Above all, Christianity was and continues to be a religion of the book and the word. The Old and New Testaments were expressions of the revealed word of God and also clear guides on how to live a pious life. As the cult of St Cuthbert grew stronger, Eadfrith realised that it needed a gospel book as a focus. In the 670s the supporters of the rival cult of St Wilfred at Ripon commissioned a gospel written in gold on purple paper, somewhat in the extravagant style of the saint himself. There is also a sense of Eadfrith’s work itself as something miraculous, touched by the divine and an object for reverence. Much later, the Lindisfarne Gospels were chained to the high altar in Durham Cathedral and into the pages of the holy book records of gifts given to the prince bishops and their see were inserted, perhaps to sanctify them. The colour and artistry of Eadfrith’s work must have seemed astonishing to contemporaries, but the fact that this was the work of a man was made clear by the deliberately uncorrected mistakes and parts that were left incomplete. Only God was capable of a work of complete perfection.
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High winds have only one welcome aspect: they drive the clouds quickly, and by midday the rain had stopped. Day trippers were emerging full of cake and coffee from overcrowded cafes. On such a foul morning, I was surprised that so many had crossed the causeway. Seeing the crowds in the streets, I realised that the solitary young pilgrims I had noticed were exceptional in another way. The vast majority of visitors were old, older than me, probably many of them retired and free to come to Lindisfarne on a weekday. Some were very elderly indeed, and I stopped counting the number who could not walk unaided, either with an arm through another or a Zimmer frame with wheels. But they did it. They came, even though it needed great effort, and I admired that. Lindisfarne Leg was nothing compared to some of the disabilities I saw. Many may have been doing something similar to me, coming to Lindisfarne to face personal demons, take stock of their lives and ultimately learn how to die, how to find what they needed to make a good death.
By the road running around the Ouse, the small bay between the village and the castle that acts as a natural harbour for fishing boats and other craft, there is a new building that from the outside seemed to have no obvious purpose. Single storey and beautifully stone-built, it turned out to be a large version of a hide, a place where the birds that land on the southern fields of St Coombs Farm and the pond close to the road might be watched. Inside are large prints of photographs of the island and a vast window that looks north towards where birds might be. It was a peaceful place and empty when I entered, even though many were passing on their way to and from the castle. Several of the photographs have quotes from visitors printed in the corners, people who sound like the pilgrims I had briefly spoken to.
When I come back over the causeway, it’s like a portal. I’m going back to peace, tranquillity and sanity – away from the mania of England.
The sound that most visitors notice here is the silence.
If you stop and just listen, wherever you are on the island, you can hear the sea.
I remember lying in the grass listening to skylarks and everything felt right. Now when I hear them, it’s as if it was then; time has shortened and I go back. Even though lots has changed here, some things haven’t.
The tide was not yet shut and I decided to visit the castle while it was still open. It dominates the island, its walls seeming to grow out of the dolerite rock it sits on. Its commanding exterior has featured often in film and on television. When I travel south on the London train, my spirits sinking, it is a landmark I always seek from the window as we hurtle past. For the last year or two, I noticed the castle had been shrouded in scaffolding and white sheeting, but when I arrived on the island I was glad to see it revealed once more, the restoration project having been completed.
In a lovely shop fitted inside the hull of an upturned boat (I later discovered that it was one used in the dangerous and clandestine North Sea traffic of the Second World War with occupied Norway) I bought my ticket and sought out one of the English Heritage guides. They are often very knowledgeable and I wanted to know if the restoration work, which had pared back a substantial part of the fabric of the castle, had discovered any traces of previous fortresses on the rock. But I was disappointed. When I asked the young man what was there during Cuthbert’s time, he replied, ‘Nothing. There was nothing here. This was the windy end of the island and nobody wanted to live here.’ I thought that highly unlikely. Throughout much of history there have been more compelling reasons than the weather for choosing to build on a site. In addition, the rock was known as Beblowe’s Crag, a name cognate to Bebbanburh or Bamburgh, so called after Aethelfrith’s queen. The crag on Lindisfarne would also have been seen as a superb site for a fortification, easy to defend and with a commanding all-round view of the sea and the island. But of course nothing will now remain of its wooden palisade and any artefacts will be irretrievably lost under the later fabric.
