It was to be a temporary place of shelter. Led by Halfdan, part of the Great Heathen Army invaded Northumbria, and in 875 the Congregation of St Cuthbert loaded their carts once more. Here is an extract from the Chronicle of Symeon of Durham:
They wandered throughout the whole district of Northumbria, having no settled dwelling-place; and they were like sheep flying before the face of wolves . . .
Many legends swirled around the wanderings of Cuthbert, his holy relics and the community who carried them. According to Symeon of Durham, the monks took ship for Ireland, the Gospels were washed overboard, Cuthbert appeared in a vision to Hunred, one of the bearers of the coffin, and told him that the great book had been washed up on a beach near Whithorn, the shrine of St Ninian, its colours miraculously intact. Analogies and borrowings from biblical stories from the Old Testament such as the exodus from Egypt, the search for the Promised Land, the Babylonian Captivity were recognised by contemporaries and the prestige of the cult of Cuthbert gained much. The perils of the Irish Sea may have had a part in the story, but it seems likely that the wanderings were more restricted in scope and limited to the north of England.
What surprises me, miracles and divine intervention aside, is how the Congregation of St Cuthbert survived in territory controlled by Halfdan and his Great Heathen Army. In fact, they prospered. Symeon of Durham noted that the monks were given rich gifts and sometimes granted land as they wandered. Perhaps they were sufficiently wealthy to employ soldiers to guard them and their precious luggage. Prelates with large retinues were by no means unusual and were criticised by Alcuin in his letters. Bishops should comport themselves with humility and follow the examples of the Bible, he wrote, but in reality most were noblemen and women and they behaved much like their secular relatives. An alternative hypothesis might suggest that such a tempting target for Halfdan’s warriors must have enjoyed his protection. Perhaps in his efforts to establish control over the old kingdom of Northumbria, he needed allies and some unity, and amongst the people Cuthbert’s cult was clearly becoming powerful.
When the Congregation reached Crayke in Yorkshire, close to York, the focus of the Viking kingdom, a remarkable and eloquent episode played out. The monks became involved in a political coup. After the death of Halfdan in 882, Cuthbert appeared in a vision to Bishop Eardulf and told him to find and ransom Guthfrith, a Danish Christian, and support his bid to become king of Northumbria. And an unlikely chain of events took place, as the Congregation succeeded in having their candidate crowned. It was an episode that showed them not as a band of homeless, fearful pilgrims pushed from pillar to post but as power-brokers. Guthfrith reigned between 882 and 895, gave grants of vast tracts of land to the monks, and most importantly made it possible for them to find a new home. Inside the welcome fortifications of the old Roman fort at Chester-le-Street in County Durham a splendid church was built, and it was there that Aldred translated the Lindisfarne Gospels into Old English and added his colophon.
For a century, the community seemed settled inside the fort, but in the 990s the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported an intense period of Scandinavian raiding. Bamburgh was destroyed in 993 and the settlements around the mouth of the Humber were attacked. Two years later the monks’ carts trundled out of the gates of the fort, bound for the monastery at Ripon in West Yorkshire. Far inland, close to the mouth of Nidderdale and the foothills of the Pennines, it probably seemed a safe haven. But after only four months the Congregation abruptly decided to return to Chester-le-Street. On the way back north, they halted. In a baffling twist in the tale, legend insists that the monks had followed two milkmaids who were looking for their dun cow. Why? What was a long caravan of precious baggage and the monks who looked after it doing following milkmaids? Perhaps they were attractive. Anyway, they led the Congregation to the banks of a river. The cart carrying Cuthbert’s shrine stuck in the mud and refused to move. It seemed that the saint had decided he need go no further. The Congregation had followed the milkmaids to a loop in the River Wear. Just as at Old Melrose, the river had created a peninsula with water on three sides and only a narrow neck of land where it turned back on itself. But it was not its attraction as a diseart that persuaded the monks to stop. The site was elevated, with high river cliffs to the south, and so was much more easy to defend than Old Melrose. Cuthbert had made a good choice and, after three days of prayer and fasting, the monks agreed with him. They began to build a wooden church on the site of what became Durham Cathedral.
