Relics at Durham

Bede died at Jarrow in 735 and was buried in his own monastery; but his bones did not stay there. According to the Durham historians of the early twelfth century, a Durham priest named Ælfred Westou removed Bede’s remains from Jarrow in the early eleventh century and laid them in the same coffin as St. Cuthbert, the great Northumbrian saint whose body had come to Durham in 995. The relics were later separated and given their own resting-place, and in 1370 were translated into a costly shrine of gold and silver in the Galilee Chapel at the west end of Durham Cathedral, where the tomb still stands beneath the inscription HAC SUNT IN FOSSA BAEDAE VENERABILIS OSSA. This file traces that history and pins the contested translation-account to the Durham sources who alone preserve it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)

Burial at Jarrow, 735

Bede died on the eve of the Ascension — the Wednesday — in May of 735, in his cell at the monastery of Jarrow where he had lived since boyhood. The fullest account of his last hours is the Letter on the Death of Bede written by his pupil Cuthbert to a fellow monk named Cuthwine, an eyewitness narrative that has Bede dictating to the end a translation of the Gospel of John and a passage of Isidore, distributing his few possessions, and singing the antiphon of the Ascension as he died on the floor of his cell (Epistola de obitu Bedae, in Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The letter does not describe his burial, but the natural and uncontested presumption — and the consistent later tradition — is that Bede was buried at Jarrow, in the church of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow that had formed and contained his whole life (Brown 2009). For nearly three centuries his grave lay there, in the monastery on the Tyne, while his books travelled across Europe.

The contrast is worth marking at the outset. Bede was not, in the first centuries after his death, the centre of a great relic-cult on the model of Cuthbert. His sanctity was acknowledged early — the title “Venerable” attaches to his name within a few generations — but the veneration of his bones is, on the evidence, a development of the eleventh century and after, bound up with the rise of Durham as the spiritual capital of the north and with the gathering of Northumbria’s saints around the body of Cuthbert (Brown 2009; Rollason, introduction to Symeon, Libellus de exordio, 2000). The story of Bede’s relics is therefore largely the story of Durham.

The reason for this is partly the fate of Jarrow itself. The twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, the great centre of learning that had formed Bede and produced the Codex Amiatinus and his whole library, did not survive the Viking age intact; the Northumbrian coastal monasteries were ravaged by Scandinavian raids from the late eighth century onward, and the community life that had guarded Bede’s grave was broken (Brown 2009). When, in the eleventh century, the monastic life of the north was being reconstituted — and when the see of the wandering community of St. Cuthbert had at last settled at Durham — the bones of the great scholar at the now-vulnerable site of Jarrow were a natural object of the relic-collecting zeal of the age. The translation of Bede to Durham is, in this light, of a piece with the wider eleventh-century concentration of Northumbria’s holy ones in the one secure and rising centre.

Ælfred Westou and the Translation to Durham

The body of St. Cuthbert, carried by his community in their long flight from Lindisfarne before the Danish raids, came at last to Durham in 995, and the church that became Durham Cathedral grew up around his shrine (Symeon, Libellus de exordio 3.1–3.2; trans. Rollason 2000). It was to this new centre, the Durham sources relate, that Bede’s bones were brought.

The agent of the translation, according to the Durham tradition, was a priest and sacrist of the Durham church named Ælfred Westou (Alfred Westou), who flourished in the first half of the eleventh century, in the years before the Norman Conquest. Ælfred is a vivid figure in the Durham record — a noted collector of the relics of northern saints, devoted above all to Cuthbert, whose body (the sources say) he tended and whose hair he combed. Among his acquisitions, Symeon of Durham reports, were the bones of the Venerable Bede, which Ælfred took from Jarrow and brought to Durham, where he placed them with the remains of St. Cuthbert (Symeon, Libellus de exordio 3.7; trans. Rollason 2000). The Durham account stresses both Ælfred’s zeal and the secrecy of the deed: he is said to have gone repeatedly to Jarrow and at last to have carried the bones away quietly, so that for a time only he knew where they lay, the relics resting in the same shrine — and, in the later and most developed form of the story, in the very coffin — as Cuthbert himself.