The castle first comes securely on record in 1548–9, but, close to the volatile border with Scotland, it is likely that the crag was fortified during the medieval period. The community of monks had been scattered after Henry VIII ordered it to be dissolved in 1537 and stone was carted around the bay from the deserted priory to build a fortress. Its cannon would protect the harbour. England and Scotland had been at war for much of the first half of the sixteenth century and Lindisfarne had become a strategically important naval base. In 1543 the island was heavily garrisoned and warships lay at anchor in the Ouse. To guard the western end of the natural harbour, three earth and timber forts were thrown up, and in 1670 a stone fort known as Osborne’s Fort was built. In those days the harbour reached farther inland, close to the eastern walls of the priory and as far as the foot of the Marygate. The Union of the Crowns of 1603 and the Parliaments in 1707 made most of these defences redundant. By 1820 the castle had become a coastguard station, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had been abandoned and the weather was destroying the fabric.
Edward Hudson had made a great deal of money from Country Life, a magazine he founded, and in 1902 he bought the much dilapidated Lindisfarne Castle. Sir Edwin Lutyens designed many country houses, the Cenotaph in London, was instrumental in the planning and architecture of New Delhi and had been the architect of the head office of Country Life. Hudson commissioned him to rebuild the castle and, after nine years, the exterior was beautifully realised, especially the western and southern facades. And work also went on off the site. From the northern windows, a new garden could be seen. Walled on three sides, it was designed and planted by Hudson and Lutyens’ friend Gertrude Jekyll, and it is a miracle of persistence. Having to take into account frequently hostile weather, she succeeded in creating a garden with a simple shape and planted in it many brilliantly and subtly colourful – and hardy – flowers and shrubs. Her scheme to have alpine and other varieties planted directly into the castle rock itself was dramatic. A boy was lowered down from the walls in a basket and into the crevices he shoved earth and bedded in young plants. Very few survived the salty winds and rain.
The young guide I spoke to said he would be giving a talk in the Ship Room, but I had time to look around the interior of the castle first. All of the rooms had been emptied of their furniture during the two-year restoration and in its place there was an exhibition of modern art.
Even though they looked stark and cold without furniture, the interiors of the castle were a surprising contrast with the drama, completeness and warmth of the exterior. They seemed frankly dismal, poky and badly lit, with tiny windows. Winter supplies enough darkness in my life, and I like interiors to be bright and full of all the different sorts of light our climate gives us.
I sat down on a stone window seat in the Ship Room to listen to the young guide’s talk and he seemed nervous. Running quickly through the early history of the castle, he came to the period of Hudson and Lutyens. There was one interesting nugget I didn’t know. Lutyens had thought the original tall chimneys were ugly and reduced
them by half. This meant that the open fires did not draw properly, and the guide pointed out how blackened with smoke the stone mantle in the Ship Room was. It occurred to me that smoke probably also leaked into the rooms themselves, to say nothing of clothing, furniture fabric and curtains. Something of a design fault, Sir Edwin. As I was deciding Lindisfarne Castle was not a place I would like to live, another guide rushed in to say that because of the wind, the tide would shut earlier than the advertised times. And because, once again, the staff lived on the mainland, the castle would also shut.
As the visitors fled to their cars, I walked down to watch the tide refloat the boats anchored in the Ouse. Fortified earlier by an excellent crab salad with extra chips at the Ship Inn, I sat down on the bench with the cable-tied messages under it. The long views south to Bamburgh and the rocks of the Farne Islands are very soothing, little changed from when Cuthbert walked around the bay, and in the warming sun and the brisk wind I felt settled.