Bishop Aldhun was well connected locally with Northumbrian nobility and could rely on protection as well as gifts of money and land. The wooden church was quickly replaced by the White Church of Stone, and after it was consecrated in 998 Cuthbert’s coffin and his shrine had at last found a home. And the monks had found an income. The White Church was completed in 1018 and one of the earliest of many pilgrims who came to the river peninsula at Durham was King Cnut. Ruling over what amounted to an empire of the North Sea that encompassed not only England but also Denmark and Norway, this immensely powerful and capable man both endorsed the cult of Cuthbert and was endorsed by it. Pilgrims began to come to Durham in large numbers and the bishopric became extremely wealthy and widely landed.
In 1080, William the Conqueror recognised that the see of Durham was strategically vital, as he consolidated his hold on his new kingdom. Needing a bulwark in the north against the Scots, he appointed William de Carilef as the first Bishop Palatine, what became known as a prince-bishop. In addition to governing the church’s lands up to and beyond the Tweed, the Bishop Palatine was given extensive secular powers, both military and civil. With the right to raise taxes, try all legal cases without any exceptions and raise troops, he could act independently as though he was king in the north. Speed of reaction to invasion was the reason why the king in the south created the Bishopric Palatine to hold the north. At that time, the building of the present cathedral began in earnest and a great deal of money was needed. When Ranulf Flambard, a successful civil servant and courtier, was made bishop, he paid little attention to spiritual duties. One monkish chronicler sniffed at his morals, writing that he liked to have his lavish meals served by ladies who wore tight-fitting bodices. At Norham, Flambard spent his time not at the church where the community had worshipped but in a mighty castle he had built on an elevated site above the Tweed. It glowered over the river at Scotland. Cuthbert had fled to the secret tracts of solitude because he feared the love of fame, and of wealth, and yet his sanctity had produced such great wealth that his successors became tremendously powerful magnates who did not hesitate to carry his standard into battle.
Lindisfarne had been completely deserted after the departure of Bishop Ecgred and the monks, and for 200 years the island disappeared from the historical record. When the Congregation carried Cuthbert’s coffin across the causeway, it seems that no one was left behind. In the monastic precinct the grass grew tall and the wind whistled around the chapel on the Heugh. The place of saints and spirits had become a place of ghosts, the church made by Creation and the paths of righteousness through the dunes were deserted, a wilderness, a broken world abandoned to the birds, the seals and the creatures of the land. Only the dead remained – Beannah, Osgyth, Ethelhard and the others – their bones buried forever in holy ground.
Eleventh-century politics shone a sudden spotlight on Lindisfarne. In 1069–70, the north rebelled against William the Conqueror and the magnates on either side of the Pennines were supported by a huge Danish fleet. When the king marched north to crush the rebels, Aethelwine, the last Anglian bishop of Durham, fled, taking the relics of Cuthbert with him. Once again they crossed the sands to Lindisfarne and a twelfth-century manuscript shows two monks carrying an elaborate shrine. They did not stay long. By 1072 Aethelwine had died in a dungeon and a Fleming, Walcher, had been appointed bishop in his place. He was safely loyal to William i. And so, for a thousand years, Cuthbert’s bones have found their rest inside the magnificence of Durham Cathedral.
