The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (33 page)

Cuthbert was rowed out to the little island in the January of 687, when the winter weather was at its worst and he endured a life of welcome solitude for two months before he fell ill. It seems that, in the bitter chill of the hardest months, Cuthbert starved himself to death. For five days, a storm prevented any of the Lindisfarne monks from reaching Inner Farne and, when Herefrith finally came ashore, he asked:

‘But my lord, how can you live like this? Have you gone without food all this time?’

He turned back the coverlet on which he sat and showed me five onions.

‘This has been my food for the last five days. Whenever my mouth was parched or burned with excessive hunger or thirst I refreshed and cooled myself with these.’

One of the onions was less than half nibbled away. He added: ‘My assailants have never tempted me so sorely as they have during the past five days.’

I did not enquire what kind of temptations they were but contented myself with asking him to let himself be waited on. He consented and let some of us stay . . .

During his long fasts Cuthbert had thought a great deal about his death and gave instructions that he should be buried near his oratory on Inner Farne, to the east of the cross he had himself raised. When Herefrith and his brother monks asked the saint’s permission to take his body for burial to Lindisfarne, the dying man refused, saying:

‘[I]t would be less trouble for you if I did stay here, because of the influx of fugitives and every other kind of malefactor which will otherwise result. They will flee for refuge to my body, for,
whatever I might be, my fame as a servant of God has been noised abroad. You will be constrained to intercede very often with the powers of this world on behalf of such men. The presence of my remains will prove extremely irksome.’

It seems that Cuthbert knew he would become the focus of a cult and, as such, a place of sanctuary for criminals and fugitives and he recoiled from the worldiness and commerce attached to that likelihood. But, after many entreaties, he ultimately agreed to allow himself to be buried in the monastic church at Lindisfarne. At last the end came.

‘I went to him,’ Herefrith continued, ‘about the ninth hour and found him lying in a corner of the oratory, opposite the altar. I sat down beside him. He said very little, for the weight of affliction made it hard for him to speak.’

But Cuthbert did manage to warn against schism in the church and to exhort his brethren to piety, kindness and obedience.

These and like sayings he uttered at intervals . . . He passed the day quietly till evening, awaiting the joys of the world to come, and went on peacefully with his prayers throughout the night. At the usual time for night prayer I gave him the sacraments that lead to eternal life. Thus fortified with the Lord’s Body and Blood in preparation for the death he knew was now at hand, he raised his eyes heavenwards, stretched his arms aloft, and with his mind rapt in the praise of the Lord sent forth his spirit to the bliss of Paradise.

I went out and announced his death to the brethren, who were themselves spending the night in prayer and vigil . . . One of the monks went without delay and lit two torches and went up, with one in each hand, to a piece of high ground to let the Lindisfarne brethren know that Cuthbert’s holy soul had gone to the Lord. They had decided amongst themselves that this should be the sign of his holy death. The brother in the watch-tower at
Lindisfarne, who was sitting up all night awaiting the news, ran quickly to the church where the monks were assembled for the night office . . .

In 698, eleven years later and on the anniversary of his death, Cuthbert’s body was disinterred by the monks and, in the monastic church, they witnessed a miracle. The corpse was entirely uncorrupted, its joints flexible and skin unbroken. The winding sheets were pristine and, to the amazed brothers, it looked as though Cuthbert was not dead but only sleeping.

The news of the miracle was rowed across the water to Inner Farne. There Bishop Eadberht had passed Lent ‘in prayer and severe fasting, shedding tears of devotion’. He ordered that Cuthbert’s tomb be elevated – that is, not reburied but placed above ground by the altar of the monastic church. It was the first stage of canonisation. As Cuthbert had foreseen, pilgrims would come to visit his tomb and indeed to touch it. Closeness to sanctity meant closeness to God and, as the cults of saints developed, many came to pray by the tomb for intercession on their behalf or for others. Bede’s
Life of St Cuthbert
lists several miracles which took place in the church at Lindisfarne. And, when Eadberht died, he was buried, according to his wishes, in a casket under the sarcophagus containing the saint’s uncorrupted corpse.

