Æthelwold

Æthelwold (also spelled Æthelwald or Ethelwald) was Bishop of Lindisfarne in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria in the eighth century. He succeeded Bishop Eadfrith, the scribe of the Lindisfarne Gospels, and occupied the see from 721 until his death in 740. No reliable source records his parentage, date of birth, or place of birth. He belonged to the monastic church of northern England that had grown from Aidan’s mission on Lindisfarne and from the cult of Saint Cuthbert, a tradition that after the Synod of Whitby combined Roman Easter reckoning and other continental practices with a still distinctive insular spirituality and art.

Before his elevation he was abbot of Melrose Abbey (Mailros) on the River Tweed, a daughter house of Lindisfarne and an important centre of the Cuthbertine tradition; Cuthbert himself had been prior there. That abbacy placed Æthelwold in the mainstream of Northumbrian monastic life in the generation after Whitby. Later northern writers, above all Symeon of Durham, preserve this Melrose connection; Bede, who finished his Ecclesiastical History in 731 during Æthelwold’s lifetime, simply names him as the bishop then holding Lindisfarne, thereby confirming his standing among the Northumbrian episcopate.

Æthelwold’s name is lastingly tied to the Lindisfarne Gospels, the great insular gospel book made at the island monastery. A tenth-century Old English colophon added by the priest Aldred states that Eadfrith wrote the book, that Bishop Æthelwold bound it and made it firm, and that the anchorite Billfrith fashioned a precious metal cover with gold, gems, and gilded silver. The original treasure binding does not survive, but the notice records Æthelwold’s role as patron and custodian of the community’s principal sacred book.

He died in 740 and was succeeded by Cynewulf. He was honoured as a saint in the Northumbrian church, and his feast came to be kept on 12 February. As with many early English monastic bishops, no papal act of canonization is recorded; veneration arose from local cultus at Lindisfarne and in churches linked to the community of Saint Cuthbert. Precise details of his death-place and burial are not given in the earliest narratives. Later Durham tradition associated the relics of Lindisfarne’s bishops with the translations that accompanied Cuthbert’s body when the community left the island in the late ninth century. The surviving evidence for Æthelwold’s life remains sparse and rests chiefly on Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels colophon, and later northern historians.