Cuthbert

Saint Cuthbert was a monk, hermit, and bishop of the Northumbrian church in the seventh century, and after his death he became the most widely venerated saint of northern England. The principal early witnesses are an anonymous Lindisfarne life written shortly after his death and the prose and verse lives by Bede, which present him as a product of the Irish-influenced monasticism of Aidan and Melrose who later accepted the Roman Easter and tonsure decided at the Synod of Whitby. His parentage and exact place of birth are not recorded in those earliest sources; later tradition has sometimes associated him with Dunbar or with the countryside of Lauderdale. As a youth he kept sheep, and a vision of the soul of Aidan of Lindisfarne being carried to heaven is said to have decided him for the monastic life. He entered Melrose Abbey, then under Abbot Eata and the prior Boisil, and was trained in the ascetic and pastoral customs of that house.

With Eata he went for a time to the newly founded monastery at Ripon. When that community was required to adopt Roman usages associated with Wilfrid, Eata’s monks withdrew, and Cuthbert returned to Melrose. After Boisil died in an outbreak of plague, Cuthbert succeeded him as prior and undertook long journeys on foot to preach, hear confessions, and tend the sick in the upland and coastal districts of Northumbria. Following the Synod of Whitby in 664, he was sent as prior to Lindisfarne in order to introduce the Roman computation of Easter and related practices without destroying the peace of the island monastery. In the mid-670s he obtained leave to live as a hermit, first near Lindisfarne and then on Inner Farne, where he built an oratory and cell and became known for extreme austerity, for stories of birds and otters in the accounts of his companions, and for counsel given to visitors.

In 684 the Northumbrian church and King Ecgfrith chose him as bishop. He was reluctant to leave his hermitage; after a visitation by the king and leading churchmen he submitted, and he was consecrated at York by Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury at Easter 685. Although first designated for Hexham, he exchanged sees with Eata so that he might remain associated with Lindisfarne. His episcopate was brief. He continued to combine pastoral travel with periods of retreat, and the early lives credit him with healings and with a concern for the poor and for monastic discipline. Foreseeing his death, he returned to Inner Farne, where he died on 20 March 687. His body was taken back to Lindisfarne and buried beside the altar.

Eleven years later the monks opened the tomb and reported the body incorrupt, an event that confirmed and enlarged his cult. When Viking raids made Lindisfarne unsafe in the late ninth century, the community carried Cuthbert’s coffin, together with relics of other Northumbrian saints and the Lindisfarne Gospels, on a prolonged wandering through Northumbria and Galloway, settling for a time at Chester-le-Street. In the late tenth century the see and the shrine were established at Durham, where a stone church and later the Romanesque cathedral housed the relics. The community of Saint Cuthbert became a major landholder and a focus of regional identity; kings of England, including Æthelstan and later William the Conqueror, paid honour at the shrine. Cuthbert’s feast on 20 March, with secondary commemorations of the translations of his relics, remained central to the calendar of northern England and of the later Benedictine cathedral priory of Durham. He is invoked as patron of Northumbria and Durham, of shepherds and sailors, and against plague.