Æbbe, now elderly but in full possession of her faculties and the immense moral authority which her experience and birthright entitled her to wield, went to her nephew the king and, explicitly linking the queen’s illness to Wilfrid’s imprisonment, begged him to liberate his prisoner and restore Wilfrid’s reliquary. The king acquiesced; Wilfrid was freed into exile and the queen recovered. This sounds like a direct diplomatic intervention on Æbbe’s part, playing the role of the wise aunt to perfection. Might there be a causal link between this intervention and Wilfrid’s establishment of the cult of Oswald in Sussex in the next two or three years?*15 Was this the fulfilment of a promise to venerate Æbbe’s brother’s holy name as a repayment for her help in his hour of desperation?
*1EH IV.4; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 347. Mag éo, the plain of the yew trees; that is, Mayo. The Annals of Ulster record Colman’s arrival at Inis Bó Finne under the year 668.
*2Xanten: the name derives from the Latin Ad Sanctum, the place of the shrine.
*3Leachta: rectangular drystone settings containing the bones or other relics of holy men and women; very often simple stone crosses were set in them as memorials. See Thomas 1971.
*4Chad, having returned to Lastingham, was offered the see of Mercia and Lindsey under King Wulfhere and established his see at Lichfield.
*5VW XVII; Colgrave 1927, 37. If Ælfwine was already sub-king of Deira, the other sub-kings mentioned must have come from tributary kingdoms: Rheged, perhaps? Lindsey? Lothian?
*6VW XVII; the churches were in the districts of Ribble and Yeadon, Dent and Catlow, far into the Pennines. It is impossible to say for how long they had been abandoned, or whether Wilfrid had expelled their priests, but the detail suggests that there had been an active British church in the Pennine kingdoms of Elmet and probably Rheged within recent memory. What the churches would have looked like physically is a matter of speculation; could they be archaeologically distinguished from domestic structures?
*7Also known as Ætheldreda and St Audrey.
*8See p.357 for a discussion of incorruption.
*9VW XIX; Beornæth is the first recorded member of a line of Northern sub-kings who may have had a principal stronghold at Dunbar. See Chapter X. There has been much debate about whether the horsemen in question were an actual cavalry unit, fighting on horseback, or whether they rode to battle and dismounted. See Cessford 1993, Hooper 1993 and Higham 1991.
*10HSC 7; South 2002, 49. Carham lies on the south bank of the River Tweed some ten miles north-west of Yeavering.
*11South 2002, 125–6. One of the most remarkable developments in landscape studies in the last thirty years has been the recognition that the boundaries of many of these units remain substantially unchanged in Northumbria and elsewhere in England, Wales, parts of Scotland and Ireland.
*12Smith 1991 and see Chapter XIII.
*13EH III.11; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 247. Beardaneu was the original form of Bardney.
*14In the eighteenth century ships of the Royal Navy, when arriving at a neutral port, would be sure to send a boat in under the command of a lieutenant to check that the navy’s gun salute would be returned appropriately; the dignity of the flag could not be exposed to any breach of protocol in that way.
*15See Chapter XIII.
XIX
Incorrupt
Meotod ana wat hwyder
seo sawul sceal syððan hweorfan
Only the Ruler knows whither
the soul shall turn then
In the first years of the twelfth century, during the decades-long construction of Durham’s stupendous Romanesque cathedral, one of its monks wrote a history of his community from the earliest times.
This holy church derives its original, both as regards its possessions and its religion, from the most fervent faith of Oswald, that most illustrious king of the Northumbrians, and a most precious martyr; for, to the praise of God, it preserves within the safe custody of our shrine, with inviolate care, those most sacred relics, worthy of all veneration, the incorrupt body of the most holy father, Cuthbert, and the adorable head of that king and martyr, Oswald.250
On 29 August 1104 the relics of St Cuthbert and King Oswald were translated*1 from the White Church on Durham’s peninsula into a bespoke shrine below the floor of the eastern apse of the new cathedral. The relics were famous both for their wonderful preservation during an epic journey through time and space and for the miracles which so often attended them. No less a temporal lord than William I of Normandy had been reduced to fever and ignominious retreat when he challenged Cuthbert’s potent magic. Even so, sceptics asked themselves if the saint’s legendary incorruptibility in life and death would stand the test of contemporary scrutiny. An anonymous monk, writing some years later, recalled that...
