Lindisfarne gospels – something from seaview

By a remarkably fortuitous chance, in the last fortnight we have seen two of the most wonderful Anglo-Saxon pieces of faith and art: the Bewcastle Cross … and the Lindisfarne Gospels …Both of them date from the 7th – 8th centuries and were products of the golden age of the Kingdom of Northumbria.

They are jaw-droppingly extraordinary. It goes without saying that this is firstly because they are so very old and so very beautiful.

But further. The Bewcastle cross is carved from a single piece of sandstone and stands outside in all weathers, as it has since it was carved over 1200 years ago.

The Lindisfarne Gospels are believed to be all the work of one man, the extremely talented Bishop Eadfrith, – and they have survived Viking raids, falling in the sea as the monks fled these same Vikings and desecration by King Henry VIII’s commissioners when they dissolved the monastery at Durham. They are much travelled …

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Towards the end of September we headed for the Cumbrian fells …This is one of the wildest places in England – north, north, north, beyond Carlisle, and approaching the border with Scotland. Backroads here now, but in Roman times Maiden Road ran past this lonely spot, linking Birdoswald fort with Hadrian’s Wall. The Romans built a fort here too, and, later, in the eleventh century, a castle was built on the site of the Roman fort. Today the church and its graveyard sit next to the castle …As you approach the little church of St Cuthbert, you get your first glimpse of the cross standing almost insignificantly beside the church …But of course, it isn’t insignificant. It’s gorgeous with carvings of saints and trailing leaves, and fruits, and intertwining patterns …Even more extraordinary, it is thought that it was originally painted in bright colours. Though I think to our modern eye, the more subtle colours of the stone are perfectly beautiful in this rural setting …There is a tiny museum attached which gives helpful information and pictures of this cross (so-called even though it is missing the cross shaft at the top). The people carved on the stone are thought to be St John the Baptist holding the lamb of God at the top, Christ in the middle, and possibly St John the Evangelist with his eagle at the bottom …The clue to the why and wherefore of this cross is in the church’s dedication to St Cuthbert …Step back those 1200 years or so, and these Cumbrian lands were part of the sizeable kingdom of Northumbria. The kingdom stretched from Edinburgh down to the Humber river, and over from Carlisle on the west coast to Bamburgh on the east. With the conversion of the Northumbrian King Oswald to Christianity, missionaries – inspired by St Cuthbert’s life of sanctity – set out to convert the rest of Northumbria. Preaching crosses such as the Bewcastle cross were set up to remind people of the Christian story they had newly learned.

The Bewcastle cross is believed to have been commissioned by Benedict Biscop whom we met briefly in my last blogpost on Bede. Benedict Biscop was Abbot of Monkwearmouth. And it was his monks from Monkwearmouth monastery who are thought to have carved the Bewcastle cross …They were spreading the Word from the eastern shores of northern England where St Cuthbert once preached and worshipped on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne …As was Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne who is believed to be the creator of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Preaching crosses told Christian stories for the hoi polloi (who couldn’t read), but the educated and learned religious were gradually acquiring access to books.

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We visited Newcastle’s Laing Gallery last week to see the Lindisfarne Gospels – a rare and precious trip north from their usual home at London’s British Library. The book was open at the beginning of the Gospel of St John, with its so-called carpet page on the left and “incipit” (introductory) page of the right …

It’s hard to explain the sense of awe this one book inspires. It is so very very old, carries with it such a story, and contains such exquisite workmanship.

Everything from the choice of smooth creamy perfectly-scraped calfskin to the still-bright colours (red lead, verdigris, orpiment, carbon, indigo and woad) and tiny gold highlights is just perfect.

Each Gospel writer gets a carpet page and an introductory page at the beginning of their writing – this is St Matthew’s carpet page …And this is the introductory page. The detail is exceptional, this is truly the work of someone with a remarkable imagination …But it is striking that you’re seeing here the same curls and whorls, similar interlacing patterns with animals and beasts and fruits and flowers all worked in together as those that are carved on to the Bewcastle cross. Perhaps we need to take a step further and imagine that sandstone cross as it might once have been, painted in these colours …

And it’s worth remembering that Bishop Eadfrith worked on these gospels in the harshest of harsh conditions. Lindisfarne at this time boasted no stone buildings, no glass windows. The winds howl in from the North Sea.

We visited one November several years ago when the mist lay heavy and unmoving. Just driving over the causeway was disconcerting. These are the dank, dark conditions Eadfrith would regularly have been working in …It’s easy to get waylaid by the beauty and skill in these objects. But it’s important to remember that they were produced in faith for the furthering of faith. The creators strove to do the best they could for this purpose. All to the glory of God, not for their own aggrandisement or pleasure.

I believe those men would like to think that the Bewcastle cross and the Lindisfarne Gospels still cause us to stop and reflect on our life’s journey – even if we cannot agree with everything that Bede says below …

Beached up on the north Northumbrian cliffs, we are exposed to all that the weather can throw at us. Over this winter so far we have endured violently squally and bad-tempered Southerlies bringing rain, rain and more rain. Recently the winds have changed to sea-salty and much colder Easterlies.

