St Cuthbert's Corpse

A Life After Death

David Willem

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781908381156
• eBook ISBN: 9781908381651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The miracle of St Cuthbert's incorrupt corpse has been the subject of much fascination since his death over thirteen-hundred years ago, inspiring pilgrims, monks, and even the construction of Durham Cathedral itself. Throughout the centuries, Cuthbert's coffin has been opened on six occasions. For the first time, accounts of these openings have been brought together in a single volume, providing a unique history of the saint from his death to the present day.

Including details of his death and burial, the moment when monks first discovered his remains to be incorrupt, and the most recent exhumation of his relics in 1899, David Willem brings alive the mystery and intrigue of the life of Cuthbert's corpse, and tries to answer questions such as, "When did the corpse decay?" and, "Is Cuthbert still buried in Durham Cathedral?"

"Elegant, accessible, and movingly written."
- Giles E. M. Gasper, Associate Director, Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University

"In Christian traditions, curiosity, piety, and awe almost inevitably frame that sensed affinity our own embodiment finds with holy bodies. St Cuthbert's body is no exception as this book shows in tracing varieties of hope, faith, and experience down the Christian centuries."
- Prof. Douglas J. Davies, Director, Centre for Death and Life Studies, Durham University

Chapter One

The Death of Cuthbert

20 March 687

He was in his mid-fifties and sick, aware that he was dying. Yet, on the day after Christmas in the year AD 686, the man whose corpse would one day have such power chose to leave his monastery on Lindisfarne to go, once again, to live alone on a stud of rock in the North Sea.

His fellow monks went with him to the Lindisfarne shore. The oldest of them, another sick man, asked the question on everybody’s mind.

“Tell us, my Lord Bishop, when we may hope for your return?”

“When you shall bring my body back here,” he replied. [1]

He was going to spend the vicious winter alone on an island called Inner Farne. His only shelter against the storms was a mud-walled, straw-roofed hovel; scratched into the ground, his latrine, a hut balanced on two pieces of driftwood wedged across a fissure in the rocks. During the few years he had previously lived as a hermit on the island, he had banked a circle of earth and stone around both his dwelling and his oratory—the hut he used for prayer. It stopped him seeing over to the mainland, preventing his mind from straying. All he could do was look up to the sun, the stars and the clouds, and the birds—the endless, wheeling universe of birds in their hopeless planetarium.

“He shut himself up in his cell away from the sight of men,” wrote Bede, who found out about his life from the monks who knew him, “and spent his time alone in fasting, watching, and prayer, rarely having communication with any one without, and that through the window, which at first was left open, that he might see and be seen; but, after a time, he shut that also, and opened it only to give his blessing, or for any other purpose of absolute necessity.”

Eight weeks after Christmas, in February 687, he suffered the first attack of what would be his final illness. And there is a record. A monk called Herefrith told Bede what happened.

For he was taken ill on the fourth day of the week; and again on the fourth day of the week his pains were over, and he departed to the Lord. But when I came to him on the first morning after his illness began (for I had also arrived at the island with the brethren three days before) in my desire to obtain his blessing and advice as usual, I gave the customary signal of my coming, and he came to the window, and replied to my salutation with a sigh.

“My Lord Bishop,” said I, “what is the matter with you? Has your indisposition come upon you this last night?”

“Yes,” said he, “indisposition has come upon me.”

I thought that he was speaking of an old complaint, which vexed him almost every day, and not of a new malady; so, without making any more inquiries, I said to him, “Give us your blessing, for it is time to put to sea and return home.”

“Do so,” replied he; “go on board and return home in safety. But, when the Lord shall have taken my spirit, bury me in this house, near my oratory, towards the south, over against the eastern side of the holy cross, which I have erected there. Towards the north side of that same oratory is a sarcophagus covered with turf, which the venerable Abbot Cudda formerly gave me. You will place my body therein, wrapping it in linen, which you will find in it. I would not wear it whilst I was alive, but for the love of that highly favoured woman, who sent it to me, the Abbess Verca. I have preserved it to wrap my corpse in.”

On hearing these words, I replied, “I beseech you, father, as you are weak, and talk of the probability of your dying, to let some of the brethren remain here to wait on you.”

“Go home now,” said he; “but return at the proper time.”

