Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Lindisfarne
March 20 · d. 687
also known as Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
Cuthbert was a Northumbrian monk, prior, and bishop of the seventh century, formed in the Irish observance of Lindisfarne and remembered for the gentleness with which he carried a divided church through a settlement he had not chosen. He died on Inner Farne on 20 March 687. Eleven years later his community opened his grave and reported his body undecayed, and from that hour he became the great saint of the North, his shrine at Durham the reason a cathedral and a city stand where they do.
On the last night of August in the year 651, a boy named Cuthbert was watching sheep in the Border hills, and he saw the sky open. Angels were carrying a soul up into the light. When he came down from the hills he learned that Aidan, the bishop of Lindisfarne, had died in that same hour. Cuthbert left the sheep to others and rode for the monastery at Melrose.
Boisil the prior was standing at the gate. He looked at the young rider coming up the road and said, before a word had been exchanged between them, "Behold the servant of the Lord." For about ten years Boisil taught him: Scripture, and the Gospel of John in particular, which the two of them read together in the old man's last days; and the habit of walking out to the hill villages where nobody else went, house by house, to preach to people who had never had a preacher come to them. Boisil foretold that Cuthbert would one day be a bishop. Cuthbert spent the rest of his life hoping that one prophecy would fail.
He was a monk in a hard season. The Northumbrian church had been founded from Iona and kept the Irish reckoning of Easter, and in 664 at the Synod of Whitby the king ruled for the Roman reckoning instead. Cuthbert had been formed in the losing observance. There is no record of him protesting. When Abbot Eata sent him to Lindisfarne as prior, precisely to bring that Irish-formed community over to the new customs, he went, and he did it from the inside, without a rupture that any source recorded. Other men of that generation spent decades in appeal and exile over the same dispute. Cuthbert spent his in the villages.
He was hard on himself and gentle with everyone else. Bede says that of the people who came to him, no one went away without consolation, no one returned afflicted with the same grief which had brought him thither. And what he did when nobody was watching came out only by accident. One night at Coldingham a brother of the monastery followed him to see where he went in the dark. Cuthbert walked down to the sea and into it, up to his neck, and stood there praising God until dawn. When he came out he knelt on the sand to pray again, and two otters came up out of the water and lay down before him and breathed on his feet and dried them with their fur, and then went back into the sea. The brother who had watched was so frightened he could barely get home. In the morning he fell at Cuthbert's feet and begged pardon, and Cuthbert forgave him on one condition: "that you tell it to nobody before my death." That is why the story exists at all. The seal of silence expired when he died.
In 676 he went out to Inner Farne, a rock in the sea, and built a hermitage there, and the years that followed were not an idyll. He told the brethren afterwards what it had been: "How often have they sent me headlong from the high rock! How many times have they thrown stones at me as if to kill me!" They never once, he said, injured his body or frightened his mind. And when the brethren admired him for his solitude he stopped them. The life of monks, he told them again and again, is the wonderful thing, the men who are subject in all things to the orders of an abbot in their watching and praying and fasting and working; many of whom, he said, "have I known far exceed my littleness."
Then in 684 they came out to the rock to take him off it. The king himself, Ecgfrith, with Bishop Trumwine and a delegation, crossing the water to argue a hermit into a bishopric. He had already told the abbess Ælfflæd, on Coquet Island, what he thought of the prospect: "I know that I am not worthy of so high a rank," and that if God laid the burden on him, perhaps after not more than two years he would be sent back to his solitude and quiet. He was consecrated at York at Easter, 26 March 685, Archbishop Theodore presiding among the bishops assembled. He served two years almost to the day.
He gave them away. He rode the diocese; he told Queen Iurminburg, walking the Roman walls at Carlisle in the spring of 685, that he had seen her husband's death, and the news of Ecgfrith's fall at Dun Nechtain came shortly after. In 686 he crossed to Derwentwater to see his friend Herebert, a hermit on the island there, and told him plainly that they would not see one another again in this world: "For I know of a surety that the time of my departure is at hand, and that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle." Herebert fell down weeping and begged not to be left behind, that as they had served God together on earth they might depart together to see his grace in heaven. Cuthbert prayed, and then told him to get up and stop weeping, because it had been granted. At Christmas he resigned the bishopric and went back to his rock to die.
