Saint Cuthbert has three feast days: March 20, the day of his death in 687 (in the Catholic Church), August 31 for the Episcopal Church, and September 4 for Wales, and for the translation of his relics to a newly-built cathedral in Durham c.999. It is because of this cathedral that I chose Cuthbert. Durham is a staple of the architectural history curriculum, so I’ve often taught about it, and I visited in 2007, but my knowledge is superficial and I welcomed the chance to learn more. My exploration left me a little grouchy, but it also led me into pleasant reflection about nature and human character.
Durham is on the A list for architectural historians as the most prominent Anglo-Saxon and Norman building in England, and as an example of important innovations in vaulting in the transition period between Romanesque and Gothic architecture. For me, the fascination of Durham is in the “graphic architecture” and in the massiveness of the compound piers and columns. By “graphic” architecture I mean the chevron moldings zigging and zagging everywhere on the undersides of the arches, and the chevrons, spirals, and diaper patterns carved into the massive cylindrical piers. Standing in the middle of all that I felt as though I’d shrunk and been absorbed into an oversize grade school writing exercise. I love the contrast of all that linear energy with the sobriety of the pillars, which seem like they might have grown out of the bedrock in pre-historic times. Last but not least, the stone-cutting is superb. What seems from a distance like a simple zig-zag molding reveals itself on closer inspection to be a composite of several delicate profiles; remarkable!
The stories of Cuthbert’s life were written by others, as was common for all early saints. Nowadays our celebrities write their own stories on their Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram accounts. In that, they are relatively credible, since their reports can be verified by those of others or by the impartiality of camera lenses, the use of Photoshop notwithstanding. But Cuthbert’s hagiographers, writing after his death and in a world that communicated primarily by conversation, were free to develop the drama of his life as they saw fit. Cuthbert revealed himself through his biographers as a precocious youth, astonishing his teachers, healing his own lameness, receiving miraculous deliveries of food from angels during long journeys, being helped by animals in cahoots with the angels, etc. etc. You know the drill.
Cuthbert’s dates are roughly 634-687. He grew up near Melrose Abbey in Northumberland, became the prior there about 662, then moved west to Lindisfarne Abbey a few years later, where he was made bishop in 684. Two years after becoming bishop he resigned and moved to Inner Farne Island to become a hermit, and there he died in 687. His first vita, written by an anonymous author about ten years after his death, describes his arrival and settlement on Inner Farne. First, Cuthbert had to clear the island of demons, then he had to build his shelter. For this, God “grew” massive stones for him, which Cuthbert moved with ease, and the sea graciously brought him a twelve-foot beam for his house. Cuthbert engaged with local birdlife, which is what you might do too if you lived all by yourself on a small island in the middle of a wild sea and needed someone to talk to. The “venerable” Bede, who began the second vita of Cuthbert in the early eighth century, embellishes the life of the hermit with several bird stories, but it would be a few centuries later when Cuthbert became forever linked to the common eider duck (Somateria mollissima), which is now often called “Cuddy’s Duck.” And from this, legend has it that Cuthbert established the first nature preserve in Great Britain, setting out rules in his animal and avian kingdom there like a medieval Dr. Doolittle and supposedly making everyone happy and in particular protecting the eider ducks.
There is, however, material evidence for this association, sort of. Cuthbert’s link to eider ducks comes from a report, c. 1165, by a Reginald of Durham, who wrote about what had been seen when Cuthbert’s wooden coffin was opened in preparation for his translation to the newly built cathedral; the saint’s body was wrapped in silk decorated with a motif of fruit, fish, and ducks. He wasn’t imagining this: fragments of the cloth, the only surviving example of Anglo-Saxon textile, can be seen today thanks to the librarian of Durham Cathedral, James Raine, who preserved them when the coffin was again re-opened in 1827.
After Cuthbert’s death on his little island, his remains were taken back to Lindisfarne, where they worked many miracles, as did the bones of the first bishop of Lindisfarne, Saint Aidan (d. 651), and the head of King Oswald (604-642), the man responsible for consolidating the Anglo-Saxon tribes of Northumberland. Alas none of these relics were powerful enough to repel those crafty Danes and Vikings, who swept down on the island c. 875. The monks fled, carrying with them Cuthbert’s coffin, into which they threw Aidan’s bones and Oswald’s head. They also wrapped up the Lindisfarne Gospels, which had been created shortly after Cuthbert’s death, and are one of our most precious examples of early medieval art; still with us thanks to these enterprising monks.
