Durham and the Shrine

Since 995 the body of Cuthbert has lain at Durham, and over it rose the great Norman cathedral that still holds his tomb. This file follows the cult at Durham: the building of the cathedral, the medieval shrine that made Cuthbert the patron of the north and the prince-bishops his stewards, the pilgrimage and the legends, the dissolution of the shrine at the Reformation — and the modern openings of the tomb in 1827 and 1899, which found a skeleton rather than an incorrupt body, and the contested question of how that finding bears on the ancient claim, handled here as a structured dispute.

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

The Coming to Durham

When the community of St Cuthbert came to the rock of Durham in 995, bearing the body through the last of its wanderings (see The Wanderings of the Coffin), they built first a temporary shelter and then, by 998, a stone church — the “White Church” — to house the saint. There the body of Cuthbert rested, the centre of a growing community and cult, through the upheavals of the eleventh century, the Danish conquest, and the Norman Conquest of 1066 (Symeon of Durham, Libellus de exordio; Rollason 2000; Aird 1998). The Normans, far from suppressing the cult, embraced it: Cuthbert became the patron of the new Norman lords of the north as he had been of the English, and the Conqueror and his successors confirmed and extended the privileges of his church.

The Cathedral

In 1093 the Norman bishop William of St-Calais began the building of the present Durham Cathedral — one of the greatest Romanesque buildings in Europe, a masterpiece of architecture raised, above all, to house the shrine of Cuthbert. The body was translated into the new church, behind the high altar, in 1104, at a solemn opening of the coffin at which, the Durham accounts say, the body was again found incorrupt and the relics examined (Symeon of Durham; Reginald of Durham; Battiscombe 1956). The cathedral became, and remains, the great monument of the cult: Cuthbert’s shrine stood behind the high altar, a place of pilgrimage and miracle, while at the west end was placed the tomb of Bede, whose remains had been brought to Durham from Jarrow in the eleventh century, so that the two great saints of Northumbria — the wonderworker and the scholar who wrote his Life — lie at opposite ends of the same church. The story of Bede and his removal to Durham belongs to his own account; here it is enough to note the fittingness of the two resting together.

The Medieval Cult

For more than four centuries the shrine of Cuthbert at Durham was one of the chief holy places of England and the spiritual heart of the north. Cuthbert was the patron of the whole region; the bishops of Durham, the prince-bishops, ruled the great palatinate of the north as his earthly stewards, wielding near-royal power “in the liberty of St Cuthbert”; his banner — the famous banner of St Cuthbert — was carried into battle, and victories such as the Battle of the Standard (1138) and Neville’s Cross (1346) were attributed to his protection (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989; Aird 1998). Pilgrims came in great numbers to the shrine; the posthumous miracles were recorded in the twelfth century by Reginald of Durham in a vast collection, the Libellus de admirandis Beati Cuthberti virtutibus, which — though a late and credulous source, used here with caution — testifies to the continuing power the saint was believed to exercise (Reginald of Durham; Tudor in St Cuthbert 1989). One curious feature of the medieval cult was the tradition that Cuthbert disliked the presence of women near his shrine, so that a line in the cathedral floor marked the limit beyond which women were not to pass — a late legend without warrant in the early Lives, reflecting the monastic anxieties of the later community rather than anything of the historical saint (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989).

The Reformation

The shrine was dismantled at the Reformation. In 1537–1540, in the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the rich shrine of Cuthbert at Durham was despoiled of its treasures and broken up by the king’s commissioners. The contemporary account in the Rites of Durham (written c. 1593 by an observer recalling the old days) reports that when the commissioners opened the coffin they found the body “whole, uncorrupt, with his face bare, and his beard as it had been a fortnight’s growth,” to their astonishment, so that they did not destroy it but, by the king’s order, buried it again beneath the place where the shrine had stood (Rites of Durham, ed. Fowler, Surtees Society, 1903; Battiscombe 1956). The shrine as a focus of pilgrimage was ended, but the body remained, reburied in the cathedral, where it lies to this day under a plain slab inscribed simply CVTHBERTVS.

