Melangell and the Hare in the Fold of Her Robe

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There is a hare under the hem of a young woman's robe, and she is saying the evening psalms to it.

She does not seem to think this is odd. She is sitting on a rock beside a thorn bush, in a clearing in a Welsh valley, with a small brown animal pressed against her knee, breathing very fast. Her voice is steady. She goes on with the psalm. And beyond the thorn bush, just out of sight, there is a noise like the end of the world, which is a pack of hunting dogs, a great many horsemen, and one very loud prince.

The noise gets closer. The hare shivers. The young woman does not stop praying, and she does not move her hand from the animal's back. And then, quite suddenly, the barking turns into a whine. And the whining turns into silence. And somebody, somewhere behind the bush, says a word that I am not going to repeat on a bedtime programme.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Saint Melangell, a holy woman of early Wales who is loved above all as the friend of hares. Her story comes from an old Latin life that was written down long after her time, and we will tell you plainly where the record is solid and where it is the old story speaking. A few of the small conversations, and most of the hare's behaviour, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin with the valley, because the valley is half of this story, and it is a very good half.

If you drive north and west out of the English midlands, you go on climbing until the road narrows and the hedges grow taller and the signposts begin to be written twice, once in English and once in a language that looks, to an English eye, as if a very organised person had dropped a bag of consonants. This is Wales. And if you keep going into the hills of Powys, you come to a place where the land folds in on itself, and a small river runs down between steep green slopes, and the sheep stand on the slopes at angles that suggest they do not read the safety notices. The river is called the Tanat. The valley it runs down is called, in Welsh, Pennant, which means the head of the valley, and it is a very good name, because that is exactly where you are. You are at the head of it. Behind you, the hills get steeper. In front of you, there is nothing to do but look.

In the autumn there is bracken the colour of a fox. In the winter there is cloud that sits on the tops like a lid. In the spring, there are lambs. And in the summer, if you are patient, and you sit very still beside a bank of gorse with a flask of tea, you may see, at the edge of the field, a long-legged brown animal that looks like a rabbit that has been to a very good school, and has grown up faster than expected. That is a hare.

Now I should explain the hare, because most of us do not meet one very often, and if we are going to spend an evening with one it is only polite to be introduced.

A hare is not a rabbit. They are cousins, the way a cat is the cousin of a lion, which is to say that they have a good deal in common, and the lion would not like to be called a cat. A rabbit lives in a burrow, in a crowd, underground, with its relatives and its relatives' relatives, and when it is frightened it dives for the nearest hole. A hare does not do any of that. A hare lives in the open. It has no burrow. It has, instead, a little scooped dip in the grass or the ploughed earth, called a form, just exactly the shape of a hare, where it sits all day with its ears laid flat along its back, so still that you can walk within a few feet of it and never see it. Its brown fur is the colour of dry grass and old earth. Its eyes are set so far round the sides of its head that it can see almost all the way around, including behind. And when it is found, when something it did not like comes too close, it does not hide. It runs. A hare can run faster than a galloping horse over a short stretch, and it can change direction in the middle of the run, in a way that has been making dogs look foolish for thousands of years.

Hares have a few other habits that people have always found delightful. Their babies are born already furred, with their eyes open, in the form in the grass. They are called leverets, and the mother does not even stay with them. She visits once a night to feed them and then goes away, so that her scent does not lead a fox to the nest. And in the early spring, the hares of the field go in for a kind of boxing, standing on their hind legs and thumping one another with their front feet, which gave us the phrase about being mad as a March hare. For a very long time, people thought it was the males fighting over the females. It turns out, if the people who study them are right, that it is very often the females telling the males to leave them alone. Which I think is the kind of fact that a story about Saint Melangell ought to have, and I leave it with you.

There is one more thing about hares. They were hunted. They were hunted for meat, and they were hunted for sport, and in the world of this story the sport was a great deal more popular than the meat. Great men kept packs of hounds, and rode out in the early morning with horns and spears, and the hare was the thing you ran down. It was a kind of tournament in which only one side had been told it was playing.

Now let us put a person in the valley.

