Cuthbert will have understood that Ecgfrith wanted to associate his great reputation for piety with his kingship. He also knew perfectly well that Aldfrith was waiting in the wings and had the community founded by the saintly Columba on Iona to back him. Ecgfrith needed his own living saint. Nevertheless the contradictions were sharp. Cuthbert had long sought the solitary life of a hermit because ‘he feared the love of wealth’, and yet the Northumbrian church had been endowed with so many gifts of land that it had grown extremely wealthy. The hermit would become a prince of the church, and his beautiful pectoral cross made from gold and garnets is a glittering symbol of his new status. And as he walked the duneland and sheltered from the wind and rain in Cuddy’s Cave, like Christ, Cuthbert had rejected ‘the kingdoms of the earth’. Yet here he was, becoming one of the most powerful men in Northumbria, and indeed all Britain. On 26 March 685, Cuthbert was consecrated Bishop of Lindisfarne by Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and six other bishops at York, and for two years he immersed himself in politics.
Motivation can be difficult to deduce, particularly at a distance of fourteen centuries. Perhaps in his long, shivering night vigils on Inner Farne, Cuthbert believed that God had spoken to him and directed that he take up the office of bishop. In Bede’s account of the meeting with Abbess Aelfflaed, there are clearly some retrospective adjustments, particularly over matters of timing. Two years is not long to hold high office unless there was some specific task that Cuthbert wanted to achieve. But there is no evidence of that. In reality he behaved much as seventh-century prelates did, progressing around his see and all its possessions and preaching to all who gathered.
He also took up the role of royal counsellor, offering views on military matters, of all things. Against Cuthbert’s advice, King Ecgfrith led an army north in May 685 to confront the Picts. At Dunnichen, near Forfar, he was defeated and killed. At the same time, Cuthbert was in Carlisle with Queen Aethelthryth, and when he had a premonition that disaster had occurred he sent the queen back to Bamburgh for her safety, behaving like a responsible, worldly counsellor.
After Dunnichen and the roll back of Northumbrian power in the north, the exiled Aldfrith became king, as Cuthbert prophesied, and a few months later he decided to lay down the office of bishop. After Christmas 686, Cuthbert returned to Inner Farne to resume the hermetic life. The contrast with his short career in politics must have been stark. It may be that, according to Bede and the Anonymous Life, Cuthbert was ill and believed he was nearing death. Or equally, it may be that the new king wanted a new bishop.
These two years at the centre of Northumbrian power sit uncomfortably with the rest of Cuthbert’s life, but then no one behaves with unwavering consistency. Throughout my journey to Lindisfarne, I had thought a great deal about this saintly man. Had he been an icon, someone who was unbendingly perfect and remote, then I would not have found him so attractive. There are contradictions in all of us: who has not said one thing and done another?
Near the end of the Crooked Lonnen, I found the Bridge Well. Peeping out from a tangle of thick grass and withered stalks of cow parsley, it was easy to miss. The water trickled from under a capstone that looked old, as though it had been there for many centuries. Wells can be disrupted, but it is likely that Cuthbert knew this one. It used to serve St Coombs Farm, whose name, cognate to Columba, suggests that there might have been a chapel nearby. And perhaps in the seventh century the little well was venerated. On my long walk I had met no one, and by the time I reached the village only a scattering of people walked the streets, the tide having shut a few hours before. The day was drawing to its close and lights twinkled in kitchen windows.
To watch the sun go down behind the Kyloe Hills, I climbed up the Heugh. The blood-orange ball sank quickly, its fiery light glinting off the sea. After the sun had slipped behind the hills, the edges of the cloud were gilded against the fading blue of the evening sky. For much of the day, I had been thinking about Cuthbert and his island, and without realising it I felt myself settled for the first time since I crossed the causeway. Perhaps the peace of Cuthbert had descended.
