Monk Under Eata and Boisil

At Melrose on the Tweed, under the gentle Abbot Eata and above all under the prior Boisil, Cuthbert received the monastic formation that shaped the rest of his life. This file follows him from his entry into the community, through the years of discipline, study, and active mission, to the great plague in which he nearly died and survived to find his work undone, and to the death of Boisil — the master who had foreseen his sanctity, read with him the Gospel of John, and prophesied his future as bishop. From Boisil, the Lives present, Cuthbert took both his ascetic rigour and his tireless pastoral zeal.

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

Entering Melrose

Cuthbert came to the monastery of Melrose — Mailros, the “old Melrose,” on a loop of the river Tweed a little from the later medieval abbey — as a young man, having dismounted from his horse and handed his spear to a servant at the gate, the Lives say, as a sign that he was leaving the world behind (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.7; Bede, Prose Life 6; trans. Colgrave 1940). Melrose was a daughter-house of Lindisfarne, founded in the Ionan tradition; its abbot was Eata, one of the twelve English boys whom Aidan had taken to train, a man Bede praises as exceptionally gentle and venerable, and one of the few Northumbrian churchmen who would keep the trust of both parties through the coming controversy (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Eata would later be Cuthbert’s abbot at Lindisfarne and, at the end, would consecrate him to the episcopate — the two men’s careers run together for forty years.

But the figure who formed Cuthbert at Melrose was the prior, Boisil. The Lives report that Boisil was standing at the monastery gates when Cuthbert rode up and, with prophetic insight, greeted the newcomer as “a servant of God,” echoing the Lord’s word over Nathanael (cf. John 1:47; Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.7; Bede, Prose Life 6; trans. Colgrave 1940). Boisil — whose name survives in the Scottish place-name St Boswells — was himself a saint, remembered as a man of prayer, learning, and prophecy, and it is from him that the Lives trace the distinctive shape of Cuthbert’s holiness.

The Pattern of Life

Under Eata and Boisil, Cuthbert learned the pattern that he would keep, and intensify, for the rest of his life: the union of severe personal asceticism with unstinting active mission. He outdid the brethren, the Lives say, in vigils, in fasting, in labour, and in the study of Scripture, sleeping little and giving himself to prayer through the night (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert I.7; Bede, Prose Life 6; trans. Colgrave 1940). Yet this rigour did not turn him inward upon himself. He went out from the monastery to preach, travelling on foot — as Aidan and his monks had done (see Northumbria After Aidan) — into the rough country and the remote upland villages that other teachers shunned, seeking out the poor and the half-converted, staying sometimes a week or a month, drawing the people by his preaching and the manifest holiness of his life (Bede, Prose Life 9; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). This evangelism on foot, persistent and humble, is one of the constants of his career; it is the Ionan apostolate carried on into the next generation.

The combination is the key to Cuthbert and links him to the whole eastern monastic tradition he never knew directly: like Antony and the desert fathers, he sought solitude and the warfare of prayer, but like them too he could be drawn out of it for the sake of souls and return again (on this rhythm, see Cuthbert and the Desert Fathers; on monasticism generally, Monasticism). The years at Melrose taught him both halves of it.

The Gospel of John and Boisil’s Prophecy

The relationship of Cuthbert and Boisil is sealed, in the Lives, by a scene that the anonymous author and Bede both treasure. When the great plague — the pestilence that swept Britain in the 660s — reached Melrose, both Boisil and Cuthbert fell sick. Cuthbert recovered, though the Lives note that he carried a lasting weakness from it; Boisil knew that he himself would die. In the seven days left to him, Boisil proposed that he and Cuthbert read together the Gospel of John — not for close exposition but for its plain teaching of the faith and love of Christ — taking one of its parts each day, and so they finished it in the week before Boisil’s death (Bede, Prose Life 8; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.27; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede, who knew of a small book of John in seven gatherings still preserved in his own day and associated with this reading, lingers on the detail; it became one of the cherished memories of the Cuthbert tradition.

In those last days Boisil also prophesied over Cuthbert. He foretold, the Lives report, that Cuthbert would attain every rank of the priesthood and would in time become a bishop — a prophecy Cuthbert is said to have received with reluctance, for he had no wish for office (Bede, Prose Life 8; trans. Colgrave 1940). This too is reported as the Lives attest it (METHODOLOGY §3.5); like the vision of Aidan’s soul, it is a literary device that binds the saint’s future to a holy man’s foreknowledge, and it prepares the reader for the reluctance with which Cuthbert would later accept the see of Lindisfarne (see The Reluctant Bishop). Boisil died, and Cuthbert succeeded him as prior of Melrose — though the chronology of his offices is not perfectly fixed in the sources.

The Plague and the Mother’s Faith

The plague years left their mark on Cuthbert’s own body and on the Lives’ portrait of him. The anonymous author tells of his recovery as itself a kind of wonder, granted in answer to the prayers of the brethren who needed him; Cuthbert, hearing they had prayed for him through the night, is said to have risen from his bed and taken up his work again, though never wholly free of the infirmity it left (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert II.8; Bede, Prose Life 8; trans. Colgrave 1940). The same period furnishes one of the gentlest of his early miracles: travelling and preaching during the pestilence, he came to a village where a woman’s son lay dying, and at his blessing the child was spared — the kind of healing-in-passing that fills the Lives and that is treated, with the rest of the miracle accounts, in Healing and Prophecy.

Toward Ripon and Beyond

The Melrose years did not run smoothly to their end. For a time Cuthbert and a party of the Melrose monks were sent south to make a new foundation at Ripon, where Cuthbert served as guest-master — and where the great controversy of the age caught up with them, ending the foundation and sending them home (the subject of the companion file, The Ripon Episode). Back at Melrose, Cuthbert resumed his place, becoming prior; and after the Synod of Whitby in 664 he would be moved with Eata to Lindisfarne itself, to become prior of the mother-house and to do the delicate work of reconciling its community to the Roman usages it had just been compelled to adopt (see Prior of Lindisfarne).

What the years under Eata and Boisil gave him was the whole substance of his sanctity in seed: the ascetic discipline, the apostolic zeal, the love of Scripture, and the readiness to obey. Boisil, dying, handed it on as Aidan, dying, had first called him; the Lives are careful to show Cuthbert as the heir of holy men, formed in the Ionan tradition he would carry, unbroken, across the change of his age.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life I.7, II.8 and Bede, Prose Life 6–9: entry into Melrose, Boisil’s greeting, the pattern of asceticism and mission, the plague and recovery, the reading of John, Boisil’s prophecy and death.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (III.26 on Eata; IV.27 on Cuthbert at Melrose and his preaching journeys, the reading of John with Boisil.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Melrose, Boisil, and Cuthbert’s formation.)
The Holy Scriptures. (John 1:47, Boisil’s greeting; the Gospel of John read in Boisil’s last week.)