The old Latin life tells us that her name was Melangell. You say it, if you want to try, something like meh-LANG-eth, with the last sound like the th in the word "this", and the Welsh will forgive you whatever you do. In some old books she is called Monacella, which is a Latin nickname meaning something like the little nun. She was, the old life says, the daughter of an Irish king, whose name appears in the manuscripts as Jowchel. And now we must be careful about what this story is. It is a legend. It was written down, in the form we have it, in Latin, and copied out by a scribe in the fifteenth century, a good many hundred years after the time in which it says she lived. The monk who wrote it did not see anything. He passed on what the valley had remembered. And what the valley had remembered, and the old life says, goes like this.

Melangell was a young woman in Ireland, in a royal household, in a world where a king's daughter was expected to be married to somebody useful. And her father had a husband in mind. He was, one gathers, a person of rank, and wealth, and all the right qualifications, except the one that mattered, which was that Melangell did not want to marry him. She wanted something else. She wanted a quiet life, given to God, with room in it for prayer. And this, in the household of an Irish king, was not a thing a daughter was allowed to say twice.

So, the old story says, she ran away. I like this about her, I must say. In the long history of the saints there is a tradition of young people leaving home in a hurry for the sake of the Lord, and it is always a mixture of the heroic and the extremely impractical. She went to the coast. She found a ship. She crossed the sea, and she was carried, the old life says, by the hand of God, across the water to the coast of Britain and then inland, through hills and across rivers, until she came to the head of the valley, and the river, and the gorse, and the silence. And there she stopped.

And there she stayed.

For a long time, said the old life. For fifteen years. She lived, as far as we are told, in a small shelter at the head of the valley, by herself, and she prayed, and she did not meet anybody. She did not hold court. She did not preach. She did not build a famous monastery or gather a school or write a rule. She was just a woman, at the head of a valley, praying. And the thing I find most moving about this is that nobody in the valley seems to have known about it. A woman lived there for fifteen years and the neighbours did not mind. She was simply there, the way a tree is simply there. The world went by at the bottom of the hill and she did not disturb it.

I don't want to rush her fifteen years. So let us stay with them a moment, and let me tell you what I think they were like, and I will say in advance that I am inventing. The old life does not tell us. But it tells us enough that I can guess.

She would have got up with the light, which in summer in Powys is very early and in winter is very late, and said her prayers in the cold. There would have been a spring close by, where she washed. There would have been a patch of ground where she grew things, kale and beans and the sort of root vegetable that does well when you hate it. There was bread, which she may have made herself or may have been given. There were no clocks, so the day was measured by the sun and the sheep. She would have heard the river all day, a thing that after a few weeks stops sounding like noise and starts sounding like a sort of company.

And I think she must have met the hare.

Not that hare. Not yet. But hares. The long brown shapes at the edge of the field, the ones who sat in their forms in the morning frost. She lived in a place where they lived, and she lived so quietly that after a while they stopped being afraid of her. This happens. Anybody who has sat still in a field for a long time will tell you it happens. You become part of the furniture. The wild thing decides that you are not an event, and goes back to its breakfast. And Melangell, sitting in front of her little shelter with a bowl of something warm in her hands, would have looked up one dawn and seen a hare, thirty feet away, washing its face with both paws, like a very small bank manager.

I think she would have smiled. And I think that is where the story begins.

The day of the hunt was a clear one.

This is the part of the old life that everybody remembers. It was a bright, cold morning, in what the story takes to be the sixth or the seventh century, though the old life is not particularly interested in dates, and the prince in question is a man whose own dates historians argue about. His name was Brochwel. Brochwel Ysgithrog, the old Welsh books call him, which means Brochwel of the Tusks, for reasons nobody quite remembers. He was the prince of Powys. He ruled the whole region, from the Severn to the hills, and he was a man of the sort that you get in that kind of story: large, handsome, loud, much loved by his followers and a little too fond of getting his own way.

He loved hunting. Oh, he loved it. He kept a pack of hounds the way some people keep a collection of stamps, and he knew every one by name, and he took them out, whenever the weather was good, and his men and horses went with them in a long glittering line, with horns and bridles and cloaks of green and blue and, for all I know, sandwiches.

On the morning in question, they came up the valley.

