St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne’
The Northumbrian monk was touched by two thieving birds who repented of their misdeeds.
Cuthbert had a particular attachment to the many wonderful birds of the Farne Islands, which remained a key feature of devotion to the saint at his shrine in Durham. He was not, however, a bird-pleaser any more than he was a people-pleaser, and if his birds needed a little moral correction he would steel himself to provide it.
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
A good example of the way Bede uses miracles comes from the story of Cuthbert’s barley. Some later chroniclers took a story about Anthony of Egypt and some wild asses and transposed it, donkeys and all, onto more recent saints. Bede, however, was content to draw parallels with a quite different miracle attributed to St Cuthbert.
The way St Cuthbert found water for his island retreat confirmed that Northumbria’s church was the real thing.
Unlike some later chroniclers, Bede did not transpose well-known miracles from one saint to another. He researched authentic miracles of Northumbrian saints and found close (but never exact) matches in the lives of saints from the Roman Empire, to show that Christianity in the British Isles was cut from the same cloth.
Cuthbert would not go to King Ecgfrith, so King Ecgfrith and his entire court had to go to Cuthbert.
Sometime after 676, Cuthbert left his monastery on Lindisfarne and retired to the nearby island of Inner Farne, with thousands of seabirds for company. His quiet retirement was to be short-lived, however, as he discovered following a rare trip down the coast to Coquet Island to counsel Elfled, the King’s sister, about the royal succession.
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’.
A man who seems to have everything loses his good looks to a dreadful disease.
In 1165, a priest came all the way to Durham from Lytham on the Lancashire coast, to give thanks at St Cuthbert’s shrine for several remarkable miracles experienced by members of his parish. He told the stories to Reginald of Durham, including this one about a man with a gruesome disfigurement.