So I was unable to prevail upon him, notwithstanding the urgency of my entreaties; and at last I asked him when we should return to him.

“When God so wills it,” said he, “and when he himself shall direct you.”

We did as he commanded us; and having assembled the brethren immediately in the church, I had prayers offered up for him without intermission; for, said I, it seems to me, from some words which he spoke, that the day is approaching on which he will depart to the Lord.

Herefrith was anxious to return to the island but was prevented by a storm that raged for five days.

At length there was a calm, and we went to the island, and found him away from his cell in the house where we were accustomed to reside. The brethren who came with me had some occasion to go back to the neighbouring shore, so that I was left alone on the island to minister to the holy father. I warmed some water and washed his feet, which had an ulcer from a long swelling; and from the quantity of blood that came from it, required to be attended to. I also warmed some wine which I had brought, and begged him to taste it: for I saw by his face that he was worn out with pain and want of food. When I had finished my service, he sat down quietly on the couch, and I sat down by his side.

Seeing that he kept silence, I said, “I see, my Lord Bishop, that you have suffered much from your complaint since we left you, and I marvel that you were so unwilling for us, when we departed, to send you some of our number to wait upon you.”

He replied, “It was done by the providence and the will of God, that I might be left without any society or aid of man, and suffer somewhat of affliction. For when you were gone, my languor began to increase, so that I left my cell and came hither to meet any one who might be on his way to see me, that he might not have the trouble of going further. Now, from the moment of my coming until the present time, during a space of five days and five nights, I have sat here without moving.”

“And how have you supported life, my Lord Bishop?” asked I; “have you remained so long without taking food?”

Upon which, turning up the couch on which he was sitting, he showed me five onions concealed therein, saying, “This has been my food for five days—for, whenever my mouth became too dry and parched with thirst, I cooled and refreshed myself by tasting these”; now one of the onions appeared to have been a little gnawed, but certainly not more than half of it was eaten; “and,” continued he, “my enemies have never persecuted me so much during my whole stay in the island, as they have done during these last five days.”

I was not bold enough to ask what kinds of persecutions he had suffered.

Herefrith did not leave him alone again. It was enough that Cuthbert, in unmedicated pain, had dragged himself to the hut near the landing place to wait for human comfort, and, this time, he was easily persuaded to allow some brothers to remain on the island to care for him. In the meantime, Herefrith rushed back to the monastery on Lindisfarne to talk to the other monks about what would happen to the body after Cuthbert died. For this was this question that now occupied the mind of the community.

Perhaps the sequence of events described by Bede has become confused, but Cuthbert’s wishes are unclear. Despite his response to the question put to him on the Lindisfarne shore—i.e. that his body should return there after he was dead—at some point his intention was to be buried on Inner Farne. He wanted to be near to the oratory, in the sarcophagus given to him by Abbot Cudda and wrapped in the cloth given to him by Abbess Verca. He knows that after he is dead, “fugitives and criminals” will flee to his body, and that if he were to be buried back on Lindisfarne, its presence would become a burden. The community would then find it “necessary to intercede for such [men] before the secular rulers, and so you may have trouble on my account.”

For the monastery however, what mattered more was that they controlled access to the corpse and its power—something much more easily done if it rested in the church on Lindisfarne rather than out on uninhabited, isolated Inner Farne. Herefrith therefore returned with a delegation to persuade Cuthbert, and, eventually, Cuthbert relented.

“Since you wish to overcome my scruples,” he says, “and to carry my body amongst you, it seems to me to be the best plan to bury it in the inmost parts of the church, that you may be able to visit my tomb yourselves, and to control the visits of all other persons.”

For the powers of the world were watching and the fate of Cuthbert’s corpse mattered. On a hill on the mainland, almost opposite Inner Farne and commanding the short sea-route to Lindisfarne, is the fortress of Bamburgh, the citadel of the Northumbrian kings. Had the court been there, it would have watched as the drama of death and concern was played out. The royal family would have seen Cuthbert’s boat leave Lindisfarne just after Christmas; seen his fire at night, the smoke during the day. They would have seen Herefrith and his fellow monks rowing back and forth, and shaken their heads at Cuthbert’s isolation during the five days of winter storm. They would have heard the story—“Tell us, my Lord Bishop, when we may hope for your return?”—and his heroic reply.

