QI The Book of the Dead

permission to bury him at Lindisfarne. His grave became the site of a miraculous cure. Aboy, possessed by demonic fits, was brought to the holy place. The monks located the spot where the water used to wash Cuthbert’s body had been poured into the ground and gave the boy some of the soil to eat. At once the demons left him and the boy was calmed.
    The monks decided to honour the saint by building him a proper shrine. In 698, eleven years after he had died, his coffin was disinterred and opened for the first time. The miraculous discovery was made that his body had not decayed: not only that, but his limbs were flexible and his clothing had not faded. Those who saw his body reported that he appeared to be not dead but sleeping, a sure sign of sainthood. The new Abbot, Eadfrith, commissioned a copy of the Gospels to be made in Cuthbert’s honour. The Lindisfarne Gospels are regarded as the supreme fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic religious art.
    The years that followed were precarious ones for the monastery. Viking raids began in earnest in 793 and a major attack in 875 prompted the monks to shift Cuthbert’s coffin and his gospels to the mainland. For more than a century, they were venerated at the parish church of Chester-le-Street, a small town eight miles inland from Sunderland. In 995 further Danish raids forced a move further south to Ripon Abbey. During the journey, the cart carrying St Cuthbert’s coffin became stuck in the mud. The monks prayed for help and the saint appeared to them in person, asking to be buried at somewhere called ‘Dunholme’. Shortly afterwards, by pure chance, they overheard a milkmaid mention the name as the place where she had lost her cow. She led them to a steep, rocky peninsula on a bend in the River Wear and the monks laid the saint to rest. This was the origin of the city of Durham.

    By the eleventh century, the tomb of St Cuthbert had become the most popular pilgrim destination in northern England. The sacrist (or keeper) of the shrine was one Elfrid Westoue. He opened the saint’s coffin regularly to trim his hair and nails with a pair of silver scissors and travelled up and down the north scooping up the relics of other local saints and placing them in bags in St Cuthbert’s tomb for safe keeping. One of the bags contained the remains of the saint’s biographer, the Venerable Bede. In 1020 Elfrid had shamelessly stolen his skeleton from the monks at Jarrow. In 1027 the Viking king Cnut, on his way back from a pilgrimage to Rome, paid reverence to the saint, covering the last six miles of the journey in his bare feet.
    In 1069 William the Conqueror began his bloody suppression of the north. As he worked his way up from York, burning every house and murdering every person in his path, the monks at Durham hurriedly tried to move Cuthbert’s coffin back to Lindisfarne. Caught out by the tide, they were intercepted by King William, who commanded them to open the casket. No sooner had he done so than he was seized by a violent fever. Taking this as a sign of the saint’s displeasure, he countermanded his order and left Durham, never to return. The monks put Cuthbert back where he’d come from.
    In 1104, more than 400 years after Cuthbert’s death, the magnificent new cathedral at Durham (begun in 1093) was ready to receive his remains. The decision was taken that his body should be inspected once more. They found the saint lying on his side as if in a deep sleep, accompanied by ‘an odour of the sweetest fragrance’. Next to him was a tiny, exquisitely lettered version of St John’s gospel, the oldest known leather-bound book to have survived in Britain. Any spare space was taken up withthe linen bags parked there by Elfrid, in which were found the relics of eight local saints and the bones of Bede. (Bede wasn’t a saint in those days, although he had been declared Venerable in 836. He had to wait until 1899 before being canonised by Pope Leo XIII, who made up for the oversight by appointing him a ‘Doctor of the Church’, the only native of Great Britain ever to be so honoured.) On the outside of the coffin was a painting, later identified as the first recorded representation of the Virgin and Child in Western art. At some point over the years, an unknown artist of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria had been keeping the flame of Western civilisation alight.
    To authenticate the evidence, the coffin and its contents were examined by a gathering of forty-seven senior