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Preface

A Short History of Lindisfarne

Having rattled through the featureless flatlands of the Fens and past the remains of the old industrial heartlands of South Yorkshire, travellers on the London train bound for Edinburgh pass a place of great majesty. As the carriages slow and glide through the small station, many look up from their newspapers or phones to gaze at Durham Cathedral. The mass of its towers and great nave perch on a river peninsula above the Wear and they speak of faith, of continuity, of solidity and of half-remembered history.

The interior of the cathedral is as awe-inspiring as the exterior. Immense pillars carry the soaring roof and lead the eye down to the high altar where the glorious stained glass of the rose window glows above it. Behind all of that splendour is what made it possible. On the floor is a slab of rust-coloured marble with the name ‘Cuthbertus’ inscribed on it. Durham Cathedral was raised on Cuthbert’s bones. Such was the power of his cult and the love believers felt for this gentle, vulnerable, deeply devout man that the towers of the great church soared to the heavens to celebrate his life, his miracles and his ability to inspire a simple and profound faith.

Beyond Newcastle, the train edges ever closer to the North Sea coast, as the lovely village of Alnmouth comes into view. Not far south of Berwick-upon-Tweed, a low, sandy island can be seen, its farthest point punctuated by a steep rock topped by a fairytale castle. Nearby a small cluster of rooftops huddle around the ruins of a church.

Lindisfarne’s beauty is quieter, less dramatic than Durham’s but its innate spiritual power is immeasurably greater. Saints walked on the island, miracles were seen, and between 685 and 687 Cuthbert was its bishop, master of a vast patrimony of land and glittering wealth. The sandy island was the centre of early Christianity in seventh-century England, a place where great faith was forged in the fires of privation, prayer and personal sacrifice.

Place-names can be emblematic, compressed nuggets of forgotten history, and the mouth-filling sensuousness of Lindisfarne may have a tale to tell. It seems that the Romans knew it as Insula Medicata, and that may have referred to an island where plants grew that were useful for making balms, poultices or decoctions. Dialects of Old Welsh were spoken down the length of Britain before and after the Roman province of Britannia, and the native name of Ynys Medcaut derived directly from the Latin name.

Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries Angles and Saxons sailed the North Sea from Scandinavia and what is now Germany and Holland to settle on the eastern shores of Britain. The kings of Lindsey ruled over the low-lying lands south of the Humber and their people knew themselves as the Lindisfaras. A band of them appears to have colonised Ynys Medcaut, perhaps building a defensive stockade on the rock where the castle now stands.

When Gaelic-speaking monks came to the island in the seventh century, they may have brought the second element of the island’s name. Fearann means ‘a piece of land’, and Lindis-fearann was coined: the land of the Lindisfaras.

Led by Aidan, twelve monks came from Columba’s famous monastery on Iona at the invitation of the Northumbrian King Oswald. As a young man he had been exiled and sought sanctuary on Iona, where he was baptised. Having won a decisive victory over a coalition of native British kings at Heavenfield, near Hadrian’s Wall, Oswald established his capital place on the sea-mark rock at Bamburgh. And so that support and resources were readily available to the new community, Aidan decided to build the first church and its monastic cells close by, on Lindisfarne.

With King Oswald translating his Gaelic for the pagan Anglian settlers, Aidan began the process of conversion. At Old Melrose on the River Tweed, then part of Northumbria, he founded another monastery. In 651 Cuthbert entered holy orders there and his long journey to Lindisfarne and sainthood form the core of the narrative that follows.

The Church in Britain was riven with controversy and in 663 Oswald’s brother, Oswy, convened a synod at Whitby to settle all arguments. Roman practices were preferred over the customs of the Celtic Church and Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne felt compelled to return to Iona. The story of these difficult times is concisely told (albeit not entirely objectively) by the greatest scholar of early medieval Britain, Bede of Jarrow, and he wrote of Cuthbert’s exasperation with those monks on the island who would not conform to Roman rules.

Lindisfarne became a place of immense richness. To provide an additional and prestigious focus for the cult of Cuthbert, Bishop Eadfrith painted one of the greatest works of art in our history, the Lindisfarne Gospels. Around the year 700, this glorious object was made on the island with extraordinary and unexpected skill. Not only would there have been a well-furnished library and plants grown to make pigments, but there were also monks who were able to create a tooled and bejewelled metalwork cover and who could bind the pages of calfskin. The great gospel book is an unlikely achievement for a community who lived in leaky wooden huts on a windy, sandy little island off the cold shoulder of the Northumbrian coast.

This beautiful book and other gilded treasures attracted unwelcome attention. In 793 the Vikings attacked the monastery, one of the first raids on the British mainland. Known as the Sons of Death, these pagan warriors eventually forced the community to abandon Lindisfarne. For about one hundred and fifty years, the Congregation of St Cuthbert wandered northern England, carrying with them the coffin, relics and treasures of St Cuthbert. In 995 all three were finally enshrined at Durham and by the early eleventh century the great cathedral had begun to rise.

In 1083 the old Anglian congregation was replaced by Benedictine monks and all links with Lindisfarne were in danger of being severed. The powerful prince-bishops of Durham determined to re-forge the relationship with the island where Cuthbert had spent the last years of his life. A priory was founded on the site of Aidan’s original monastery and its ruins dominate the modern village. The new church was built opposite the parish church of St Mary. The priory had been raised over the ruins of an earlier Anglian church. Very little can now be seen of the monastery where Aidan, Cuthbert and Eadfrith walked through their exemplary lives.

When Henry VIII’s dynastic difficulties persuaded him to dissolve England’s monasteries, Lindisfarne was quickly deserted, despite its venerable origins. After 1537, the island became a naval base in the sporadic wars with Scotland and stone was robbed out of the priory to build a fortress on the castle rock. Nevertheless, much of the priory church remained intact as late as the 1780s, when it was visited by antiquarians and artists. By the 1820s, the central tower and the south aisle had collapsed and much stone was carted off to build houses in the village and elsewhere.

In the last two hundred years, Lindisfarne’s fame and spiritual magnetism have been reborn. Now thousands of visitors cross the causeway to visit the holy island, its priory and castle. As many of these modern pilgrims walk in the footsteps of great saints, they see more than ruins, feel more than a sense of the long past. They come because the island is still a place of spirits, a place where they can hear the whispered prayers of Cuthbert and the echo of psalms that were once sung under these huge skies.