Cuthbert

Cuthbert was born in 635 in the region around Smailholm, in what is now the Scottish Borders but was then part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria ^[1]. Almost everything known about his childhood comes from two early sources: an anonymous life written by a monk of Lindisfarne around 700, and the prose and verse lives composed by the historian Bede in the following decades ^[2]. Both describe a boy of ordinary rank, raised by a foster mother named Kenswith, who spent his youth tending sheep in the Lammermuir Hills.

The year of his birth coincided with a turning point in Northumbrian church history. In 635 King Oswald invited the Irish monk Aidan from Iona to establish a monastery on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, and it was this Irish tradition of monasticism that would shape Cuthbert's entire career ^[1]. Bede records that on the night of 31 August 651, while watching flocks near the River Leader, the young Cuthbert saw a vision of a soul carried to heaven by angels. He later learned that Aidan had died that same night, and the experience convinced him to enter religious life ^[2].

Some details in the early lives suggest that Cuthbert may have first served briefly as a soldier, since Northumbria was at war with Mercia during his adolescence. Whatever the case, in 651 he presented himself on horseback, carrying a spear, at the gates of Melrose Abbey on the River Tweed, where the prior Boisil received him into the community ^[3].

At Melrose, Cuthbert trained under Abbot Eata and Prior Boisil, learning the disciplines of Irish monasticism: long fasts, night vigils, memorization of the psalter, and preaching journeys into the surrounding countryside ^[3]. Around 655 Eata took a group of monks, Cuthbert among them, to found a new monastery at Ripon on land granted by the Deiran sub-king Alhfrith. The venture collapsed within a few years when Alhfrith demanded the community adopt Roman customs; Eata and Cuthbert returned to Melrose rather than comply, and the site passed to Wilfrid ^[2].

A plague swept Northumbria in 664, and Cuthbert nearly died of it. Boisil, who did die in the outbreak, is said to have spent his final week reading the Gospel of John with his pupil and predicting that Cuthbert would one day become a bishop ^[2]. On Boisil's death Cuthbert succeeded him as prior of Melrose. In that office he became known for missionary circuits through remote hill villages that other clergy avoided, sometimes staying away from the monastery for weeks at a time ^[1].

The same year brought the Synod of Whitby, at which King Oswiu ruled that Northumbria would follow Roman practice on the dating of Easter and the form of the monastic tonsure, ending the dominance of the Ionan tradition ^[4]. Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne resigned and withdrew to Iona with those who would not accept the ruling. Eata was appointed abbot of Lindisfarne in the reorganization that followed, and he brought Cuthbert with him as prior. Cuthbert's task was delicate: he had been formed in the Irish tradition, yet he now had to lead a reluctant community into Roman observance. The early lives record that he wore down opposition in chapter meetings through patience, sometimes simply adjourning a stormy session and reintroducing the same question the next day until agreement came ^[2].

After roughly a decade as prior of Lindisfarne, Cuthbert sought the solitary life that Irish monks regarded as the summit of spiritual discipline. He first withdrew to a small islet just off Lindisfarne, still called St Cuthbert's Isle, and then in about 676 moved to Inner Farne, a bare dolerite island some seven miles down the coast, exposed to the North Sea and previously believed to be haunted by demons ^[1].

On Farne he built a circular enclosure of stone and turf with walls high enough that he could see nothing but sky, containing an oratory and a single dwelling cell, along with a guest house near the landing place for visitors from Lindisfarne ^[2]. He dug a well, grew barley after his wheat crop failed, and gradually reduced his contact with the outside world, in his final years opening his window only to give a blessing.

The most repeated stories of Cuthbert's life belong to this period and to his earlier travels, and many involve animals: otters warming his feet after night prayers in the sea at Coldingham, a pair of ravens on Farne that he rebuked for stealing thatch and that returned in apparent penance, and his protection of the eider ducks nesting on the island ^[2]. Because of that last tradition the eider is still known in Northumberland as the cuddy duck, and Cuthbert's rules for the birds on Farne are often described by modern writers as one of the earliest recorded instances of bird protection in Britain ^[5].

