Bede’s Life of Cuthbert: The Remarkable Life of a Mediaeval Best-seller

By Katharine Tiernan

Any visitor to the magnificent Romanesque cathedral in Durham will be drawn to the tomb of Cuthbert, the great saint of the north in whose honour the cathedral was built. His shrine is in the most sacred place in the cathedral, immediately behind the high altar. Originally hung with an ornate canopy, his tomb is now covered with a simple block of stone with his name, Cuthbertus, inscribed upon it. 

The visitor may ask, who was this Cuthbert? How did a seventh-century monk from a remote corner of Northumberland come to be at the heart of one of the most powerful and influential cults in mediaeval England?

Title Page - Bede's Life of St Cuthbert

Part of the answer to these questions lies at the other end of the cathedral, in the Lady Chapel. In these more secluded surroundings our visitor can find another tomb, that of the Venerable Bede. Bede was thirty-nine years Cuthbert’s junior, and the two men never met. But without Bede, Cuthbert might be nothing more than a vague legend, like many other saints of the period, and the great cathedral at Durham might never have been built.

The story begins with a young Anglo-Saxon warrior, who at the age of seventeen took the decision to enter a monastery. Cuthbert’s monastery was close to the old Roman settlement of Trimontium, now Melrose in the Scottish Borders. At that time it was part of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. The year was 651, and the Christian faith had only recently arrived in the kingdom.

Cuthbert spent the rest of his life as a monk, but not in seclusion. He was an evangelist for the new religion and was also involved in the bitter power struggle which was to take place between the original Celtic Christianity of Northumbria and the nascent power of the Roman Church. In the latter part of his life he became a hermit on Inner Farne for eight years, bearing witness to the austere values of the Celtic tradition. While he was there, his fame as a wise man and miracle worker started to spread. As the Roman Church under his contemporary, Bishop Wilfrid, grew in wealth and power to rival the state, Cuthbert embodied the alternative values of the Northumbrian Church. When Wilfrid eventually fell from power, the King himself sailed to Inner Farne to implore Cuthbert to return to lead the Church as Bishop of Lindisfarne, which he eventually agreed to do. He went from the solitude and contemplation of a hermit’s life to the busiest job in the Church.

Cuthbert was already regarded as a saint by the time he died in 687. But the final proof of his sainthood was discovered eleven years after his death. The Lindisfarne monks wished to move his relics into the church for veneration, and opened his coffin, expecting to find a skeleton. Instead, they found his body incorrupt, the grave clothes fresh.

This was sensational proof of Cuthbert’s sanctity. Lindisfarne was to become a major pilgrimage centre and the monks decided a record of his life and miracles was needed. A Life was compiled by one of the monks of Lindisfarne, now known as the Anonymous Life. It must have been widely copied and circulated, and a copy reached Bede, a monk in St Peter’s monastery at Monkwearmouth.  He clearly felt a strong affinity with the saint’s story. In 716, when Bede was in his early forties and already a distinguished scholar, he composed a version of the Life in Latin verse.  Impressed, the Lindisfarne brothers begged Bede to write a new and more comprehensive prose life of the saint. He undertook the task with his customary scholarly rigour.  In his Preface to the Life Bede tells us that he ‘has passed on nothing to be transcribed for general reading that has not been obtained by rigorous examination of trustworthy witnesses’. Of particular importance was a monk named Herefrith, who was with Cuthbert when he died. Bede quotes verbatim Herefrith’s account of the days leading up to Cuthbert’s death, and the death itself.

19thC Image of St Bede

The new Life was a great success. It is not difficult to see why. Although it is in some ways a conventional hagiography designed to give proofs of Cuthbert’s sainthood, it is also full of human interest and lively description. Bede loves a good story. He gives us a clear idea of Cuthbert’s character, and some of the miracles described are endearingly mundane – when the brothers forget to bring over a suitable plank to construct his latrine on Inner Farne, God obligingly arranges for a suitable piece of wood to be washed up on the shore.

Some of the stories have become iconic, for example the tale of St Cuthbert and the otters, reported by one of the monks. He saw the saint leave the monastery where he was staying late at night and followed him, curious. He saw Cuthbert go down to the sea where he remained all night in prayer, standing in the icy waters. When he left the sea at dawn, two sea otters followed the saint out of the water and dried his feet with their fur. The watching monk was overcome with guilt at having spied on the saint and fell at his feet to beg forgiveness.