When I sat down on the stone bench, I saw two big tankers far out to sea, travelling in opposite directions. The next time I looked up, they had disappeared. Without realising it, I had spent time turning over my thoughts. On my journey to Lindisfarne, it had occurred to me more than once that my efforts to concentrate on issues were mostly fleeting. I am easily distracted. But up on the Heugh I did manage to focus for once. Perhaps the island and its silence were working on me. Though in truth my feelings were more negative than positive.
Nearing seventy, I am past caring what other people think of me, except for family and close friends. I have come to a simple, even simplistic view that what I think of myself and my actions is what matters.
On my way to supper, pondering my advancing years, thinking that the years raced past faster and faster, I remembered an old friend’s analysis of the stages of later life. Ricky Demarco built a reputation in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s as a gallery director and gifted cultural entrepreneur in Edinburgh, and the last time I saw him he told me he was eighty. Using a football analogy, surprising for Ricky, he said that we might all reasonably expect to fulfil the biblical three score and ten, but anything after seventy was extra time, and after eighty it was the penalty shoot out.
11
When God Walked in the Garden
I woke to wind-driven rain being flung against the windowpanes, and immediately thought of our old horses. Four of them, the Old Boys, live out through all weathers, well-rugged and fed, but wind-driven rain is a bane for them since it is so penetrative. By pointing their hindquarters into the direction of the wind, sometimes standing close to each other and where the undulations of the East Meadow take the edge off the cold blast, they try to weather the worst of it. All are big horses who were ridden by my daughters and my wife to high competitive standards, but now they are in their twenties. Gem, a cross-bred Dales pony, will be thirty this year. In the terrible snows and rains of 2017, we lost Murphy, a lovely, big, elegant chestnut I sometimes rode. Slipping on a slope in the meadow, he went down and could not get up again, his rickety, arthritic legs having no purchase in the mud. When the vet came to put him to sleep (I dislike euphemism but cannot bear to write anything else here), Lindsay gave him a bowl of hard feed and he amazed us by finishing it down to the last crumb. His will to live was not extinguished, but we had no alternative and, in what my wife calls the last act of kindness, he died a peaceful death. We covered him with old rugs and weighted them with stones to keep the foxes off him overnight, before the mechanical digger came to bury him.
I think often of the horses and the other animals who have died. Tears sometimes come, but I know they had good lives and we loved them. There should be no regret in that. They were lucky to be with us and we were lucky to have them.
As the wind whistled and the rain spattered, it was no day for walking – although Cuthbert and the more austere brothers may have seen it as another God-given opportunity to mortify the flesh. Their thick, homespun woollen robes will not have kept out rain like this, no matter how much lanolin had been left in the yarn. Once they were wet through, they would not have been dry for days. No need for hair shirts on Wild Lindisfarne.
Instead, it was a day for a book. Not the sort to be read in an armchair in front of a crackling fire, but one of the most famous books in the world.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were written and painted on the island, a blaze of glorious colour against the background of the grey North Sea. There is a facsimile copy in St Mary’s Church and I had brought with me an excellent commentary, Painted Labyrinth by Michelle P. Brown. Sadly, the real thing, the Gospels themselves, are in the British Museum in London, something that strikes me as a national disgrace and a waste. Objects acquire much more meaning if they are seen in their place of origin rather than as one of a thousand treasures in a vast museum that has no connection with them. If they were s
hown where they should be, in a bespoke building dedicated only to them on Lindisfarne, the presence of the Gospels would be transformative, bringing visitors all year round, even in weather like today’s, to look at this stunning work of art in precisely the place where it was created. Visitor numbers for the British Museum would suffer no ill effect – there is so much else to see – but the island economy would prosper. And more than that, this remarkable book would be better understood and its artistry relished all the more in the place where its creators walked their lives thirteen centuries ago.