I want you to picture it properly, because there is something wonderful in the scale. On one side of the clearing there is a hillside. It is cold and clear and the bracken is crackling with frost. On the other side, the river. And down the middle of the valley, from the south, there comes a long, rolling sound, and it is not the river. It is dogs. It is the sound of a great many dogs who have smelled something and are extremely excited about it, and behind them the horn, which goes up and down in long notes, and behind the horn, the voices of the men calling to one another. There is something in a hunting sound that is old and wild and, if you are a person who has been sitting alone in a valley for fifteen years, a good deal too loud.

Melangell heard it from her shelter. She was at prayer, as she usually was at that hour, kneeling on the ground with her hands folded in front of her. She did not stop. People who pray every day are good at going on while the world makes a noise. But she listened, and she thought, I expect, that the sound would pass. Hunts did. It would go on up the hill, or down the river, or across the moor, and in an hour it would be gone.

It did not pass.

Because what she did not know, and what she soon found out, was that the sound was coming toward her. And in front of the sound there was something small, and brown, and very fast.

The hare came out of the bracken at a speed that cannot be described to a person who has not seen one run. It crossed the clearing in what felt like one stride. It had no plan. A hare in full flight is not thinking. It is running with its whole body, ears flat, back legs flung out behind it, going as fast as a living thing can go, with a pack of hounds a few lengths behind it, and the one thing a hare cannot do, once it has run and run and run, is run forever. It was tired. It was exhausted. And it had been chased across half of the valley, over the stones, through the brambles, across the stream, and it had come, at last, to a place where there was a person.

The old life says it ran straight at her.

Now the clever part of the story is what it did next. A hare, as I said, does not hide. It is not an animal of holes. It is an animal of the open, of speed, of the sudden swerve. But on that particular morning, at that particular clearing, with the hounds a few bounds behind, the hare did something that no hare in the field had ever been known to do. It went to the girl. It ran in under the fold of her robe, where it fell over her knee, and it lay there, trembling, pressed against her, with its ears flat, its eyes wide, and its small heart going like a drum.

Melangell looked down.

I would very much like to know what she was thinking. The old life does not say. But I do not think she was afraid, because she was not someone who got afraid easily. I think she was surprised, and then she was very gentle. She put her hand on the hare's back, and felt the heartbeat through the fur, and said to it, in a voice I imagine to have been very low, something like, "There now. There now. You are quite all right." Which is a thing you can say to a person or to a hare, and which, in either case, works about half the time.

And then the dogs arrived.

They came out of the bracken in a great brown and white wave, a dozen of them, more, with their heads down and their tongues out and their ears streaming, and every one of them was running toward the girl.

I must pause here, because this is the moment when the story is most likely to be told badly. It is easy to make it into a scene of fright and violence. It was not. It was a scene in which a girl sat on a rock in the cold with a hare under her robe and did nothing at all. She did not shout. She did not raise a staff. She did not wave her arms or make a fuss. She sat, and she looked at the dogs, and, the old life says, she went on praying.

And the dogs stopped.

Not all at once. First the leader pulled up, with his front legs stiff, sliding on the wet grass, so that the two behind ran into him and nearly turned a somersault. Then the rest, one after another, like a line of carriages shunting on a railway. Then they stood there, in a half circle, ten paces off, and none of them came any nearer. They did not bark. A moment ago the whole valley had been full of their voices, and now there was nothing. The leader's tail went down. A younger hound at the back whimpered, a high little sound, and lay down on its belly in the grass with its nose on its paws. The old life says they backed away. It says they went on whining and slinking, and could not be made to come back, though the huntsmen shouted at them.

And I want to be careful about how we hear that. This is where a person might say, oh, so she had a power over dogs, she was a sort of enchantress. And that is not what the old life says, and it is not what this programme believes. We are told that she was praying. We are told that the dogs stopped. We are told, by implication, that it was the Lord who stopped them. He is the one who made the dogs and the hare and the girl, and who is fully able, if he wishes, to make one of them gentler than another. Melangell did nothing. She was, as saints often are, in the way of what God was doing. And what God was doing was keeping a small frightened animal alive.

Then the prince came up.

He rode into the clearing on a big bay horse, with his spear in his right hand, red in the face, and a bit short of breath. His men came behind him, two and three at a time, in their blue cloaks. Brochwel pulled up in the middle of the clearing and looked around, and saw, in order: his dogs, who were lying down; the thorn bush; a girl on a rock, in a plain brown robe, with her hands folded; and in the fold of the robe, half hidden, the ears of a hare.

