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March 2003

Parish History Episode 23

The Mysogyny of St Cuthbert

The old “Family of Saint Cuthbert”, the married priests who, for over two hundred years, had, amidst many dangers, carried the coffin of Saint Cuthbert throughout the South of Scotland and the North of England, and who had erected the cathedrals (now both demolished) at Chester-le-Street and Durham, which had been built to enshrine the saint’s Incorrupt Body, had been dispersed, and their Community was no more. They had been replaced by reformed Benedictines, men who honoured their vows of celibacy, and who had begun the construction of a new and greater cathedral in the city of Durham - the cathedral that still stands to-day as the heart of our diocese.

In the course of building that cathedral, the small cemetery which contained the bodies of the former priests and their families was destroyed, and the gravestones of the dead were broken up and used in the foundations of the new chapter house. Some of the gravestones were unearthed when the chapter house was rebuilt last century, and the broken stones, engraved with Christian symbolism such as representations of the Crucifixion, can now be seen in the Monks’ Dormitory museum in the cathedral.

Such desecration of these tombs obviously implies, on the part of the new Benedictines, contempt for their predecessors : perhaps even hostility towards men who called themselves monks, but who yet had not renounced their wives. Some of these attitudes were to be taken over into the general attitude of the new reformed religion towards all women. A legend was to be born that the saint, Cuthbert, whose shrine stood at the heart of the cathedral, had always been an inveterate woman-hater. There is of course no evidence for this in the older legends told about him. He may, in his younger days, have been employed successively as a shepherd boy, a builder’s labourer, a soldier, and a monk, all occupations in which most of his companions would be male, but there is nothing to suggest hostility towards women in his later years when he was a bishop. He spoke to women, prayed for them, even performed miracles for them, and behaved almost like a saint!

But the new monks saw him differently. The old tale of the marble line across the cathedral floor, said to mark the nearest that women would be permitted to approach the saint’s tomb, is typical of the new spirit. Legends were to be told about bold women who approached too close. The earliest tells us how, during the episcopate of Ranulf Flambard (1099-1128), at a time when the new cathedral was still under construction, a group of small girls were kicking a ball around (Ha’way the lasses!) on what is now Palace Green, but was then presumably a building site, when the ball entered the apse of the building, and rolled along what is now the Chapel of the Nine Alters, ending up beside the Tomb of Cuthbert. A small lass ran in after it, and picked the ball up, but, as punishment for intruding her female body into the sanctified space around the Saint’s Incorrupt Body, she was struck down paralysed. She was carried home, and shortly afterwards her parish priest came up to the cathedral and told the monks that she had died. They went to Cuthbert’s Tomb, and prayed to Cuthbert that he might forgive her, and he not only forgave her her sin, he was so moved by their prayers that he restored her to life.

Some women of importance resented this curse on their sex, and stories are told, on at least three different occasions, of a great lady sending her maid, dressed as a page-boy, into the saint’s presence, with, on each occasion, dire results for the unfortunate maid.

In 1333 it even happened to the Queen of England. King Edward III had resolved to avenge his father’s disastrous defeat at Bannockburn, and to make another attempt at conquering Scotland. He raised an army, and marched up the Great North Road. He arrived at Durham, with the intention of lodging in the monastery attached to the cathedral. He was entertained by Prior William Cowton, and asked his host what military resources the Palatinate could put at his disposal in order to assist him in his campaign against the Scots. The wine flowed freely, and the Prior was surprisingly generous in offering the King peasants to serve in the campaign. When the men got very drunk, the King’s wife, Queen Philippa, resolved on retiring to bed, and she, with a retinue of maidservants, was found accommodation in the monastery (in the monks’ dormitory? surely not?).

A monastic servant came to the refectory, where the King and Prior were still living it up, and whispered in Prior Cowton’s ear that the Queen and her maids were sleeping upstairs. The Prior was furious, and he ordered that they must be woken immediately, and transferred to beds in Durham Castle. The King was so pleased with the Prior’s generosity in promising so many men for the war, that he made no protest. So the Queen and her maids were woken up (by the monks?), and made to get out of bed, in their nighties or less, and to walk round the outside of the cathedral, well away from Cuthbert’s Shrine, to the Castle, where fresh beds awaited them.

Prior Cowton kept his promise, and provided plenty of men for the King’s wars (including, it would appear, three lancers and six archers from Houghton), and Scotland was invaded, and a victory of a sort, with appalling casualties on both sides, was won at Hallidon Hill. Most of the nine men from Houghton probably sleep more soundly on that battlefield than ever their Queen did in Durham City.

Similar stories are told even from the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Henry Watkins, the then Archdeacon of Durham, imagined himself to be acting in the spirit of Saint Cuthbert by avoiding women as much as possible, When, in 1916, women were brought into the cathedral to perform clerical and cleaning tasks, so many men having been taken for even bloodier battles than that on Hallidon Hill, he expected these women to keep out of his way, and always, when not performing liturgical duties, moved about with a big heavy stick, with which he thumped the floor as he walked around, in order to warn cleaners to scuttle away, and with which he rapped on office doors before entering, so that female clerks could hide themselves in cupboards.

Even before the War, in 1912, a great Suffragette Rally had been planned in Durham, and the Dean and Chapter, influenced perhaps by Archdeacon Watkins, feared that the women might be planning to destroy or damage the cathedral, and so iron grilles were erected to protect the stained glass windows from any stones which might be thrown by rioters. These unsightly grilles remained on some windows, including the Gilpin Window, adjacent to the main doorway, until 1994, when, at the time that Durham Cathedral saw thirty-eight women (including two of our former curates, Catherine Hooper and Caroline Dick) at last ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England, they were finally taken down.

By the end of the Twentieth Century, it might seem that justice had at last been done. Women could walk as freely as men in the cathedral; a man who behaved like Archdeacon Watkins would have been ridiculed by everyone; the Suffragettes had won the right to vote; and women, equally with men, could become priests. But “the Norman Reformation”, as we might call it, had left other marks, besides a tradition of misogyny, on the Church.

The Latin Church was now a renewed Church. It possessed unity under the Pope, and an efficient hierarchy connecting the Pope in Rome with the meanest peasant in the remotest of Latin lands. By the Schism of 1054 it had been set apart from the Church of Constantinople and the other Eastern Churches. By decrees of the Lateran Council of 1059, it had been decided that, when a Pope died, the privilege of electing a successor would fall to the College of Cardinals alone : thus ended a century during which German kaisers had taken to themselves the responsibility for appointing popes. By now the Church was governed by an order of priests, sharply differentiated from the laity both by their own renunciation of marriage, and (as new liturgical practices arose, in which the priest alone drank the Wine of the Eucharist, while the Bread was shared by both priest and people) by their refusal of full Communion to the people.

This well-organised and efficient Church soon came to own much of the land in England and in other countries. It became very wealthy, and this in itself would bring danger to the institution. It also soon came to evolve offices for dealing with dissent. While the Inquisition was not formally established until 1229, we begin to read of heresy trails, and of the burning of condemned heretics and witches (at first in very small numbers, compared to the holocausts of later centuries), in the middle of the Eleventh Century. This also, besides being very wrong and sinful in itself, would bring danger to the Church of later times, through resistance to intellectual development.

The Latin Church thus became an extraordinarily efficient organisation, in comparison to the ramshackle structure of the Eastern Churches, but in the course of time it would prove less than perfect. Through its very efficiency, it would become the more difficult for it to adapt to new insights, whether they came from human reason or from Divine inspiration.