This band of monastic refugees wandered throughout Northumberland for several years, carrying their treasures, (remember Call’s journey with the coffin of Augustus at the end of Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry? If not, this is a book you should read.) until at one point Cuthbert—or his coffin—refused to move any further. Bishop Aldhun, who was leading the group, learned through a vision that Cuthbert wanted to go to Dun Holm, but no one knew where that was. Enter two women cow-herders…one had lost her dun-colored cow, and the other directed her towards what is now Durham, about ten miles away, to find it. The monks thought Cuthbert might like that idea too, and sure enough, his coffin practically flew there on its own accord.
The center of Durham sits atop a hard and high sandstone butte surrounded by the River Wear. The site is naturally defensive, thus a great choice for those exhausted monks to build their new monastery. Their route is now commemorated by Dun Cow Lane, which runs east-west a little way north of the cathedral, and the monks’ advisors can be seen immortalized in a nineteenth-century stone relief on the north façade of the cathedral. By 999 a stone cathedral was in place, and September 4 marks the date that Cuthbert’s remains were placed in this structure. The years roll on…and we all know what happened in 1066, when William of Normandy conquered England, but let’s take a brief pause to look at the effect that event had on English politics and religious structures in particular.
William’s effort to consolidate power and win his new subjects over by continuing certain traditions was aided by his Italian archbishop Lanfranc, based at Canterbury. William concentrated on castle-building, and Lanfranc worked on setting a precedent for the creation of powerful cathedral-monasteries; monasteries run by their priors but also by their bishop-abbots. On the continent, bishops’ seats were usually separate from the monasteries, which were run by abbots or abbesses and often located some distance from urban centers. Lanfranc’s goal was to link bishops’ seats to existing Benedictine monasteries, and in the period after the Conquest, ten “campuses” containing a bishop’s palace/fortress, a cathedral, and a monastery were created and purposefully situated in urban centers to better intersect with economic activity and project a physical reminder of Norman power. Durham is the most striking physical example of this, with its defensive site close to the Scottish border, the looming presence of the bishop’s palace that was built in 1072, and the imposing cathedral that followed.
On August 11 in 1093, ground was broken for the new cathedral. The old Saxon cathedral remained in place, nestled into what would become the southern transept of the new building until it was no longer needed, probably in 1104 when Cuthbert’s body translated. The Galilee, or Lady Chapel at the west end of the cathedral was added in the 1170s, and the tri-partite apse was replaced by the T-shaped “Chapel of Nine Altars,” and the towers heightened in the last half of the thirteenth century.
The story of the Galilee chapel made me grouchy. Usually these “Lady Chapels,” unique to England and built as areas dedicated to the Virgin Mary, are found in the east end of the church. At Durham, this chapel was also to serve as a place for women to worship, close to Cuthbert’s shrine near the high altar, since women were forbidden to enter the church otherwise. Construction was duly begun at the east end, but the stones would not rest in place. The story persists that it was Cuthbert, unsettled by the idea of having women so close to him, who retaliated by unsettling the stones. However, a geological study from 2016 makes it clear that it is exactly at this point that the hard sandstone that supports the rest of the cathedral gives way to a less stable sediment. In 1175 however, it was Cuthbert’s word that counted, and so the Galilee Chapel was built at the west end, squeezed into the space between the cliff and the building (illustrations are above).
Much ink has been spilled over the architecture of Durham Cathedral, mostly related to the debate over the origins and sequencing of the ribbed groin vaults, a story that’s essentially about the structural efficiency of the pointed arch as compared to the limitations of round “Romanesque” arches. That’s a complicated story, but there’s more to celebrate at Durham. The structure has remained relatively untouched, and offers us a unique look at pre-and-post-Conquest architecture. Anglo-Saxon elements include the cubical capitals, the large soffit rolls, intersecting arcading motifs in the stone wall reliefs, and predominantly; the linear ornament everywhere that echoes motifs found in pre-Conquest manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Norman elements include mostly the use of alternating supports: compound piers and columns, that link to the vaulting experiments above.
The linear ornament is especially striking on the seven-foot-diameter cylinders that serve as alternating vertical supports throughout the church. If you were one of those kids like me, who, while taking a bath, meditated on the design of the metal grill covering the bathroom wall heater and wondered why the letters spelling “Thermador” did not line up with the grid of the grill, wishing with all my heart that I could correct the problem, you will relate to my interest in these columns. They are variously incised with chevrons, spirals, and diaper patterns. The amazing thing is that all these stones were pre-cut on the ground and then put in place; that their joints line up at all seems nothing short of a miracle. The spiral motif is used in the choir, the most sacred part of the church; in the north transept; and for the northernmost column in the south transept. The southern column in the south transept, however, has a hybrid chevron-spiral pattern. Its existence has sponsored several theories about its raison d’être. It has been called the “Apprentice’s Column,” the thought being that the master mason was on vacation when this one was carved; it has been considered a purposeful aberration to avoid human-made perfection (only God can create perfection); and it has been seen (in a more scholarly light), as a possible indication of where Cuthbert was originally buried in the old Saxon church. Regardless of how it arrived on the scene, most everyone is in agreement that the spiral columns, which are reserved for the choir and areas with altars, hearken to the use of the spiral columns described in the Bible for Solomon’s Temple, and used extensively in early Christian architecture, St. Peter’s in Rome being an important example. I love the Durham spirals in part because they seem so like the sturdy Normans, forceful, simple, and straightforward in their intentions, but I also love the mind games that the “real” spirals play with you (is this really a structural element? It seems on the verge of dancing out from under its load…).
