Three Parisian house sparrows (passer domesticus) tucking into a little baguette. Reginald tells us that before he died, St Cuthbert promised the birds of Inner Farne – the tiny island near Lindisfarne in Northumbria to which he retired shortly before his death in 687 — that he would protect them from harm, a promise dubbed St Cuthbert’s Peace. Evidently, it also applied to birds on lands dedicated to the saint, as far afield as Lancashire.
ONE hazy summer’s day, the priest of St Cuthbert’s church in Lytham despatched his servant to shoo some birds from the kitchen garden.* Passing through the churchyard, the servant noticed a sparrow darting to and fro, and further investigation where the grass was thickest revealed a nest and a little chick. At once, he forgot everything except catching the mother.
The poor bird took refuge in the church porch, but he easily reached her. “Much good has Cuthbert done you”, he chuckled gleefully, walking off with his prize.* Yet the path through the churchyard seemed longer than he remembered. Much longer. He was still stumbling through an apparently never-ending churchyard as dusk fell.
There the priest found him, almost witless. “What’s that in your hand?” he cried. “A bird,” came the dazed reply. “She claimed Cuthbert’s Peace. I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.” The priest led him inside the church to hear his confession, before sending him home quite well.
Reginald located the church in ‘Lixtune’, which has often been taken to be Lytham in modern-day Lancashire. He describes it as a village on the west coast, at the far northern point of ‘Chester lands’, either mediaeval Cheshire or the Diocese of Chester. Reginald included the story in a section dedicated to events in Copeland, at the southwest corner of Cumbria.
The servant was defying St Cuthbert’s Peace, the promise made to the birds of the Farne Islands by St Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne, before his death in 687. See posts tagged St Cuthbert’s Peace (4).
Précis
Some imp prompted a parishioner at St Cuthbert’s in mediaeval Lytham to take a mother sparrow from her chick, even though the bird sought sanctuary in the church. The saint, however, doomed the heartless man to wander helplessly in the churchyard for hours on end, until the priest rescued him and heard his confession. (54 / 60 words)
