The Cuthbert Cult and the Gospels

The cult of Cuthbert produced some of the supreme masterpieces of early medieval Europe, made for his shrine and carried with his body through the Viking age. This file gathers the artistic and devotional flowering of the cult: the Lindisfarne Gospels, the magnificent illuminated book made — its colophon says — by Bishop Eadfrith in honour of God and St Cuthbert; the tiny intact Gospel of John recovered from his coffin, the oldest surviving European book; the carved coffin-reliquary, the gold-and-garnet pectoral cross, and the other relics of the tomb; and Aldred’s tenth-century Old English gloss to the Gospels, the earliest English translation of the Gospel text.

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

A Cult That Made Masterpieces

The veneration of Cuthbert was not only a matter of pilgrimage and miracle; it was a great engine of art and learning. The community that kept his shrine — first at Lindisfarne, then in exile, then at Durham — lavished on it the finest work of which Insular culture was capable, and because that community preserved its treasures through the Viking age and beyond, an extraordinary amount of it survives. The objects made for or associated with Cuthbert’s cult are among the most important monuments of early medieval Christianity, and they are, in their own way, a primary source for his sanctity: they show what his shrine meant to those who made and gave them (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989; Battiscombe 1956).

The Lindisfarne Gospels

The greatest of these is the Lindisfarne Gospels (now British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv), one of the supreme achievements of Insular illumination — a Latin Gospel-book of the Vulgate text, written and decorated about 700, with full-page “carpet” pages of intricate interlace, magnificent decorated initials, and evangelist portraits, in a fusion of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Mediterranean styles that is the hallmark of the golden age of Northumbrian art (Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels, 2003; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). A colophon added in the tenth century by the glossator Aldred records the tradition of its making: that Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (698–721), wrote it “for God and for St Cuthbert”; that Æthelwald, his successor, bound it; that Billfrith the anchorite adorned it with gold and gems; and that Aldred himself glossed it (Aldred’s colophon, in the Lindisfarne Gospels; Brown 2003). [Disputed: the colophon's attribution of the writing and painting of the whole book to Eadfrith alone, working c. 698–721 in honour of Cuthbert, is the tradition and is accepted by many scholars (Brown 2003), though it is a two-and-a-half-century-later notice and some art historians question whether a single hand produced the entire manuscript; the date (c. 700, around the translation of 698) and the Lindisfarne origin are securely established on art-historical grounds even where the precise authorship is debated (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989)]. Whatever the exact circumstances of its making, the Lindisfarne Gospels was made at Lindisfarne in the generation of the translation, in honour of the saint, and it is the visible glory of his cult at its height.

The Gospels travelled with the body in the wanderings after 875 (see The Wanderings of the Coffin); one of the community’s cherished stories tells how the book was lost overboard when they attempted to cross to Ireland and was recovered, undamaged, on the shore at the saint’s guidance — a tale that, whatever its history, expresses the book’s status as a relic of Cuthbert no less than a Gospel-book (Historia de Sancto Cuthberto; Symeon of Durham; Brown 2003).

Aldred’s Gloss: The Earliest English Gospels

In the mid-tenth century, while the community and the book were at Chester-le-Street, the priest Aldred added, between the lines of the Latin, a continuous Old English gloss — a word-for-word translation of the Gospel text into the Northumbrian dialect of English (Aldred’s gloss, in the Lindisfarne Gospels; Brown 2003). This gloss is the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels into the English language, antedating by centuries the great vernacular Bibles, and it is a monument of the history of English as well as of the Cuthbert cult. That the oldest English Gospels should be written into the margins of a book made for Cuthbert’s shrine is a fitting emblem of the place his cult held in the religious and cultural life of the north.

