Cissa of Crowland

Our Venerable Father Cissa, Hermit of Crowland

Venerable · Priest · d. 8th century

Cissa was an eighth-century hermit of Crowland in the English fenland, a disciple of St Guthlac and his successor as keeper of the hermitage. The whole of his record comes from Felix's near-contemporary Life of Guthlac and the traditions of Crowland that grew from it: born among a heathen people and not yet baptized, he came to Britain and received baptism, as Guthlac had foretold; he "afterwards held the place" of his master's solitude; he was a priest; and it was from his lips, with those of the abbot Wilfrid, that Felix gathered much of what he wrote of Guthlac. No vita of Cissa himself survives, no date of death is transmitted, and the medieval English calendars assign him no day; he is commemorated on September 23 in the calendar followed here.

No life of Cissa was ever written, and everything known of him is incidental to the record of his master. The surviving notices are these, and the Life stops where they stop.

Felix's witness. Felix, writing his Latin Life of Guthlac about 730–740 for King Ælfwald of the East Angles, names his informants in the prologue: he investigated all he wrote "from the most reverend abbot Wilfrid and from the priest, of pure conscience as I judge, Cissa, and also from others who had long dwelt with the man of God and knew his life in part." The Anglo-Saxon version of the Life repeats the debt at its opening: "I begin now to speak of the life of the blessed man Guthlac, as I have heard those relate who knew his life, Wilfrid and Cissa." Cissa was thus alive when Felix wrote, a priest, and one of the two men on whose testimony the principal record of Guthlac rests.

The prophecy and the succession. Felix relates that the abbess Ecgburh sent to ask Guthlac who should be the keeper of his place after him, and that the hermit answered that the man "was of heathen race, and was not yet baptised; but notwithstanding, that he should soon come, and should receive the rites of baptism. And it came to pass: for the same Cissa, who afterwards held the place, came to Britain a little time afterwards, and was baptised there, as the man of God foretold." After Guthlac's death in 714, then, Cissa held the anchorite's station at Crowland; of his life there, and of his death, nothing further is recorded.

The Crowland tradition. The later tradition of Crowland abbey, as transmitted through its chronicle materials and summarised by Stanton, counts Cissa among four disciples of Guthlac who lived in separate cells near the saint — "Cissa, from whom Felix, the writer of his life, gained much information; St Bethlin, honoured at Stafford; Egbert, the Saint's especial friend; and Tatwine" — and says they continued that manner of life even after the foundation of the abbey. The chronicle in question (the pseudo-Ingulf Historia Croylandensis) is a late and untrustworthy compilation, and nothing is taken from it here beyond this grouping, which agrees with Felix as far as Felix goes. Of the four companions, Bettelin is separately commemorated in this calendar on September 9 (see Bettelin of Crowland).

Feast and commemoration

September 23 (church date; New Calendar civil September 23, Old Calendar civil October 6). The witness is the calendar of the Antiochian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland (St Constantine York feed), whose GB&I line for the day reads: "St. Cissa of Crowland, hermit (8th C)." Its named upstream corroborates: Orthodox England has "Cissa, Sept 23, early 8th cent. A disciple of St Guthlac at Crowland in England." No older calendar authority for the day was found — Stanton assigns him no day — and the OCA's Lives of the Saints for September 23, checked live, does not carry him. No proper service exists; the common of a venerable applies. He shares the day with his fellow-islander of the spirit, Adomnan of Iona, in the GB&I layer.

Iconography

No image of Cissa, medieval or modern, is known to this collection; he is listed among the wanted icons. An icon would follow the type of a hermit-priest of the fens: monastic habit, the marshland solitude of Crowland, perhaps at the side of his master Guthlac, whose established iconography (the scourge received from St Bartholomew) would identify the pair.

Disputed questions

His day. Stanton's index enters "Cissa, of Croyland, no day": the medieval English calendars transmit no feast for him. The September 23 commemoration rests on the modern Orthodox lists (Orthodox England, and the York calendar following it); what older authority, if any, stands behind that date has not been found, and this is recorded as a finding.
His origin. Felix says only that Guthlac's foretold successor was of heathen race, not yet baptized, and "came to Britain" — implying birth outside Britain, or at least outside its baptized nations; the sources do not say where he came from, and no guess is recorded here.