Herefrid, the priest who attended him and later governed Lindisfarne as abbot, was with him at the end and gave Bede the account in his own words. Cuthbert's last charge to the community was about peace: "Have peace, and divine charity ever amongst you: and when you are called upon to deliberate on your condition, see that you be unanimous in counsel." Take in the strangers who come to you, he said, and speed them on their journey, and never think yourselves better than others who share the same faith and life. And then a stranger clause, which nobody could have read rightly at the time: if you are ever forced to choose, take up my bones and leave this place and live wherever God sends you. He received the viaticum and died in prayer on 20 March 687. Herebert died the same year, and the tradition holds it was the same hour.
They buried him on Lindisfarne that day. Eleven years later the community opened the grave to lift his bones into a shrine, as was the custom, and reported that they found his body undecayed. And when the Danes came at last and the monks had to run, they remembered what he had told them, and they took up his bones and carried him: seven years of wandering, then Chester-le-Street, then Ripon, and in 995 a hill above a river bend where the cortege stopped and would not go further. Durham is there because he is.
Notice what Cuthbert did with the settlement he lost. He had been formed in one observance, the church chose another, and he neither fought it nor sulked; he went where he was sent and did the work from inside, and the only thing the sources record him raising his voice about at the end was peace and unanimity and hospitality to strangers. Notice too that he would not let anyone admire him for the dramatic part. The hidden vigils were meant to stay hidden, and when the brethren praised his solitude he told them the ordinary obedient life was the wonder, and that many of them exceeded his littleness. Where has a decision gone against you that you are still, quietly, refusing to serve under?
Almost everything that can be known about Cuthbert comes from three closely related Northumbrian texts written within a generation of his death, and they are not three independent witnesses. The anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti, by an unnamed monk of Lindisfarne, was composed between 699 and 705, within twelve to eighteen years of the death and within a few years of the 698 opening of the grave that occasioned it. Bede wrote a verse Life around 705 to 716 and a prose Life before 721, the latter commissioned by Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne; he treated Cuthbert again in Book IV of the Historia Ecclesiastica, finished in 731. Bede's principal source for the prose Life was the Anonymous Life. What look like parallel confirmations are usually Bede rewriting the same Lindisfarne dossier. Cuthbert himself wrote nothing at all: no letter, no treatise, no prayer. Every word given as his above is reported speech, transmitted by Bede on the authority of informants he names, chiefly Herefrid, who was present at the death and whose account Bede reproduces, he says, in the words of the man who related it to him.
By the standards of the genre that is unusually good sourcing, and it is worth saying what it does and does not establish. It is evidence about the quality of the witnesses and the seriousness of the transmission. It is not evidence that the otters came.
The dates are firmer at the end of the life than at the beginning. No primary source gives a birth year: 633, 634 and 635 all circulate in modern reference works, and all are back-calculations from the 651 vision. The birthplace is contested (the neighbourhood of Melrose in one account, Dunbar in another), and no early source settles it. His social class is genuinely open. Bede has him a shepherd boy, which the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 read straightforwardly as lowly parentage; against that, he was fostered out, he is described riding a horse as a youth, and Irish genealogies make him a possible second cousin of King Aldfrith. Neither reading can be proved, and the shepherd detail is itself a recurring hagiographic pattern. His parents are unnamed in every early source. A twelfth-century Durham text, the Libellus de ortu Sancti Cuthberti, supplied him with an Irish royal father and mother, Muriadach and Sabina; that genealogy is a late invention of the sort medieval houses regularly manufactured for their saints, and it is worth mentioning only as an example of what the later devotion produced.
Two conflicts inside the early record deserve naming. The two earliest Lives disagree about where his monastic life began: the Anonymous Life places the start of his career at Ripon, whereas Bede shows that it was in fact Melrose. Modern reference works follow Bede, but this is Bede correcting his own source rather than two witnesses agreeing. And Boisil's death is given as 661 in some places and 664 in others; the two are not interchangeable, since 661 precedes the Synod of Whitby and the standard framing has Boisil dying in the pestilence that came soon after it. On the consecration, Bede says seven bishops came together, Theodore among them as primate; the Catholic Encyclopedia gives six.
Durham Cathedral, begun in 1093 to house him, keeps his shrine behind the high altar, and the Cathedral says prayers are offered at the tomb every day of the year. His feast on 20 March is marked there with an Evensong and procession, and a walking pilgrimage from Finchale Priory to Durham on a Saturday near the feast ends with a festal Eucharist and a procession to the shrine. A second observance falls on 4 September, keeping the enshrinement of the relics in the new church at Durham in 999, a translation feast distinct from the death-day. Lindisfarne Priory on Holy Island, now a ruin in the care of English Heritage, remains a pilgrimage site, and St Cuthbert's Isle, the tidal islet where he made his first hermitage, is still walkable at low tide.