But whatever the weather throws at us, we sit tight in our small sandstone cottage, and are good at keeping busy and toasty.My eye is always drawn out – when the grey allows ( and we’ve had a lot of grey this winter) – to Holy Island on the horizon, and to wonder how the monks there coped with the wind and the cold and the rain.We know about these monks because some of them were so exceptional, so saintly, that Bede (himself an exceptional early historian) recorded their history. In the early 7th century, King Oswald of nearby Bamburgh had summoned the monks from Iona to bring Christianity to his kingdom. It was St Aidan who stablished the monastery, and St Cuthbert was to follow there as bishop.

We don’t have Bede’s histories alone to tell us about these early monks. We have inherited from this place and these early years one of the most remarkable and beautiful illustrated books of all time, the book of the Lindisfarne Gospels, apparently made by the later Bishop of Lindisfarne, Eadfrith, in honour of God and St Cuthbert.

First page of St Matthew’s gospel. Image made available to the public domain by Wikipedia.

These are the ruins of the monastery church on Holy Island today. Life in these buildings would have been hard and rough enough, but, in fact, these aren’t the buildings Cuthbert, Aidan and others knew. These are 11th century buildings. The early monks would have had oak buildings thatched with reeds.From the security and warmth of our windows, I often look out on Holy Island and wonder about the monks’ lives. And that manuscript – how on earth could the scribes do this skilled, delicate work in such bitterly cold conditions – no windows, remember?

Hard lives. Hard and dangerous lives.

Extreme danger, in fact, with the earliest known Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793. Eventually (in 875) the monks fled, taking with them what they valued most: the body of their beloved St Cuthbert. A life-size wood carving in the church on Holy Island commemorates their journey. It gives a sense of the struggle to carry the coffin and body, but what of the panic, the fear, the gut-wrenching terror.From our small cottage we can see the sea and down the coast to Lindisfarne, and when there are large bonfires on Holy Island, we can often see their smoke too. Farmers here might have seen the approach of those terrifying Viking longships, or the smoke from their destructive fires.Skip through the generations to the 13th century, and people here endured a new menace: the Reivers. The Border lands, the ungovernable country between the separate kingdoms of Scotland and England, experienced years of lawlessness (right up to the Union of the Crowns in 1603) because of the depredations of the Reivers.

Novels have been written and ballads sung of the Reivers, the wild lawless men who grabbed and took whatever they wanted – especially if it belonged to another family that they were at odds with. It was Sir Walter Scott who really put the Reivers on the map. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border established the tales of the Reivers as romantic, glamorous, and exciting. Actually, they were nasty, cruel and vicious.These Border lands were divided into six Marches, and Berwick lay in the English Eastern March. It was better governed than most.

But it was bad enough. It’s not hard to find examples of defensive architecture. In our adjoining parish of Ancroft, the church itself had a secure tower to offer safety when the Reivers swept in. The walls are 1.35 metres in thickness, the upper windows are tiny. You can climb to the top of the tower, and there are fine views around. It might have been used as a look-out, and it’s possible warning beacons may have been lit from here. This tower is certainly no ecclesiastical adornment.Even in more recent times, life was miserably hard in these parts. Coal was mined under the neighbouring fields, and the tramway bearing coals to transport ships runs across our view ( it’s the uneven shrubby line of trees running from the top right of the landscape across to where it meets the modern Eastcoast Mainline running along the coast).In the local churchyard, there are several sad gravestones which tell of deaths at the colliery. One of them is for John Harbottle who was accidentally killed on the 21st November 1865, aged 45 years. We don’t know how he died, but you can read more on these accidents at Scremerston Colliery at the Durham Mining Museum webpage. No Health and Safety Inspectorate in those times. But of all the troubles in this part of the world, it was surely the sea that caused most grief.Just up the coast at St Abbs, these small statues stand as a reminder of the terrible cost of fishing disasters. These are the wives and children of Charles Purves and James and William Thorburn who lost their lives in the great storm of 1881. 189 fishermen from the east coast of Scotland perished in that storm.Another extremely dangerous (but potentially very lucrative) sea-faring enterprise was whaling. Berwick’s last whaling ship, the Norfolk, left on its last voyage in 1836. She sailed over to the North American coast in the spring, but come winter, found herself trapped by ice in Pond Inlet (of Baffin Bay) with several other ships. The Captain of the Norfolk recorded on 15th January 1837: “…The frost is very severe and the ice has been pressing to a great height all around us.” They did not escape the ice until mid-March. Many, many men died of scurvy as well as frostbite.

One Berwick whaling-ship owner proudly announced his trade on his front door.Those are harpoon heads on the front door panels.These balustrades on the roofs of local Spittal houses are sometimes know as widows’ walks. From them pacing wives and ship-owners might scan the sea, looking for sight of ships.The whale oil was processed in the manufactories where the last Spittal chimney now stands. It was a foul-smelling and obnoxious process. Is it surprising that people fled, leaving this beautiful area for places where they hoped they might have a better life?I am left to reflect on my twenty-first century luck to be living here, safe and warm and healthy – so as to be able to enjoy it in comfort.