I came to the Ouse because I wanted to think about Lindisfarne’s long past and a turning moment in Britain’s history, something that took place precisely where I sat. I have often found that walking where Roman soldiers marched or being in old churches where pilgrims came can make time collapse on itself. Sitting on the edge of the Ouse, terrifying wraiths raced past me, with murder and plunder in their ghastly hearts. On 8 June 793, what medieval chroniclers called ‘a shower of hell’ burst over Lindisfarne. The entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote of fell portents:
This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of lightning rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after . . . the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy Island by rapine and slaughter.
The Vikings had sailed into history. Blown westwards across the North Sea by greed and a need for adventure, their dragon-ships, the dreki, were seen by the monks off the island coast. They looked different from the ships that usually plied the coasts. Roared on by their sea-lords, the Viking oarsmen rowed hard for the stony beach to rasp up their dreki above the tide-line. And as the monks scattered, these pagan worshippers of Odin, Thor, Freya and Tiw did not hesitate to break down the doors of the church and steal everything of value that they saw. Any monks who stood in their way were cut down and others no doubt fled to the dunes. It may be that Billfrith’s jewel-encrusted cover for the Lindisfarne Gospels was ripped off the great book in a Viking raid. It is a miracle that the Gospels themselves survived. In the priory museum, what is known as the Domesday Stone shows warriors attacking, their swords and axes raised above their heads ready to strike. It may be part of a memorial to those whose blood spilled over the shrine and Cuthbert’s coffin on that terrible day.
Shockwaves reverberated throughout Western Europe. The monastery and its treasures were undefended; there had been no need. According to Bede, Lindisfarne was ‘the very place where the Christian religion began in our nation’, and God and the saints protected it. When news of the raid and its devastation reached Alcuin of York, a scholar who had gone to the court of Charlemagne and was considered by contemporaries ‘the most learned man anywhere’, he was stunned. His letters to Higbald, Bishop of Lindisfarne, have survived and they reflect shock, and recrimination. ‘The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of priests of God, stripped of all its ornament, exposed to the plundering of pagans,’ he wrote. More than shocked, Alcuin could not understand why God and the saints had allowed the Vikings to pillage the monastery. There had to be a reason. Here, he asks Higbald to examine his conscience:
Either this is the beginning of greater tribulation, or else the sins of the inhabitants have called it upon them. Truly it has not happened by chance, but it is a sign that it was well merited by someone. But now, you who are left, stand manfully, fight bravely, defend the camp of God.
Alcuin may have had a point. Chroniclers recorded a conspiracy in 788 against King Aelfwald of Northumbria led by a nobleman called Sicga. The king was killed but the coup d’état appears not to have succeeded. Faction fighting continued, and five years later Sicga ‘perished by his own hand’. But on 23 April 793, only a few weeks before the Viking attack, this regicide and suicide was buried on the holy ground of Lindisfarne, presumably because his family had given gifts to the church. The incident appears to have been well known, the occasion of disapproving comment, and it may be that when Alcuin wrote to Higbald that the attack was merited, he might have had Sicga in mind.
The summer after the raid on Lindisfarne, Viking dragon-ships were seen in the Hebrides and the diseart founded by St Donan on the island of Eigg was raided. In 795 Iona was attacked and many of the treasures of St Columba were stolen. The Vikings returned in 798 and 802, and in 806 they slaughtered sixty-eight monks and lay brothers. Abbot Cellach had no option but to make plans to abandon the island. On Lindisfarne, there are no records of more raids; perhaps warriors from Bamburgh garrisoned the island, using a stockade on the castle rock. Projecting into the sea, it was an excellent place to keep lookout for dragon-ships, and where a beacon could be lit to raise the alarm and rally resistance if an approach was made through the harbour. Used to undefended monasteries and easy pickings, the Vikings may have thought it too much trouble.
