20 March marks St Cuthbert’s Day, the 1339th anniversary of his death at his hermitage on Inner Farne in Northumberland’s Farne Islands. Cuthbert is revered as our patron saint, but just how does Cuthbert fit into the origin story of Northumbria?
Before Northumbria
Back in prehistory, the area of land we now call Northumbria was home to a myriad of Celtic tribes, including the Votadini and the Brigantes. Then as we all know of course, the Romans invaded what they called Britannia in AD 43 in the reign of Emperor Claudius and then in 122, what was to become Northumbria was split in two by the Emperor Hadrian and the wall bearing his name, which roughly followed the course of the River Tyne. For the next four centuries the wall and its nearby forts dominated the human landscape of Northumbria, until the last Roman legions left to return to Rome around 410 AD after the sacking of Rome by the Gothic army led by Alaric.
For about 140 years, the Celtic tribes of Britannia, used to the defence of the Roman army and not used to having to defend themselves from attack from the sea, were vulnerable to potential attacks from the east. Eventually an attack came in the form of Ida the Angle. As Martin Dufferwiel relates in Northumbria’s Bloody History, Ida “established himself at the old Celtic fort of Din Guyardi, the Dynguoaroy recorded by the chronicler Nennius, writing early in the ninth century: the coastal stronghold that would eventually become Bamburgh Castle. This was the dawning of the Province of Bernicia, from which would later develop the Kingdom of Northumbria”.
Oswald unites Northumbria
The following decades would see a struggle between the Anglian newcomers and the old Celtic tribes of Britain, until the death of Edwin and the victory of Welsh king Cadwallon and penda of Mercia, at the Battle of Hatfield, just to the northeast of present day Doncaster, which saw Northumbria fall apart in 633. Meanwhile on Iona, Oswald, son of former Northumbrian king Aethelfrith, who had been expelled from Northumbria by the new king Edwin, on Aethelftirth’s death in 616, heard of the devastation of Northumbria by Cadwallon and his thoughts turned towards Northumbria and its revival as a kingdom. And as Oswald had been brought up in the Celtic Christian tradition on Iona, this was to be a Christian kingdom.
So, it was that in 635, the decisive battle in early Northumbrian history was to be fought at Heavenfield near Corbridge after Oswald had erected a huge wooden cross and then both selected favourable ground and caught Cadwallon and his army by surprise near the River Tyne.
Oswald and Aidan
Once he was firmly established as king of Northumbria, Oswald sent for monks from Iona where he had lived for so many years. The first to come to the monastery at Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast and within clear sight of the fortress at Bamburgh, was too stern and made no real progress in converting pagan Northumbrians to Christianity. So, it was that Aidan came as a replacement and had much more success and would go to be venerated, like Oswald incidentally, as a saint.
Meanwhile, around the same time as Oswald was winning his decisive victory at Heavenfield, a baby was born on the northern edge of Northumbria and he was to go by the name of Cuthbert. Cuthbert would grow into a lively, athletic boy, but even then there was a foreshadowing of his future life when he was playing a game and a younger boy of about three rebuked Cuthbert for his foolish ways. Then as a teenager,Cuthbert’s – and Northumbria’s life, was to change forever.
Cuthbert, the Northumbrian saint
It was while looking after sheep in (probably) the Lammermuir Hills, that Cuthbert saw a vision of light streaming from the sky accompanied by a choir of angels. At the same time as he saw the vision Aidan had just died on Lindisfarne, Cuthbert took this as a sign to follow a Christian calling and he made his way to Old Melrose, a daughter house of the Lindisfarne priory, found a few miles to the east of the current town of Melrose and its abbey.
Under the tutelage of the wise, old irish priest Boisil, Cuthbert would go on to learn how to be the spiritual leader of the Northumbrians, as more and more followed their king Oswald and converted to Christianity. Among the famous events of his life, Cuthbert established what are thought to be the world’s first conservation laws, to protect eider ducks on and around Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands. In this way Cuthbert helped to give Northumbria both a sense of community and crucially a sense of identity. And this would lead inevitably to Northumbria’s Golden Age.
The crowning glory of this Golden Age was of course the Lindisfarne Gospels created by Bishop of Lindisfarne Eadfrith in the early years of the 8th century in honour of God and Saint Cuthbert. It has also been said that, “Eadfrith played a major part in establishing Cuthbert’s cult after his relics had been raised to the altar of the monastery church on 20th March, 698, the eleventh anniversary of his death. The Gospels may have been made in honour of that event.”. The cult of Cuthbert would become, along with Christian traditions that he was associated with, a major part of Northumbrian identity. Indeed Northumbrians were to become known as “Cuthbert’s folk”.
And then after Cuthbert’s death on 20 March 687, in his tiny hermit’s cell on Inner Farne, we have the story of what happened with Cuthbert’s body and how it was taken away from Lindisfarne a century later, so that it would be safe from the rampaging Vikings, taken perhaps as far as Galloway, to end up firstly in Chester-le-Street and ultimately in Durham, where it now resides at the east end of the beautiful Durham Cathedral.
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