This translation is the single most important and most contested fact in the history of Bede’s relics, and it rests entirely on the testimony of the Durham historians. It must therefore be reported as what those sources attest rather than as established fact:

[Disputed: the translation of Bede's relics to Durham — the account that Ælfred Westou took the bones from Jarrow and laid them with Cuthbert rests on the testimony of the Durham historian Symeon of Durham (early 12th c., *Libellus de exordio* / *Historia Dunelmensis ecclesie*) and of Reginald of Durham later in the same century; the core claim that Bede's bones came to Durham through Ælfred is consistent across the Durham tradition, but some details — the secrecy of the removal, the exact date, and the placing of the bones in Cuthbert's own coffin rather than merely his shrine or church — are hagiographically shaped and not independently corroborated].

The date of the removal cannot be fixed precisely; it falls within Ælfred’s career as sacrist, conventionally placed in the 1020s and 1030s, in the decades before 1066, but the sources give no year (Symeon, Libellus de exordio 3.7, with Rollason’s notes, 2000; Brown 2009). What can be said with confidence is the shape of the tradition — that Durham, by the early twelfth century when Symeon wrote, firmly held that the bones of Bede rested within its walls beside the bones of Cuthbert, and attributed their coming to the relic-gathering sacrist Ælfred Westou. Symeon was himself a monk of Durham, writing the official history of his own church within living memory of the community’s institutional traditions, and his testimony is the foundation of everything later said about Bede’s relics; Reginald of Durham, writing in the second half of the twelfth century on the miracles of Cuthbert and other northern saints, repeats and elaborates the Durham tradition (Rollason, introduction to Symeon 2000; Brown 2009). The account is thus internally well-attested at Durham and externally unverifiable — a hagiographical and institutional memory, pinned here to its earliest written witnesses per METHODOLOGY §3.5.

Several features of the Durham account belong recognisably to the conventions of the medieval translatio — the literary form in which the moving of a saint’s relics was narrated — and should be read with that in mind. The motif of the secret, even furtive, removal of holy bones from a vulnerable site to a securer one is a commonplace of the genre; so is the concentration of relics around a single great patron, here Cuthbert, whose body was the magnet that drew the lesser shrines to itself. The presentation of Ælfred as a holy and licensed collector, rather than a mere thief — though the bald fact is that the bones were taken from Jarrow without Jarrow’s leave — is exactly what the form requires, the act of pious appropriation reframed as an act of devotion to the saints. None of this means the underlying event did not occur; relics genuinely were moved in this period, and the broad claim that Bede’s bones came to rest at Durham is not seriously doubted. It means rather that the colouring of the account — its secrecy, its piety, its precise staging — is the colouring the Durham tradition gave it, and the historian’s caution is properly directed at the details rather than at the core (Rollason, introduction to Symeon 2000; Brown 2009). This is why the structured note above pins the secrecy and the exact date and the placing in Cuthbert’s own coffin as the contested elements, while leaving the central fact of the translation as the firm and consistent witness of the Durham church.

Separation from Cuthbert and the Shrine of 1370

For a long period, the Durham tradition holds, the bones of Bede lay together with those of Cuthbert. When Cuthbert’s coffin was opened — most famously at the great translation of 1104, when his body was moved into the new Norman cathedral and found (the Durham accounts say) incorrupt — Bede’s relics, on the Durham reckoning, were among the contents and were thereafter distinguished and given a place of their own (Symeon, Libellus de exordio, with Rollason 2000; Brown 2009). The two cults, of the incorrupt Cuthbert and of the learned Bede, were henceforth kept apart, though both belonged to Durham.

The decisive moment in the public veneration of Bede’s relics came in 1370, when his bones were translated into a sumptuous shrine of gold and silver and set up at the west end of the cathedral, in the Galilee Chapel — the great Lady Chapel built in the late twelfth century across the western front of Durham Cathedral. There, in a shrine paid for at considerable cost and adorned with precious metal, Bede’s relics became a station of pilgrimage in their own right, the destination of those who came to honour “the Father of English History” at the opposite end of the cathedral from Cuthbert’s shrine behind the high altar (Brown 2009; the Durham Cathedral tradition). The placing is itself eloquent: the two great saints of Northumbria framed the church between them, Cuthbert the wonder-worker at the east, Bede the scholar at the west.

