‘Your Child Shall Be Healed’
When the plague once again visited Northumbria, Bishop Cuthbert of Lindisfarne left his island retreat and brought comfort and healing to the suffering.
686
Anglo-Saxon Britain 410-1066
When the plague once again visited Northumbria, Bishop Cuthbert of Lindisfarne left his island retreat and brought comfort and healing to the suffering.
686
Anglo-Saxon Britain 410-1066
This post is number 16 in the series Miracles of St Cuthbert
In 664, a particularly nasty epidemic of plague struck the British Isles and lasted for over twenty years. It nearly killed monk Cuthbert, who was never completely well for the rest of his days. Shortly after he was consecrated bishop of Lindisfarne in 685, the plague broke out again. Undaunted, Cuthbert left his beloved island retreat to tour the villages of the mainland, bringing comfort to the sick and bereaved.
AT the same time the plague made great ravages in those parts, so that there were scarcely any inhabitants left in villages and places which had been thickly populated, and some towns were wholly deserted.* The holy father Cuthbert, therefore, went round his parish, most assiduously ministering the word of God, and comforting those few who were left. But being arrived at a certain village, and having there exhorted all whom he found there, he said to his attendant priest, “Do you think that any one remains who has need that we should visit and converse with him? or have we now seen all here, and shall we go elsewhere?”
* At about this same time, in 686, the plague carried off almost everyone in the monastery of St Paul in Jarrow, where Bede was a teenage pupil of Abbot Ceolfrid. See A Quick Study. The existence of bacteria was unknown until Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) published his observations in a series of letters to the Royal Society of London, and it would be almost another three centuries before antibiotics provided a cure. See Penicillin. This was not the first encounter with the plague for Cuthbert: see ‘Why Am I Still Lying Here?’.