Northumbria After Aidan

Cuthbert was born around 634 into the kingdom of Northumbria, in the years when the Irish monks of Iona were making it Christian. This file sets the political and ecclesial scene: the great northern kingdom forged from Bernicia and Deira, its double conversion under Edwin and Oswald, the Ionan mission of Aidan and the founding of Lindisfarne in 635, and the character of the Celtic-monastic church into which Cuthbert would be drawn — the church that gave him his formation and whose Easter usages would be overturned in his own lifetime.

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

The Kingdom of Northumbria

Northumbria — the land “north of the Humber” — was in the seventh century the most powerful of the English kingdoms, and the most spiritually fertile. It had been forged out of two older Anglian realms: Bernicia, the northern part, reaching from the Tees up to the Forth, with its royal fortress at Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast; and Deira to the south, centred on the old Roman city of York. United under one dynasty, the descendants of Ida and Æthelfrith, Northumbria at its height held a loose overlordship over much of Britain, English and British alike (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.5; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). It was into this kingdom, somewhere in its Bernician heartland in the basin of the river Tweed, that Cuthbert was born about the year 634 — the precise place is unrecorded, and the Lives give him no lineage (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.3; trans. Colgrave 1940). The questions of his birthplace and ancestry, including the old debate over whether he was of English or Irish stock, are taken up in the companion file The Shepherd Boy and the Vision.

The Northumbria of Cuthbert’s childhood was a warrior society — a world of kings and their war-bands, of feud and exile and the constant pressure of rival dynasties — only recently and incompletely Christian. Bede, writing his History from within this world a generation later, presents its conversion as the work of God through a sequence of holy kings and holy missionaries, and it is from Bede above all that the shape of the story comes (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II–III; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The Double Conversion: Edwin and the Roman Mission

Northumbria was converted twice. The first conversion came from the south, from the Roman mission that Pope Gregory the Great had sent to Kent in 597 under Augustine of Canterbury. When King Edwin of Northumbria married Æthelburh, the Christian daughter of the Kentish king, she brought with her the Roman bishop Paulinus, and in 627 Edwin himself was baptized at York after a famous council of his counsellors — the occasion of the well-known image of the sparrow that flies through the lighted hall out of the winter dark and back into it, which one of Edwin’s men offers as a figure of the brevity of human life and the hope the new faith holds out (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.13; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). On the wider Gregorian mission to the English from which Paulinus came, the Roman side of the story is treated in the collection on St. Gregory the Dialogist.

This first conversion, however, did not hold. In 633 Edwin was killed in battle at Hatfield by the pagan Mercian king Penda in alliance with the British king Cædwalla of Gwynedd, and Northumbria collapsed into a year of devastation in which much of the recent Christianity was swept away. Paulinus fled south with the widowed queen, and the Roman mission in the north effectively ended (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.20; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). It is a measure of how fragile the work had been that Bede can say the faith very nearly perished there altogether.

Oswald, Iona, and Aidan

The lasting conversion of Northumbria came not from Rome by way of Kent but from the Irish church by way of Iona, and it is this Ionan-monastic Christianity that formed Cuthbert. The agent of it was King Oswald, son of Æthelfrith, who as a young exile during Edwin’s reign had taken refuge among the Irish and the Scots of Dál Riata and had been baptized at Iona, the island monastery founded by Columba (see St. Columba of Iona). When Oswald returned and recovered his father’s kingdom in 634 — defeating Cædwalla at the battle of Heavenfield near Hexham, where he raised a wooden cross and prayed before the fight (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.2) — he sent back to Iona for a bishop to evangelize his people.

The first monk sent proved too austere and unbending and returned reporting the English to be ungovernable; in his place Iona sent Aidan, a man of gentleness and discretion, and it is with Aidan that the Christianization of Northumbria truly begins (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.5; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Oswald gave Aidan, at his own request, the tidal island of Lindisfarne off the Bernician coast — close enough to the royal fortress of Bamburgh to be under the king’s protection, remote enough to be a true monastic retreat, an island that is an island only at high tide. There in 635 Aidan founded the monastery and episcopal see of Lindisfarne, which would become the mother-church of the north and the centre of Cuthbert’s world. The founding of Lindisfarne, Aidan’s mission on foot through the Northumbrian countryside, and his life are the subject of the companion collection on St. Aidan of Lindisfarne.

