When the Reformers sold off the treasures of Durham Cathedral, they sold a priceless piece of Scottish history into oblivion.
The Black Rood of Scotland was an heirloom of the Scottish royal family, captured by the English at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 and added to the treasures of Durham Abbey. After the sixteenth-century Reformers ransacked the cathedral, the cross disappeared. A generation later, the Rites of Durham recalled some of the wonderful history of the vanished relic in a breathless tale, edited here by John Davies in 1671.