A CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 85rule: the abbot or prior had to change the allocation of the monks'
beds twice every week and 'shall carefully watch to see that no one
possesses anything unnecessary or hidden' .5"
As well as in monasteries proper, in which groups of monks lived
communally under the direction of a hierarchy of seniors, aspiring
ascetics could be found leading solitary lives as hermits. The Bierzo,
in western Leon, where Fructuosus established some of his monaster-
ies, was famous for its hermits, who, like Aemilian in the Rioja, lived
in caves and sought their own spiritual salvation in isolated contem-
plation and rigorous mortification of their bodies. Although basically
solitary, groups of such men could have an overall spiritual director.
Because they were not as regimented as the monks in monasteries,
and therefore harder for the ecclesiastical hierarchy to oversee, con-
ciliar decrees were directed to keeping them under episcopal super-
vision, and some were forcibly co-opted into the ranks of the clergy.
One such late seventh-century ascetic, Valerius of Bierzo, briefly
forced to become a priest against his will, has left a fascinating if
eccentric corpus of short writings. This includes three brief accounts
of visions of the afterlife and of celestial rewards and punishments
seen by the monks Maximus, Bonellus and Baldarius. Valerius also
wrote a precis of the late fourth-century ascetic Egeria's story of her
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and he composed some short works of
monastic instruction and a small body of poetry. His most peculiar
writings are three short autobiographical pieces describing certain
difficulties and persecutions to which he was subjected, particularly at
the hands of the local clergy and populace. These idiosyncratic but
innovative pieces are notable for their employment of legal meta-
phors, and need to be understood as an attempt to expand the fron-
tiers of the established genres of monastic exhortatory literature.^57
Valerius viewed his varied literary oeuvre as a unity, and in its few
extant manuscripts it is kept together and the whole dedicated to his
fellow hermits in the Bierzo and their spiritual director Donadeus.
Despite the limitations of the evidence, it is clear that it was in the
Visigothic period that asceticism took a firm hold on the peninsula.
The signatures of abbots appended to the act of the councils, the
enactments of some of those councils concerning monastic practices
and discipline, and the clear interest of individuals sHch as Bishops
Eugenius II and Julian of Toledo in the ascetic life and its aims all
clearly indicate the hold that it was gaining on the Spanish Church.
Later references too, as for example in Catalan charters of the ninth