More marvels were to come. Some time around 698, Bishop Eadfrith began work on the magnificent achievement known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Several accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus had been in circulation amongst early Christian communities but in 325 the Council of Nicaea authorised four, the work of the Four Evangelists, generally recited as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Eadfrith set to work on the immense labour of writing them all into a single volume and illuminating their stories of Christ with gloriously coloured and conceived miniature paintings.

The copying of the text was done first. Paintings of two of the gospel writers bound into the book showed how Eadfrith and
other scribes of the time worked. Having placed a board across their laps, they put their feet on a stool approximately half the height of their chair. This canted the board towards the scribe and allowed him to see his work square-on rather than looking at the letters obliquely as happens when writing on a flat desk. While this set-up produced very beautiful calligraphy, the long hours needed to complete all four gospels without help must have taken their toll on Eadfrith’s back and posture. And, with only small and often unglazed windows to admit it, the quality of the light was poor in monastic buildings of the seventh and eighth centuries and most scribes preferred to work outdoors when the weather allowed.

The Lindisfarne Gospels were tremendously costly in more than time and discomfort. Known as a codex, the bound book was made up of pages of vellum or calfskin. The younger the animal the better the quality of the writing surface and the monastery at Lindisfarne must have had access to large herds of cows whose progeny they could afford to slaughter each year. Four years after the first sheets of vellum had been scraped, sized in lime and stretched out for Eadfrith, another tremendous project was undertaken in Northumbria – this time at the joint monastery of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow. Three copies of the entire Bible were commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrith and, to produce the vast quantity of vellum needed, land was granted to raise a herd of 2,000 cows. In the economy of eighth-century Northumbria, this represented a huge outlay.

Once a sheet of vellum was pinned to a writing board, tiny holes were made to delineate the area for text and then it was ruled with a pointed stick. Since vellum was organic and still springy, it was hoped that these ruled lines would become quickly invisible. In the portraits of Matthew and Mark (Luke and John are shown by Eadfrith working with scrolls, the predominant form of the book in the first century
AD
and so historically correct), the gospel writers are seen holding quill pens. The long tail feathers of geese or swans were preferred because they could be repeatedly sharpened and, in the illustrations, none of the
pens appears to have been left fledged in classic style. For closer, finer work, reed pens could be used but the pressure from a scribe’s fingers usually meant a short life. Ink sat in an inkhorn often poked through a hole in the writing board. Until the middle of the twentieth century, school desks were still being made with a hole for an inkwell and the design is a direct descendant from the methods of the Northumbrian scribes. The bible-black ink used by Eadfrith was probably made from a form of carbon – either soot or burnt bones. Irish scribes sometimes used iron-gall, a black ink made from oak apples and sulphate of iron.

The text in the Lindisfarne Gospels is very beautiful. Eadfrith wrote the Latin in a script called ‘insular uncial’. This probably developed from Roman cursive but the smooth surface of vellum allowed greater flourish than was possible on much rougher papyrus. Letters had more rounded forms and these could be achieved without the risk of the pen nib catching and spattering ink over the page. Uncials are capital letters but, in the Lindisfarne Gospels, Eadfrith added some ascenders or upward strokes, such as b, d, h, or l, or descenders as with p and q. Letters with bowed elements, like the last two, are given wide flourishes and ascenders are often decorated with wedge-shaped finials, an opportunity for Eadfrith to add more colour.

The gospels were written in a diminuendo style with very large and gorgeously decorated capital letters at the beginning of sections. The size of the letters gradually shrinks until a standard script is reached and this carries on until the end of a chapter or passage. And unlike earlier Roman script and inscriptions, Eadfrith made each word distinct with the use of spacing and, borrowing from Tiro, Cicero’s famous secretary and the inventor of shorthand, scribes used a number of standard abbreviations.