Some, founding their opinion on vain conjectures, dreamt that long before this our time his body has been removed to some other place by some secret act of violence, but that his grave, although it can no longer boast of its precious treasure, is not deprived of the glory of his virtues; but, in proof of its old possessor, is resplendent with frequent miracles, even at the present time. Others admitted that the sacral remains are still here, but, that the frame of a human body should remain undissolved during the revolutions of so many ages, they said was more than the laws of nature allow of...251
The temptation to take this opportunity to look inside Cuthbert’s sacred coffin was overwhelming; the dilemma almost unbearable. Would the curious be punished for their impiety? Would they be disappointed, and risk the relics losing their healing powers and protective virtues for the Durham community? The stakes were high: the value of these holy bones was incomparable; on their history the edifice of the palatine bishopric of medieval Durham, almost a kingdom within a kingdom, rested. The ceremony was anticipated with excitement and trepidation:
...the day of the approaching translation being made known far and wide, there was a great flocking to Durham from every side. Men of all ranks, ages and professions, the secular and the spiritual, all hastened to be present.252
After much deliberation and soul-searching the brethren resolved to examine the contents of the chest in which the supposed relics were contained. In truth, the monks of Durham had reason to believe that their saint’s body might yet be incorrupt. For had he not been exhumed some years after his death in 687 and found in a marvellous state of preservation as proof that, in death as in life, he was untainted?
Cuthbert, prior of Lindisfarne, later reluctant bishop to King Ecgfrith and finally a solitary hermit in his tiny sanctuary on Inner Farne, was brought back to Lindisfarne after his death. There he was washed and wrapped in cloth, robed in his priestly garments, wrapped once more in a waxed shroud and interred in a stone sepulchre at the right hand of the altar in the church.
After eleven years, through the prompting and instruction of the Holy Spirit, after a council had been held by the elders and licence had been given by the holy Bishop Eadberht, the most faithful men of the whole congregation decided to raise the relics of the bones of the holy Bishop Cuthbert from his sepulchre. And, on first opening the sepulchre, they found a thing marvellous to relate, namely that the whole body was as undecayed as when they had buried it eleven years before.253
It was as if Cuthbert were still alive, wrote his anonymous biographer. The limbs were still supple when the body was lifted from its grave; the vestments and shrouds appeared in perfect condition and when the monks unwound the headcloth they found the saint’s head had ‘kept all the beauty of its first whiteness’.254
Bede, moved to verse, made the connection between Lindisfarne’s spiritual primacy in England, Cuthbert’s unblemished career and the evidence of the body:
Blest home! how great a guest shines in this place,
Free from all stain, where joy and glory blend!
With ease, Omnipotent, his blest remains,
Thou bidst corruption’s gnawing tooth to spare...255
There were precedents for the venerat
ion of an incorrupt saint. Oswald’s right arm, preserved a few miles to the south of Lindisfarne in the church at Bamburgh, had never withered, as a sign of God’s favour after the king had given his feast and the silver dish on which it was served to the poor. Aidan had intervened directly to ensure that the ceremonial importance of the king’s munificence should not go unmarked. An idea that the incorruptible corpse was a reflection of earthly virtue and post-mortem godly favour was not new. No less an authority than Paul, writing to the Corinthians in the very earliest years of what became the Christian era, had established the precedent:
Behold, I shew you a mystery.
We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump
for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption,
and this mortal must put on immortality.256
It seems that the monks of Lindisfarne had some idea that their saint might be found incorrupt—why, otherwise, decide to raise him from his interment? It is tempting to look for either a Continental or insular instance which might have been the immediate inspiration either for the disinterment or the vocabulary used by the anonymous monk in describing Cuthbert’s lustrous whiteness.*2 In about 650 Saint Fursa, the Irish monk who had converted the East Anglians, died and was left unburied for a month before his interment, with no signs of putrefaction.257 His body was translated four years later, still incorrupt. In 695, just two years before Cuthbert’s exhumation, the body of Queen Æthelthryth, Ecgfrith’s reluctant first wife, had been disinterred by her sister at Ely and found to be incorrupt after sixteen years, proof of her virtuous and virginal life.258 An eyewitness to that exhumation, the doctor who had treated her for a tumour, confirmed to the astonishment of the congregation that the scar of his operation had healed. Æthelthryth was re-buried in a stone sarcophagus, recovered from the cemetery of the Roman town of Grantacæstir, modern Cambridge. As it happens she was not the first in her family to be favoured: in about 664 Æthelburh, her sister, had died as abbess of the monastery of Faremoutiers-en-Brie (to the east of Paris). After seven years the monks of that community decided to bring her bones into their new church:
On opening her sepulchre they found her body as untouched by decay as it had also been immune from the corruption of earthly desires. They washed it again, clothed it in other garments, and translated it to the church...259
We cannot say if Fursa or some other unrecorded saint set a fashion for incorruption in the late seventh century. There was, though, an established procedure for disinterring the bones of holy men and women and raising them to a more prominent place in a church to ensure that they received due respect and that the miracles of healing which they were expected to perform might somehow be more effective. This idea of translation is so ancient that looking for direct precedent is superfluous: as a practice it probably goes back to the sky burials of animist pastoralists.*3 We are left with the possibility that the Lindisfarne community felt compelled (by the Holy Spirit according to the anonymous author; by Cuthbert himself according to Bede) to bring his presence more intimately into the lives of those who missed him; that having exhumed him they felt a natural, if gruesome, curiosity to look on his face once more; that having found the body incorrupt it was immediately taken by them as a mark of the most special divine favour. Given the monks’ very likely knowledge of the corporeal fates of Æthelthryth and her sister, not to mention fellow-Irishman Fursa, we may suspect a predisposition to expect, perhaps to contrive, a form of incorruption.