Cuthbert's solitude ended against his will. At a synod held at Twyford on the River Aln in 684, presided over by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury in the presence of King Ecgfrith, Cuthbert was elected bishop of Hexham. He refused to leave his island until the king himself, accompanied by Bishop Trumwine, sailed to Farne and pleaded with him in person ^[2]. An exchange of sees was then arranged with his old abbot Eata, so that Cuthbert became bishop of Lindisfarne instead, and he was consecrated at York on 26 March 685 by Theodore and six other bishops ^[1].

His episcopate lasted barely two years but the sources describe it as strenuous. He travelled through the diocese on horseback and on foot, confirming, preaching, distributing alms and visiting plague-stricken settlements, in the pattern of the itinerant Irish bishops he had known in his youth ^[3]. Bede preserves the tradition that shortly before the battle of Nechtansmere in May 685, in which Ecgfrith was killed by the Picts, Cuthbert was in Carlisle and sensed the disaster at the moment it happened, warning the queen to flee ^[2].

He also formed a notable friendship with the abbess Ælfflæd of Whitby, daughter of King Oswiu, who consulted him on the royal succession, and he supported the future king Aldfrith, then living as a scholar in exile ^[4]. Contemporary material evidence of his episcopate survives: a small portable altar and a pectoral cross of gold and garnet, both recovered from his coffin, are displayed at Durham ^[6].

Around Christmas 686, sensing his health failing, Cuthbert resigned the bishopric and returned to his hermitage on Inner Farne ^[1]. His final weeks are described in unusual detail because Bede interviewed Herefrith, the abbot of Lindisfarne who attended him. A winter storm cut the island off for five days, during which the sick man survived on stored onions, and when the brothers finally reached him they found him in his shelter by the landing place, badly weakened by an ulcerated foot ^[2].

Cuthbert died on Inner Farne on 20 March 687, shortly after receiving communion, having urged the Lindisfarne monks in his last conversation to keep peace among themselves and hold to the catholic observances agreed at Whitby ^[2]. A monk signalled his death by torchlight to a watcher on Lindisfarne. Although Cuthbert had asked to be buried on Farne, he had conceded that the community might take his body home, and he was interred in a stone coffin beside the altar of the church on Lindisfarne ^[1].

Eleven years later, on 20 March 698, the monks opened the grave intending to move his bones to a wooden coffin above the pavement, a customary elevation for a saint. According to both the anonymous life and Bede, the body was found undecayed, with its joints still flexible and its vestments fresh ^[2]. The report of incorruption transformed local reverence into one of the great cults of medieval Europe, and the carved oak coffin made for the 698 elevation survives, in reconstructed form, at Durham Cathedral ^[6].

Any Cuthbert biography has to reckon with the fact that his influence after death exceeded even his living reputation. Within a generation Lindisfarne produced the anonymous prose life, Bede wrote a verse life and then a prose life around 721, and Bishop Eadfrith made the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the masterpieces of early medieval book art, which a tenth-century note says was created in honour of God and St Cuthbert ^[7]. A tiny copy of John's Gospel placed in his coffin, now called the St Cuthbert Gospel, is the earliest intact European book still in its original binding; the British Library acquired it in 2012 for nine million pounds ^[8].

Viking raids, beginning with the attack on Lindisfarne in 793, eventually forced the community to abandon the island. In 875 the monks left carrying Cuthbert's coffin, along with the head of King Oswald and the Lindisfarne Gospels, and wandered for seven years before settling at Chester-le-Street in 883. In 995 the community moved again to a defensible bend of the River Wear, and there the shrine gave rise to the city of Durham ^[4]. The Norman cathedral begun in 1093 was built explicitly as his shrine church, and his relics were translated behind its high altar in 1104, when the coffin was again opened and the body again declared incorrupt ^[6].

Throughout the Middle Ages Cuthbert was the patron of the north of England, invoked in war against the Scots, his shrine among the richest pilgrimage destinations in Britain. Henry VIII's commissioners dismantled the shrine in 1539, but the body was reburied under a plain slab where it remains, and an examination in 1827 recovered the pectoral cross and other relics ^[6]. His feast is kept on 20 March, with a second feast of the translation on 4 September, and he is honoured in the Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox calendars. For anyone asking who was Cuthbert, the shortest answer is that he was the hermit bishop whose grave built a cathedral, and among the most striking Cuthbert facts is that a community formed around his coffin survived exile, invasion and reformation, and still keeps his tomb thirteen centuries after his death ^[4].