The Wanderings of the Coffin

When the Vikings made Lindisfarne untenable, the community of St Cuthbert did as their saint had charged: rather than abandon his body, they took it up and carried it with them. This file follows one of the great stories of the English Church — the sack of Lindisfarne in 793, the abandonment of the island in 875, and the long exile of the familia of Cuthbert, bearing the incorrupt body and the relics of the saints from refuge to refuge for over a century, through Chester-le-Street, until in 995 they came at last to the great loop of the Wear and the rock of Durham, where the saint chose, the tradition says, to rest. The chief source is the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto.

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

The Sack of 793

On the 8th of June 793, Viking raiders fell upon Lindisfarne, plundering the church, slaughtering or carrying off the monks, and desecrating the holy place — the first great Viking assault on the English Church, and an event that sent a shock through Christendom (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 793; Alcuin, letters to King Æthelred and to the community of Lindisfarne, 793; ed. in Whitelock, English Historical Documents I). The scholar Alcuin, at Charlemagne’s court, wrote in horror to the brethren of Lindisfarne that “the church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God,” lamenting that the most venerable place in Britain had been given as a prey to pagans (Alcuin, Epistola 20, to the Lindisfarne community; trans. Whitelock 1955). The body of Cuthbert was not taken; the shrine survived the raid, and the community continued on the island for many years yet. But 793 was the beginning of the end of Lindisfarne as the home of the saint, and it inaugurated the age of terror under which his body would at last be carried away.

The Abandonment of Lindisfarne, 875

For most of a century the community held on, but the Viking pressure grew until, in the 870s, with the Danish “Great Army” overrunning Northumbria and the kingdom collapsing, Lindisfarne could no longer be held. About the year 875, Bishop Eardwulf and the abbot Eadred led the community off the island, taking with them their greatest treasures: the incorrupt body of Cuthbert in its coffin, the relics of other Lindisfarne saints — including the head of King (St) Oswald and the bones of Aidan that had not gone to Iona — and the Lindisfarne Gospels (Historia de Sancto Cuthberto 9–20; ed. and trans. Johnson South 2002; on the Gospels, see The Cuthbert Cult and the Gospels). Thus began the long exile of the familia Sancti Cuthberti — the community and household of the saint — wandering through the north and the borderlands, the body of Cuthbert borne with them, fulfilling to the letter the charge he had given on his deathbed that they should carry his body with them rather than leave it if ever they were driven out (Bede, Prose Life 39; Historia de Sancto Cuthberto; see The Translation of 698).

The Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, a compilation made by the community itself in the tenth and eleventh centuries, is the principal source for these wanderings, and it is a source of a particular kind: a record of the saint’s estates, miracles, and patrons, written to assert the rights and lands of the church of Cuthbert, so that its narrative of the wanderings is bound up with its land-claims and must be read with that purpose in view (Johnson South 2002, introduction; Rollason, in St Cuthbert 1989). Its famous stories — the attempt to cross to Ireland turned back when the Gospels were lost overboard and miraculously recovered on the shore, the body that could not be moved until the right resting-place was reached — are the community’s own traditions of its exile, reported here as such.

The Years at Chester-le-Street, 883–995

After years of wandering, the community found a settled home. About 883 they came to Chester-le-Street (Cunceacestre), a former Roman site on the road south of the Tyne, and there established the see and the shrine of Cuthbert, which remained for more than a century (Historia de Sancto Cuthberto 13–20; Johnson South 2002). The Chester-le-Street period was, in fact, a time of consolidation and even prosperity for the cult: it was here, the tradition holds, that the West Saxon king Guthred was raised to the Northumbrian throne under the patronage of Cuthbert, and here that later kings of England, notably Æthelstan, made rich gifts to the saint and acknowledged his protection — Æthelstan’s visit and his gift of books and treasures to the shrine being recorded in the Historia and commemorated in a famous manuscript portrait of the king presenting a book to Cuthbert (Historia de Sancto Cuthberto 26; Rollason 1989; on Æthelstan’s gifts, see Durham and the Shrine). The community at Chester-le-Street also produced, in the mid-tenth century, the Old English gloss added between the lines of the Lindisfarne Gospels by the priest Aldred — the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels into English (see The Cuthbert Cult and the Gospels).

The Move to Durham, 995

The Chester-le-Street home was not the last. In 995, with a renewed threat of Viking raids, the community again took up the body and moved south, briefly to Ripon, and then — the tradition tells — set out to return north, only to find that the cart bearing the coffin could not be moved past a certain place: the saint himself, by this sign, choosing his final resting-place. The spot was the great defensible loop of the river Wear, the rock later called Durham (Dunholm), and there in 995 the community settled the body of Cuthbert and built first a temporary and then a permanent church to house it (Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and the later Durham traditions; Symeon of Durham, Libellus de exordio; Rollason 1989; Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans, 1998). The story of the immovable cart and the dun cow whose milkmaids guided the community to the chosen hill is part of the Durham foundation-legend, a later embellishment of the move, and is reported as such; the historical core is that in 995 the body of Cuthbert came to Durham, where it has remained.

With the arrival at Durham the wanderings ended. The church built over the body grew into the great Norman cathedral, begun in 1093, that still stands and still holds his tomb; the familia of Cuthbert became the wealthy and powerful community of Durham, the prince-bishops ruling the north as the saint’s earthly stewards. The story of the Durham shrine, the medieval cult, and the modern openings of the tomb is taken up in the final section (see Durham and the Shrine).

The Meaning of the Wanderings

The wanderings of Cuthbert’s coffin are more than an antiquarian curiosity; they are the story of how a community kept faith with its saint, and of how that faith carried the cult, the relics, and the great manuscripts through the destruction of the Viking age to safety. The men of Lindisfarne did not abandon the body of their bishop, even in flight, even across a century; they bore it with them as their treasure and their patron, and where it came to rest they made their home. The incorrupt body was, in the most literal sense, the centre of their identity: the familia Sancti Cuthberti was the household of a dead man who was believed to be alive and present in his undecayed flesh, ruling and protecting them still. That such a community could survive the wreck of Northumbria, preserve the Lindisfarne Gospels and the coffin-reliquary and the pectoral cross, and carry them at last to Durham, is one of the reasons so much of the seventh-century Northumbrian achievement comes down to us at all. The wanderings saved the relics, the manuscripts, and the memory; and they bound the saint forever to the north he had served, so that Cuthbert is, to this day, the saint of Durham and of the whole English north (Rollason 1989; Aird 1998).

References

Historia de Sancto Cuthberto: A History of Saint Cuthbert and a Record of His Patrimony. Ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. (The flight from Lindisfarne, the wanderings, the years at Chester-le-Street, the patronage of Guthred and Æthelstan, and the move to Durham; the community’s land-claims and the purpose of the text.)
Whitelock, Dorothy, ed. English Historical Documents, c. 500–1042. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s.a. 793; Alcuin’s letters on the sack of Lindisfarne.)
Symeon of Durham. Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis ecclesiae. Ed. and trans. David Rollason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. (The Durham tradition of the wanderings and the foundation.)
Rollason, David. In Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe, eds., St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The community of St Cuthbert, the wanderings, and the move to Durham.)
Aird, William M. St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071–1153. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998. (The foundation at Durham and the later community.)