GWATKIN, HENRY MELVILL: Church of England; b. at Barrow-on-Soar (8 m. n. of Leicester), Leicestershire, July 30, 1844. He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge (B. A.,1867), where he was fellow in 1868-74 and theological tutor in 1874-91. Since 1891 he has been Dixie professor of ecclesiastical history in the University of Cambridge and fellow of Emmanuel College. He was also Gifford lecturer at Edinburgh in 1903-05 and has written Studies of Arianism (Cambridge, 1882); The Arian Controversy (London, 1889); Selections from Early Christian Writers (1893); The Eye for Spiritual Things (Edinburgh, 1906); and The Knowledge of God (Gifford lectures, 1906).

GWYNN, JOHN: Church of Ireland; b. at Larne (18 m. n.e. of Belfast), County Antrim, Ireland, Aug. 28, 1827. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (B.A., 1850; MA., 1854), where he was fellow in 1853-64. He was also warden of St. Columba's College, Dublin, from 1856 to 1864, and from 1863 to 1882 was rector of Tullyaughnish, County Donegal, in addition to being dean of Raphoe in 1873,82. After being rector of Templemore, County Derry (1882-83), he was Archbishop King's Lecturer in divinity in Dublin University (1883-88) and since 1888 has been regius professor of divinity in the same university. He has written Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians in The Speaker's Commentary (London, 1881), besides editing The Apocalypse of St. John in a Syriac Version hitherto Unknown (Dublin, 1897), and The Book of Armagh (1905), and translating Selections from Ephraim and Aphrohat in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series (Edinburgh, 1898).

GYROVAGI ("Circuit-Wanderers," almost = "Tramps"): Vagrant monks who subsisted upon charity. Benedict of Nursia mentions them as being worse than the cenobites, eremites, or Sarabaites (q.v.), and desired their extermination (Requla, i.). Taking advantage of the general rule of hospitality they roved from one cell to another, refusing to adopt the community-life. Even prior to Benedict's day they were common in the Occident. Augustine calls them circelliones, or Circumcelliones (q.v.), and relates that they were the first monks to carry on a brisk traffic in spurious bones of martyrs. Cassian also mentions a class of monks who were probably identical with Benedict's gyrovagi, and the circumcelliones of Augustine. They were notorious gluttons, shrank from fasting and even beguiled the cloister brethren to break fasts of obligation. The earliest report of such unstable monks in the Orient is contained in a Greek tract on ascetic rules (cf. MPG, xxxi. 84, 119). Nilus the Sinaite (d. after 430) complains of these "false monks" (bk. iii., epist. 119), and Johannes Climacus (d. 606) warns the true and settled anchorites to beware of all gyrovagi (Scala paradisi gradus, xxvii.).

The Church soon recognized the duty of restraining the excesses of these vagrants. The Gallican synods at Angers in 453 (cannon viii.), and at Vannes in 465 (canons vi. and vii.) ruled that the roving monks should be debarred from communion and on occasion should be strictly disciplined; the two Spanish synods at Toledo in 633 (canon liii.) and 646 (canon v.) demanded that the religiosi vagabundi should either be coordinated with the clergy or else consigned to the cloister. The monastic foundations of Caesarius of Arles, Benedict of Nursia, and Cassiodorus in the sixth century served to repress wandering monks, expressly binding their inmates to persevere in the monastic estate until death, and to remain in the cloister first selected. The triumph of the Benedictine rule in the eighth century brought Western monasticism under the fixed cenobite form. In the East measures to suppress roving monks were taken by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 (canon iv.), also by Justinian, and later by the Second Trullan Council in 692 (canon xlii.). Notwithstanding these enactments, there were roving impostors in monks' garb throughout the Middle Ages. Later the term "gyrovagi" was sometimes applied to unsettled and migratory clerics.

G. Grützmacher.

Bibliography: E. Martens, Commentarius in regula S. Benedicti, pp. 53 sqq., Paris, 1690; A. Calmet, Commentaire sur la regle de S. Benoit, pp. 26 sqq., ib. 1734; Heimbucher: Orden und Kongregationen, i. 149; KL, vi. 1403-04.