Some time around 651, Cuthbert appeared at the gates of the monastery of Old Melrose:
By chance Boisil was standing at the monastery gates when he arrived and thus saw him first. Cuthbert dismounted, gave his horse and spear to a servant (he had not yet put off secular dress) and went into the church to pray. Boisil had an intuition of the high degree of holiness to which the boy he had just been looking at would rise, and said just this single phrase to the monks with whom he was standing; ‘Behold the servant of the Lord,’ imitating Him who, at the approach of Nathaniel, exclaimed: ‘Behold an Israelite indeed, one in whom there is no guile’. An old veteran, Sigfrith, priest of Jarrow monastery, told me the tale; he was there with Boisil at the time, a mere youth in the first steps of monastic life. Now he is living the life of perfection. He has only a few feeble breaths in him and is thirsting for the joys of the future life.
Boisil said no more. He welcomed Cuthbert and when he explained the purpose of his visit, namely to leave the world behind him, Boisil received him with great kindness into the community.
This passage from Bede’s Life of Cuthbert has the quality of reportage, gilded a little perhaps but undoubtedly made the more authentic by old Sigfrith’s recollections. Riding a horse, carrying a spear and accompanied by a servant, Cuthbert was clearly an aristocrat of some degree, like most of the leaders of the early church. And his name is English, meaning ‘famous’ and ‘bright’. The latter element is clear in the Galloway place-name, Kirkcudbright, which means what it sounds like, ‘Cuthbert’s Kirk’. The young man’s name passed into common currency as both a surname and a Christian name and, like the seventy-two church dedications to him, it is concentrated in the north of England and Scotland, broadly in the expanded territory of ancient Northumbria.
Traditions vary but, much to the continuing distaste of some at Durham Cathedral, it seems likely that Cuthbert came from Lauderdale, the valley which saw the bloody battle at Degsastan fifty years before. In his magisterial Antiquities of Roxburghshire and Adjacent Districts, Alexander Jeffrey recorded the belief that the young man rode only a short distance to Old Melrose, from the disappeared settlement of Wranghame, at the foot of Brother-stone Hill. It appears that he had been fostered out to a family there and raised by a woman called Kenspid. Bede wrote that he often visited ‘the house of his old nurse, indeed he always called her “mother” ’. Aristocratic boys were often sent away from home in this way and fosterage was a tradition which persisted amongst the Highland clans until the eighteenth century.
Although much of Bede’s hagiography is formulaic, consciously drawn from biblical examples and designed to establish Cuthbert, the man of God, as a great saint, the author includes a remarkable passage in the prologue addressed to Bishop Eadfrith and the community of monks on Lindisfarne:
While the book was still in note form, it was often looked over and revised by our very reverend brother, the priest Herefrith, whenever he came here, and by others who had lived a long time with the man of God, and who were, therefore, more conversant with the details of his life. On their advice I made several amendments. I have tried to avoid all ambiguity or hair-splitting and write a clear investigation of the truth in simple terms. I have already taken care to let you yourselves examine what I have written, so that what was false could be amended, what was true confirmed.
When, with the help of the Lord, the book was finished, and had been read for two days before the elders and teachers of your community, and its every detail had been considered, they then approved all I had written, declaring it fit to be read and transcribed by all whose holy zeal moved them to do so. The discussions you held among yourselves have brought to light many other facts, just as important as those I record here and well worth writing down, except that it hardly seems right to make insertions and add to a carefully planned and completed work. Furthermore, since I have been quick to carry out the task you thought fit to impose on me, may I suggest that you crown your kindness by not being slow to reward me with your prayers. When, in reading my book, your hearts are raised to a more burning desire for the Kingdom of Heaven, by the memory of our holy father, do not forget to intercede with the divine mercy on behalf of one so small, so that I may be found worthy on earth to long for and hereafter in perfect bliss to see ‘the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living’. And, when I am dead, pray for my soul and say mass for me as though I were one of your own household, and be so good as to inscribe my name on the roll with your own.
Few scholars before modern times took such trouble as Bede to verify his information from trustworthy sources where it was possible. But there is more than a faint echo of tetchiness in the second part of this extraordinary extract. Bede was not modest and knew he was scrupulous – it appears that he had been forced to cry ‘enough’ and defend his work from never-ending meddling from Lindisfarne. Cuthbert was a figure of vast importance – powerful Northumbrian churchmen knew it – and this unmistakable evidence of squabbling over the detail of his saintly life only serves to underline that importance. But Bede was not to be moved. Echoing clearly across thirteen centuries is the stamp of man putting his foot down. The Life of Cuthbert became the definitive text, the basis of a tremendously popular cult, and its author’s name was indeed inscribed on the roll of the pious. In Durham Cathedral, the tomb of St Bede keeps company with that of his hero.