Cuthbert Praying in the Sea

Bede completed his Life of Cuthbert in 721. He went on to include an abridged version in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, published ten years later. Bede’s monastery, St Paul’s, was one of two Benedictine monasteries at Monkwearmouth established in the Roman tradition. It was a thriving centre of scholarship and culture with a busy scriptorium. It was here that the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest complete Latin bible, was produced as a gift for the Pope. We can be sure that once completed, the Life of Cuthbert would have been copied many times and circulated to churches and monasteries in the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as well as Northumbria and further afield in Frankia and Italy. It was a true mediaeval best-seller.

This wide distribution was essential to the survival of the work. A hundred and fifty years later the Viking invasions destroyed the monastic culture of Northumbria. The monks and nuns were an easy target for pagan raiders who had no compunction in looting the monasteries and enslaving their inhabitants. The written word had no value for the Vikings. The monastic libraries with all their books, deeds and records were destroyed; St Paul’s at Monkwearmouth became a roofless ruin. In 875, with the Danes now in command of York and heading northwards, the monks took the coffin containing the incorrupt body of the saint, together with the illuminated Gospels created in his honour, and left Lindisfarne.

 Seven years later, in 882, they established a new monastery at Chester-le-Street after the miraculous intervention of the saint enabled them to make terms with Guthred, the Danish king of York. The cult of St Cuthbert, together with its lands and possessions, survived. It continued to attract pilgrims, not least from the royal house of Wessex.  We are not told whether a copy of Bede’s Life had been popped into the coffin alongside the Lindisfarne Gospels, but certainly copies would have still existed elsewhere in parts of the country which had escaped the brunt of the Danish invasions.

Chester-le-Street was the only surviving monastery in the north of England for close on a hundred years. Although the Community diligently preserved the Lindisfarne traditions associated with the cult, monastic discipline started to slip. Monks married and had families, and the senior positions in the Community became hereditary, with each family holding a portion of the lands owned by St Cuthbert. The monastic reform movement of the tenth century which sought to end such practices was confined to the southern half of England, which enjoyed more stability than the north. For the Community the main aim was survival.

By the end of the tenth century, renewed threat from Danish armies led the Community to move again, this time to a promontory above the River Wear. Uninhabited at the time, it was cleared with the loyal help of the local population and the saint’s new shrine was established at Durham. It proved to be an excellent choice and highly defensible.

Cuthbert Welcoming Visitors

However, 1066 saw the arrival of a new and different threat to the Community: the Normans. The threat this time was less physical – the Normans were, after all, Christians – but ideological. The Normans regarded Anglo-Saxon culture, including their saints, as backward and inferior.  As the Normans started to take over the English Church, they often replaced Saxon saints with their own continental saints. Although St Cuthbert’s incorrupt body gave him claim to special status, King William was not convinced. On a visit to Durham he demanded that the Community open the coffin before him and threatened to kill all the senior clergy if it proved to be a fake. However, during a mass for All Saints’ Day, which was to be followed by the opening of the coffin, the King was visited by a terrible heat and fever. He leapt up, called for his horse and galloped out of the city. He was never to return to Durham. The Community was reprieved – for the time being.

Sometime after this incident King William appointed a Norman to the bishopric at Durham. The man was Walcher, a cleric who had been a canon at Liege, one of the great centres of learning in mid-eleventh century Europe. What view would he take of Cuthbert’s claims to sainthood? Walcher was an educated man with access to monastic libraries. Before he came to Durham he read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and his Life of Cuthbert.  They convinced him of the exceptional status of the saint and in turn, he convinced the King of the importance of the cult. Its future was secured – thanks to Bede.

There were to be changes, though. Having read Bede, Walcher knew that Cuthbert had been a celibate monk and that the original guardians of the shrine had been celibate monks also. Walcher’s plan was to oust the married canons and found a Benedictine monastery at Durham whose monks would be the new guardians of the saint.

Astonishingly, Bede was to play a role here too. A few years earlier, the prior of Winchcombe Abbey, a Saxon man named Aldwin, had acquired copies of Bede’s Life of Cuthbert and the Ecclesiastical History for the monastic library. They had an electrifying effect on him. The chronicler Simeon of Durham records:

He understood from the History of the Angles that the province of the Northumbrians had previously been peopled with numerous bands of monks, and many troops of saints … .these places, that is, the sites of these monasteries, he earnestly desired to visit, although he well knew that they were reduced to ruins, and he wished, in imitation of such persons, to lead a life of poverty.