In art he is nearly always a bishop holding a crowned head in his hands: the head of St Oswald, king and martyr, placed in his coffin for safekeeping and found there in 1104. The otters of the Coldingham vigil are his oldest animal attribute and the only one anchored in an early text. In Northumberland the eider ducks of the Farnes are still called Cuddy's ducks, from the local familiar form of his name, and he is popularly named the protector of the nesting seabirds; that story first appears roughly five hundred years after his death, and there is no early evidence he decreed anything of the kind. The affection is real and the decree is not.
The essential texts are three, and they overlap. Bede's prose Life of St Cuthbert, written before 721 at the commission of Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, supplies most of what is quoted above: the night in the sea and the otters, with the charge of silence, at ch. X, §§16 to 17; the assaults on Inner Farne and the praise of the ordinary monastic life at ch. XXII, §§36 to 37; the conversation with Ælfflæd on Coquet Island at ch. XXIV, §§40 to 41; and the last charge to the community, "Have peace, and divine charity ever amongst you," at ch. XXXIX, §65. Bede names Herefrid, the attendant priest and then abbot of Lindisfarne, as his eyewitness for the death at ch. XXXVII, §59. The wording used throughout is J. A. Giles's public-domain translation of 1845, published in The Biographical Writings and Letters of Venerable Bede (James Bohn, London), and available in transcription at Elfinspell (elfinspell.com) and in the original scan at archive.org/details/biographicalwrit00bede. Readers should be warned that a differently worded version of the peace charge circulates widely in devotional writing; it is not the Giles text quoted here.
The farewell to Herebert, "I know of a surety that the time of my departure is at hand," comes from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book IV, ch. 29, in A. M. Sellar's revised translation of 1907, online at ccel.org/ccel/bede/history.v.iv.xxix.html. Book IV, chs. 27 to 32 is also where the episcopal chronology, the seven consecrating bishops, and Ecgfrith's death at Dun Nechtain are found.
The anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti, written at Lindisfarne between 699 and 705, survives in eight Continental manuscripts and no English copy; the oldest is Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 15817 (early ninth century), and the best text is Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 267 (c. 900). Both Lives are edited together, Latin with facing English, in Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede's Prose Life (Cambridge University Press, 1940), still the scholarly standard; Colgrave's is also the standard modern English rendering. Bede's verse Life is edited by Werner Jaager as Bedas metrische Vita sancti Cuthberti (Palaestra 198, Leipzig, 1935).
For the later history: the Catholic Encyclopedia's 1908 article "St. Cuthbert" (newadvent.org/cathen/04578a.htm) is the source for the emblem of Oswald's head and for the older reading of his parentage. On the eider-duck legend, see "The Mystery of St Cuthbert's Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography," Folklore (2016). The report of the 1899 examination of the grave appeared in Archaeologia.
S. Cuthbert was born in England, and when he was eight years old our Lord showed for him a fair miracle for to draw him to his love. For on a time, as he played at the ball with other children, suddenly there stood among them a fair young child of the age of three years, which was the fairest creature that ever they beheld, and anon he said to Cuthbert: Good brother, use no such vain plays, ne set not your heart on them. But for all that Cuthbert took none heed to his words, and then this child fell down and made great heaviness, wept sore and wrung his hands, and then Cuthbert and the other children left their play and comforted him, and demanded of him why he made such sorrow. Then the child said to Cuthbert: All mine heaviness is only for you, because you use such vain plays, for our Lord has chosen you to be an head of holy church; and then suddenly he vanished away. And then he knew verily that it was an angel sent from our Lord to him, and from then forthon he left all such vain plays and never used them more, and began to live holily. And then he desired of his father that he might be set to school, and anon he drew him to perfect living, for he was ever in his prayers, night and day, and most desired of our Lord to do that which might please him and eschew that should displease him. And he lived so virtuously and holily, that all the people had joy of him, and within a while after, Aidanus the bishop died. And as Cuthbert kept sheep in the field, looked upward and saw angels bear the soul Aidanus the bishop to heaven with great melody. And after that S. Cuthhert would no more keep sheep but went anon to the abbey of Jervaulx, and there he was a monk, of whom all the convert were right glad, and thanked our Lord that had sent him thither. For he lived there full holily, in fasting and great penance doing. And at last he had the gout in his knees, which he had taken of cold in kneeling upon the cold stones when he said his prayers, in such wise that his knees began to swell and the sinews of his leg were shrunk that he might neither go nor stretch out his leg, but ever he took it full patiently and said: When it pleases our Lord it shall pass away.