For Cuthbert was much more to the court than an anchorite, much more than a curiosity on a hermitage just out to sea. He was also the Northumbrian royal family’s chosen bishop and their court soothsayer, a kind of Christian Merlin to these Anglo-Saxon Arthurs. Perhaps he was even of the court himself. And, just as his choice of resting place fell between between a lonely grave on Inner Farne and a public tomb in the church of Lindisfarne, so too the whole of his life had been stretched out between the periphery and the centre. Ever since he had been a young squire, when he had ridden up to the gate of the monastery at Melrose to ask about taking religious vows, he had tried to escape to the edge of the world.

It was not that he had chosen not to live. He had always taken his faith to the peasant people in the Northumbrian hills and showed them how the power of this new, foreign religion could sometimes cure their loved ones. He had consorted with kings and queens, and he had found his way through the great religious controversy of his times—the difference between the Celtic and Roman traditions of Christianity in the land that was yet to become England. Yet, at each stage of his life, he had tried to withdraw. From Melrose, he had gone to the monastery on Lindisfarne which, then as now, was cut off from the mainland twice a day by the tide. While on Lindisfarne, he had gone to live as a hermit on one of the islets that was only accessible at low tide, and finally, he had tried to live alone out on Inner Farne.

But the more he retreated, the more spiritual authority was created by his rejection of comfort, company, human love and human passion, and the more this drew the world to him. Eventually it overwhelmed him. One day, in the year 684, the king and the court determined that he serve as bishop, if only for a couple of years.

It was a woman who brokered the deal. Her name was Aelfflaed.

She was a princess of the Northumbrian royal family and a nun. In gratitude for a victory in battle, her father the late king had dedicated her to chastity and the religious life, and Aelfflaed had risen to become Abbess of Whitby.

She was thirty years old when the meeting took place; Cuthbert was fifty. She summoned Cuthbert from Inner Farne to another island, another piece of marginal land, this time in the mouth of the River Coquet on the sea route between Inner Farne and Whitby. Ostensibly, she had called him there because she wanted to see into the future.

She wanted to know when her brother Ecgfrid, the reigning king, would die. “For I know,” she said, “that you abound in the spirit of prophecy, and that, if you are willing, you are able to tell me even this.”

His reply seemed to predict that the king could be dead within a year.

The prophecy made her weep. But, “having wiped her face,” Bede wrote, “she with feminine boldness adjured him by the majesty of the Holy One, that he would tell her who would be the heir to the kingdom, seeing that Ecgfrid had neither sons nor brothers.”

Cuthbert thought for a moment. Then he reassured her that, despite the lack of heirs, the new king would be someone she could embrace with as much sisterly affection as she did the current king.

She pleaded with him to tell her where the heir might be found.

Again, Cuthbert was vague. “You behold this great and spacious sea”, he said, “how it aboundeth in islands. It is easy for God out of some of these to provide a person to reign over England.”

For Aelfflaed, this was enough to make the succession clear. Cuthbert had agreed metaphorically to anoint her half-brother, who was in hiding over the sea in Ireland.

She then asked him a second question: whether Cuthbert would be willing to become bishop, with the implication that he would spiritually oversee the passing of the crown from one of her brothers to another.

“Oh, with what various intentions are the hearts of men distracted!” she chided him. “Some rejoice in having obtained riches, others always eager after them are still in want: but thou rejectest the glory of the world, although it is offered thee, and although thou mightest obtain a bishopric, than which there is nothing more sublime on earth, yet thou preferrest the recesses of thy desert to this rank.”

“I know that I am not worthy of so high a rank,” he replied carefully, “nevertheless, I cannot shun the judgement of the Supreme Ruler, who, if he decreed that I should subject myself to so great a burden, would, I believe, restore me after a moderate freedom, and perhaps after not more than two years would send me back to my former solitude and quiet.”

So, on Coquet Island, in 684, a deal was done between this influential man and this influential woman, between the hermit and the princess. Cuthbert would give his authority to the succession and, in return, he would only have to serve for two years as bishop.