Aldwin travelled north and with two companions set up camp in the ruins of St Paul’s Monastery. His single-handed revival of northern monasticism caught on, and others came to join him. By the time Walcher was planning to establish a monastery at Durham, there were local monks ready to help him.

Before Walcher could realise his plans he was murdered in a feud with the local Northumbrian nobility. The bishopric went to another Norman cleric, William St Calais. The new bishop energetically followed through on Walcher’s plans. Not only did he successfully found the new monastery, he went on to initiate the construction of a new cathedral in St Cuthbert’s honour to replace the existing Saxon church. The magnificent cathedral and the shrine of St Cuthbert would become the leading pilgrimage destination in the country. Bede’s Life of Cuthbert gained new popularity with lavishly illustrated versions appearing. The best-seller was back – and the fame of the saint it chronicled. 

REFERENCES
Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, trans. Bertram Colgrave Christ the King Library
The Age of Bede, trans. J.F. Webb, ed. D.H Farmer Penguin Classics
Simeon’s History of the Church of Durham Llanerch

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Katharine Tiernan is a writer, teacher and passionate nature-lover. She grew up close to the dramatic coastline of North Northumberland and continues to draw inspiration from its history and landscape. She is currently working on a series of historical novels based on the legacy of St Cuthbert and his Community. Her first novel Place of Repose: A Tale of St Cuthbert’s Last Journey was published by Ningaui Press in 2013. Following its publication Katharine went on to hone her writing skills with an MA in Creative Writing (Distinction) at Newcastle University.

Her latest novel, Cuthbert of Farne: A novel of Northumbria’s warrior saint, published by Sacristy Press, traces Cuthbert’s life and spiritual journey against the background of his turbulent times.
Katharine lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, with a view from her writing desk across the Tweed estuary to Lindisfarne.

Buy Cuthbert of Farne: https://www.sacristy.co.uk/books/fiction/cuthbert-novel

Connect with Katharine: www.katharinetiernan.com

The Christians Are Coming! (The islands of Iona and Lindisfarne)

by Matthew Harffy

The early seventh century was a time of military and religious upheaval in Britain. The different rulers of the small kingdoms across the island vied for supremacy, and violence and death were never far away. Unsurprisingly, most kings of the day died in battle and few reigned for more than a few years at best, some only for months before meeting their bloody ends.

By portableantiquities [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

As Angles, Saxons and Britons fought for the land, so different religions battled for the souls of the populace. Christianity resurged on the island, pushing the older religions back into the darkest recesses of mountain valleys and deep forests. By the middle of the century Christianity had been adopted by most of the nations of Britain (or at least by their nobles and royal families). From the south came missionaries sent from Rome; Europeans such as Augustus, Paulinus, Birinus and Felix. From the north came a different flavour of Christianity, not Roman in background, but Irish.

The story of this northern Christianity is one of two islands. Iona in the west and Lindisfarne in the east.

By Jan Smith from Brisbane, Australia (First glimpse of Iona) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Iona became the centre of the Irish Christian mission in the sixth century when Colm Cille (more commonly known as Columba), an Irish noble, was exiled. He settled on the small island of Iona, which was probably known as Hii at the time and almost certainly gaining its modern name from a transcription error of Ioua Insula (“Island of the yews”) to Iona sometime in the thirteenth century. Iona was then part of the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata and Columba was given it as a base for him and his brethren of monks from whence to preach to the people of Dál Riata and the Picts.

The mission was very successful and Iona became a Christian stronghold in the northwest of the British Isles. The expansion from the west to the east coast came as a result of another exiled noble taking up residence in Iona. This time it was Oswald, the offspring of Æthelfrith, the king of Northumbria.

In 633, after spending his formative years on Iona, Oswald, son of Æthelfrith, was presented the opportunity to take back the throne that had been his father’s. His father’s killer, Edwin, had in turn been slain by an alliance of Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Oswald brought a warband south and confronted Cadwallon near Hadrian’s Wall. Before the battle, Oswald ordered a great cross to be erected and had his men kneel and pray to God for victory.

In the ensuing battle, Oswald’s warhost crushed Cadwallon’s force, slaying the Welsh king and cementing Oswald as the ruler of Northumbria. Christ had granted Oswald victory, and he vowed to bring Christ to the people.