Once Eadfrith had completed the text, he began to paint. Using compasses, set squares and protractors, he almost certainly worked out his designs and compositions on wax tablets first. Then, with a series of dots and pinpricks, he transferred the outline to the vellum and began using his tiny brushes. Those
made from the coats of pine martens were much favoured. Eadfrith’s palette was wide and shows the network of trading contacts these apparently isolated Northumbrian communities had. Yellow, green, blue, black, gold, silver and white could be sourced from Britain’s plant life and mineral resources but rich reds such as kermes or carmine came from the Mediterranean. Lapis lazuli was brought from Afghanistan and pulverised to produce ultramarine while folium, which yielded a range of tints from pink to purple, was extracted from the sunflowers of the Mediterranean littoral.

Once the pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels were complete, they were bound in fascicles or gatherings of double pages. This was a moment in the production process which shows how much planning was required. Because the hide of a calf provided a large area for writing (and when laid on its long side, the shape of the book), it meant that double pages could be bound in multiples of at least two. If a codex was thought likely to make 16 pages then numbers one and sixteen needed to be copied on the same double sheet and so on. Not all gospels were made like this but calfskin was very expensive and the advantages of fascicle binding became quickly clear.

A beautiful leather binding and cover, richly tooled but now lost, was made for the gospels by Aethelwald, Eadfrith’s successor as Bishop of Lindisfarne. And an outer cover of gold, silver and gemstones was created by a man called Billfrith the Anchorite, another term for a hermit. Perhaps he worked alone in his forge but given the precious materials he was using, he cannot have been left in isolation.

The Lindisfarne Gospels have been acclaimed as a master-work, a perfect synthesis of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon techniques, motifs and sensibilities. In the tenth century a dedication was added and it simply said that the great book had been made ‘in honour of St Cuthbert’. And, between the lines of Eadfrith’s immaculate Latin text, a translation into Old English was added. It is the earliest gospel in the vernacular in England.

The vast resources devoted to making the book should be
understood in the context of the eighth century. Above all Christianity was seen as the religion of the word and the Bible as the repository of the word of God. As such the gospels, placed on the high altar during Mass, were objects of veneration in their own right. This way of looking at Eadfrith’s achievement places the book alongside the great altarpieces, devotional sculpture and icons of Christian art. Made to honour a very great saint, made in the monastery he knew and loved so well, near where he went to die, the gospels are absolutely of Lindisfarne in a spiritual as well as a historical sense. It is a matter of great regret that they are kept in the British Museum in London.

While the scribes worked in the peace and beauty of Lindisfarne, all was not quiet on Northumbria’s northern front. In his ‘recapitulation’ of dates and important events at the conclusion of his great history, Bede noted that, in 698, ‘Bertred, the royal commander of the Northumbrians, was killed by the Picts’. Perhaps this defeat took place around the Stirling Gap or was the result of a reassertion of Pictish control over Fife. The battle or skirmish happened well after the death of Bridei, the victor of Dunnichen and slayer of Ecgfrith, and it is evidence of a growing power in the north. The Anglian bishopric founded at Abercorn on the southern shores of the Forth was abandoned around this time and its bishop, Trumwine, ‘withdrew with his people’, finding refuge deep in Northumbria at the monastery at Hartlepool. Abercorn lay very close to the old ferry crossings to Fife – near the narrows where the modern bridges stand – and within easy reach of a hostile shore opposite. If Aldfrith and his generals could not sustain a bishopric at Abercorn, it may be that their reach had shrunk back to Edinburgh and the fortress on the Castle Rock and perhaps what is now West Lothian had been lost.

Pictish kings had close dynastic links with the rulers of Dalriada and the Old Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde and, as Bede concedes, all were released from Northumbrian overlordship when Ecgfrith and his war bands fell at Dunnichen. In the south, another great power rose up to confront Aldfrith
and his successors. The name Mercia derived from the word for marches or borders because it lay on the southern frontier of Northumbria but, with the long reigns of three capable kings, it ceased to be marginal and became the central political focus in England. Aethelbald, Offa and Coenwulf ruled Mercia from 716 to 821, more than a century of continuity and expansion. Directed by them, Mercian armies enforced overlordship in the south and, while Northumbria remained more or less independent, it was as a junior partner. Kings who sat on the throne at Bamburgh were no longer
Imperatores Totius Britanniae
.