IN 1097, Saint Anselm, then archbishop of Canterbury, upon leaving the court after a serious dispute with King William Rufus, saved a hare that was being hunted by the boys and dogs of his household. The hare ‘fled between the feet of the horse on which Anselm sat’, according to Eadmer, the archbishop's biographer. Eadmer goes on to describe how the saint ensured that the hare was safe, and then burst into tears as some of his men laughed at the plight of the animal, with the dogs still sniffing about, trying to get at the hare. If taken as fact, and Eadmer claims to have been present at the incident, this story is plausible, since the dogs would have been frightened to run under the horse, while the rider would have been concerned to prevent his horse from panicking. It could have been written as a miracle story, with the saint restraining the dogs by his saintly virtue, but Eadmer seems to play down any miraculous element to his story. The moral is clear nonetheless: Anselm says, ‘You laugh, do you? But there is no laughing, no merry-making, for this unhappy beast. His enemies stand about him, and in fear of his life he flees to us asking for help. So it is with the soul of man …’. Anselm likened the peril of the hare to the peril of the soul after death, surrounded by demons, and desperately needing heavenly aid.