Cuthbert and the Barley Reivers
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
676
Anglo-Saxon Britain 410-1066
By Vincent van Gogh, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.
‘Wheat-field with Crows’, by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), painted in the last year of his life. Bede’s Northumbria was evangelised by Irish monks, but in 664 the Synod of Whitby decided that the Kingdom would henceforth prefer the less punishing monastic traditions found across the Mediterranean world, and Cuthbert was one of those tasked with phasing them in. By matching up Cuthbert and Anthony, the acknowledged father of desert asceticism, Bede shows that a Northumbrian monk in the kindlier Benedictine tradition is still a true desert father.
Introduction
This post is number 13 in the series Miracles of St Cuthbert
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.
SAINT Anthony retired to an oasis in the Eastern Desert in search of solitude;* and to become more self-reliant, decided to tend his own kitchen garden beside a pleasant stream. However, when a troop of wild asses that visited the stream began helping themselves to Anthony’s vegetables, the monk felt justified in reproaching them. ‘Why do you reap where you did not sow?’ he asked mildly.* The donkeys thereafter drank at the stream, but let the garden alone.*
Cuthbert, says Bede, had a similar experience. For much the same reasons as Anthony, he tried raising wheat and then, when that failed, barley. But as his crop ripened nicely deep into autumn, Inner Farne’s numerous birds began to raid it.* So Cuthbert had it out with them. If God had given them permission, he said, then that was alright; otherwise they should not reap where they had not sown. The birds, abashed, took it to heart, and did not trouble Cuthbert’s barley field again.
Based on ‘A Life of Cuthbert’, by St Bede of Jarrow (?672-735).
Next in series: Cuthbert and the Sorrowful Ravens
St Anthony the Great (251-356). The Eastern Desert is an eastern portion of the Sahara, between the Nile and the Red Sea. Anthony was Bede’s example of a monastic saint from the Greek-speaking East; for a saint of the Latin-speaking West, he turned to Benedict of Nursia. See A Tale of Two Springs.
A reference to Matthew 25:24, part of the Parable of the Talents. It tells of a wealthy man who gave three servants some cash to invest. One of them merely buried his, excusing himself by saying that he was afraid to take a risk as his master was ‘a hard man’ who reaped where he did not sow. The silly fellow overlooked the fact that his master had ‘sown’ his money by getting his servants to invest it, and they were the ones ‘reaping’ profit from another’s risk. In the case of the asses and the crows, however, the animals really could not say that they had contributed anything to the two little gardens they were so cheerfully raiding.
The same story is nowadays told of St Anthony of Padua (1195-1231), but it will be seen that it originated with his namesake.
The word ‘reiver’ in the title is a Northumbrian and Scottish word for a robber, nowadays rarely used for anything but the murderous Border Reivers of the 13th-17th centuries. ‘Reive’ and its Standard English spelling ‘reave’ (past tense and past participle ‘reft’) are now archaic, but ‘bereave’ and ‘bereft’ are still common.
