By the late second century, perhaps earlier, there existed groups of Christian ascetics living in or near Egyptian villages.  These “withdrawers” (apotaktikoi/ἀποτακτικοί) were for the most part solitaries, and were the “elders” to whom Antony first turned to learn asceticism.  Even after the establishment of formal cenobitic and eremitical monasticism these village ascetics may have been the most numerous kind of Christian ascetics, and may also have been the itenerant remuoth excoriated by Jerome, and renamed saraibites by the Master and Benedict.

Peter Brown describes the phenomenon of early ascetics:

    Throughout the fourth century, Egypt was a region afflicted by troubling anomalies. It was more like Syria, as we know it to have been in the late third century, than the great Patriarchs of Alexandria and similar spokesmen of the official church would have cared to admit.[12] Gnostic groups still clung to the fringes of the local churches. One such contained eighty women members, who were said to be devoted to flamboyant inversions of conventional sexual morality, while remaining regular parishioners of their local church. The Manichaean Elect moved with ease up and down the Nile, following the normal contours of settled Christianity from town to town.[13] The Nile valley was filled with sturdy apotaktikoi, “renouncers,” who would have resembled the “Holy Walkers” of Syria. Bands of rootless persons, given to chastity, to fasting, and to begging, filled the nooks and crannies of the towns.[14]

    In the fourth century, it was far from certain that the desert would emerge as the unchallenged locus of Christian heroism. In Egypt, as previously in Syria, the growth of asceticism threatened to revive the radical expectations long associated with the Encratite movement. Hierakas was a younger contemporary of Saint Anthony.[15] A spiritual guide in a provincial town of the Nile Delta, Hierakas knew the Scriptures by heart. Like Origen, he enjoyed a reputation as an inspired exegete. A tireless writer and copyist, whose eyesight remained miraculously intact at the age of ninety, Hierakas wrote in Coptic as well as in Greek, and had even composed his own devotional psalms. He was the arbiter of ascetic opinion in his region. His views were clear. They were a radical extension of the “historical” presentation of virginity that we have seen in Origen and Methodius. The age of the Old Testament contained all the precepts necessary for decent, conventional living. The Gospel had added nothing to these. Christ had brought only one novelty to earth, and, with the novelty, the hope of salvation—chastity. Only the unmarried had a place in His Kingdom.[16]

    What was disturbing about Hierakas was that the “true” Church he envisaged took the form of an old-fashioned federation of continent “cells” within the settled community. The desert was absent from his message. Men and women were to gather together into little confraternities, bound by personal vows of chastity. As in Encratite Syria, spiritual fathers of Hierakas’ persuasion shocked their opponents by boasting of the close ties of service and spiritual companionship that linked them to their continent woman disciples. In Hierakas’ opinion, continent persons were the only Christians in Egypt who would be saved: their presence in the towns and villages of the Nile Delta would have mocked the hopes of salvation of the average married house-holder. By advocating the formation of groups of continent men and women among the laity, Hierakas threatened to bring into the churches of the settled land the touch of a perilous freedom better left to occupants of the distant desert.[17]

Pearson cites sources [including Goehring and Judge] suggesting that these village ascetics may have existed in second-century Egypt:  Gnosticism and Christianity in Roman and Coptic Egypt  By Birger Albert Pearson

Pages accessible in Google Books:  http://books.google.com/books?id=c8m0eAMQ34sC&pg=PA38&dq=ascetics+society+desert&cd=4#v=onepage&q=ascetics%20society%20desert&f=false

Communities of 

This Webpage was created for a workshop held at Saint Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, California in 1990....x....  .