The North: Tuesday

14 September 2010

We arrived too late on Monday to see the museum displays at Durham Cathedral, so we spent the morning in the fantastic Treasury where St Cuthbert's coffin, is kept, and in the Monk's Dormitory where a display of carved Saxon crosses can be found with interesting casts of famous crosses and wonderful carved pieces of stone collected by antiquarians dismayed at losing examples of this early art form.

 Durham gave us a rainbow in fact and a pot of gold in metaphor when Bob got the call just as we were leaving the Palace Green to head north to the holy sites of Saxon Christianity that the contract for his new job was in the mail, ready to be signed. 

Christianity was brought to England with the Romans as one of many religious sects gaining popularity as the Empire both grew to encompass a broad range of cultural influences and began its decline. When the Romans abandoned Britain c. 410, a truly Dark Age began and Christianity might have have petered out except for the missionary work of St Patrick. Patrick was a Roman-Britain, probably
born in the area of Hadrian's Wall which is now the northernmost English counties of Northumberland and Cumbria, who lived during the 5th century when Rome withdrew its troops. He was abducted as a child and taken to Ireland where he lived for several years before returning to Britain and becoming a Christian. He returned to Ireland and through his missionary work converted the Irish to Christianity.

During the 6th century, Britain was re-Christianised from two directions. In 563, the monastery of Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, was founded by the exiled Irish monk Columba and a small band of his followers. A few years later in 597, Pope Gregory I sent the monk Augustine to Britain to convert the locals to Christianity. By this time the locals were Saxons who had emigrated from Denmark and northern Germany and taken over from the native Britains who were now pushed into the western provinces of Wales and Cornwall. Theories on why the Saxons moved in include the lure of rich agricultural land or by invitation as mercenaries helping the local warlords in what was undoubtedly a century of upheaval.

Augustine was successful in winning over the Kentish king who was married to a Christian Frankish princess. Augustine set up a monastery in the former Roman city at Canterbury which of course remains the headquarters of the Church of England. In the north, Iona's monastery sent Aidan to the east coast of Northumbria to establish a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne in 635. Cuthbert, whose shrine is in Durham Cathedral, became a legendary leader of the Lindisfarne community. Christianity spread through Saxon Britain, but differences of worship and practice arose between the Iona communities and the Roman communities leading to a crucial Synod held in 664 at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire where a decision was made by the Northumbrian king to follow the Roman tradition after both sides were given a chance to present their case.

In the years after Whitby, two important church and monastery communities were founded in what was then Northumbria. Benedict Biscop founded St Peter's in Monkwearmouth in 674. Biscop was an ardent supporter of Rome making six times to the city, bringing back books and art treasures for his foundation.

The Saxon Tower at Monkwearmouth

The remaining Saxon wall with tiny windows

The portal in the Saxon wall

Saxon carvings in the exterior porch

A Saxon dragon carving found during an excavation

In 681, Biscop sent a group of his monks to Jarrow, a few miles north, to found the companion church and monastery of St Paul's. At the age of eight, the Venerable Bede entered Jarrow and remained part of the foundation until his death in 735.Much of what we know about this period, making it not such a Dark Age, is from Bede's prolific writing, especially his History of the English Church.

The Norman portal at Jarrow

The small Saxon church was attached to the rebuilt
Norman church to be used as the chancel

The exterior entry of the Saxon church with
the original 685 dedication stone above the arch

The dedication stone

Next to St Paul's in Jarrow is Bede's World, an educational centre with informative displays about the period and the place and Bede's contributions to early Christian scholarship, including the formula to determine the date of Easter (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, if you are wondering), perhaps the most important issue dividing the Iona and the Roman churches before Whitby. Since the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are what it's all about, coming up with different dates by means of different calculation, just wasn't on. Bede's World is also putting together a living history Saxon farmstead as another part of the exhibition. All of this will be given much greater status if UNESCO agrees to accept the UK's 2010 nomination of the Twin Monasteries as a World Heritage Site next year.

The Saxon farm reconstruction

To continue the tale of the Golden Age of Saxon Christianity, the era ended abruptly when the Vikings began their invasions in the 9th century. At Lindisfarne, Cuthbert had died in 687, but when his coffin was opened a decade later, his body was found to be miraculously uncorrupted. In 875, when the Vikings destroyed Lindisfarne, the monks picked up Cuthbert's coffin and carried it about with them for 120 years until, the legend says, they followed a cow who sat down in a field on an ox-bow in the Wear River, and that was a sign to build Cuthbert's shrine. After the Norman's arrived they co-opted the local Saint Cuthbert, as clever victors do, and built Durham Cathedral to honour him with the magnificent shrine where his body was interred in 1104. And yes, that same coffin is my favourite treasure in the Cathedral's museum. The sides and top are carved with primitive angels and evangelists, with Christ in Majesty and as a baby being held by his mother, the earliest depiction in Western art.

The Golden Age of Saxon Christianity in the North produced the greatest works of art of those Dark Ages: illuminated manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the carved Saxon crosses. The influence of Saxon Christianity was a crucial in the revival of learning in Western Europe. The brief pit stop in the quick tour of Western history between Rome and the Conquest is always the Carolingian Renaissance. Charlemagne's favourite scholar Alcuin was educated in York under a bishop who had been a student of Bede's at Jarrow. But the Golden Age was already coming to an end. In 793, the first Viking attack on Lindisfarne was met with shock. Alcuin wrote at the time, "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race. . . .The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets." The Viking invaders also plundered the monasteries at Monkwearmoth and Jarrow, and they were abandoned for two centuries. In the 12th century, the Normans, the tamed Vikings of France, rebuilt the churches and revived the monastic foundations as their own.