The Translation of 698

Cuthbert died on the Inner Farne on 20 March 687 and was buried in the church of Lindisfarne. Eleven years later, in 698, the community resolved to raise his bones and enshrine them above the floor for veneration — and when they opened the tomb, the Lives attest, they found not bones but the whole body, undecayed, the limbs supple, the vestments fresh, as though he were asleep. This file sets out his death, the burial, and the translation of 698, and the meaning of incorruption in the tradition — reported throughout as what the Lives attest under METHODOLOGY §3.5, the wonder on which the whole later cult of Cuthbert was raised.

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

The Death on Farne

Cuthbert, having resigned the see of Lindisfarne late in 686, returned to the Inner Farne to die in the solitude he loved (see The Reluctant Bishop). The Lives give a detailed and moving account of his last illness, drawn — Bede stresses — from the eyewitness testimony of Herefrith, the abbot of Lindisfarne who attended him, and others who were present (Bede, Prose Life 37–40, with the preface naming his informants; trans. Colgrave 1940). Cuthbert fell ill, was attended at the last by a few brethren who came over from Lindisfarne, received the Eucharist, and gave them his final counsels — among them a charge, much remarked, that they should keep the unity of the catholic peace and the rule of life, and should not, if they were ever driven from the island, leave his body behind but carry it with them, a charge that would be literally fulfilled in the wanderings to come (Bede, Prose Life 39; trans. Colgrave 1940; on the fulfilment, see The Wanderings of the Coffin). He died in the night of 20 March 687, in the act of prayer; the brethren signalled his death to Lindisfarne with torches, and his body was carried across the water and buried in a stone coffin to the right of the altar in the church of St Peter at Lindisfarne (Bede, Prose Life 40; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.29; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). His feast is kept on this day, 20 March (see The Church Calendar).

The Opening of the Tomb

Eleven years after his death, the Lives report, the community of Lindisfarne, moved by the miracles that had begun at his tomb and wishing to honour him as his sanctity deserved, resolved to raise his remains from the grave and enshrine them in a new coffin set above the pavement, where they could be venerated — the act the Church calls a translation. They obtained the leave of Bishop Eadberht, and on a day in 698 they opened the stone coffin (Bede, Prose Life 42; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.30; trans. and ed. Colgrave 1940; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

What they found, the Lives attest, astonished them. They had expected to gather dry bones; instead they found the whole body incorrupt — entire and undecayed, the flesh sound, the joints flexible so that the limbs could be moved, more like a sleeping man than a corpse, and the grave-clothes and vestments still fresh and bright. The account, which Bede took from the testimony of those present, is precise: they found the body whole, “as if still alive,” the limbs pliant, the garments not only undecayed but of a marvellous freshness; awe-struck, they reported it to Bishop Eadberht, who was then keeping Lent in retreat, and he directed that the body be wrapped in new vestments and laid in the new coffin above the floor (Bede, Prose Life 42; Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.30; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The translation of 698 is commemorated on 4 September (see The Church Calendar).

This account is reported here as exactly what it is: the testimony of the Lives, pinned to their texts, the claim of the Lindisfarne community as recorded by the anonymous author and by Bede, who had it from eyewitnesses but did not himself see it (METHODOLOGY §3.5). It is not certified here as adjudicated fact; it is reported as the wonder the sources attest, in the words and on the authority of those sources.

The Coffin and Its Contents

The coffin made for the translation of 698 survives, in fragments, to this day — the carved oak coffin-reliquary recovered from Cuthbert’s tomb at Durham, decorated with incised figures of Christ, the evangelists, the apostles, the Virgin and Child, and angels, one of the most important pieces of Anglo-Saxon art to survive. It is, in effect, the original shrine, made to hold the incorrupt body, and it travelled with the body through all its wanderings (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989, on the coffin; Battiscombe, ed., The Relics of Saint Cuthbert, 1956). Within and about the body other relics gathered over the centuries — the pectoral cross of gold and garnet found on the saint’s breast, a portable altar, an ivory comb, and the small Gospel of John (the “Stonyhurst Gospel,” now the St Cuthbert Gospel in the British Library), the earliest intact European book, which is associated with his burial. These objects, recovered at the openings of the tomb, are the material witness to the cult and are treated further in connection with the Durham shrine (see Durham and the Shrine).

The Meaning of Incorruption

For the tradition, the incorruption of Cuthbert’s body was the supreme sign of his sanctity, and it is worth setting out what the Church understands by it. In the Orthodox and the wider patristic tradition, the incorruption of a saint’s relics is received as a gift of God, a token that the body which was the temple of the Holy Spirit and the instrument of a holy life is honoured by God even in death, and a foretaste of the resurrection in which the whole man, body and soul, will be glorified. Incorruption is not regarded as automatic or as the necessary mark of every saint — many great saints leave only bones — but where it is found it is read as a particular grace, the visible continuation of the wonders that marked the saint’s life (on the veneration of relics in the tradition, the principle is the same as that articulated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council and the defenders of the holy images and relics). The incorrupt body of Cuthbert was, for the men of Lindisfarne and for the centuries that followed, the proof and the pledge of his power: the saint was not gone but present, his body the place where heaven touched the earth, the centre of the cult and the goal of the pilgrim.

It is this that made the body so precious to the community, and that explains the extraordinary lengths to which they would go to preserve it: when the Vikings came and Lindisfarne could no longer be held, they did not bury the body and flee, but took it up and carried it with them, as Cuthbert himself had charged, through a century of wandering until it came to rest at Durham (see The Wanderings of the Coffin). The incorrupt body was the community’s treasure, its identity, and its patron; where it went, the familia of Cuthbert went, and where it came to rest, the church of Cuthbert was built.

The Reopenings and the Modern Question

The Lives report that the body was found still incorrupt at later openings of the tomb during the Lindisfarne and Chester-le-Street periods, and the medieval Durham tradition continued to affirm its incorruption down to the Reformation. The modern openings of the tomb — in 1827 and again in 1899 — found not an incorrupt body but a skeleton, wrapped in remains of rich vestments and accompanied by the relics; the interpretation of these findings, and their bearing on the ancient claim, is a contested question treated, with a structured [Disputed: ...] note, in the discussion of the Durham shrine (see Durham and the Shrine). For the present file it is enough to say that the incorruption of 698 is reported as the Lives attest it; what the nineteenth-century investigators found, and how the two are to be reconciled, belongs to the assessment of the cult.

The translation of 698, then, is the hinge of the whole Cuthbert story after his death. It transformed a holy bishop’s grave into a shrine, a local saint into the patron of the north, and a buried body into the incorrupt treasure that a community would carry on its shoulders for a hundred years rather than abandon. Everything that follows — the wanderings, the Gospels, the great church at Durham, the medieval cult — flows from the moment the men of Lindisfarne lifted the lid of the coffin and found, as they believed, their bishop asleep.

References

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (Bede, Prose Life 37–42: the last illness and death on Farne, the final charges, the burial at Lindisfarne, the translation of 698 and the finding of the incorrupt body; the preface naming Herefrith and the eyewitness sources.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.29–30: Cuthbert’s death, burial, and the translation of 698 with the incorrupt body.)
Battiscombe, C. F., ed. The Relics of Saint Cuthbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Dean and Chapter of Durham, 1956. (The coffin-reliquary, the pectoral cross, and the relics recovered from the tomb.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The translation, the coffin, and the cult of the incorrupt body.)