The facsimile is very good, a gift to the church, and it sits close to the monochrome wooden sculpture of the monks carrying Cuthbert’s coffin. That is pleasing because it was the power of the saint who prompted the creation of this work of art. The Gospels were written and painted by one man, probably over a two-year period some time after 698, the year Cuthbert’s body was found to be uncorrupted and he was elevated to sainthood. The Bishop of Lindisfarne, Eadfrith, is credited with authorship in a colophon appended to the Gospels in the tenth century by a priest called Aldred:
Eadfrith, Bishop of the Lindisfarne Church, originally wrote this book, for God and for Saint Cuthbert and – jointly – for all the saints whose relics are in the Island. And Ethelwald, Bishop of the Lindisfarne Islanders, impressed it on the outside and covered it – as well he knew how to do. And Billfrith, the anchorite, forged the ornaments which are on it on the outside and adorned it with gold and with gems and also with gilded-over silver – pure metal. And Aldred, unworthy and most miserable priest, glossed it in English between the lines with the help of God and Saint Cuthbert . . .
Aldred translated the Latin gospels into Old English at Chester-le-Street, where the Lindisfarne community built a church in the tenth century before moving on to Durham. Aldred also noted that the book was bound by Ethelwald, who succeeded Eadfrith, and he makes the point that he ‘well knew how to do [it]’. Clearly this was not the first illuminated manuscript either man made, such is the richness of their skills and experience. But it is the only one that survived. The skill of Billfrith has been lost, probably looted in the Viking raids on Lindisfarne. Surprisingly, he was an anchorite, a hermit who had himself walled up, although clearly not permanently. Metalworking such as he did needs practice and also the Gospels are unlikely to have been his only work. It seems a strange combination – anchoresis and the skills of a jeweller – and perhaps it should qualify our views of these ascetics. Their privations are unlikely to have been constant and were probably periodic, perhaps like going on retreat.
The Gospels are a stunning artistic and spiritual achievement that show an apparently small and marginal island community at the centre of Western European cultural life. For the main text, Eadfrith used a southern Italian gospel book and consulted other works copied around the shores of the Mediterranean. Celtic and German styles of metalworking are imitated in the illumination, and the carpet pages that come between each gospel are like oriental rugs. But even more than all of these connections, the Lindisfarne Gospels are remarkable because they are clearly the product of a community with the skills and knowledge to translate all of these into one of the greatest books ever made. There must have been a substantial library on the island, a store of plants identified and cultivated to create the colours and make the ink, and a huge investment in calfskin for the pages. In every sense the Gospels are a spectacular outpouring from a deep reservoir of immense and varied skills and knowledge, something that may be seen as unsuspected on this windblown little island off the northern edge of England. That is a further and persuasive reason why the book should come home: it would change perceptions, both outside and inside.
The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each begin with a preface and what are known as Canon Tables. These list passages of text and show which are shared in which gospels. Framed by architectural arcades held up by richly decorated columns, they are beautifully written, the script an artform in itself. Then come the incipits, literally ‘it begins’, the opening words of the gospels, and these are gorgeous, the first letter made into a virtuoso piece of decoration that takes over the whole page. Each of the four evangelists is portrayed, all of them as scribes, composing their gospels. Their iconography is distinctive. Matthew is shown as an older, grey-bearded man and behind his head there is a figure that might be an angel, blowing a trumpet, possibly the Last Trump on the Day of Judgement. Looking out from behind a beautifully painted red curtain is a man carrying a book, a figure that may represent Christ. Mark is shown with a lion (hence the lions on St Mark’s in Venice), and he is beardless and youthful. So is John, and behind him, carrying a book, an eagle flies directly to the throne of God, prefiguring the Second Coming. Luke is shown as older and bearded, and behind his halo is a winged calf, a symbol of the crucifixion. In all the portraits, the drapery is luxuriant, wonderfully well realised by Eadfrith, an artist at the peak of his powers.
These portraits are the sole representations of people in the Gospels. Early Christians had a fear of idolatry, the graven images of the Bible, and this meant that abstract, geometric decoration of the sort seen on the carpet pages and the calligraphy in the book were given so much prominence. The Lindisfarne Gospels are emphatically not a riot of gorgeous colour, as I read in one history, but a contained, controlled piece of work that uses the harmony of proportion and the precision of intricate design.
