QI The Book of the Dead

clerics. The abbot of Sées in northern France even went as far as touching the corpse, moving its arms and legs about and tweaking its ears to show that rigor mortis had still not set in. The miracle was confirmed and, for the next 400 years, Cuthbert’s corpse lay undisturbed.
    In 1534, as part of Henry VIII’s reforms of the Church of England, the Church Commissioners were instructed to destroy Cuthbert’s tomb, removing any treasures that might have been buried with him. Opening it up, they took out his golden staff and other jewellery but once again, to their amazement, they found St Cuthbert ‘fresh, safe and not consumed’ and sporting what looked like a fortnight’s growth of beard. The monks were then allowed to rebury his physical remains – and those of his eight saintly companions – in the floor of the cathedral, where the shrine had once stood.
    Somewhere along the line, a legend grew up that Cuthbert hated women, so none were allowed to approach his tomb tooclosely. Given his regular and apparently cordial dealings with abbesses during his lifetime, this feels like an unjustified slur invented by misogynistic monks. A second legend was that, at some point in the late seventeenth century, his body had been stolen and replaced. In 1827 the Dean and Chapter decided to see if they could locate the body under the cathedral floor. After a long search they eventually came across a coffin whose exterior closely resembled the one described in the 1104 account. They lifted the lid. Inside, wrapped in five layers of silk, was an ordinary skeleton, an ivory comb, a portable silver altar and, lying on the skeleton’s ribcage, a beautiful square Anglo-Saxon gold cross, inlaid with garnet, which has now become the emblem of Durham University.
    In 1899 – 1,212 years after Cuthbert had died and the year Bede finally got his sainthood and his doctorate – the coffin was opened for the last time and medical tests were made on Cuthbert’s bones. These matched the known details of his life – such as they were – and they suggested that the body had been mummified for a long period after death. More recent scholarship has speculated that the combination of Cuthbert’s emaciated state at the time of his death and the high sand-and-salt content in the Lindisfarne soil might well have resulted in mummification. In any event, his legend started a trend and there are now more than a hundred Christian saints who have been reported as ‘incorrupt’ at some time after burial, although few have endured such a busy posthumous schedule as Cuthbert.

     
    In 1835 the remains of an expatriate Englishwoman were exhumed from the cemetery in the hamlet of Watervliet in upstateNew York. In this case, the reason for the exhumation wasn’t to see if the corpse was ‘incorrupt’, but to check that it was there at all. Ann Lee (1736–84), known to her followers as ‘Mother Ann’, or ‘Ann the Word’, was the leader of the Shaker movement in North America. Her personality was so dominant that even though she was a woman many of her followers believed she was the resurrected Christ and simply refused to accept that she could ever die.
    Ann Lee was born in Toad Lane, Manchester. The illiterate daughter of a blacksmith, she came from a large, poor family who sent her out to work as a velvet-cutter when she was only five years old. The job involved hours of walking backwards and forwards with a special knife, slitting open the tightly woven loops of silk to create a velvet pile. In the course of a day, a velvet-cutter might expect to cover 20 miles. By the age of eighteen Ann was working as a cook at the new Manchester Infirmary. She was a strong, big-boned girl with light chestnut hair and intense blue eyes. Despite her good looks, she conceived a deep hatred of sex from an early age, and most of the visions she witnessed (from her early teens onwards) focused on the depravity of human nature and the evils of lust. As second youngest of eight children she had grown up in a tiny house with her elder siblings, several of whom were cohabiting with their spouses. It may have been this exposure to sexual activity at close quarters and at an early age that was the source of Ann’s revulsion. She had such a compelling gift for persuasion, however, that she managed to get her own mother to take up celibacy. This infuriated her father, who threatened Ann with a whip.
    Her own marriage confirmed Ann’s worst suspicions. She had