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Bede Himself
Most of the writers of the textual sources for the Roman period and the Dark Ages have little or nothing to say about themselves. Tacitus was the son-in-law of Agricola and a Senator, Aneirin survived the battle at Catterick and Nennius apologised for his poor Latin. Uniquely, Bede of Jarrow offered posterity more than a passing sense of his life, his preoccupations, occasional irritations and his temperament. Here is his own potted autobiography at the end of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People:
I was born in the territory of this monastery. When I was seven years of age I was, by the care of kinsmen, put into the charge of the Reverend Abbot Benedict and then of Ceolfrith, to be educated. From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write. At the age of nineteen I was ordained deacon and at the age of thirty priest, both times through the ministration of the reverend Bishop John on the direction of Abbot Ceolfrith. From the time I became priest until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy Scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation.
* * *
Cuthbert’s life story is related as a series of miracles, prophecies and pious acts woven together into a chronological sequence. Exorcisms, the power of prayer to prevent disaster and the ability to see into the future are all essential in compiling the sense of an exemplary life, one touched directly by the hand of God and one upon which a cult can begin to build. But amongst the marvels are strewn fascinating glimpses of seventh-century Bernicia.
The wide extent of Anglian control of the Tweed Basin is hinted at when Cuthbert was visited by a man in great distress. His wife had been possessed by a demon and he begged for the saint to send him a priest so that she might have comfort in her last tormented hours. But Cuthbert said that he himself would come and, more, that the man’s wife would be cured at his approach and the devil completely cast out when she touched the bridle of his horse. And so it happened.
Bede begins the passage with: ‘There was a sheriff [shire-reeve] of King Ecgfrith, called Hildmer.’ It appears that this man lived fairly close to Old Melrose and that Cuthbert knew the couple. Like him, they were part of a local elite and Hildmer administered a royal shire on behalf of King Ecgfrith. This reference dates the incident to some time between 670 and 685 but, more p
articularly, the use of the phrase ‘a sheriff’ suggests several royal estates along the banks of the Tweed. In a territory only recently incorporated into Bernicia, such a degree of royal ownership is perhaps not surprising. Hildmer’s shire may have been at Sprouston where aerial photography has revealed the outlines of several Anglian halls of the relevant period. Or perhaps the possessed woman touched the bridle of Cuthbert’s horse at Philiphaugh, near Selkirk, where another hall stood. The scatter of Anglian place-names – Midlem, Bowden, Ashkirk – around the latter is suggestive. Four centuries later, much of the central Tweed Valley was still in royal hands when King David I of Scotland famously endowed three abbeys at Selkirk (later moved to Kelso), Jedburgh and Melrose.
In addition to exorcism, it appears that apostasy was another of Cuthbert’s many cares:
[A]nd outside, in the world, he strove to convert people for miles around from their foolish ways to a delight in the promised joys of Heaven. Many who had the faith had profaned it by their works. Even while the plague was raging some had forgotten the mystery conferred on them in baptism and had fled to idols, as though incantations or amulets or any other diabolical rubbish could possibly avail against a punishment sent by God the Creator. To bring back both kinds of sinners he often did the rounds of the villages, sometimes on horseback, more often on foot, preaching the way of the truth to those who had gone astray. Boisil did the same in his time. It was the custom at that time among the English people that if a priest or a cleric came to a village everyone would obey his call and gather round to hear him preach.
A very early preacher’s bell was unearthed at Ednam, a village with an Anglian name near Kelso, and it seems that, when he arrived at a settlement, a preacher would use one to summon the faithful. While Bede’s account is a useful record of how the word of God was spread in a countryside without churches, it is also puzzling. The archaeological record, inscriptions, scraps of evidence from written sources and Bede himself attest a native British population who had been Christian for some time. They were, after all, Y Bedydd, ‘the Baptised’. The Angles were recent converts and Bede specifically mentions ‘the English’. At least two readings are possible. Either Cuthbert was preaching only to the communities of Anglian settlers in the Borders or native Christianity was shallow, possibly only securely established amongst the Well-Born and in need of regular reinforcement. Here is another extract from the same chapter which inclines to the latter interpretation:
He made a point of searching out those steep, rugged places in the hills which other preachers dreaded to visit because of their poverty and squalor. This, to him, was a labour of love. He was so keen to preach that sometimes he would be away for a whole week or a fortnight, or even a month, living with the rough hill folk, preaching and calling them heavenwards by his example.
The Old Welsh language hung on in the hill country of the Borders for many generations after the coming of the Bernicians and it may be that Cuthbert had the gift of tongues, having been raised in a bilingual community.
Once his congregation had listened to his stories and pious examples, ‘they confessed every sin openly’. This reference catches a moment in the development of a particularly powerful aspect of early Christianity. Much influenced by Irish example, monks began to seek someone to be an anam-cara, a Gaelic term meaning ‘a soul-friend’. Usually a fellow monk, this was a person to whom it was possible to confess sins and thereby entrust with the welfare of the soul in the afterlife. Gradually confession became a transaction between two people, private and confidential – and frequent. In Cuthbert’s time, sins were, it seems, for public consumption. In small communities, they probably were anyway.
