The Ripon Episode

Sent from Melrose to help found a new monastery at Ripon, Cuthbert served there as guest-master — until King Alhfrith, won to the Roman cause, gave the foundation instead to Wilfrid and his party, and the Melrose monks, who kept the Celtic Easter, were turned out. This early collision with the great controversy of the age sent Cuthbert back to Melrose and stands as the prologue to the Synod of Whitby and his own later conformity. This file sets out what the Lives and Bede report of the episode, the famous angel-guest story attached to Cuthbert’s time as guest-master, and the significance of the expulsion.

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

The New Foundation

Some years into Cuthbert’s life at Melrose, the abbot Eata was given land at Ripon, in Deira to the south, on which to establish a new monastery, and he took with him a party of the Melrose brethren to found it — Cuthbert among them, appointed guest-master (hospitarius), the monk charged with receiving and caring for travellers and visitors (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert II.2; Bede, Prose Life 7; trans. Colgrave 1940). The grant came from Alhfrith, son of King Oswiu and sub-king of Deira, a young prince of strongly Roman sympathies who would soon be the chief lay champion of the Roman party in the north (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). For a time, then, Cuthbert was building a house in the Ionan tradition at a place that was about to become a centre of the opposite cause.

The Angel at the Guest-House

It is to Cuthbert’s time as guest-master at Ripon that the Lives attach one of their most loved early miracles, and it is worth recounting as the Lives tell it, since it shows the character they ascribe to him (METHODOLOGY §3.5). One winter morning, the anonymous author reports, a young traveller came to the guest-house, and Cuthbert received him with all hospitality, washing his hands and feet and pressing him to stay and eat. The guest was in haste, but Cuthbert, unable to find any bread ready, asked him to wait while he fetched some; and when he returned the stranger was gone, though the snow lay thick and unbroken outside and there were no footprints to be seen. Going to set the table, Cuthbert found there three warm loaves of unusual whiteness and fragrance, and understood — the Life says — that he had entertained an angel unawares, and that thereafter he was often fed in like fashion (Anonymous, Life of Cuthbert II.2; Bede, Prose Life 7; trans. Colgrave 1940). The story is a deliberate echo of Abraham’s angelic guests (Genesis 18) and of Hebrews 13:2, “be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares”; it sets the seal of heaven on Cuthbert’s hospitality and is reported, like all such wonders, as the testimony of the Lives rather than as adjudicated fact.

The Guest-Master and the Ideal of Hospitality

That Cuthbert was made guest-master at Ripon is worth pausing over, for the office and the angel-story together illuminate a side of his holiness easily overshadowed by the ascetic of Farne. The hospitarius was charged with the reception of strangers — pilgrims, travellers, the poor, men of every station who came to the monastery gate — and in the monastic tradition this duty was held in the highest honour, because the guest was to be received as Christ himself. The principle is biblical and patristic: the Lord’s word that “I was a stranger, and ye took me in” (Matthew 25:35) was understood to make every guest a sacrament of Christ’s presence, and the receiving of strangers a work of the Gospel (on the monastic context of this ideal, see Monasticism). The angel-guest at Ripon is the Lives’ way of confirming that Cuthbert kept this duty as it should be kept: he received the stranger with humility, washed his feet, pressed food upon him — and the stranger proved to be a messenger of heaven, the hospitality rewarded with bread from God.

The episode thus does double work in the Lives. It shows Cuthbert’s sanctity in the active, social virtue of charity to the stranger, balancing the solitary virtues of the cell; and it places him in the long tradition of monastic hospitality that runs from the desert fathers through the Rule of Benedict — where the reception of guests “as Christ” is given its own chapter — and that was a hallmark of the Irish monasticism in which Cuthbert was formed. The Ionan houses were famed for their open-handed welcome of travellers, and Cuthbert carried this into his own life: even as bishop and hermit he received those who sought him, and the Lives never let the rigour of his asceticism eclipse the warmth of his charity. The guest-master of Ripon and the confessor of Lindisfarne and the counsellor of Farne are one man, whose holiness was as available to the stranger at the gate as it was hidden in the cell.

The Expulsion

The Ripon foundation did not last. King Alhfrith, increasingly committed to the Roman cause and to the brilliant, masterful young Wilfrid — who had travelled to Rome and Gaul and returned a passionate advocate of Roman usage — decided to give Ripon to Wilfrid and a community that would keep the Roman Easter and the Roman tonsure. Eata and the Melrose monks, who held to the Celtic reckoning, were required to conform or to leave; they chose to leave, and returned to Melrose, surrendering the new monastery to Wilfrid (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25, V.19, on Wilfrid and Ripon; Eddius Stephanus, Life of Wilfrid 8; ed. Colgrave 1927; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The date is usually placed about 661, a few years before the Synod of Whitby.

Bede, writing as a partisan of the Roman cause but a deep admirer of Cuthbert, handles this episode with notable restraint, and the anonymous Lindisfarne author barely dwells on it; neither wishes to make Cuthbert a casualty of the controversy in a way that would set him against the Roman order he later embraced (Stancliffe, in St Cuthbert 1989). The plain fact, however, is that Cuthbert’s first experience of the Easter question was as one of the displaced: he and his brethren lost their foundation precisely because they kept the usages of Iona. This is what makes his later conformity so significant — he accepted, for the sake of the Church’s unity, the very reckoning for which he had once been turned out of doors.

Wilfrid and Cuthbert

The Ripon episode is also the point at which the careers of Cuthbert and Wilfrid first cross, and the contrast between the two men is one of the structural facts of seventh-century Northumbrian Christianity. Wilfrid — aristocratic, Romanizing, magnificent, a great builder and a relentless litigant who would spend much of his life appealing to Rome over disputed sees — represents one model of the churchman; Cuthbert — humble, ascetic, Ionan in formation, drawn always to solitude and the poor — represents another (on Wilfrid, Eddius Stephanus, Life of Wilfrid; Mayr-Harting 1991). They were not enemies, and the Lives avoid setting them against each other, but the two types they embody — the Romanizing prince-bishop and the Celtic-monastic ascetic — would shape the church of the north for a generation. That Cuthbert, the Ionan, would come to hold the see of Lindisfarne by Roman consecration, while never ceasing to be the ascetic of Farne, is the resolution the English north would most cherish.

The Prologue to Whitby

The Ripon affair is best read as the prologue to the Synod of Whitby and to the central drama of Cuthbert’s life. The controversy that broke his foundation was not settled at Ripon but only there made personal to him; it would be carried to its decision three years later at Hilda’s monastery of Whitby, when King Oswiu, hearing both sides, ruled for the Roman Easter (see Accepting the Roman Easter). Cuthbert, back at Melrose and soon its prior, would accept that decision without reservation, and would then be sent to Lindisfarne to make the same conformity take root there (see Prior of Lindisfarne). The man expelled from Ripon for keeping the Celtic Easter became the peacemaker who reconciled the mother-house to the Roman one — and that arc, from displacement to reconciliation, is one of the deepest things the Lives have to show about him.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Anonymous Life II.2 and Bede, Prose Life 7: Cuthbert as guest-master at Ripon; the angel-guest and the three loaves.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (III.25 on Alhfrith, Wilfrid, and Ripon; V.19 on Wilfrid; the run-up to the Synod of Whitby.)
Eddius Stephanus (Stephen of Ripon). The Life of Bishop Wilfrid. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. (Wilfrid’s acquisition of Ripon, ch. 8.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (Stancliffe on the hagiographers’ restraint over Cuthbert’s Celtic displacement.)
The Holy Scriptures. (Genesis 18; Hebrews 13:2, the entertaining of angels unawares.)