Recent advances in forensic archaeology make it possible to postulate that Cuthbert’s body may have been less decomposed than one might expect from the normal processes of putrefaction and autolysis (biological self-consumption). Thirty years ago there was very little literature or research on the decay of human remains, despite the frequency with which excavators encountered them. That situation changed dramatically with the development of the science of taphonomy (from the Greek: it means, literally, the law of burial), after the excavation of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crypt at Spitalfields in the East End of London between 1984 and 1986, and with the belated collaboration of archaeologists with criminal investigators which led to the establishment of forensic archaeology as an applied discipline in its own right.260
From the crypt of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque masterpiece of Christ Church with All Saints, Spitalfields in the shadow of the City of London came more than nine hundred deceased humans, many of whom had been interred in wooden coffins sealed inside lead caskets. It was effectively a giant, if macabre, laboratory. Bodies were recovered in every conceivable state of preservation. It took a certain sort of dispassionate character to deal with it all, month after month underground in the odd surroundings of a busy East London neighbourhood with a fruit and vegetable market just across the way.
In extreme cases soft tissue preservation included brain matter, adipocere (an unpleasant chalky wax derived from fat), skin and muscle tissue. Other bodies were found desiccated. In these, the liquids from internal organs and soft tissue had been absorbed by coffin wood and the sawdust with which coffins were often packed to prevent unseemly bumping and rattling during funeral processions; the lead seals had broken so that moisture had been able to drain away; and the coffin had been kept in a stable environment in which cool, dry air was able to circulate. The result was that clothing, skin and tendons were preserved.
The condition of a striking number of corpses found in the Spitalfields crypt calls to mind the anonymous hagiographer’s description of Cuthbert’s exhumed body. The critical conditions here were isolation from the normal burial environment of damp soil, worms, insects and so on; a protective lead coffin and shroud; and a combination of natural processes in which chemical mummification had taken place. The stability of the burial environment ensured the absence of further decay. In these individuals facial features were recognisable; post-mortem stubble on male bodies gave an appearance more of dissolute slumber than death and the sort of lustrous whiteness observed by Cuthbert’s exhumers after a mere eleven years of interment can easily be imagined.
That such processes might have occurred in an Early Medieval context is confirmed by the excavation in 1981 of a vault beneath St Bees Priory in Cumbria. Here, interred in a punctured lead coffin dating to about 1290, a corpse was exhumed by archaeologist Deirdre O’Sullivan and subjected to modern post-mortem examination.261 This showed that chemical changes had occurred in body fats after death, protected from external decay processes by the lead coffin and by a wax shroud; these had formed fatty acids which crystallised, dehydrated and acidified the corpse, preventing further bacterial decay. Rob Janaway, the forensic archaeologist who was present at many of the Spitalfields disinterments, believes that lead ions, released when lead interacts with the organic acids present in a human corpse, may have an inhibiting effect on the micro-organisms associated with decay.262
It is possible that the monks of Lindisfarne had attempted some form of embalming during the original preparation of Cuthbert’s body in anticipation of his later elevation. There are references to the use of myrrh and aloes as embalming agents in Bede’s commentary on the Song of Songs.263 But forensic science does not require this to have happened: clean, cool, dry conditions—and Lindisfarne, it must be remembered, has very sandy, well-drained soils—together with some form of protective covering such as waxed shroud and lead or stone sarcophagus, will suffice. The possibility that Cuthbert was first buried in a coffin made of lead—the same material in which his church at Lindisfarne was clad by Bishop Eadberht within a few years of Cuthbert’s death—is a very real one and would explain perfectly the state of his disinterred body in 698.264 The lead—many tons of it—can only have been procured from a major Roman site, and Corbridge or Whitley Castle are the most obvious candidates. If the church at Lind
isfarne was sheathed in lead, there surely must have been sufficient to provide a lead coffin for Cuthbert. One would very much like to know if his predecessors, the two East Anglian abbesses and Fursa, had been clad similarly; Roman burial in lead coffins is known in several hundred instances. There is also the case of the late Roman form of interment known as a gypsum burial, in which there seems to have been an attempt to preserve corpses using the desiccating properties of this anhydrous mineral: there are instances at Poundbury in Dorset and, perhaps more significantly, at York.265
Cuthbert had not wanted to be returned to Lindisfarne; had feared his presence might be a sort of circus attraction or distraction (he was right). Even he could not have anticipated the tribulations to which his fragile body was to be subjected over the next thousand and more years. Almost a hundred years after his translation, Lindisfarne was subject to the first mainland raid on Britain by those Scandinavian raiders who came to be called Vikings...
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sub anno 793
In this year terrible portents appeared in Northumbria, and miserably afflicted the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. And soon followed a great famine; and after that in the same year the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne island by rapine and slaughter.266
A contemporary, the great Northumbrian scholar Alcuin, conveyed the appalling shock felt by Northumbrians when he wrote to King Æthelred:
...never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.267
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