We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2015
The cult of St Cuthbert was central to the regional identity of north-eastern England with its inhabitants termed the haliwerfolc, or ‘people of the saint’ (Cuthbert). The saint became crucial to the liturgical practices and celebrations of Durham's clerical and secular communities as well as being a guarantor of martial victories; usually against the Scots. However, with the cult of saints an early victim of the Reformation launched by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the outlook for St Cuthbert's legacy became increasingly uncertain. Attachment to the saint's memory became inextricably entwined with Durham's pre-Reformation history as commemoration of the cult, rather than the saint, took on more significance. This article looks at how St Cuthbert's historians and other antiquaries regularly manipulated his legend to satisfy different purposes and circumstances; so that completely different perspectives on Cuthbert and his cult have emerged over the centuries since the Reformation. But, throughout the changing interpretations of St Cuthbert's story his significance in Durham remains unchallenged.
1 See Bailey, Richard N., ‘Cuthbert's Relics: Some Neglected Evidence’, in Bonner, Gerald, Rollason, David and Stancliffe, Clare (eds), Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200 (Woodbridge 1989), p. 231fGoogle Scholar
2 Raine, J., Cuthbert, with an account of the state in which his remains were found upon the opening of his tomb in Durham cathedral, in the year 1827 (Durham and London 1828).Google Scholar
3 Raine, Cuthbert, pp. 228.
4 Hayward, Paul Antony, ‘Demystifying the Role of Sanctity in Western Christendom’, in Howard-Johnston, James and Hayward, Paul Antony (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and The Middle Ages (Oxford 1999), p. 115.Google Scholar
5 For the significance of St Cuthbert to the regional identity of the north-east see, Liddy, Christian D., The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages, Lordship, Community and the Cult of St Cuthbert (Woodbridge 2008);Google Scholar Newton, Diana, North-East England, 1569–1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Woodbridge 2006).Google Scholar
6 The concept was developed through succeeding centuries and by the fifteenth century the haliwerfolc had become a ‘chosen people’ in a Middle English poem that recounted the flight of the community with its saint's body that drew parallels with Old Testament experiences. See, The life of St Cuthbert in English verse, c A.D. 1450, ed. Fowler, J. T. (SS, 2, 1899) and Liddy, Bishopric, pp. 193–5.Google Scholar
7 Symeon of Durham, Tract on Origins and progress of this the church of Durham, ed. and trans., Rollason, David (Oxford 2000), pp. 144–147.Google Scholar
8 Symeon of Durham's record was joined by two works by Reginald of Durham while twenty of thirty-eight surviving manuscripts of Bede's Life of Saint Cuthbert were copied and a number of collections of his miracles were written. See, Abou-el-Haj, Barbara, The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge 1997), p. 139;Google Scholar Aird, William M., ‘The Making of a Medieval Miracle Collection: The Liber de Translationibus et Miraculis Sancti Cuthbert’, Northern History, 28 (1992), pp. 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 The earliest surviving evidence for those practices is a missal and a liturgical miscellany, from the fourteenth century, which describe the four large-scale processions around the cathedral in the early summer; on Ascension Day, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christ Day. BL MS Harley 5289; BL MS Royal 7.A.vi.
10 Rites of Durham, p. 23.
11 Longstaffe, W. H. D., ‘The banner and cross of Cuthbert’, AA 2nd ser., 2 (1858), pp. 51–65 Google Scholar at 61 and 62.
12 See, for instance, Nelson, Alan H., The Medieval English Stage, Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago and London 1974).Google Scholar
13 Marshall, Peter, Reformation England 1480–1642 (London and New York 2003), p.54.Google Scholar
14 Whiting, Robert, ‘Abominable Idols: Images and Image Breaking Under Henry VIII’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Heal, Felicity, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford 2003), p. 107;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Brown, A. D., Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford 1995), pp. 57–63;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Whiting, R., The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and The English Reformation (Cambridge 1989), pp. 54–5;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer, J. S. and others (London 1862–1910), 12; 1, p. 204.Google Scholar
15 Sturge, Charles, Cuthbert Tunstal; Churchman, Scholar, Statesman, Administrator (London 1938), pp. 60–1.Google Scholar
16 See, Bush, M. L., The Pilgrims’ Complaint: A Study of Popular Thought in the Early Tudor North (Farnham 2009), pp. 91–4; 109–10; 180–1.Google Scholar St Cuthbert and his banner is dealt with specifically at 92–3.
17 Longstaffe, ‘Banner’, p. 62–3.
18 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Hughes, Paul L. and Larkin, James F. (New Haven 1964–9), 1; pp. 301–2.Google Scholar
19 Sansom, Christopher, ‘The Wakefield Conspiracy of 1541 and Henry VIII's Progress to the North Reconsidered’, Northern History xlv, 2 (2008);Google Scholar The King's Book 1543, ed. Lacey, T. A., London 1895, p xi.Google Scholar
20 Extracts from the Accounts of the Abbey of Durham, ed. Fowler, J. T. (SS 103, 1900), iii, p. 741.Google Scholar
21 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Proclamations, pp. 1; 393–403 at 394.