Christine Matthews [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

As soon as he was settled on his new throne, Oswald sent to Iona for a bishop to guide his pagan people to Christ. The brethren of Iona eventually sent Aidan, a gentle and patient man who believed in engaging all people, even slaves, in discourse about Christ. He set up a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, also known now as Holy Island. From that tidal island base, which in many ways mirrored Iona in the west, Aidan set about bringing Christianity to Northumbria.

Aidan travelled the land, founding churches and monasteries throughout the north, and Lindisfarne became famous as a place of religious teaching and great learning. And all the while, the bishops of Lindisfarne worked alongside the kings of Northumbria to bring the word of Christ to a land that had all but forgotten that religion after the Romans had left the island some two centuries before.

By mattphotos (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Oswald was followed on the throne by his brother Oswiu, who continued to champion Christianity and was responsible for convening the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Synod is important, for it was there that the two competing forms of the faith – Roman and Irish – were debated and one chosen. Such intricacies as the way monks' hair should be tonsured and how the date of Easter should be calculated were discussed. It might not sound like much, but the ramifications of the decision were far-reaching. The Roman way was decided upon, which ultimately saw Lindisfarne, with its Irish roots, fall out of favour.

It was still a place of great learning, however, and the following decades would see the creation of wonderful treasures such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. This period of cultural flowering is known as the Golden Age of Northumbria. Monks sought peaceful meditation of the will of God, praying and working diligently over beautiful manuscripts that would become famous all over the known world. For a hundred years or more the island of Lindisfarne was a beacon of education and culture.

St. Matthew - Lindisfarne Gospels (710-721), f.25v - BL Cotton MS Nero D IV, via Wikimedia Commons

Little did those scholarly scribes know that one day Northmen would descend upon their island retreat, smashing the peace and tranquillity in a welter of blood. For one of the things that Lindisfarne is now famous for is that, in 793, it became the location of the first recorded Viking raid in Britain. Those treasures that were so well-known to be guarded only by peaceful monks proved too much temptation to raiders from across the North Sea.

But for those decades in the seventh and eighth centuries, Lindisfarne was a centre of learning and wisdom that saw Northumbria become one of the most important kingdoms of Britain, whose influence was felt across the continent.

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Matthew Harffy is the author of the Bernicia Chronicles, a series of novels set in seventh century Britain. The first of the series, The Serpent Sword, was published by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus on 1st June 2016. The sequel, The Cross and The Curse was released on 1st August 2016. Book three, Blood and Blade, is due for publication in December 2016.

The Serpent Sword and The Cross and the Curse are available on Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, and all good online bookstores.

Blood and Blade is available for pre-order on Amazon and all good online bookstores.

Website: www.matthewharffy.com

Twitter: @MatthewHarffy

Facebook: MatthewHarffyAuthor

Bees and the Brehon Law in Early Medieval Ireland

By Kristin Gleeson

St Gobnait by Harry Clarke, Corning Museum

What would happen if bees from your hive swarmed and then settled in a neighbour’s tree, or if you were stung badly by one of your neighbour’s bees? If you were living in Ireland in the 6th century, the matter would be very clear. In the first case, your neighbour would be entitled to half the yield of honey, and in the second case, you would be entitled to a sufficient amount of honey that matched the severity of the sting.

Bees and the honey they produced were an important element in early Medieval Ireland and other parts of Europe. They were a significant source of nutrition for people who lived in a land that in many areas was often wet and difficult to farm. Honey also possessed an antiseptic quality that was important for internal healing, as well as external healing. And of course when fermented, it provided a drink that could make you forget how wet and difficult the land was to farm.

Medieval skep

In Britain and the rest of Europe the hives were made of straw, coiled into the familiar cone shape and stitched together with thin branches of brambles/blackberries stripped of their leaves and thorns, called a ‘skep’ from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘skeppa’ meaning ‘basket.’ In winter they would put straw tents over the skeps to keep out the elements, called ‘hackles,’ if they weren’t in little stone nooks, or ‘boles,’ like those of the monks of Lindisfarne. In Ireland, however, where cattle grazed outdoors all year and little straw was harvested, I was told by local historians sedgegrass was used instead, well up until the last century. The hives were then thatched against the rain that fell all year round and kept against the south wall of the ‘lios’ or wall of the home area.

