Relics and the Cult

Aidan died at the royal town of Bamburgh on 31 August 651, in a tent pitched against the wall of the church, leaning on a wooden post that — Bede says — twice survived the burning of the church around it and became a relic worked through with healings. His body was buried at Lindisfarne; when the Irish bishop Colmán withdrew after the Synod of Whitby (664), he took a portion of Aidan’s bones with him to Iona. From his foundation grew one of the great holy places of the English church — the shrine of Cuthbert and, in the early eighth century, the milieu that produced the Lindisfarne Gospels. This file follows Aidan’s death, the early cult, and the later fame of the see he made.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle of Northumbria)

The Death at Bamburgh

Aidan died, as he had largely lived, in the orbit of the royal fortress. Bede records that the bishop was at the royal town of Bamburgh when his last illness came upon him; a tent had been set up for him on the west side of the church, against the wall, so that the tent leaned against the church itself, and there Aidan breathed his last, supported by a post or buttress (destina) that braced the church’s outer wall (HE III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The date is the firm point of his whole chronology: 31 August 651, in the seventeenth year of his episcopate, only twelve days after the murder of King Oswine of Deira, whom Aidan had loved and whose death, Bede suggests, the bishop could not long survive (HE III.14, III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; see The Thin Record). His body was carried to Lindisfarne and buried there, in the cemetery of the brethren, and later — when Finan had built the larger oak church — translated into the church itself, to the right of the altar (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The Relic of the Post

The most famous relic of Aidan was not his body but the wooden post against which he died. Bede relates that the church at Bamburgh was afterward burned down twice — once when the whole town was destroyed — and that on both occasions the flames, which consumed everything else, spared that single post against which the dying bishop had leaned: it stood untouched amid the ashes (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). After the second fire the post was reverently built into the structure of the rebuilt church, and Bede reports that healings were worked through it — that many who came in faith were cured, and that splinters cut from the beam and steeped in water restored the sick (HE III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). These accounts are reported here as Bede’s testimony and pinned to his text per the methodology (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the miracles are treated fully in The Miracles and the King). Whatever their historical character, they show that the cult of Aidan had taken root by Bede’s day, attached both to his burial-place at Lindisfarne and to the place and instrument of his death at Bamburgh.

The Translation of the Bones

A poignant detail attaches to Aidan’s relics at the close of the Ionan period at Lindisfarne. When the Synod of Whitby (664) decided for the Roman Easter and the Irish bishop Colmán resigned and withdrew (see The Line of Bishops and St. Colmán of Lindisfarne), Bede records that he took with him to Iona a portion of the bones of Aidan, leaving part behind at Lindisfarne (HE III.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The gesture is eloquent: the departing Irish carried their founder’s relics back to the mother-house from which he had come, even as they left the church he had planted in English hands. Aidan’s bones were thus, in a sense, divided between the two homes of his life — Lindisfarne, which he founded, and Iona, which had formed and sent him — a fitting image of a saint who belonged to both [Disputed: Bede states that Colmán took away part of Aidan's bones to Iona; the subsequent history and present whereabouts of any of Aidan's relics are not securely traceable, and later claims about surviving relics cannot be confirmed from early sources].

The Later Fame of Lindisfarne

The see Aidan founded did not fade with the departure of the Irish; on the contrary, it grew into one of the most celebrated holy places of the English church, and its fame redounds to its founder. Three things in particular gave Lindisfarne its later glory.

First, the cult of Cuthbert. Cuthbert (c. 634–687), formed in the tradition Aidan had planted, became bishop of Lindisfarne and the most venerated saint of northern England; when his body was found incorrupt at the translation of 698, his shrine made Lindisfarne a place of pilgrimage, and his cult — later carried to Durham, where his body still rests — became one of the great devotions of medieval England (see St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and The School and the Saints). Cuthbert’s fame was, in a real sense, the flowering of Aidan’s foundation: the island Aidan chose for prayer became the shrine of the saint his community produced.

Second, the Lindisfarne Gospels. In the early eighth century, around 700–720, the community of Lindisfarne produced one of the supreme masterpieces of Insular art — the illuminated Gospel-book known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, traditionally associated with Bishop Eadfrith and made in honour of God and St. Cuthbert (Mayr-Harting 1991; Farmer 2011). The Gospels are the artistic monument of the church Aidan founded, fusing Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Mediterranean elements into a work of extraordinary beauty — the visible splendour of a community that had begun in the austere poverty of Aidan’s island monastery. That such a treasure should have grown from so frugal a foundation is itself a kind of testimony to the depth of what Aidan planted.

Third, the endurance of the place as holy ground. Lindisfarne remained a centre of Christian life until the Viking raids — the sack of 793 was one of the events that announced the Viking age to a horrified Christendom — and even after the community eventually removed Cuthbert’s body to safety and finally to Durham, “Holy Island” kept its name and its sanctity. The island Aidan asked for as his seat became, and remains, one of the iconic holy places of the British Isles.

The Founder and the Glory

There is a proportion worth marking in all this. Aidan himself left no shrine to rival Cuthbert’s, no masterpiece like the Gospels, no great surviving relic-cult of his own; his veneration, real and continuous, was always quieter than that of the saint his foundation produced. But the quietness is fitting. Aidan was the planter, not the flower; the founder whose monument was meant to be a community and a school of saints rather than a personal cult (see The Thin Record and Legacy and Assessment). The fame of Lindisfarne — Cuthbert, the Gospels, the holy island — is Aidan’s true memorial, the harvest of the seed he sowed. The feast on 31 August keeps his own memory (see The Orthodox Reception); but his greatest monument is the holiness of the place he made.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.14, III.16–17, III.26. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Aidan’s death at Bamburgh against the church-post, 31 August 651, in the seventeenth year of his episcopate, twelve days after Oswine, III.14, III.17; the post that would not burn and its healings, III.17; the burial and translation at Lindisfarne, III.17; Colmán’s removal of part of Aidan’s bones to Iona, III.26.)
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The later history of Lindisfarne; the Lindisfarne Gospels; the cult of Cuthbert.)
Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (Aidan’s death, feast, and cult; the Lindisfarne Gospels.)