22 Rites of Durham, p. 59.
23 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Proclamations 2, pp. 35–38 at 37 and pp. 117–132 at 122.
24 The statutes of the cathedral church of Durham: with other documents, relating to its foundation and endowment by King Henry the Eighth and Queen Mary, ed. Thompson, Alexander Hamilton (SS 143, 1929), xxxiv;Google Scholar Dobson's Drie Bobbes, first pub 1607, ed. Horsman, E. A. (Oxford 1958), p. 83.Google Scholar
25 Hodgson, J. F., ‘The Church of Auckland St Andrew’, AA new ser. 20 (1899), p. 169.Google Scholar
26 Rhatigan, Emma, ‘Preaching Venues’ in MacCulloch, Peter, Adlington, Hugh and Rhatigan, Emma (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford 2011), pp. 90–1;Google Scholar The works of James Pilkington, ed. Scholefield, James (The Parker Society, 1842), p. 129.Google Scholar
27 Marcombe, David, ‘“A rude and heady people”: the local community and the rebellion of the northern earls’, in Marcombe (ed.), The Last Principality, Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 1494–1660 (Nottingham 1987), p. 119 Google Scholar (his italics).
28 The earls’ proclamation, issued from Darlington, on 16 December 1569, is at BL MS Harleian, 6990, fo. 44, and printed in Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, p.150. For a reassessment of the rising see, Kesselring, K. J., ‘“A cold pye for the papists”: Constructing and Containing the Northern Rising of 1569’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2004), pp.417–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Northern Rebellion of 1569. Faith, Politics and Protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke 2007).
29 SP 15/15/30; Sadler Papers, pp. 2; 53–4.
30 These are in Durham University Library, DDR/EJ/CCD/1/2, and printed in Depositions and other ecclesiastical proceedings from the courts of Durham, ed. Raine, J. (SS 21, 1845), pp. 136–205.Google Scholar See also, Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion, pp. 118–143.
31 PGL, DDR/EJ/CCD/1/2, fos. 170, 177–9, 180, 182–183, 187, 190, 196, 200, 203.
32 Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Proclamations, 3, no 567.
33 Lake, Peter, ‘Anti-popery: The structure of a Prejudice’, in Cust, Richard and Hughes, Ann (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow 1989).Google Scholar
34 This has been passed over with little or no comment in the Scottish historiography, except for Pollitt, Ronald, ‘The Defeat of the Northern Rising and the Shaping of Anglo-Scottish Relations’, Scottish Historical Review, 64 (1988), pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
35 Kesselring, Northern Rebellion, 113–15.
36 Dillon, Anne, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot 2002), pp. 13; 172–5.Google Scholar
37 The life and death of Mr William Whittingham, deane of Durham, who departed this life anno domini 1579, June 10, ed. Green, A. E., Camden Miscellany 6 (1871); Rites of Durham, p. 23.Google Scholar
38 Marcombe, David, ‘“A great villain of the Geneva gang”? William Whittingham, Dean of Duham, a Reassessment’, in Conflict and Disaster at Durham (Durham 2003), p. 7.Google Scholar
39 See, for example, Po-Chia Hsia, R., The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge 1998),Google Scholar Chapter 8.
40 Abou-el-Haj, Medieval Cult of Saints, p. 13.
41 Durham, Dean and Chapter Library, MS B. II. 11.
42 Rites of Durham, pp. 107–8, and cited as exemplifying the pomp and lavish spectacle of the procession, Nelson, Alan H., The Medieval English Stage, Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago and London 1974), p. 34.Google Scholar See also, McKinnell, John, ‘The Sequence of the Sacrament at Durham’, North-Eastern History 8 (1998), esp. pp. 3–7.Google Scholar
43 Turpie, Tom, ‘A monk from Melrose? St Cuthbert and the Scots in the Later Middle Ages, c. 1371–1560’, The Innes Review, 62 (2011), pp. 47–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
44 Wood, A., Athenae Oxoniensis (1550–1714), Oxford 1691, I, col 455.Google Scholar And see, also, Pattenden, Philip, ‘Robert Hegge, an Oxford Antiquary’, Oxoniensia 45 (1980), pp. 284–99Google Scholar and Pattenden, ‘Robert Hegge of Durham and his Cuthbert’, Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland ns 5 (1980), pp. 107–123.Google Scholar
45 Doyle, A. I., ‘Claxton and the Durham Chronicles’, in Carley, James P. and Tite, Colin G. C. (eds), Books and Collectors, 1200–1700 (London 1997), p. 335.Google Scholar
