Miracles of St Cuthbert
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Miracles of St Cuthbert’
One Christmas Eve back in the twelfth century, a monk keeping midnight vigil in Lindisfarne priory watched spellbound as two great doors opened all by themselves.
During Viking raids in 793, the monastic community on Lindisfarne hastily exhumed the body of St Cuthbert (?635-687) and fled. After two hundred years of wandering they found a home for him at Durham, and in 1093 the Bishop of Durham re-established the priory on Lindisfarne. In the early days it was staffed by just a couple of Durham monks, but one Christmas, we are told, they received some visitors.
Shortly before Easter, an ivory box went missing from the gifts presented at the shrine of St Cuthbert.
Reginald (?-?1190) was a monk of Durham Priory where St Cuthbert, the seventh-century Bishop of Lindisfarne, lay buried behind the High Altar. Pilgrims came from all over the country with stories of the saint’s miraculous interventions, and Reginald compiled a catalogue of them, and of the miracles reported at Cuthbert’s shrine. Some he witnessed with his own eyes, such as this one.
A man steals a mother sparrow from her chick, but St Cuthbert isn’t going to let him get away with it.
In 1165, a priest came all the way to Durham from Lixtune (possibly Lytham) on the west coast. He told Reginald of Durham a number of remarkable stories about miracles performed by St Cuthbert, patron saint of his church, and the bond with his beloved birds called ‘St Cuthbert’s Peace’.
The Sheriff of Northumberland allows wealth and power to go to his head — and his digestion.
In the 680s, St Cuthbert was Bishop of Lindisfarne, an island just off the Northumberland coast, though he lived alone on neighbouring Inner Farne. His remains were later brought to Durham, where in 1093 a large priory was begun in his honour. Reginald, a monk in the priory, recorded dozens of miracles at Cuthbert’s Durham shrine, but some still went to Farne to seek his help.
Henry VIII’s experts declared that saints were nothing special, but St Cuthbert had a surprise for them.
In the Reformation, King Henry VIII’s University men told him research had shown that praying for miracles at the shrine of a saint was superstitious nonsense. So he let them smash the shrines, break open the coffins with a sledgehammer, and recover any nice jewellery before the human remains were incinerated.