Irish skep with thatch

Bees were kept not only on farms but also at religious communities in early Christian times. Monks (managh) and nuns (cailecha) tended the sick and injured among their community, as well people in the surrounding area. One such cailecha was Gobnait, a woman who settled in West Cork and established a convent, or community of women. She became so well known for her healing, with honey as her staple medicine, that her fame spread and eventually, after her death, she became the patron saint of bees.

With bees such a vital part of the daily lives of medieval Irish people, it is no surprise that they featured in the Brehon laws. “Brehon” is an ancient Irish term for judge. Over the centuries the judges accumulated a series of laws which they passed down orally from one generation of judges to the next. To qualify to become any one of the various levels of judges and lawyers - which in all likelihood were offshoots of the poets (filidh) - required that the person study at one of the named schools. It was a period of study that lasted a number of years in which they learned poetry as well as the laws.

Under the Brehon laws there were five paths to judgement: truth, duty, right, propriety and proper inquiries. These paths ensured that each case was considered carefully.  The choices were thrashed out beforehand by the respective lawyers in a process called airthacra, which was akin to the hearing of legal arguments in modern court cases.  Most disputes, however, were usually settled before they wound up in court.

During the early Christian period, from about the 5th century to the 8th century, the laws and law cases were recorded by Christian clerics and ‘adjusted’ if the laws didn’t fit the Christian outlook. Most of our knowledge of early Irish or Brehon law comes from these old Irish law texts, mainly composed in the 7th and 8th centuries. Some of these texts have survived in a complete form in later manuscripts (generally of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), but many are to be found only in fragments. The best preserved collection of early Irish law texts is that of the Senchás Mar, "great tradition," which is likely to have been organized as a unit about A.D. 800. The texts in this collection are all anonymous, and it is not known where or by whom they were put together. However, most of the place-names and personal names cited in the texts relate to the northern Midlands and southern Ulster, so it is probable that the material derived from this area. It may have been assembled in a monastic law school, such as that at Slane, County Meath.

Section of Irish law, Library Ireland

Much of the Brehon law is founded on the principle of restitution, rather than punishment, so often the judgements involved various types of compensation for any injury done. The cases and laws therefore encompassed much of what mattered in everyday life. The Senchás Mar originally consisted of 50 law texts broken up into three sections. There doesn’t seem to be a strict logic to the arrangements except that similar subjects are grouped together. For example, the law text relating to cats is followed by the law text relating to dogs.

In the first third of the work there is a general discussion of legal topics and a description of St Patrick’s role in its codification. This essay is followed by laws on the formal seizure of another’s property to enforce legal claims against him. There is also a discussion on the acts regarding hostages, laws regarding the “free fief” and fosterage fees, as well as free clientship and base clientship which were two different classes in the highly stratified society that was Ireland. There were also other texts dealing with the laws of marriage and divorce, the arrangement of customary behavior and the relationship of society to the Church.

The surviving final third, like the first third, is not complete by any means. It does have evidence that suggests it may have contained laws on carpenters, coppersmiths and blacksmiths, sick maintenance as well as trapping deer. It also has medical legal texts “Judgements of Blood-lying” and “Judgements of Dian Cecht” (a legendary physician).

Included in the middle section, the most complete section, are the judgements dealing with trespass by domestic animals, fencing obligations and other related topics. Here we can learn such interesting judgements like if an animal is killed in a jointly owned herd and the culprit cannot be identified then a lot is cast across the whole herd. The animal on which it falls is held to be responsible. Whether or not that animal is punished is a mystery. Other interesting aspects discussed in this section include rules for bringing water for a mill across a neighbor’s land. Conflict in a situation like this is easily imaginable. A final section, which understandably gets full discussion is  "Judgements Concerning Thefts."

It is in this middle section that the Bechbretha or “Bee Judgements” are found. They include a discussion of trespass by honey bees.  It’s there, for instance, we can learn that a person who is blinded by a bee gets a hive in recompense.  Or that there were penalties for a person who moves a hive not belonging to them. And most reasonably we can learn that if a person shakes or disturbs a hive and the bees should attack that person as a result, the owner was free from liability for any injuries that might result.

The Brehon laws stretched back centuries and through them we can understand the daily life of the ancient Irish. If the laws are anything to go by it shows a society that relied heavily on mediation and compensation, perhaps in attempt to avoid more violent acts of retribution, vengeance and punishment.

Kristin Gleeson holds a Ph.D. in history and a Masters in Library Science. Her novel, In Praise of the Bees, weaves in aspects of the Brehon Law. You can find out more about Kristin and her other books at her website.