St Cuthbert
Monk, Bishop and Saint: an account derived from Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert by Dr David Hunt
Durham Cathedral
Feast Day: March 20th
Thanks to Bede, our first glimpse of Cuthbert (ch. 1) is of a young boy playing games with his friends, keen and always eager to win, until one precocious infant (‘no more than three years old’) urged him to more serious pursuits, addressing him as ‘most holy priest and bishop’: ‘how ill it befits you to play with children, you whom the Lord has marked out to instil virtue into your elders!’ That God had plans for the young Cuthbert was even more apparent some years later (ch. 4) when he was shepherding a flock of sheep in the hills, on night watch while his companions slept, and was granted a vision of angels descending to escort ‘the spirit of some holy man’ up into heaven. This was 31 August 651, and next day Cuthbert was told that his vision had coincided with the death of Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne and indeed a man of outstanding holiness, who had been summoned from Iona by king Oswald to further the spread of Christianity throughout Northumbria. The young man took the vision as a sign that God was calling him to follow in Aidan’s footsteps, and abandoning his shepherding he ‘decided to enter a monastery’.
Childhood prophecies and visitations of angels are, of course, the stuff of hagiography (tinged with echoes of biblical stories). It is, however, a matter of history that the monastery entered by Cuthbert was Melrose, and thus likely that the hills where he had been shepherding were located in what we now call the Scottish borders, but in the seventh century were part of that great swathe of lands from the Humber to the Forth which made up the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. The choice of Melrose for Cuthbert, rather than Aidan’s Lindisfarne, was perhaps because it was his ‘local’ monastery; more specifically it was down to the influence of the prior of Melrose, Boisil, who is another of those who had premonitions that Cuthbert was destined for holiness. Boisil (ch. 6) saw Cuthbert arrive outside the monastery gates and entrust his ‘horse and spear’ (the trappings of his secular status) to a servant, then enter the church to pray. Boisil was the first to welcome the young recruit, hailing him to his fellow-monks ‘Behold the servant of the Lord’, and recommending him to abbot Eata for admission to the community.
Under Boisil’s guidance, Cuthbert zealously adopted the monastic life: he ‘watched, prayed, worked and read harder than anyone else.’ When abbot Eata moved south in what proved to be an abortive attempt to establish a monastery at Ripon, Cuthbert was one of the monks who accompanied him, appointed as guest-master of the new foundation: then, with Eata and his brethren ejected from there by Wilfrid, Cuthbert returned to Melrose and the tutelage of prior Boisil, only to be struck down by the plague then sweeping the country (ch. 8). His fellow-monks spent the whole night in a vigil of prayer for his recovery, ‘for they felt they could not do without him on account of his holiness.’ Cuthbert survived, albeit subject to bouts of continued pain for the rest of his life, but strengthened in the knowledge of the prayers of his brethren. When Boisil in turn succumbed to the plague, knowing that death was not far off, he spent the last seven days of his life reading his copy of St John’s Gospel together with Cuthbert, and hinting (like the child in the playground) that his favoured disciple would one day be a bishop. It is perhaps to these final moments with Boisil that the future bishop Cuthbert traced his love of the fourth gospel, a copy of which would one day lie beside him in his own coffin.
Around 662 Cuthbert succeeded Boisil as prior of Melrose, setting a high example of the religious life for his monks to follow (ch. 9). His influence extended well beyond the monastery walls, as he followed the example of Boisil and Aidan in undertaking extensive journeys (‘sometimes on horseback, more often on foot’) to preach and teach the word of God. Legend has it that on one such journey he pitched his tent in the country outside the walls of Edinburgh, the site commemorated by successive churches dedicated to St Cuthbert below the castle rock. Another journey brought him to the coast at Coldingham, where St Ebba, hearing of his reputation, invited him to her monastery ‘to exhort the community’ (ch.10); and where he was observed going down to the beach at dead of night to spend hours in prayer ‘up to his arms and neck’ in the cold waters of the North Sea, emerging to have his feet warmed and dried by a pair of otters, who received Cuthbert’s blessing before slipping back into the sea. Once on his travels (ch.12) he and a boy accompanying him found themselves without food, and spotted an eagle land on the riverbank with the prize of a newly captured fish. The boy grabbed the fish, only to be instructed by Cuthbert to cut it in half and return a portion to the eagle, whom God had sent to provide for their needs. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, and Jesus in the wilderness, Cuthbert, the faithful man of God, trusted that he and his companion would not go hungry.
Later in the 660’s (?) abbot Eata transferred Cuthbert as prior to the monastery on Lindisfarne (ch.16), to lead the community there by the example of his holy life, a regime of prayer and self-discipline, accompanied by an increasing repute for the miraculous cures attributed to his intercessions. But the main reason for his move to Lindisfarne was probably the demand for his diplomatic and peace-making skills in the wake of the Synod of Whitby and its acceptance of ‘Roman’ practices. Cuthbert faced opposition from ‘some of the monks who preferred their old way of life to the rule’, but such was his saintliness and patience that he gradually and painstakingly won over their obedience. In Bede’s summary of his efforts, we can detect something of the move away from ancient habits derived from Iona to the more formal structure of a monastic rule.