One hundred and thirty calfskins were used, and no doubt more were discarded because of blemishes. The Anglo-Saxons were fond of riddles, and in St Mary’s Church a display board reproduces one that captures the process of preparing the skins to be made into pages:
An enemy ended my life, deprived me of my physical strength. Then he dipped me in water and drew me out again, and put me in the sun where I soon shed all my hair. After that, the knife’s sharp edge bit into me and all my blemishes were scraped away. Fingers folded me and the bird’s feather moved over my brown surface, sprinkling meaningful marks. It swallowed more wood dye and again travelled over me leaving black tracks. Then a man bound me, he stretched skin over me and adorned me with gold. Thus I am enriched by the wondrous work of smiths, wound about with shining metal.
The word ‘vellum’ comes from velin, an old French word for a calf, and traces of the animals can still be seen in the Gospels. The spine left a darker line and the sheets were arranged so that it runs horizontally. Apparently, this prevented the cut calfskin from cockling, trying to return to the shape of the animal. This would have caused paint to peel and flake. Incidentally the shape of the calf itself meant that skins were cut as double pages, written and painted out of sequence and then bound in gatherings of even numbers, eight pages in the Gospels. This established the shape of modern printed books.
Once the skins had been soaked, scraped and cut to size, Eadfrith ruled the pages with a stylus that would leave an impression rather than a mark. He then pinned the skin to a writing board. Good light was at a premium and on bright, windless days scribes worked outside rather than burn candles in darker interiors. Using a penknife, Eadfrith then cut his quill pens (from geese, swans or even crows – bird life on Lindisfarne around the year 700 was probably as plentiful as it is now) and made sure each nib was of a uniform breadth so that there was no variation in the size of his script. And he succeeded. The lettering never appears to vary and its uniformity makes it look as though it might have been printed. Ink was made from oak galls, the wood dye of the riddle, mixed with iron salts. Sometimes known as oak apples, these are growths on the tree that contain the larvae of a species of wasp. This must have been easily available, but probably not on treeless Lindisfarne.
Once all was prepared, Eadfrith began to copy from his southern Italian gospel in a script known as insular majuscule, sometimes as half-uncial. It was first developed in Ireland and came to Lindisfarne with Aidan and the early bishops from Iona. Majuscule refers to the size of the lettering, and it is indeed majestic, flowing across the pages. It is very time
-consuming to write and the scale of Eadfrith’s achievement is humbling. But it is a difficult text for modern readers, even those with a little monastic Latin. There is no punctuation, but the length of the line usually helps clarify meaning. When a sentence ends, the rest of the line is left blank.
When he ruled his incipit pages, Eadfrith had already worked out the decorative scheme and allowed space for it. Analysis of the Gospel pages show something surprising. Once he had tried out his ideas for decoration on some waste material, Eadfrith used the back of the sheets of calfskin for the outline drawings he needed to guide his painting. That meant he drew them in a mirror image, and in order to see the marks through the skin, he appears to have invented the lightbox. Candles were placed behind the skin, which must have been held rigid on some sort of stretcher, or if working outside, polished metal was angled to reflect the sun so that he could make out his marks. And to avoid scoring the sheets, making marks that might have trapped paint, he used a more rounded lead point, something he seems also to have invented.
The colours are glorious and all seem to have been made from plant or mineral extracts on Lindisfarne. Other illuminated manuscripts used pigments from around the world – red or vermillion came from insects that lived under the bark of oak trees that grew around the Mediterranean, while the blue of lapis lazuli came from the Himalayas. All of the colours used in the Gospels appear to have been home-made. The group who helped Eadfrith were clearly skilled in plant lore, extracting reds, greens and yellows from what grew locally. It was as though the colours of the island found their way onto Eadfrith’s pages, as though a garden made by God was used to praise Him. Not all of the pigments came from plants; other parts of Creation also added vivid hues. Yellow came from orpiment, a type of mineral arsenic that was extracted from ore. Purples, crimsons and blues could be made when acid or alkaline materials were mixed with plant extracts such as lichen, folium and woad indigo. These recipes, particularly for the ink, were excellent because over thirteen centuries the colours have faded only a little.
To the Island of Tides Page 24
