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April 2002

Parish History Episode 12

THE WANDERINGS OF SAINT CUTHBERT

As mentioned last month, the Vikings descended on Lindisfarne in A.D. 793. They sacked the monastery, stole everything of value, killed or enslaved the monks and other islanders, and ravaged the farmlands on the mainland, across the causeway, fighting off a party of soldiers from Bamburgh Castle. Year by year, other raids on the English coast followed, and abbey after abbey was destroyed. These heathen men seemed, when they landed, always to make first for abbeys or churches, as they knew that that was where earthly treasures were to be found.

It seems like a judgment upon a Church which had accumulated riches, and a society which lacked the energy to protect itself. If the monks of Lindisfarne had followed the Rule of their founder, Aidan, and had devoted all their worldly gain, after feeding themselves, to the needs of the poor, they would have been unlikely to have been robbed. Aidan’s timber-and-thatch church would have burned easily, but what pirate would have bothered to cast anchor in order to burn it?

The abbey had probably been largely rebuilt, when pirates attacked again, in the 830’s, and the monks retreated to Norham, on the Tweed, out of sight of the sea. They took with them certain holy relics that earlier Viking raiders had ignored, including the coffin containing the body of Saint Cuthbert, said to be whole and uncorrupt.

Then, in the Autumn of 874, when Ingvar and Halfdane arrived at Tynemouth, and wintered there, prior to Halfdane’s terrible march on York, in which a broad stretch of countryside, including Houghton and dozens of other communities, was utterly destroyed by the Viking horde (as mentioned in last month’s article), the monks at Norham, fearing that the Vikings might march North, abandoned that town, and, taking with them the Incorrupt Body of Saint Cuthbert, along with the head of King Oswald, and a magnificently illustrated Bible from Lindisfarne, began to make their way up into the Cheviots, and then Westwards across Tweedsmuir towards the hills of Galloway.

On and on they wandered, a bedraggled group of refugees, the monks taking it in turns to carry the saint’s coffin. They were to be joined in their odyssey by other desperate persons trying to escape the Vikings. By the time that they reached the beaches of Galloway, opposite the Ulster shore, the monks - if they were still monks, as they claimed to be - seem to have been accompanied by female companions, and were living almost as family men. Probably they had, in their flight, attracted other parties of panic-stricken fugitives, including frightened women in similar flight from Viking raiders, newly widowed it may be as a consequence of such raids, or perhaps ravished virgins. Unable to turn anywhere for safety, and possibly pious by nature, such women might well attach themselves to a party such as that of the monks bearing the coffin of Saint Cuthbert, and would accept the rôle of Mary, or of Martha - or of wife. By the time this Community, the Family of Saint Cuthbert as it will come to call itself, will have settled down, it will be a community of married men, living with their wives and children : something very different to what Benedict had envisaged when he first encouraged the men of the Roman and Western Church to seek the vocation of monasticism.

The monks were intending to find a boat, and to embark for Ireland, where they hoped to find sanctuary. As Ireland was suffering at least as much as Britain from Viking raids, there seems to be little logic in their plans. They, and their fellow fugitives, seem to have been running around in blind panic, like sheep which have scented wolves.

They did manage to find a boat for Ireland, but, overloaded perhaps with the relics that the monks insisted on taking with them, it swamped just after leaving port, and capsized, but fortunately the monks got back ashore without loss of life, or of the precious coffin. The Bible however was lost in the shipwreck, but fortunately it was found cast up upon the beach a few miles away, a day or two later.

The monks seem to have accepted the shipwreck as a judgment, as a sign that God did not intend them to go to Ireland. Where then did they go? They moved Eastwards from Galloway, and then Southwards, across the present Border and into what is now England. They then travelled deeper into England, and ended up, it would appear, at a village called Crayke, about ten miles from York, the city where Halfdane was ensconced, ruling as a king in his new home in the Vale of York.

We will leave the Family of Saint Cuthbert there until we come to tell of their further adventures in next month’s “Signpost”. But we might here take the opportunity to say more about that Bible that was washed overboard in the shipwreck, and was then cast up on a lonely Galloway beach.

This was that Bible that is now known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Few people in Houghton will have seen it. The other treasures that the monks bore away from Lindisfarne and Norham when danger threatened are now to be seen in Durham Cathedral, but this copy of the Gospels is so precious that it has to be stored in the British Museum, three hundred miles from home.

It was beautifully illuminated by Eadfrith, a monk of Jarrow who resided there at the same time as his friend Bede. He began that labour of love at Jarrow, but it was far from completed when he was given promotion as Bishop of Lindisfarne in 697, so he took it with him, to complete it on the island.

In 698 Eadfrith presided over the opening of Cuthbert’s temporary tomb (the saint had died, in 687, on the islet off Seahouses known as the Lesser Farne, where he had been living as a hermit for the last year of his life; his body was given temporary sepulture in the sand-dunes of Lindisfarne until the shrine that was being prepared for him was ready, eleven years later), and found the saint’s body to be whole and Incorrupt. It was because of this miracle that Bede dedicated his Life of Cuthbert to his old friend Eadfrith.

By this time, the work of illumination in Eadfrith’s Gospels was probably complete, and it was much as we find it to-day (if we visit the British Museum in London). It consists of the four Gospels alone, and is written in Latin (the Vulgate text), though Eadfrith showed his learning by writing the title-page of each Gospel in Greek.

But, in addition to the magnificent decoration that Eadfrith has given to the text, and the meticulous care he has taken with the illumination, these Gospels have been made even more interesting for us as a later monk has added an English translation, written interlinearly in a small, neat hand, between the illuminated letters of Eadfrith’s Latin text. This is the earliest English prose translation of the Gospels known to us, though there were earlier translations into heroic verse by Northumbrian bards such as Caedmon and Cynewulf.

This copy of the Gospels is also of interest, as it seems to confirm something of the story, told by Symeon of Durham in the first place, of the wanderings of the Family of Saint Cuthbert, carrying his relics and other precious items from place to place as they tried to escape the Viking menace (the story used by me to give this account of their Wanderings). The edges of the leaves of the book appear to be damaged, possibly by contact with salt water - in such a way as to be consistent with the book having been in the sea for a day or two, with the covers locked tightly so that water could not penetrate further.