Cuthbert of Lindisfarne

Cuthbert was a Northumbrian, born around 634, and by the account Bede gathered from those who knew him he was keeping sheep in the Lammermuir hills one night in 651 when he saw a soul carried heavenward in light, learned it was the hour Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne died, and went to the monastery at Melrose to take the habit. He was formed there in the Irish tradition Aidan had brought from Iona, became guest master at Ripon and prior at Melrose, and after the Synod of Whitby in 664 settled the Roman usages at Lindisfarne itself as its prior, winning over a reluctant community by patience, the virtue every source makes his signature.

The pull of solitude ran deeper than office. Around 676 he withdrew to the Inner Farne, a bare island in the North Sea, built a cell whose walls cut off every view but the sky, and lived as a hermit, praying, it was said, through the night in the sea with the otters warming his feet at dawn, and protecting the eider ducks that still bear his name on those coasts. In 685, against his will and at a king's and synod's insistence, he was consecrated Bishop of Lindisfarne. He served two years, returned to the Farne sensing his death, and died there on 20 March 687, signalling the moment by torchlight to the brothers watching from Lindisfarne.

Cuthbert's cult began eleven years after his burial, when the Lindisfarne community opened his tomb in 698 to elevate his bones and found, the sources report, a body undecayed. Incorruption was the medieval signature of exceptional sanctity, and the discovery, joined to the miracles recorded at the shrine, made Lindisfarne a pilgrimage center and Cuthbert the premier saint of northern England. For him or by him the community produced treasures that survive: the Lindisfarne Gospels were made in his honor within a generation, and the tiny gospel of John found in his coffin, the St Cuthbert Gospel, is the oldest intact European book still in its original binding.

The Viking descent on Lindisfarne in 793 began the strangest chapter. The monks eventually left the island carrying the coffin, and for over a century the community moved through northern England with its saint, settling at Chester-le-Street, then in 995 at Durham, where the cathedral was raised around his shrine. The tomb was opened repeatedly across the centuries, the body reported whole as late as 1104, and the shrine stripped at the Reformation though the burial remains in the cathedral. Bede, who wrote Cuthbert's life twice, fixed his image for the Middle Ages; the modern St Cuthbert's Way, walked from Melrose to Lindisfarne, retraces the country of his beginnings in his name.