And within a while after, his brethren for to do him comfort bare him into the field, and there they met with a knight which said: Let me see and handle this Cuthbert's leg; and then when he had felt it with his hands, he bade them take the milk of a cow of one colour, and the juice of small plantain, and fair wheat flour, and seethe them all together, and make thereof a plaister and lay it thereto and it will make him whole. And as soon as they had so done he was perfectly whole, and then he thanked our Lord full meekly. And after, he knew by revelation that it was an angel sent by our Lord to heal him of his great sickness and disease.
And the abbot of that place sent him to a cell of theirs to be hosteler, for to receive their guests and do them comfort, and soon after our Lord showed there a fair miracle for his servant S. Cuthbert, for angels came to him oft-times in likeness of other guests, whom he received and served diligently with meat and drink and other necessaries. On a time there came guests to him whom he received, and went into the houses of office for to serve them, and when he came again they were gone, and went after for to call and could not espy them, ne know the steps of their feet, how well that it was then a snow; and when he returned he found the table laid and thereon three fair white loaves of bread all hot which were of marvellous beauty and sweetness, for all the place smelled of the sweet odour of them. Then he knew well that the angels of our Lord had been there, and rendered thankings to our Lord that he had sent to him his angels for to comfort him.
And every night when his brethren were abed he would go and stand in the cold water all naked up to the chin till it were midnight, and then he would issue out, and when he came to land he might not stand for feebleness and faintness, but oft fell down to the ground. And on a time as he lay thus, there came two otters which licked every place of his body, and then went again to the water that they came from. And then S. Cuthbert arose all whole and went to his cell again, and went to matins with his brethren. But his brethren knew nothing of his standing thus every night in the sea to the chin, but at the last one of his brethren espied it and knew his doing, and told him thereof, but S. Cuthbert charged him to keep it secret and tell no man thereof during his life. And after this within a while the bishop of Durham died, and S. Cuthbert was elected and sacred bishop in his stead after him, and ever after he lived full holily unto his death, and, by his preaching and ensample giving, he brought much people to good living. And tofore his death he left his bishopric and went into the holy island, where he lived an holy and solitary life, unto that he being full of virtues, rendered his soul unto Almighty God and was buried at Durham, and after translated, and the body laid in a fair and honourable shrine, where as yet daily our Lord shows for his servant there many fair and great miracles. Wherefore let us pray unto this holy saint that he pray for us.
The 685 consecration was politically brokered, and the sources make no secret of it. He was elected at a synod at Twyford in 684 in the king's presence and with Archbishop Theodore there, and he accepted after a royal and episcopal delegation crossed to his island to argue him out of solitude. Modern readers attentive to church and crown will want that machinery named rather than smoothed into "he was persuaded."
Two further cautions belong to any honest account. The first concerns the incorruption. The claim was made in 698 and again at the Durham opening of 1104, where the body was described as flexible in its joints and like a person asleep rather than dead. But the tomb was opened again by Canon James Raine on 17 May 1827 and once more in 1899, and what those examinations found was a skeleton amid layered coffin remains. The defensible statement is not that the body did not decay; it is that incorruption was believed, claimed, and never re-verified once anyone looked with modern method. The second concerns the story's usual frame. The popular modern picture of Whitby as a free, nature-loving Celtic church overthrown by an authoritarian Rome is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century construction; recent scholarship argues that what was at issue was a technical dispute over the reckoning of Easter and the form of the tonsure within a single communion. Whitby was real and consequential, but the drama that gives Cuthbert's peaceableness its usual tension is largely modern. The quieter claim is better: he served without recorded protest under a settlement his own formation had opposed.
There is no canonization file, and there was never going to be one. Cuthbert belongs to the age before any juridical process existed: no postulator, no tribunal, no beatification, no pope. His standing rests on unbroken veneration since the seventh century, received into the calendars of the Church of England and the wider Communion, and kept on 20 March by Catholics, Anglicans, and the Orthodox alike.
British (Received Pronunciation): Lindisfarne /ˈlɪndɪsfɑːrn/
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Cuthbert, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31