* * *
After a foul start, the day had cleared completely and, even after the sun had slipped behind the Kyloe Hills, some late evening light warmed the village. The clear sky would mean a shining, bright full moon and after supper I walked down to the harbour to watch its beams trace a pale, rippling path across the surface of the sea. It was my last night on the island. Instead of going to bed, it seemed right to walk. Beyond the street lights of the village, there was enough moonlight to see my path and I started up the lonnen that leads from Chare Ends to the dunes. The winds of the morning had died away almost completely and when I climbed up to the first range of dunes, there was little more than a light breeze, a zephyr. Turning to look back at the lights of the village, and of Bamburgh Castle and the Farne lighthouse beyond, I sat down on a sandy shelf on top of the high dune. It was what I had seen in 1965 when I was little more than a child, a fifteen-year-old boy looking out over what life might hold. The years between seemed heavy, suddenly, and I felt tears come, sadness that all that time was behind me and so little remained. I thought about my mum, my dad and Bina, my grannie, who looked after me when I was a wee boy needing a cuddle. I still miss them, and up on the sand dune I wept because of something simple and incontrovertible. I had lost them, these people who made me.
Their departures began with the death of my dad on a snowy February night in 1986. I was working in my office at home when the phone rang. The doctor told me that my dad had died, apparently from a heart attack, about an hour before. He had been standing by the sitting-room window, had put his hand to his chest and said to my mum, ‘Oh, Ellen,’ and fell back against a chair, said the doctor.
‘Tell my mum I will be there with her as soon as I can.’ It was snowing steadily, big flakes, and I loaded the back of my car with anything heavy I could find to keep it down on the road and make it as stable as possible. Soutra would be treacherous, the hill the A68 from Edinburgh has to cross before the road descends to Lauderdale and the Tweed Valley. I phoned the police in Lauder to say I would be crossing it and they agreed to look out for me. At Fala Village, I stopped at another phone box to call them, so that they knew roughly when I would cross Soutra. It was snowing so heavily that the windscreen wipers were almost useless and often I had to guess where the road was in the whiteout. But I made it, keeping focused by playing music very loud, driving everything out of my head except the thought that I must be with my mum. On this night, no matter how bad the weather, she could not be alone.
When at last I stopped outside 42 Inchmead Drive in Kelso, Margaret Boyd, our kind and gentle neighbour, met me at the front door. My mum was hunched by the fire, staring at it, in shock, and when I embraced her she felt limp, exhausted. Adam, Margaret’s husband, was an immensely strong man and he had carried my dad’s body upstairs to the bedroom. When I went up, I lay next to him for a while, holding his cold hand. After a time, Margaret knocked on the door. ‘Alistair, your engine is still running.’ When I went out to turn the key, I looked down the road, its yellow streetlights only just visible through the falling snow, and I thought that one day my son would make this journey.
I stayed on the dune for a long time, watching the moon move slowly across the sky, thinking about the dead and about my children and grandchildren and their lives to come. Cuthbert had a powerful faith and no doubt it was much tested, especially towards the end of his life. What sustained him was an absolute belief in an afterlife and the bargain he had made with God. In exchange for all of that prayer and privation, Cuthbert would ascend to heaven as Aidan did, carried aloft in the arms of angels. I have no transaction like that, nothing to offer and no belief in a life after death. And so I simply have to be accepting of the inevitable and try hard not to be afraid. As I walked back down the lonnen, I hoped I would be lucky and thought of one of my heroes, Robert Louis Stevenson.
As a child and a teenager, I loved Kidnapped and Treasure Island and still believe him to have been a very great writer. He was at his peak in the 1880s with these novels, and Jekyll and Hyde, The Master of Ballantrae, The Black Arrow, The Wrong Box and the wonderful A Child’s Garden of Verses. But his health began to deteriorate and he often moved in search of a climate that would ease his respiratory problems. Kidnapped was written in Bournemouth. Eventually he settled on the Pacific island of Samoa, but became more and more depressed. His powers seemed to be fading and he feared a decline into permanent ill health: ‘I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse – aye, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.’
Then he began work on a new novel and energy returned as he wrote Weir of Hermiston, a work he would not complete. ‘It’s so good that it frightens me.’ Death came for him in a moment. As he opened a bottle of wine, Stevenson felt something happen. It was a stroke, and within a few hours he was dead, his wish completed, dying in his boots. He wrote a requiem to be inscribed on his tombstone and I love its sentiments very much.
