Miracles of St Cuthbert
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Miracles of St Cuthbert’
The Northumbrian saint warned of an enemy who would stop at nothing to silence the good news.
While he was a monk at Melrose in the Scottish Borders, then part of the Kingdom of Northumbria, St Cuthbert used to visit lonely villages to tell people about a God very different from the capricious pagan spirits they feared and worshipped. He became a popular figure, able to draw surprising crowds.
One of England’s most precious artefacts, the Lindisfarne Gospels, was nearly lost at sea.
Just before the Danes sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793, the monks smuggled out the body of St Cuthbert, carrying it on their shoulders all over Northumbria in the hope of finding a place free from violence. Eventually, their successors led by Bishop Eardulf and Abbot Eadred lost heart, and decided to take refuge in Ireland.
A young monk was rewarded for taking his duties as guest-master seriously.
In about 658, Abbot Eata sent Cuthbert from Melrose Abbey away south to Ripon, to be the guest-master in a new monastery there. It was while he was at Ripon that Cuthbert had a remarkable experience which left him trembling with excitement and fear.
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.
The magnificent cathedral at Durham owes its existence to a missing cow.
Durham Cathedral is founded on the shrine of St Cuthbert, an Anglo-Saxon saint who was Bishop of Lindisfarne in the 7th century. How he came to his last resting place in Durham at the turn of the 11th century, after over a century of wandering, is told in the story of the Dun Cow.
Cuthbert trusted that keeping his promised fast would not do him any harm.
A shieling is a temporary stone hut, built for the summer months when sheep or cattle are taken to higher ground. Bede tells us that a near-contemporary, the seventh-century saint Cuthbert, once had a remarkable experience in one of these huts, as he was journeying across the empty moorland of Northumbria.