The Tomb-Openings of 1827 and 1899

The grave was opened again in modern times, under the eyes of antiquaries and clergy, and what was found has become a contested matter. In 1827 the Durham authorities opened the tomb and found, within a series of coffins (including the fragments of the carved coffin of 698), a skeleton wrapped in the remains of rich vestments — among them the embroidered stole and maniple of King Æthelstan’s gift — together with the pectoral cross, the portable altar, the ivory comb, and other relics (Raine, St Cuthbert, 1828; Battiscombe 1956). The bones were reburied. In 1899 the grave was opened once more, and the remains examined by anatomists, who reported a skeleton consistent with a man of Cuthbert’s age and build (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989, on the openings; Battiscombe 1956). The relics recovered in 1827 are now preserved in the cathedral treasury — among the most important survivals of Anglo-Saxon art (see The Cuthbert Cult and the Gospels).

The interpretation of these findings, and their bearing on the ancient and medieval claim of incorruption, is genuinely disputed. [Disputed: the *Lives*, the medieval Durham accounts, and the *Rites of Durham* (c. 1593) report the body found incorrupt at successive openings down to the Reformation; the modern openings of 1827 and 1899 found a skeleton, not an incorrupt body. The discrepancy is variously explained. Some hold that the original incorruption was real and that ordinary decay set in only in the later medieval or post-Reformation centuries, perhaps after the disturbances of 1537–1540 (a view sympathetic to the tradition); others (e.g., Raine 1828, the Protestant antiquary who conducted the 1827 opening) argued that the medieval "incorrupt body" had long been a wrapped and perhaps partly artificial bundle and that no true incorruption was ever there to be found; still others judge that natural mummification or favourable burial conditions preserved the body for a time and that the medieval reports exaggerated a real but partial preservation. The 1899 anatomical examination established that the bones are those of a single man compatible with Cuthbert but could not adjudicate the question of earlier incorruption. The matter cannot be settled from the evidence, and the positions turn in part on prior convictions about the miraculous (Battiscombe 1956; Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989)]. What can be said without dispute is that the Lives and the medieval cult report incorruption (see The Translation of 698); that the modern openings found a skeleton with rich relics; and that the reconciling of the two is a question on which sources and scholars differ, and which the Church holds with the sobriety METHODOLOGY §3.5 enjoins — the incorruption pinned to its attestation, not certified as fact, and the modern finding reported as what it was.

The Shrine Today

Durham Cathedral remains, after the Reformation and the centuries, the home of Cuthbert. His grave behind the high altar, marked by the worn slab, is still a place of prayer and pilgrimage; the relics — the cross, the coffin-fragments, the vestments — are displayed in the cathedral; and the cult, though no longer the engine of pilgrimage it was in the Middle Ages, continues, kept by Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Christians alike who honour the saint of the north (Bonner, Rollason, and Stancliffe 1989). The body that the men of Lindisfarne carried for a hundred years rather than abandon, and that they laid at last on the rock of Durham, has rested there for over a thousand years, and the great church raised over it is itself the most eloquent monument to what Cuthbert meant, and means, to the English north. The final assessment of the man and the saint is the subject of the companion file (see Legacy and Assessment).

References

Battiscombe, C. F., ed. The Relics of Saint Cuthbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Dean and Chapter of Durham, 1956. (The history of the tomb and its openings; the relics recovered in 1827; the assessment of the incorruption question.)
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe, eds. St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989. (The shrine at Durham, the medieval cult, the prince-bishops, the legends, and the tomb-openings.)
Aird, William M. St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071–1153. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998. (The cult under the Normans; the building of the cathedral; the palatinate of the bishops.)
Raine, James. St Cuthbert: With an Account of the State in Which His Remains Were Found upon the Opening of His Tomb in Durham Cathedral, in the Year 1827. Durham, 1828. (The 1827 opening and the antiquary’s interpretation.)
Rites of Durham. Ed. J. T. Fowler. Surtees Society, vol. 107. Durham, 1903. (The c. 1593 account of the shrine and its dissolution at the Reformation.)
Symeon of Durham. Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis ecclesiae. Ed. and trans. David Rollason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. (The coming to Durham and the early history of the church.)