Raids around the coastal communities continued throughout the early decades of the ninth century, as fleets began to cross the North Sea. Some established longphortan, ship-camps where they had dragged the dreki inland or upriver and built a stockade so that they could overwinter and resume raiding in the spring. It was the beginning of colonisation. One of the earliest ship-camps was set up at the mouth of the River Liffey, what became Dublin, and it was there the Vikings established their most lucrative activity. The early attackers stole portable loot, whatever glittered on the altar tables of monasteries, but they also took whoever could be abducted, bound and bundled onto the open deck of a dragon-ship. From the first, the Vikings took captives, and in one of his five letters about the raid on Lindisfarne, Alcuin offered diplomatic help in ransoming ‘the youths who had been led into captivity’. At Dublin a busy slave market was established and, rather than jewelled crosses or gospel book covers, it was human trafficking that made Viking sea-lords wealthy.
The conventional view of these raiders as indiscriminate butchers was inaccurate, a shocked reaction to the early raids and particularly the slaughter on Iona in 806. Monastic scribes called them the Sons of Death and, like a bolt of Thor’s lightning, they seemed to appear out of nowhere, sailing through the sea-mists and trailing devastation in their wake. In reality the Vikings wanted captives not corpses. Merchants sailed from Muslim Spain and the North African coast to buy Christian slaves at the Dublin slave market. Fair-headed men and women were sold at a premium and sometimes customers requested that they be castrated. Aristocratic captives also fetched high prices. Evidence from an analysis of ancestral DNA shows a scatter of Scottish markers in the modern population of the western seaboard of Norway. This may be a legacy of the slave trade, the descendants of captives brought back across the North Sea.
For the year 841, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported a resumption of raiding down the East Anglian coast and the old kingdom of Lindsey, now north Lincolnshire. Bishop Ecgred of Lindisfarne may have felt uncomfortable at how close the threat of attack was creeping and anxious that the sails of a fleet might be seen offshore, rather than two or three ships. With his prior and chapter, he made plans to abandon the island. The traditional date for the departure of the monks is 875, but there is evidence that it took place thirty years before.
In 655 King Oswy of Northumbria had gifted land to Lindisfarne at Ubbanford on the lower reaches of the Tweed. This place became known as Norham, originally the Northern Settlement, and it watched over the first ford upriver from Berwick. A wooden church was established and, s
oon after he became bishop, Ecgred had a stone church built on its footprint and dedicated to St Ceolwulf. It has disappeared, its site thought to be under a stand of yew trees to the east of the large medieval church. Around it, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that something more than a church was built there during Ecgred’s time. The very large churchyard hints at a monastic precinct, and on the village green there is a preaching cross, possibly a successor to something older. In the medieval church, there are individual fragments of cross shafts. Clumsily cemented together in a column are many other fragments, including a carving of an angel, that came from other crosses around an earlier church. For more than a century, Norham had also been the mother church, the matrix ecclesia, as well as the administrative centre of Norhamshire, an extensive and early royal grant to Lindisfarne.
As the threat of Viking attack edged closer, Bishop Ecgred led a sad exodus across the sands and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was abandoned. The wanderings of the Congregation of St Cuthbert had begun. All of his relics and those of other saints, such as Oswald and Aidan, were loaded onto carts. Cuthbert’s coffin may indeed have been carried by relays of bearers, as suggested by the sculpture in St Mary’s. It is also thought that Aidan’s original wooden church, itself a sacred relic, was dismantled and brought to Norham. It must have been a time of immense sadness, to leave the place where saints had walked, the island-church built by God and recognised by Aidan. But Cuthbert’s body and all of the holy relics had at all costs to be preserved and kept out of the desecrating hands of heathens. It may have been in the years after 841 when the ditches and banks of a precinct were dug at Norham and crosses raised and painted. Perhaps the pillar in the medieval parish church (dedicated to Cuthbert, St Peter and Ceolwulf) contains fragments of crosses that originally stood on Lindisfarne. If so, they are a sorry sight, but at least they are preserved.
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