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
That is what I hope for, some years of decent health and good work, and an increasing sense of acceptance and perhaps peace. With all of the medical advances of the last century, we are living longer and longer, and I believe that we spend too much time denying death, frantically postponing it and consequently not thinking about what we’ll do when it comes, not making preparations. If my time on the island had taught me anything, it was to come out of that sort of denial. In any case, age need not be seen as a continuing series of losses. Perhaps wisdom of a modest sort can be gained. For me, there is also the joy of my children, Adam, Helen and Beth, my grandchild, Grace, and, I hope, her cousins to come. That is not the eternal life so devoutly wished for by Cuthbert, but it is a version of it. When my son, Adam, was born, I passed on the delighted news to Andrew Cruickshank, a lovely actor and wonderful man who chaired the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when I ran it. He exclaimed down the phone, ‘Immortal, my boy! Children make you immortal!’
12
Crossing the Causeway
I thought I might be bored. When my wife stays overnight at competitions with her lovely mare, I rattle around the farmhouse on my own, making a sandwich, half-finishing a glass of wine, watching the best bits of The Godfather for the hundredth time. I find myself in the evening flicking through TV channels or the pages of a novel, often going to bed early to shorten the day. But my time on Lindisfarne had passed very quickly. By doing so little, I seem to have done a great deal. Using my phone to take about five hundred photographs and filling a notebook, I felt myself become an observer. Rather than passing through, focusing on a goal or a destination, almost indiscriminately and certainly without a plan I began looking around the island, at its people and visitors, and thinking about rather than merely noting what I saw. I had taken a vow of silence. Most surprising was that after a time I did not miss conversation. In new places, I often talk to people I don’t know and will probably never meet again. But here all my exchanges were brief and mostly practical. Perhaps closing my mouth opened my consciousness a little more and encouraged internal conversations, the sort of dialogue with myself I rarely have.
Pleasingly, my last day dawned bright and clear, and I had the morning to myself before my wife came to take me back across the causeway, back home and back to all that I love. Frustrated by the early closure of the priory on the first day, I had not gone back. In any event, I was much more intrigued by the much earlier monastery, by Aidan and Cuthbert and how they saw the island. In my notebook, I had scribbled ‘Bog standard Benedictine monastery that hides what is really interesting’. Lindisfarne Priory looked to me much like many other r
uined medieval churches. It was only its location that made it different from scores of others across Britain. But, as often on the island, my first impressions were wrong.
Made mellow and warmed by the morning sunshine, the sandstone of the priory church glowed. The view through the wrought-iron gate was almost painterly, and what is known as the Rainbow Arch, a surviving rib from the vaulting, completed a pleasing picture. I noticed that some of the pillars marching down the nave are decorated with chevrons and other motifs, like the massive pillars that hold up Durham Cathedral. However, more than architecture links the two churches.
When Aethelwine fled across the causeway to seek refuge from the armies of William the Conqueror, he re-made a broken link and unwittingly brought Lindisfarne back to life after the long centuries of abandonment. For that we should be grateful because if the priory had not been built, fewer people would come to Lindisfarne and the stories of Aidan, Cuthbert and the other saints would be less well understood. The brief return of the relics in 1069–70 were a prelude to much activity. The new Bishops-Palatine relied on the income and prestige derived from having Cuthbert’s shrine at Durham, and when the old Anglian cathedral clergy were replaced by Benedictine monks after 1083 they decided to build a new church and set up a community on the island. The original Congregation who came from Chester-le-Street could claim to be the legitimate heirs of Cuthbert, but the Benedictines could not. Instead they established their role as guardians of the saint and his cult by re-founding his monastery. They had also inherited the vast territories of the Haliwerfolc, the Holy Man’s People, St Cuthbert’s Land, and needed their ownership to be recognised and not disputed. Many of these possessions, such as Islandshire and Norhamshire, lay far from Durham but close to Lindisfarne.
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