The Character of the Ionan Church

The Christianity Aidan planted in Northumbria had a particular and recognizable character, and to understand Cuthbert one must understand it, for it was the air he breathed. It was, first of all, monastic to its core. The Irish church from which it came was organized not primarily around territorial bishops and cities, as the Mediterranean church was, but around monasteries and their abbots; the bishop, though his order was honoured, often lived within a monastery under the rule of its abbot (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.4, on Iona’s unusual arrangement). Lindisfarne was at once a cathedral and a monastery, its bishop a monk among monks. This fusion of the episcopal and the monastic would mark Cuthbert’s whole career, in which he moved between the cell and the see without any sense of contradiction (on the monastic-episcopal pattern generally, see Monasticism).

It was, second, a Christianity of ascetic and apostolic poverty. Bede holds up Aidan and his monks as a reproach to the laxer clergy of his own day: they travelled on foot, owned little, gave away what they were given, and combined preaching with a rigorous personal discipline of fasting, vigil, and study of the Scriptures (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.5, III.26; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The Lenten withdrawals to the Inner Farne and to Coldingham, the long vigils, the readiness to live on next to nothing — all that Cuthbert would later carry to its extreme on Inner Farne — belonged to this inherited ideal.

It was, third, a Christianity marked by the Celtic peculiarities that would soon bring it into conflict with the Roman party: above all its own method of calculating the date of Easter, and its distinctive form of the monastic tonsure. These were not matters of doctrine but of usage and discipline, yet they came to symbolize the whole question of whether the northern church would conform to the practice of Rome and the rest of the Western Church or hold to the inheritance of Iona. That conflict would come to a head at the Synod of Whitby in 664, when Cuthbert was a young monk, and would shape the central drama of his life (see Accepting the Roman Easter). Aidan himself, Bede is at pains to insist, kept the Celtic Easter and yet was a saint — a holiness across the divide that Bede honours even as he judges the reckoning mistaken (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.17; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The Generation Between Aidan and Cuthbert

Aidan died on 31 August 651, leaning against the wall of a church at Bamburgh, after sixteen years as bishop (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.17). By then the faith was rooted. He was succeeded at Lindisfarne by Finan and then by Colman, both Irishmen sent from Iona, who carried on the Ionan tradition and would defend it at Whitby. The monastery had become a nursery of saints and bishops: from its school and its daughter-houses came a remarkable generation — Eata, Cedd and Chad, Wilfrid (for a time), and others who would fill the sees of the English. Hilda’s double monastery at Whitby, founded in this same milieu, would train five bishops and host the great synod. This was the church into which Cuthbert was born and in which he would be formed: young, monastic, ascetic, Irish in its usages, and astonishingly productive of holiness.

It is essential to the shape of Cuthbert’s life that he stands exactly on the seam between this Ionan inheritance and the Roman order that was about to be imposed on it. He was formed wholly within the Celtic-monastic world of Aidan and his successors; he would accept, loyally and without rancour, the Roman Easter when the Church decided for it; and he would spend much of his life reconciling the one to the other. In him the two traditions that met and clashed at Whitby were not opposed but joined — which is the deepest reason the English north would remember him, above even Aidan, as its own great saint (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, eds., St Cuthbert, 1989, introduction). That double inheritance is the foundation on which everything else in this guide is built.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Books II–III: the conversion of Northumbria; Edwin and Paulinus, II.13–14, 20; Oswald and Heavenfield, III.1–3; the sending of Aidan and the founding of Lindisfarne, III.3, 5; Aidan’s life and death, III.5, 17, 26.)
Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life I.3 on Cuthbert’s birth and region.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Cuthbert at the seam of the Celtic and Roman traditions.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991. (The Ionan church in Northumbria and its character.)