46 Wills and Inventories (SS 1860), pp. 272–3.
47 BL MS Harley 374.
48 John Calverley was Hegge's brother-in-law. BL MS Add 27423. And see Pattenden, ‘Hegge and His Cuthbert’, pp. 108–9.
49 Woolf, Daniel, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford 2003), p. 186;Google Scholar Scutts, Sarah, ‘“Truth Never Need the Protection of Forgery”: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge's “History of St Cuthbert's Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunhome” (1625)’, in Clarke, Peter and Claydon, Tony (eds.), Saints and Sanctity, Studies in Church History 47 (2011), p. 272.Google Scholar
50 Ian J. Gentles, ‘Thomas Fairfax, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1612–72)’, DNB (Oxford).
51 G.J. Toomer, ‘Edward Pocock (1604–91)’, DNB (Oxford)
52 Symeon of Durham, pp.100–101.
53 This is from the title page of Rud, Origin.
54 Rud, Origin, p. 3.
55 Rud, Origin, p. 3; and see Newton, North-East England, pp. 71–4.
56 Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede's Prose Life, texts, transl. and notes by Colgrave, Bertram (Cambridge 1940), pp. 282–5; 356.Google Scholar Rollason and Dobson, ‘Cuthbert’, DNB (Oxford)
57 See, Harvey, Margaret, ‘The Northern Saints After the Reformation in the Writings of Christopher Watson (d.1580), Studies in Church History 49 (2011), pp. 258–268,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 259. Watson's ‘History’ is at BL, MS Cotton Vitellius C IX.
58 Stouk, Medieval Saints, xvii-xviii; Howard-Johnson, Introduction, in Howard-Johnson and Hayward, The Cult of Saints, p. 7.
59 aThe Statutes of the Cathedral Church of Durham, with Other Documents Relating to its Foundation and Endowment by King Henry the Eighth and Queen Mary, ed. Fowler, J. Meade (SS 142, 1929), pp. 3–63.Google Scholar
60 Hegge, Legend, p. 5.
61 Rud, Origin, p. 3.
62 Hegge, Legend, pp. 14, 16.
63 Hegge, Legend, pp. 12–13.
64 Rud, Origin, P. 9.
65 Hegge, Legend, p. 3.
66 Durham University Library, Add Ms 866, f.60v.
67 TNA: PRO, SP 16/162/32, 33.
68 Durham Dean and Chapter Library, Hunter MSS, xiii, 16.
69 Basire, Isaac, Sermon preached at the funeral of Jo. Cosin, Bishop of Durham … (London 1673).Google Scholar
70 Adrian Green, ‘The Power and the Glory: The Architectural Patronage of John Cosin’, in Scott Mandelbrote ed. Music and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Cambridge: The Peterhouse Partbooks (Boydell, forthcoming).
71 The vanitie and downe-fall of superstitious ceremonies: or, a sermon preached in the cathedral church of Durham by one Peter Smart, a preaband there, July 27. 1628 (Edinburgh 1628). See also, John Cosin. Correspondence: With Other Papers Illustrative of His Life and Times, ed. Ornsby, G. (SS 52 (1869), especially, pp. 184, 195.Google Scholar
72 The acts of the high commission court within the diocese of Durham, ed. Longstaffe, W. H. D. (SS, 1858), p. 197ff.Google Scholar
73 Vanitie and downe-fall.
74 James, Mervyn, Family, Lineage and Civil Society. A Study of Society, Politics and Mentalityin the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford 1974), pp. 125, 197.Google Scholar
75 Cosin, Correspondence, p. 212.
76 Hutchinson, W., The history and antiquities of the county palatine of Durham (Durham 1785), 1, pp.20–26.Google Scholar
77 Spearman, G., An enquiry into the ancient and present state of the county palatine of Durham (Edinburgh 1729), p. 20.Google Scholar
78 See, Hook, David, ‘John Davies of Kidwelly, a Neglected Literary Figure of the Seventeenth Century’, The Antiquary, 11 (1975).Google Scholar
79 Wills and inventories (SS 1860), pp. 272–3.
80 See, for example, Newton, North-East England, pp. 147–52.
81 Marcombe, ‘”A great villain of the Geneva gang”?’, pp. 2, 7.
82 David Hewitt, ‘Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832)’, DNB (Oxford)
83 See, Hayward, ‘Demystifying the Role of Sanctity’, pp. 120–22.
84 Fordyce, W., The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham (London 1857), p. 20.Google Scholar
85 Longstaffe, ‘The Banner and Cross of Cuthbert’, AA 2nd ser., 2 (1858), pp. 51–65; Victoria Tudor, ‘The Misogyny of St C’, AA 5th ser., 12 (1984), pp. 157–165.
86 Harpsfield, N., Historia Anglicana ecclesiastica (Douai 1622), p. 105.Google Scholar Apparently there was also a ring which Harpsfield claimed to have kissed as a divine momento and which was later kept in Paris. My thanks to Dr Margaret Harvey for this information.
87 Rud, Origin, 28.
88 Hegge, Legend, 23.
89 DNB (Oxford)
