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December 2001

Parish History Episode 8

THE IONA MISSION

Last month, we mentioned how, about A.D. 616, King Edwin of Deira (York-shire) had made himself king also of Bernicia (Northumberland), and had thus united the North-East of England under his rule. This extension of his power involved the death of King Ethelfrith of Bernicia, and a group of Ethelfrith’s thanes found it wise to flee, together with the late king’s wife and children, Northwards into Celtic lands. They eventually settled on the Isle of Iona, under the protection of the monastery which had developed there, as a result of Columba’s mission (see the end of Part 5 of this history, in the September issue of “Signpost”). Here King Ethelfrith’s sons, Oswald and Oswy, had been baptised, and brought up as Christians accustomed to the Celtic rites. When news of King Edwin’s sudden death, in 633, in battle against King Cadwallon of Gwynedd and King Penda of Mercia, reached Iona, Princes Oswald and Oswy set out for home, together with some of King Ethelfrith’s retainers who had also found refuge on Iona, and, gathering some support along the way from Gaelic and Pictish warriors, they arrived in Northumbria with sufficient strength to enable them to drive out the Welsh and Mercian invaders, and to eliminate King Edwin’s family.

Once the princes had settled down in peace at Bamburgh, with the older lad, Oswald, as king, they wrote to Seghine, the Abbot of Iona, and requested that monks be sent to Northumbria to teach the people the Way of Christ. The first man sent out by Seghine soon returned to Iona, Bede tells us, with the pessimistic information that the people of Northumbria were not interested in theology and would not listen to sermons. However the good abbot then, in 635, sent out Aidan, a more tactful and more persevering man, who established his base on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, within sight of the royal castle of Bamburgh. This strange island - linked twice a day to the mainland when the tides ebbed back, and twice a day cut off when the waters came streaming in - became the seed-bed of English Christianity. Such an island home must have reminded Aidan and his companions of Iona, and perhaps recalled to the English their more ancient sanctuary on Heligoland (see Part 6 of this Parish History, in the October issue of “Signpost”).

Lindisfarne did prove indeed to possess the Spirit of Iona: as Columba had evangelised the kingdoms of the Picts and the Gaels from the tiny Isle of Iona, so Aidan and his companions began to tramp across the hills of Northumbria, preaching the Gospel of Christ to whomsoever would hearken to their message. Later, the older monks tended to remain on Lindisfarne, while Aidan and the younger ones moved around as itinerant missionaries. Hearing of this work, an Irish bishop arrived, and he consecrated Aidan to the episcopate, so that Aidan could ordain the native English lads who were coming to Lindisfarne.

Here there does seem to lie a difference in emphasis between the Iona and the Roman Missions. The Iona monks did not wait for reinforcements from their home base, but recruited local lads for the work of the Church. These boys were taken to Lindisfarne, and there learned the Christian life while serving successively as lay workers, engaged in building, fishing and farmwork, then as monks, and next as ordained priests, ready to go out and take the Sacraments to the peoples of the Bernician hills, and often to more distant regions. When Aidan died, in 651, the Church at all levels, below that of Abbot-and-Bishop of Lindisfarne (Aidan and his first two successors, Finan and Colman, were all Gaels), seems to have been almost entirely indigenous. By that time, it seems, hundreds of English boys and girls had come to Lindisfarne to join in the work of the Church.
Aidan was perhaps not, at first, quite ready for the girls. There had certainly been nuns in Ireland, almost two centuries earlier, but Columba’s mission in the Gaelic and Pictish North had made little use of female vocations. Aidan however took the girls in, and they were soon to predominate in Northumbrian monasticism, while the boys tended to be sent out as missionaries. By the end of the Seventh Century, most of the larger monasteries in Northumbria - Coldingham, Ebchester, South Shields, Whitby, Coxwold, Stonegrave, Watton - were “double monasteries”, ruled by abbesses, with large numbers of nuns combining their religious duties with agricultural, domestic, literary, artistic and educational work, while there would be a comparatively small number of monks resident, mostly men resting between missions or retired from the active ministry.

The conquest of England by the Irish monks was amazingly swift. In about twenty years from Aidan’s arrival in England in 635, they had spread the Gospel over all England, except for Kent, Middlesex and Surrey, which owe their conversion to the Roman mission, and Sussex and the Isle of Wight, two small kingdoms which remained resolutely closed to Christianity until the second half of the Seventh Century. Not all of these monks came through Iona and Lindisfarne, some came direct from Ireland, but among those who did set out from Lindisfarne were Chad, who finally succeeded in evangelising Mercia, after the death of King Penda in 655, and Chad’s brother Cedd, who reevangelised Essex, after the abandonment of the Roman mission in that kingdom.

However, the best known, and best loved, of all these itinerants was Cuthbert, though his travels were not as extensive as those of Chad or Cedd. Cuthbert had been born, about 634, in some settlement in the Lammermuir Hills (in East Lothian; Bernicia then stretched as far North as the Forth Estuary, so Cuthbert would have thought of himself as English, not Scottish), and as a boy he had worked for a while in the building of Tyningham Abbey (near Dunbar). Later he became a shepherd in his native hills, and then he served as a warrior - fighting perhaps in the war against Mercia in which Oswald’s brother Oswy slew King Penda (655). On returning from the war, he entered the newly built Melrose Abbey. From there, after a year or two’s training, he embarked on the wandering pilgrim life typical of a Celtic missionary monk.

He was to become the most popular of Northumbrian saints, and his fame was soon to eclipse that of Aidan, the founder of the Northumbrian Church. He was to become the patron of the Prince-Bishopric of Durham, and the people of that Diocese would be known in mediaeval times as the Haliwervolk, that is as the people of the Holy One, meaning Cuthbert. Many extraordinary miracles were to be credited to him, including healing the sick, raising the dead, exorcising evil, improving the weather, and miraculous feedings.

One such miraculous feeding is said to have taken place at Chester-le-Street, where the saint’s body would afterwards lie for over a hundred years (883 to 995). It is said that Cuthbert was snowed up there, in an old Roman building, for several nights during a winter journey, but was miraculously fed with fresh warm bread. The Wear valley was then, apparently, a rough frontier land: roads were bad, habitable buildings were few, angelic bakers were needed where human ones were lacking.

It would be nice to be able to record that Cuthbert was either on his way to or from Houghton-le-Spring when that incident occurred. Unfortunately, there is no record of the saint ever having visited our town - there is not even any certain proof that a town or village did then exist at Houghton-le-Spring.

But if there was a Houghton in those days, and if Cuthbert did visit here, it would seem that no miracles were required, and hence none were performed. With bakers like Simpson’s, Peter’s and Gregg’s, what need had Houghton of miraculous bread?