Oswald’s gift of Lindisfarne, 6 miles up the coast from Bamburgh, to the monks from Iona enabled them to establish a monastery and a bishopric in the political heart of the Northumbrian kingdom. The ultimate success of the monks’ mission, together with the long-term wealth of their monastery, was founded on their proximity to the royal dynasty of Bernicia.Ĭuthbert died on 20 March 687 and was buried in a stone coffin inside the main church on Lindisfarne. Eleven years later the monks opened his tomb. To their delight they discovered that Cuthbert’s body had not decayed, but was ‘incorrupt’ – a sure sign, they argued, of his purity and saintliness. His remains were elevated to a coffin-shrine at ground level, and this marked the beginnings of the cult of St Cuthbert, which was to alter the course of Lindisfarne’s history. Miracles were soon reported at St Cuthbert’s shrine and Lindisfarne was quickly established as the major pilgrimage centre in Northumbria. As a result, the monastery grew in power and wealth, attracting grants of land from kings and nobles as well as gifts of money and precious objects. The cult of St Cuthbert also consolidated the monastery’s reputation as a centre of Christian learning. One of the results was the production in about 710–25 of the masterpiece of early medieval art known today as the Lindisfarne Gospels. In 1069–70 the Durham monks returned briefly to Lindisfarne with St Cuthbert’s relics to escape the ‘harrying of the North’ by the armies of William the Conqueror, which sought to suppress northern resistance to the Norman Conquest. This brief return prefigured the establishment of a permanent cell, or outpost, of the Durham community on Lindisfarne. Its purpose was to reaffirm the link between Anglo-Norman Durham and Anglo-Saxon Lindisfarne, and to establish the right of the Norman monks of Durham to be the guardians of St Cuthbert’s legacy. The precise date of the foundation of the new cell on Lindisfarne is uncertain, but by 1122 a Durham monk called Edward was active there. The earliest surviving reference to a full-scale community of monks is in a document dated 1172. The church, which was built by about 1150, contained a cenotaph (an empty tomb) marking the spot where, according to tradition, Cuthbert’s body had been buried. Although his relics were by then in Durham, the place of his primary shrine on Lindisfarne was still a sacred spot which attracted pilgrims. Initially there were probably only a few monks here, with numbers rising to about ten during the 13th century. Lindisfarne was staffed by monks from Durham, with each monk staying for two or three years before returning to the mother-house. In 1537 the priory was closed on the orders of the commissioners of Henry VIII (r.1509–47), one of the 200 or so smaller religious houses that were the first to be suppressed. The buildings of the priory were not dismantled at the Reformation, probably because (like Durham itself) they proved useful to the Crown’s defence strategy in the north.

In 1542–5 three earth-and-timber defences were built around the harbour to the east of the priory. At the same time, an ambitious plan was proposed for extensive outer defences.īy the later 18th century the by now ruinous remains had become a popular tourist attraction for antiquarians and artists. Drawings and descriptions of the priory show that until about 1780 the church survived virtually intact. By the 1820s, however, the central tower and south aisle had collapsed.Ī local landowner, Mr Selby, acquired the site in the early 19th century, and consolidated the remains. Sir William Crossman excavated the monastic buildings in the late 19th century, and in the early 20th century the church was excavated and the walls were consolidated.ĭespite his efforts, the west front collapsed in the 1850s. Joanna Story is Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester.

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