Saint Guthlac (c. 674–714) in his fenland hermitage were, according to his biographer Felix, the parents of a young man named Hwætred. “Vexed for four years by an evil spirit” (per quadrennium a maligno spiritu vexatum), emaciated and devoid of strength, the boy had previously been brought by his mother and father to “the holy places of the saints so that he might be washed in holy water by priests and bishops” (ad sacratas sedes sanctorum adductus est, ut a sacerdotibus episcopisque sacratis fontibus lavaretur). Without exception, these remedies had afforded no relief, and the parents nearly despaired until word reached them of the miracles wrought by “a certain hermit who dwelt in the midst of the fen on an island called Crowland.” And so they undertook the journey to Crowland where, after receiving his guests warmly, Guthlac immediately led the afflicted boy by the hand to his oratory. Three days of fasting and prayer followed. Then, at sunrise on the third day, Guthlac “washed him in the water of the sacred font and, breathing into his face the breath of healing, he drove away from him all the power of the evil spirit” (tertia vero die, orto sole, sacrati fontis undis abluit, et, inflans in faciem eius spiritum salutis, omnem valitudinem maligni spiritus de illo reppulit). Not again for the rest of his life would Hwætred be so afflicted.

Accounts of saints’ healings of demoniacs are, of course, very much to be expected in works of hagiography, demonstrating as they do how the heroes of these narratives shared in the “power over unclean spirits” Christ granted his apostles (Matthew 10:1). But it has not gone unnoticed that the cure just described is not wholly in keeping with the conventions of this tradition. Felix's divergences from prior examples, the present essay will suggest, indicate not only his occasional independence from them, but also something of the tensions between secular and regular clergy manifest in the conciliar legislation of this period; tensions that Felix does not manage wholly to conceal in his accounts of Guthlac's meeting with Bishop Headda and subsequent ordination. (It is notable, as we will see, that a later recasting of Felix's Vita removes outright the details that Felix had narrated with seeming evasiveness.).