Despite his forays out into the world to spread the gospel, Cuthbert hankered after the hermetic life but with qualifications. In his last days, Boisil had prophesied that the young monk would become a bishop and Cuthbert struggled to reconcile two competing and very different religious impulses:
‘If,’ he would lament, ‘I could live in a tiny dwelling on a rock in the ocean, surrounded by the swelling waves, cut off from the knowledge and sight of all, I would still not be free from the cares of this fleeting world nor from the fear that somehow the love of money might snatch me away.’
Clearly the attraction of the diseart was very strong but Cuthbert knew that complete isolation was probably unrealistic. Out in the fleeting world, politics was shifting and the Bernician kings were waxing immensely powerful.
In his Life of Columba, written a generation before Bede, Adomnan of Iona recounted the story of a vision which came to King Oswald before the battle at Denisesburn in 634.
That same night, just as he had been told in the vision, he marched out from the camp into battle with a modest force against many thousands. A happy and easy victory was given him by the Lord according to his promise. King Cadwallon was killed, Oswald returned as victor after battle and was afterwards ordained by God as emperor of all Britain.
Imperator Totius Britanniae – these were grand, resonant words, a very deliberate harking back to the glories of Rome and the time when Britannia was a united province and not a squabble of small kingdoms. Still standing close to its original height in many places and with many of its formidable forts largely intact, Hadrian’s Wall ran through the midst of Oswald’s territory and profoundly informed his aspiration. Around the year 600, his contemporary, Oswin of Deira, was said to have been born inside the walls of the old fort at Arbeia, at South Shields. The great wall was a daily reminder of the ancient might of Rome and a relic of the immense power of the imperators, as well as a persistent prompt to ambition.
Bede made much of Oswald’s brief reign, claiming that he held hegemony over ‘the four nations of Britain’ and, at the time of writing, the Bernician king had been canonised. A saintly ruler, touched by the hand of God, was always likely to be awarded a heroic and determinant role in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People but it seems, in hindsight, that Bede was overstating Oswald’s actual achievements.
In 641, the saintly king needed more than the aura of lost empires to save him. Here is the entry from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
Here Oswald, King of Northumbria, was killed by Penda the Southumbrian at Maserfield [probably Oswestry – Oswald’s Tree – in Shropshire], on 5th August, and his body was buried at Bardney. His holiness and miracles were abundantly made manifest through this island, and his hands, undecayed, are at Bamburgh . . .
And in the same year that Oswald was killed, his brother Oswy succeeded to the Northumbrian kingdom, and he ruled 28 years.
Like his brother, Oswiu became king at the age of thirty, a mature and experienced warrior in the prime of his life, but, unlike Oswald, he reigned for a long time before dying not on the battlefield but in his bed in 670. Despite Adomnan and Bede’s attachment of the title of Emperor of All Britain to Oswald, it was Oswiu, the hard-bitten pragmatist who came after the saint, who turned a big name and claim into a clear political reality.
Oswiu’s opening challenge lay on the southern borders of his kingdom of Bernicia. Occupying the modern counties of Durham and much of Yorkshire, Deira had been Edwin’s base and, in the 640s, had fallen under the control of Oswin, the baby born in the ruins of the Roman fort at Arbeia which stood at the mouth of the Tyne. Bede wrote that Oswiu ‘could not live at peace with Oswin’ and the new king of Bernicia wasted little time in moving to establish himself as overlord of Deira. By 651, the way was clear. Betrayed by Deiran noblemen, Oswin had been captured, handed over to Oswiu and murdered. But instead of taking the throne himself, the new overlord installed his nephew, Aethelwald. It was to prove a dire miscalculation. Three years later Aethelwald allied himself with the pagan King Penda of Mercia, the killer of his father at Oswestry. Here are extracts from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede which describe, almost as a matter of routine, the treachery and violence of seventh-century politics:
Here Oswy killed Penda at the River Winwaed and 30 royal children with him, and some
of them were kings . . . And Peada, Penda’s offspring, succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians . . . But that king Peada ruled no length of time, because he was betrayed by his own queen at Eastertide.
And Bede sketched in more detail:
But Oswald’s son, Aethelwald, who should have helped them [at the battle at the Winwaed] had gone over to the enemy and had acted as a guide to Penda’s army against his own kin and country, although during the actual battle he withdrew and awaited the outcome in a place of safety. When battle had been joined, the pagans suffered defeat. Almost all the thirty commanders who had come to Penda’s aid were killed . . . This battle was fought close by the River Winwaed, which at that time was swollen by heavy rains and had flooded the surrounding country: as a result many more were drowned while attempting to escape than perished by the sword.
The Winwaed flowed through the district of ‘Loidis’, according to Bede, and it is the ancestor of the modern name of Leeds, part of the ancient kingdom of Elmet and before that, the Ladenses. The defeat and destruction of the thirty war bands who rode with Penda to the Winwaed, if not an exaggeration, probably swung the balance of power decisively in Oswiu’s favour and firmly established his overlordship of Mercia, which stretched from the Humber to the Thames. And the victory at the Winwaed made the Bernician king Imperator Totius Britanniae, in control of almost all of the old Roman province. But it was not to be enough. Oswiu’s ambition turned his gaze westwards.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 22