Spirals are a good way to segue to the Nature segment of this essay, which will start with a note about a poem entitled simply Durham that was written sometime between the eleventh and twelfth century to celebrate the merger of Cuthbert with the identity of the city and cathedral. Its hyperbole reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s description of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In the poet’s Durham, the stones are “wonderfully grown,” the Wear River is “strong with waves,” and “blessed Cuthbert” lives within the fortification that is “celebrated throughout Britain.”
All this drama is far from what I imagine Cuthbert’s life to have been like; his journey from Melrose to Lindisfarne, his rejection of bishop’s power, and his move to Inner Farne Island where he lived with his ducks. That life was celebrated in the romantic prose of the poet Wordsworth seven centuries after Durham was built. Curiously, Cuthbert’s life in the seventh century, the erection of the Durham complex in the twelfth century, and Wordsworth’s re-creation in the nineteenth century all have something in common. During each epoch there was a concern with unification, with creating identity, and with consolidating power. In Cuthbert’s time, King Oswald and Bishop Aidan used Christianity to unify the north, and the Synod of Whitby in 664 resolved that Latin would be the common language for the monasteries and that Roman customs would prevail. Bede’s history of Cuthbert publicized the value of this common denominator. In the eleventh century, Durham was created out of whole cloth to personify both the benevolence and power of the Norman conquerors; they were benevolent because they recognized the value of existing cults—in this case that of Cuthbert—and they used those cults to enhance their stamp of power through architecture and the politicization of bishops. Jumping forward to the early nineteenth century, Britain was bursting at the seams as it entered the Victorian Era, and to counteract the chaos (which could be compared to our entry into the Information Age), people looked back to Anglo-Saxon and medieval Britain for a sense of foundation and unity. Two Cuthbert-related events in particular will bring this essay to a gentle close on the shore.
The first concerns the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, called Grace Darling, who lived in the Farne Islands when Lindisfarne and Cuthbert’s life there had been long forgotten. On a stormy day in September of 1838, she spotted a steamship that had broken in two on the rocks, alerted her father, and the two of them rowed out to save the passengers. Grace became a heroine; after her death in 1842 her hair and parts of her dress were as relics, and—as part of the quest for national identity—she became conflated with Cuthbert and the effect of nature on moral character; tough environments instill heroic values in those living there. Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands became a tourist destination, and Cuthbert’s Chapel, which had languished for 1000 years on Farne Island, was restored.
Wordsworth covered this event, and he celebrated Cuthbert through his study of Bede’s vitae, and as part of his sonnets on the history of the Church in England. Living in the peaceful Lake District, he speculated on the effects of landscape on character, worrying that he had been too softened by his gentle environment and questioning the value of his tendency towards contemplation rather than to action. He saw Bede and Cuthbert as admirable action heroes shaped by the wild winds and waves of the Northumbrian coast. Ah, the grass is always greener…
Durham as a site, with its “wonderfully grown stones,” its prominent butte and its imposing buildings, stands as a testament to the power of humans to shape their environment. Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands, in contrast, appear and disappear with the tides. Their accessibility depends on the mood of the sea; they are not unlike those meandering thoughts that Wordsworth worried about, which no columns, no chevrons or spirals, would ever contain, thank god.
References for Weeks 35 through 39: Cuthbert
Websites:
Lindisfarne Gospels from British Museum site: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_nero_d_iv
Cuthbert’s Way:
https://www.stcuthbertsway.info/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Appleton, Helen. “The Old English Durham and the Cult of Cuthbert,” in the Journal of English and German Philology, July 2016, pp. 346-369.
Bacola, Meredith. “The Hybrid Pier of Durham Cathedral: A Norman Monument to the Shrine of St. Cuthbert?” in Gesta, Vol. 54, No. 1 (March 2015), pp. 27-36.
Fay, Jessica. “Wordsworth’s Northumbria: Bede, Cuthbert, and Northern Medievalism,” in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 111, No. 4 (October 2016), pp. 917-935.
Jackson, Michael J. and Brian Young. “The building of Durham Cathedral (1093-1133): the preliminary considerations,” in Construction History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2016), pp. 23-38.
Minard, Antoine. “The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography,” in Folklore, 127:3, 2016, pp 325-343.