He said, in a voice which I think was meant to be thunderous and came out a little weak, "Call them up."

The huntsman blew the horn. The old life says the horn stuck to his lips. Some versions of the story tell it that way, anyway, and I don't want to make a theological point about it. It is the kind of detail that you put in a story for children when you want them to laugh, and I think it is meant to be a little funny. The huntsman blew, and the horn would not leave his mouth, and he stood there, holding it with both hands, going pink and then purple, while the dogs lay in the grass and looked at the sky.

And then Brochwel did something I very much like. He stopped.

He had come up the valley to kill a hare. He was a prince. He had a hundred men behind him and a spear in his hand, and in front of him there was one young woman, alone, in the middle of a field. A weaker sort of person would have gone on. A louder sort would have shouted. Brochwel, instead, looked at the girl for a long time, and then looked at the hare, and then looked back at the girl. He did not get down from his horse. But he lowered the spear.

"Who are you?" he said. His voice had changed.

And now she spoke.

I imagine she spoke slowly. She had not said a great many words to anybody for a long time, and the sentences must have come out one at a time, like water out of a cold tap. She told him her name. She told him that she was from Ireland, and a king's daughter, and she told him why she had come: that her father had wished to marry her to a man she did not wish to marry, and that she had run away, across the sea, to a place where God might keep her safe and let her pray. She said she had been there for fifteen years. She said she had never harmed anyone, and had never wished to.

And Brochwel, sitting on his horse, with the spear lowered, listened. The old life says, that he was moved. It says that he listened to the whole of her account, and at the end of it, said something that, I think, he did not entirely expect to say.

He said, "This is a place of refuge now."

I find that sentence one of the best in the whole of the old life. He had come hunting, and what he said was refuge. He did not say, you may stay. He did not say, I give you permission. He said, this is a sanctuary. He gave her the land. He gave her the whole valley, as a place where anybody who was hunted, or frightened, or running for their life, might come and be safe, and he said that no one should be taken from it by force. It was, the old life says, a place where a man in danger could come to her door, and the prince's own people would not touch him.

And, as the story is told, nobody in that valley was allowed to hunt a hare.

There is a lovely thing about this part of the tale, which is that I think most people believe it, at least in the sense that matters, because of what the valley kept doing afterward. The old custom was that the people of the valley called the hares by a special name. They called them Melangell's lambs. In Welsh, Wyn Melangell, or Oen Melangell. And it was said that if a hare was being hunted, and a man said, quietly, "God and Saint Melangell save you," the hare would escape. The old people said it, and you may think what you like about whether the hare could hear. But it was said by ordinary farming people in a mountain valley for the better part of a thousand years, and that, to me, is a great deal more interesting than whether a horn can stick to a man's face.

I will say that again, because it matters. The legend may or may not be true in all its details. The valley is true. The church is true. The habit of the hares is true. Something happened in that place, once, that made a whole community feel it should be safe for the small and hunted. And that feeling, I think, is the real miracle of Pennant, and it lasted a very long time.

What did she do afterward?

Here the old life gets very practical, which I like. It says that other women came to join her. There was a young woman who had heard of the valley, and then another, and then a small group. They built small cells and a little church. And Melangell, who had asked for nothing in the world except to be left alone, became, quite against her inclinations, an abbess. This is a thing that happens to saints with a gift for quiet. They go to the end of the earth to avoid being in charge, and the end of the earth fills up behind them, and one fine morning they find a community on their hands and a roster of who is doing the washing up.

I think she took it well. I like to imagine that she took it the way she took the hare. She did not make a fuss. She learned the names of the new sisters. She learned who liked what, and who needed to be left alone in the mornings, and who talked in their sleep. She taught them the psalms. She sat with them in the evenings in the little church, with a lamp. And, the old life says, the prince came back, and sometimes brought gifts, and sometimes sat on a stone at the back for an hour without saying a word, and then went away looking thoughtful.

