This Place Is Pryson

An anchorite or anchoress permanently encloses themselves in a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. At St Anne’s in Lewes, an anchoress was buried in the exact place she would have knelt at her squint in order to see the high altar, meaning, as Roberta Gilchrist put it in Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism, ‘she would have had to kneel daily in her own grave.’ In their cells anchoresses followed a regime of prayer, and guidance literature advised that they should occupy themselves with reading, writing or activities suitable to the enclosed life, like mending church vestments or making cloth.

Source: www.lrb.co.uk