The Sea Inside

cook. (Conveniently, cetaceans could be eaten on fast days: the porpoise itself got its name from the French,
porc-poisson
, pork fish, and was ordained a ‘royal fish’ by the Normans to reserve it for the religious and the nobility.) On another occasion, while staying at the aptly named abbey of Coldingham on the Scottish coast, Cuthbert went out into the night to pray, wading naked into the water. Such chilly immersions were often undertaken by other northern monks to sustain their long vigils. One would often break the ice on the river to enter it. ‘Is it not cold, brother Drycthelm?’ his brethren called out, to which the phlegmatic monk replied, ‘I have known it colder.’ St David, too, was said to stand in the freezing sea to test his faith.
    After spending the dark hours up to his neck in the water, towards dawn Cuthbert returned to the shore, to be followed by two otters which began to play around his feet, warming his toes with their breath and drying them with their fur. Having done so, they received the saint’s blessing, then scampered back into the sea. (I wonder if the monks of Netley sought the spiritually-stiffening effects of Southampton Water? Perhaps if I were more saintly I might persuade a pair of marine mammals to perform a similar favour.) A twelfth-century illumination depicts the skinny-dipping Cuthbert cloaked by the waves, all the while spied upon by a curious fellow monk. Then, in a kind of time-lapse animation, the saint is seen seated on a rock, receiving his pedicure from the ghostly otters.
    Northumbrian monasteries such as Coldingham, Whitby and Lindisfarne were built by the sea; it was their highway, their fastness, and their undoing, laying them open to Viking raids. Cuthbert sought somewhere less accessible, and found his desert island in an archipelago of thirty remote rocks, ‘sieged on this side and that by the deep and infinite sea’. Nowadays the Farnes are famed for their grey seals, puffins, and nesting terns that threaten to peck interlopers’ heads, but Inner Farne had been long haunted by dark-faced demons, clad in cowls and riding goats, ‘their countenances most horrible’. The saint soon drove them off, much as his predecessor St Patrick ordered the serpents out of Ireland.
    ‘Farne’ means traveller or pilgrim, and in his quest for solitude, Cuthbert was not satisfied by the surrounding sea or the island’s basalt buttresses. He built a circular enclosure of boulders and turf whose floor he lowered ‘by cutting away the living rock’, leaving him with a view of only the sky, so as not to be distracted in his contemplations. Out in the unyielding grey of the North Sea, he became an anchorite on his island, if not anchored to it, like the chained saints of the desert, or the chained books in a library, both free and imprisoned in his cell.

    Within Cuthbert’s corral stood two structures: one an oratory, the other his house, roofed with rough beams and thatch. His settlement did not lack convenience: a third hut housed his toilet, handily flushed by the tides twice a day. And down in the island’s harbour he built a hospitium where visiting brethren could lodge. At first Cuthbert, who would stay on Inner Farne for nine years, came out to greet his callers and would wash their feet, not unlike his otters; but latterly, he’d merely wave a blessing from his window.
    In his lovely loneliness, Cuthbert sought only the company of non-human neighbours who, in return, performed services for him. Once, reading a psalter by the sea, the saint dropped his book into the water – I imagine its glittering illuminated and unchained pages fluttering as they tumbled into the murky depths, an expensive loss in an age when books were more precious than almost anything. At that moment, a seal dived down and returned with the book in its mouth. It too received a blessing for its efforts, although I suspect a little fresh fish would have been as welcome.
    And in his self-sufficiency, Cuthbert discovered that sometimes the local wildlife had to be taught a lesson. When a flock of birds began to raid his newly planted field of barley, he reproved them, ‘And why are you touching a crop you did not sow?’ They were followed by a persistent pair of ravens, who stole from his roof to line their nest. The saint asked, patiently, that they should return what they had taken, only to be scoffed at by the birds. That roused him to anger. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ,’ he