The demands on Cuthbert in the monastery, and his ever-increasing reputation outside it, fostered in him the desire to retreat into solitude, and to pursue his life of prayer in company with God alone (ch. 17). He first withdrew to a more secluded spot on Lindisfarne, the rocky outcrop known to this day as ‘St Cuthbert’s Isle’, and then across the water to the inner Farne, an island reputedly ‘haunted by devils; Cuthbert was the first man brave enough to live there alone.’ Here with the assistance of his brethren he built three structures – a dwelling for himself, an adjacent oratory, and a guest-house for visitors – much of the labour done with his own hands, shifting heavy stones ‘with the help of angels’. Despite the rocky ground, a pit was dug which, thanks to Cuthbert’s prayers, became a well-spring supplying him with water. He lived off the crops he grew for himself, once he had tamed the island’s birds out of carrying off the grain for themselves (when they were not stealing straw from the roof of the guesthouse to build their nests), one contrite raven even returning with the gift of a lump of pig’s lard, which Cuthbert liked to show to visitors and invite them to grease their shoes with it (chs. 19-20). Cuthbert’s easy rapport with the birds of inner Farne was to become one of the most endearing of the stories which came to surround him, but it is not until the writings of Reginald of Durham in the later 12th cent. that we first hear specifically of his protection of the island’s eider ducks (’Cuddy’s ducks’).
Cuthbert may have yearned for isolation, but the visitors still came across the water from near and far to be consoled by his preaching and cured of their ailments through his prayers. Nor in the end could he keep at bay the wider troubles of the Northumbrian church, and that prophecy of Boisil’s which haunted him that he would one day become a bishop. The moment came at a synod presided over by Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the presence of king Ecgfrith of Northumbria, which named Cuthbert bishop of Hexham (ch. 24). It took a delegation sailing across to the inner Farne led by the king himself to plead with Cuthbert in person – and an arrangement with his old abbot and master Eata to exchange the see of Hexham for that of Lindisfarne – finally to persuade him out of his reluctance. Cuthbert was consecrated bishop of Lindisfarne at York on Easter Day 685.?.
For Bede, Cuthbert was the model bishop (ch. 26), ‘protecting the flock committed to him by constant prayer on their behalf.’ The travels of this ‘holy shepherd …. doing the rounds of his sheep-folds’, preaching to his people far and wide, and his prayers effecting many miracles of healing, took him over to the west at Carlisle (chs. 27-8) and south to ‘a convent of virgins close to the mouth of the Tyne’ (ch. 35, S. Shields?) – pastoral journeys recalled still in the exquisitely jewelled pectoral cross and portable altar removed from his coffin and on display in the Cathedral museum in Durham – but his heart remained on the inner Farne: sensing that he did not have long to live, he had returned here to his hermit’s cell before the end of 686, in only the second year of his episcopate. Bede (chs. 37-40) records his final days through the eye-witness account of the monk Herefrith, who tended to the dying Cuthbert, passing back and forth between the inner Farne and the brethren waiting anxiously for news on Lindisfarne. It was Cuthbert’s wish to be buried in the solitude of his hermitage ‘where I have fought my fight for the Lord’, but the monks wanted his resting-place to be with them at the heart of the monastery, befitting the public memory of their beloved brother (and perhaps, more prosaically, where they might control access to his tomb). Cuthbert at last acceded to their wishes, and on his death his body was transported back to Lindisfarne, to be buried (on 20 March 687) beneath the floor to the right of the altar in the monastery church.
Eleven years later (ch. 42) the monks prepared a new wooden coffin with the intention of ‘elevating’ Cuthbert’s remains to greater prominence and visibility, and his body was exhumed from its burial place. To their amazement, ‘they found the body completely intact, looking as though still alive, and the joints of the limbs still flexible: it seemed not dead but sleeping.’ So began the sainthood of Cuthbert, their revered prior and bishop not only interceding for them in the heavenly realm but now miraculously revealed in his incorrupt body to be a ‘living’ presence among them on earth. So in the centuries to come, eventually uprooted by the Viking invasions, the monks of Lindisfarne went nowhere without the treasured coffin and its saintly contents, spending long years at Chester-le-Street and finally settling around the turn of the first millennium on the peninsula of the river Wear in Durham. Then came the Norman conquerors, who lost no time in turning the presence of Cuthbert to their own advantage, in 1083 supplanting the last of the Anglo-Saxon community with a new Benedictine foundation to guard his legacy, and ten years later beginning the building of their majestic cathedral to house his remains. On 29 August 1104 the treasured coffin, after being reverently opened to reveal the still ‘intact’ body of Cuthbert, was placed in its shrine behind the High Altar of the partially-completed cathedral. When, at the end of 1539, the agents of Henry VIII arrived on their mission to destroy the shrine, Cuthbert’s miraculous presence would successfully defy attempts to throw away his bones, enabling him to be reburied on the very same spot where his shrine had stood, and where he rests to this day.
(David Hunt, Durham: May 2025)