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The young monk taught some hard-hearted pagans a lesson they’d never forget.
The historian Bede (c.672-735) was a monk at Jarrow, a short distance up the River Tyne from Tynemouth in North East England. It was at Jarrow that Bede heard this story, as told by one of those who had seen it a few years earlier.
... I heard John Wesley sing. A visitor on the quayside on Sunday May 30th, 1742, would have stumbled into a crowd agape and a determined clergyman singing psalms.
In 1742, John Wesley extended his northern preaching tour to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a large, cramped city by the North Sea, founded on coal mining and the coal-trade of England’s east coast. Many areas were grindingly poor, and over time ignorance and want had so tightened their grip that violence and addiction kept areas such as Sandgate, down on the Quayside, utterly wretched. Naturally, it was to Sandgate that Wesley at once demanded to go.
Cuthbert, struck down by plague, was vexed to find that his brethren had been praying for him all the previous night.
When the monastery at Ripon was founded in 661, Cuthbert served there under Abbot Eata. Eata clung loyally to a peculiar and not very accurate way of dating Easter borrowed from Ireland, and three years later King Oswy, who preferred the calendar used in Canterbury, Rome and the East, appointed Wilfrid in Eata’s stead. Cuthbert returned to the Abbey at Melrose in the Scottish borders.
The blacksmiths of Crowley’s ironworks in Winlaton and Swalwell took it upon themselves to regulate prices in the markets of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
When at the end of Pride and Prejudice (1811) Jane Austen banished George Wickham to serve in a militia regiment in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, she was not sending him out of harm’s way. Lydia might enjoy the town’s musical salons and Theatre Royal, but all around was a hive of heavy industry and radical politics. Both had long been dominated by Crowley’s Crew, articulate freethinkers among the blacksmiths of Crowley’s ironworks at Winlaton.
The young Christian from ancient Northumbria was healed of a lame leg in a manner that reminded Bede of the archangel Rafael.
As a small boy, Cuthbert had been approached at playtime by a toddler who told him in the most grown-up fashion to cultivate mind as well as body. Some years later, though long before he became a monk, another unearthly visitor came by.
Cuthbert’s friend comes asking for a priest to attend his dying wife — so long as it isn’t Cuthbert.
St Cuthbert’s miracles not only brought healing or deliverance from danger, but left others wiser and kinder for having lived through them. In this example, his friend Hildemer learnt that illness, and specifically mental illness, is nothing for a Christian to be ashamed of.
William Stead conceived modern print journalism in the belief that newspapers could change the world.
Driven by a sense of moral crusade, William Stead (1849-1912) transformed newspaper journalism from simple reporting into political activism, pioneering now familiar techniques from headlines, illustrations, interviews and editorial comment to the plain speech and lurid storylines of the tabloids.