The Reformation and the Surviving Tomb

The medieval shrine did not survive the English Reformation. In the dissolution of the monasteries and the assault on shrines in the late 1530s and 1540s, the gold-and-silver shrine of 1370 was despoiled and dismantled, as were the shrines of saints across England, including Cuthbert’s own (Brown 2009; the Durham Cathedral tradition). The precious metal was stripped away; but the relics were not destroyed, and the tomb — the stone resting-place in the Galilee Chapel — remained. Bede’s bones were re-interred there, and the tomb stands in the Galilee Chapel to this day, a plain blue-black stone tomb-chest at the west end of the cathedral.

The survival of the tomb where the shrine perished is itself characteristic of what the Reformation did and did not do at Durham. The reformers’ quarrel was with the cult of relics — the gold, the offerings, the pilgrimage, the apparatus of veneration that had grown up around the holy bones — far more than with the bones themselves, and at Durham, as with Cuthbert, the relics were taken down from their precious enclosure and buried in the plain stone beneath. The effect, paradoxically, was to leave the two great Northumbrian saints lying in the cathedral still, but stripped of the medieval magnificence that had surrounded them: Cuthbert beneath a plain slab behind the high altar, Bede beneath a plain tomb-chest in the Galilee Chapel at the far west. What the Reformation removed was the shrine; what it left was the grave, and the grave is what remains for the pilgrim and the visitor today (Brown 2009; the Durham Cathedral tradition).

The tomb bears the famous Latin inscription:

HAC SUNT IN FOSSA BAEDAE VENERABILIS OSSA
(“In this grave are the bones of the Venerable Bede.”)

The line is a medieval leonine hexameter, long associated with Bede’s resting-place and bound up with the legend of the origin of his title “Venerable”; the present tomb-slab and its lettering belong to a much later refurbishment of the tomb in the nineteenth century (the inscription was cut anew in the 1830s), but the verse itself and the placing of Bede’s relics in the Galilee Chapel are medieval (Brown 2009; the Durham Cathedral historical literature). The Galilee Chapel today — with its slender Romanesque arcades, the tomb of Bede at one end and the cathedral’s other monuments nearby — is the visible terminus of the whole history this file has traced: from the cell at Jarrow where Bede died, through the eleventh-century removal by Ælfred Westou, to the shrine of 1370 and its despoiling, to the tomb that pilgrims and visitors still approach.

Veneration and Pilgrimage

Around this tomb the veneration of Bede has continued, through and beyond the Reformation that stripped its shrine. In the medieval period the Galilee shrine drew pilgrims to “the Father of English History”; in the modern period the tomb has remained a place of prayer, and the renewed interest in Bede as a saint of the undivided Western Church — Orthodox as well as Roman Catholic and Anglican — has given the Galilee Chapel a wider significance (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010, on Bede’s reception). For Orthodox Christians the resting-place of Bede is the tomb of a pre-Schism saint of the West, commemorated in the calendar (his feast on 25/27 May), and the Galilee Chapel is honoured as such (see A Doctor of the Church, Venerated East; on the calendar, The Church Calendar).

It is fitting, and characteristic of the man, that the saint who gathered Northumbria’s history into one book should lie at last in the same church as the saint whose Life he wrote. Bede composed the prose and verse Lives of Cuthbert (see The Lives of Cuthbert); and in the Durham tradition his bones were carried to rest beside Cuthbert’s own, the hagiographer brought home to the saint he had served with his pen. Whatever the precise history beneath the Durham account — and it is, as the structured note above records, a tradition pinned to its sources rather than an independently verifiable fact — the symbolism the Durham church gave it is exact: the scholar and the wonder-worker, the two pillars of Northumbrian sanctity, kept together in one place against the loss that overtook so much else of the Anglo-Saxon Church.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Includes Cuthbert’s Epistola de obitu Bedae, the account of Bede’s death and the events at Jarrow in 735, at 579–587.)
Symeon of Durham. Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis ecclesie (Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Church of Durham). Ed. and trans. David Rollason. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. (The coming of Cuthbert’s body to Durham in 995 at 3.1–3.2; Ælfred Westou and the removal of Bede’s bones from Jarrow at 3.7; Rollason’s introduction and notes on the Durham relic-traditions and their reliability.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. (The afterlife and relics of Bede; burial at Jarrow; the translation to Durham; the shrine of 1370 and the Galilee Chapel; the Reformation despoiling; the HAC SUNT IN FOSSA inscription.)
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (The reception and afterlife of Bede.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s death, sanctity, and the growth of his cult.)