Introduction
This short hymn comes from a collection of hymns collected by English monks just after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and preserved at Durham Cathedral. Many of the hymns are well-known Latin hymns of the wider Roman Church, helpfully annotated with Old English vocabulary. Nestling among them is this affectionate little hymn dedicated to St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (?635-687), who lies buried in the Cathedral there.
This mighty warrior, whose deeds
Amazed, whose merits* shone:
St Cuthbert, hath to his reward
And to his Captain gone.
The fiery passions of our flesh
By faith he trampled down,
He spurned the charms that quickly fade,
To care for love alone.
The law of God was his delight,
His duty, God’s command;
Men praised him for his shining worth,
His open heart and hand.
In dry land where no water was,
Of well or spring no trace,
He made a laughing river flow,
A lasting sign of grace.*
A tongue he freed, that for long years
In clumsy chains had lain;*
From stony ground in days he raised
A field of golden grain.*
So let us call upon his name,
His quickening aid implore;
That our reward might be to sing
With joy for evermore:
To the Father Unbegotten,
To his begotten Son,
And to his Spirit, glory be,
While all the ages run.
Translated from the Latin as given by the Surtees Society in The Latin Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church: With an Interlinear Anglo-Saxon Gloss (1851), edited by Joseph Stevenson.
A word not found in the New Testament, used in the Western tradition to express the idea that God rewards those who do good works: see for example Matthew 6:4, Revelation 22:12, or 2 John 1:8. The later Roman Church debased this word, but English saints such as Bede still understood it correctly. He reminds us in a sermon for Lent, reflecting on Christ upon the Mount of Olives, that “We do not come to him by our merits, but by his grant of grace alone, as John testifies when he says: And in this is love, not that we loved God, but that he first loved us.” See 1 John 4:10.
A reference to a story from St Bede’s Life of Cuthbert, which tells how St Cuthbert relied on a spring in an area of his little island retreat where no evidence of water had ever been seen before. See A Tale of Two Springs.
From a remark dropped by St Bede at the start of his Life of Cuthbert in verse, it was believed by many at Durham that he had been cured of a speech ailment of some description ‘while I was celebrating his miracles’. See Educating Martin.
Another tale from St Bede’s Life of Cuthbert, this time telling how some birds stole Cuthbert’s little barley crop and forced him to replant it right at the end of the growing season. The barley nonetheless flourished. See Cuthbert and the Barley Reivers. The writer of the hymn is careful to contrast the ‘long time’ of the stammerer with the ‘short time’ of the harvest.
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