The St Cuthbert Gospel of John

A second great book belongs even more intimately to the saint: the St Cuthbert Gospel (formerly the Stonyhurst Gospel; now British Library, Add. MS 89000), a small, exquisite copy of the Gospel of John, made in Northumbria in the early eighth century and placed in or with Cuthbert’s coffin, where it was found at one of the openings of the tomb (Brown, The St Cuthbert Gospel, 2015; Battiscombe 1956). It survives in its original tooled red leather binding — the oldest intact European book, its binding unaltered since the eighth century — and is one of the most precious objects of early medieval Christianity. Its association with the small Gospel of John that Boisil and Cuthbert read together is part of the cult’s tradition (see Monk Under Eata and Boisil), though the surviving book is a separate copy placed in the coffin. That a book should be buried with the saint, and survive intact for thirteen hundred years, is itself a kind of wonder of preservation, and a witness to the bookish, scriptural piety of the world that made him.

The Coffin-Reliquary and the Relics

The material relics of Cuthbert, recovered from his tomb and now preserved at Durham, are the third great monument of the cult. The coffin-reliquary — the carved oak coffin made for the translation of 698, incised with figures of Christ in majesty, the four evangelists with their symbols, the twelve apostles, the Virgin and Child, and the archangels — survives in fragments and is the most important piece of Anglo-Saxon wood-carving and one of the earliest representations of these subjects in English art (Battiscombe 1956; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). Found on the saint’s breast was the pectoral cross of gold cloisonné set with garnets, a masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon jewellery and one of the iconic objects of the period; with the body were also a portable altar of wood and silver, an ivory liturgical comb, and rich vestments, some of them — like the embroidered stole and maniple — gifts of King Æthelstan in the tenth century (Battiscombe 1956; on Æthelstan’s gifts, see The Wanderings of the Coffin). These objects, recovered chiefly at the openings of 1827 and 1827–1899, are the tangible remains of the cult and are treated further in connection with the Durham shrine (see Durham and the Shrine).

The Devotional Flowering

Around these great objects gathered a whole culture of devotion. Royal patrons — Guthred, Æthelstan, Edmund, and after the Conquest the Norman kings and bishops — endowed and venerated the shrine; pilgrims came in numbers; the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto and, later, Reginald of Durham’s vast collection of posthumous miracles recorded the saint’s continuing power (Reginald of Durham, Libellus de admirandis Beati Cuthberti virtutibus; Tudor, in St Cuthbert 1989). Cuthbert became the patron not only of his community but of the whole north of England, his banner carried in war, his name invoked for protection, his shrine at Durham one of the chief goals of English pilgrimage until the Reformation. The artistic flowering of the cult — the Gospels, the carvings, the jewellery, the manuscripts — is the outward expression of this devotion, the offering of a community’s finest skill to the saint it believed to be alive and present in its midst.

For the Orthodox reader, this flowering is instructive. It shows the cult of a saint working exactly as the tradition understands it should: the veneration of the holy one overflowing into the making of beauty, the relics and the shrine becoming a centre of prayer, art, learning, and pilgrimage, the whole life of a community gathered around the body of its patron. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the coffin of Cuthbert are not incidental to his sanctity; they are its fruit, the visible offering of the love his holiness drew from the people of the north — and, by the providence that carried them through the Viking age, the means by which so much of the seventh-century Northumbrian achievement survives at all.

References

Battiscombe, C. F., ed. The Relics of Saint Cuthbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Dean and Chapter of Durham, 1956. (The definitive study of the coffin-reliquary, the pectoral cross, the vestments, the portable altar, the comb, and the other relics recovered from the tomb.)
Brown, Michelle P. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe. London: British Library, 2003. (The making, art, date, and context of the Lindisfarne Gospels; Eadfrith’s authorship and Aldred’s colophon and gloss.)
Brown, Michelle P. The St Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John. London: British Library, 2015. (The St Cuthbert / Stonyhurst Gospel, the oldest intact European book, recovered from the coffin.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The cult, the manuscripts, the relics, and the artistic legacy; Tudor on the posthumous miracles.)
Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. (The Gospels in the wanderings; the patronage of the cult.)