It was not an easy burden, but he made a success of it—both politically and spiritually. He was so close to power that he was with Aelfflaed’s sister-in-law the Queen when, as he had predicted, the king died. And although there is no record of Cuthbert’s role in the succession, Aelfflaed’s half-brother ruled for almost twenty years, starting what would eventually become known as the golden age of the Kingdom of Northumbria. Cuthbert made a success too of being both bishop and hermit.

This is what his other biographer, an anonymous monk and near-contemporary, says of his time as bishop:

He continued with the utmost constancy to be what he had been before; he showed the same humility of heart, the same poverty of dress, and, being full of authority and grace, he maintained the dignity of a bishop without abandoning the ideal of the monk or the virtue of the hermit . . . For his discourse was pure and frank, full of gravity and probity, full of sweetness and grace . . . To each one he gave varied advice with exhortations suitable to his character; that is to say he always knew beforehand what advice to give to any man and when and how it should be given. [2]

He was strict too, as a hermit-bishop would be. There are hints—in the reference to the poverty of dress and in his refusal to wear the cloth that the Abbess Verca gave him while he was alive—that there was a tendency for these Anglo-Saxon monasteries to be less like places of religious discipline and more a spiritual retreat for aristocrats, some of whom were unwilling to swap their rich, soft, ostentatious clothing for scratchy, undyed wool. Perhaps even that final question—“Tell us, my Lord Bishop, when we may hope for your return?”—was not that of a faithful servant but a cruel taunt to remind a sick, old man that he had no option but to die a hard, lonely death.

Cuthbert’s last act as bishop was to visit two of the leading women of the church: one was the Abbess Verca and the other was Aelfflaed.

Aefflaed had asked him to dedicate a new church for her at Ovington. Yet, on this their last meeting, something so strange happened that she was to tell the anonymous biographer about it.

On that day, Cuthbert fell into a trance while they were dining. This unnamed monk’s account differs from that of Bede in some details, but the shape of the story is the same. Cuthbert experienced a petit mal; his limbs relaxed, his colour changed, his hand lost its grip on his knife which clattered onto the table, his eyes were “unusually fixed”.

His priest leaned in to alert Aelfflaed to his incapacitation, and when Cuthbert came to, she asked him what had been revealed to him in his moment of reverie. At first, Cuthbert tried to laugh off the dropped knife.

But she was intrigued. She pressed him further.

Eventually, he told her that while in his trance he had seen a soul being carried to heaven.

“From what place was it taken?” she asked.

“From your monastery,” he replied.

And his name?

“You will tell it me,” said Cuthbert finally, “tomorrow when I am celebrating mass.”

Aelfflaed sent a messenger out overnight to find someone whose passing could confirm Cuthbert’s second-sight, and, back on her estate, the messenger discovered how a shepherd called Hadwald had died that day, having fallen out of a tree.

According to the anonymous biographer, when the messenger returned the next day, it was just in time for Aelfflaed to burst in to the middle of the mass and reveal what had happened. She rushed in at the very point when Cuthbert was asking God to remember the souls of the departed—as dramatic a moment as an objection in the middle of a wedding.

“Remember, Lord, thy servants . . . ” Cuthbert intoned.

Breathless with excitement, Aelfflaed revealed what she has found out. She delivered the news, Bede records, with woman-like astonishment, “as if she were going to tell him something new and doubtful”.

“I pray, my lord bishop, remember in the mass my servant Hadwald, who died yesterday by falling from a tree.”

But Bede is also recording something more than her excitement at being the person to reveal how the prophesy had been fulfilled. Perhaps there is a hint of flirty incredulity that the passing of so low a soul should have been shown to so high a bishop.

So, something happened at the dedication of the church in Ovington—some public drama between this man and this woman in the drama of the mass. At their moment of parting, as he left her for the last time before his death, something occurred that was memorable enough to be recalled in subtly different versions by different witnesses some twenty years later.

It is unlikely they ever saw each other again. Cuthbert returned to Inner Farne to di...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: The Death of Cuthbert
• Chapter 2: The Body that Would Not Rot
• Chapter 3: The First Anglo-Saxon Kings of All England
• Chapter 4: The Coming of the Normans
• Chapter 5: The Dissolution of the Monasteries
• Chapter 6: The Second Protestant Desecration
• Chapter 7: The Victorian Investigation
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Endnotes