And the valley went on being a refuge. Poor people came with their troubles. Frightened people came, who had done something foolish or had something done to them. Animals came, too, I imagine, since the old life says that the wild creatures of the valley were not afraid of her. The hare was only the first of them. There are stories of other small animals, the hedgehog and the wren and the shy brown fieldmouse, coming to the door and being fed. I cannot vouch for those, and the old life does not say much about them. But I would like to think that in the evening, in the little church, when the sisters had said their psalms and the lamp burned low, there was a small brown shape at the back, under the bench, with its ears laid flat, that did not belong to any of them and was not asked to leave.

And she lived like that, in her valley, for thirty-seven years more, the old life says. Thirty-seven, and fifteen, and the whole of her life is one long afternoon in a Welsh valley. And at the end of it she died, in the quiet way that the saints of the old life do, and was buried there. The old life does not give her a grand death. It simply says that she died in peace, and that the community mourned her, and that the valley kept her memory.

The feast of Saint Melangell is on the twenty-seventh of May. And now we are going to slow down a little, because the day is almost done.

Here is what happened to the place.

It would be nice to say that the valley stayed exactly as she left it, a green hollow in the hills with a stream. In a way it did. But the people remembered her, and they did what people do. They built a church. We do not know the first one. It may have been of timber. But by the twelfth century, there was a stone church at the head of the Tanat, small and thick-walled, in the Romanesque style that was common in the Welsh border. It stands there still. It is not large. It is, in fact, rather small. Inside, there is a shrine, a stone shrine made in the twelfth century, with carved decoration on its sides, and for many hundreds of years it held the memory of the saint, in the place where she died.

And here is a part of the story that you may like. The shrine, like a great many shrines in Britain, was taken apart. It was broken up at the time of the Reformation, in the sixteenth century, when the old devotions were swept out of the churches. The pieces were hidden away. They were built into walls, they were left in the churchyard, and for a very long time nobody knew what they had been. Then, in the twentieth century, someone noticed the pieces. They were collected, and examined, and fitted together, like a stone jigsaw puzzle with some parts missing. And in our own lifetimes, a good deal of the old shrine was put back, in the little church in the valley, and people began to come again.

It is a quiet place, they say. It has a churchyard with yew trees, very old, and a stream running past the wall. There is a little chapel, built behind the church, with a round apse where the shrine used to be. In the summer, there are visitors. People who are going through a hard time often come. People who have been hunted, in one way or another, by illness or grief or fear or other people. And hares are carved in the woodwork, and painted on the glass, and drawn, in pencil, on cards in the visitors' book.

And in the fields around it, if you are patient, and sit still beside the gorse with a flask of tea, you might see, at the edge of the grass, a long brown shape with its ears laid flat, sitting very quietly in its form. It would not be anybody's business but its own. It would have no idea it was part of a story. And it would be, in a country that has been a refuge for hares for more than a thousand years, perfectly at home.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

The main source for tonight's story is a Latin life of Saint Melangell, called in some books the life of Monacella, which was copied out in the fifteenth century. That is a long time after she lived. So what we have is a legend, told by monks who got it from the valley, and it should be heard that way. The things we can say with real confidence are the church and the shrine at Pennant Melangell, which are still there, the custom of calling the hares her lambs, which was recorded by later writers, and the fact that she was honoured in that valley for a very long time. Beyond that, the details are the old story speaking: the Irish king, the flight by sea, the fifteen years, the prince and his hounds, the horn that stuck to the huntsman's lips, and the gift of the valley. Historians are not sure of the prince's dates, and the old life gives none for Melangell herself.

What this episode made up is the small things. The conversations. The way the hare sat. The suppers and the weather. Her thoughts, which the old life does not give us, and which I have imagined as best I can. And the hares' boxing, the leverets and the form in the grass, which are not from the old life at all but from people who study hares, and who are, I think, the only ones who know.

One more thing. This is a story about a saint who was a refuge, and about a prince who decided to be one too. It is not a story about magic. The hounds stopped because God stopped them, not because a girl had a trick. And she did not do a great deal. She sat, and prayed, and said, "You are quite all right." And that was enough.

That's the story of Melangell for tonight. Her feast is kept on the twenty-seventh of May, and the little church in the valley of the Tanat is still there, with a shrine, and a yew tree in the churchyard, and, if you are lucky, a hare at the edge of the field. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord, who watches over the sparrow and the hare, watch over you tonight, and keep you safe, and let you rest. Goodnight, and God bless.

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