A Dean's Dozen: 12 Years living and working in a World Heritage Cathedral

Just over one hundred years ago, in 1912, a book was published with the title The Story of the Deanery, Durham, 1070-1912. Its author was George Kitchin. He had been dean since 1894. He was the author of works on, among other things, Francis Bacon, John Ruskin, the history of France, and Winchester where he had been dean before Durham. He was a friend of Lewis Carroll who had photographed his daughter. He was the last Dean of Durham to have oversight of the University, and was its first Chancellor.

His book on the Deanery was his last, and he never lived to see it published. It is a striking, large-format volume with many photographs and drawings, an invaluable record of the Deanery as it was in his day. While well researched, it does not pretend to be a work of scholarship. Rather, it is his tribute to a house he loved. In the preface, he describes himself as a passing hermit-crab who must soon leave this shelter he has enjoyed for rather longer than my own decanal 12 years. He says that he wants to ‘express my own thankfulness for being permitted to dwell in this shelter for an old man’s last days. The record of the ancient chambers makes the past live again and will, I hope, be an inspiration for all who may hereafter have the good fortune to live in this Deanery.’[1] So it has proved for this dean. My only regret is that I did not get to revise the book for its centenary in 2012, for there is a great deal about the Deanery that Kitchin did not know about that is now revealed, including the miraculous 15^th century wall painting in the entrance hall, what was once the Prior’s Chapel.

My subject in this lecture is Living and Working in a World Heritage Cathedral. I begin with the Deanery because the ‘living’ part of the title belongs there, as does much of the ‘working’ too. It is a relatively little-known part of the World Heritage Site, so I hope you will allow me to say something about my own experience of living there before I broaden the perspective to take in the more public and visible aspects of my role. In both, I want to try to reflect not on the built heritage itself, wonderful though it is, so much as on its interaction with human buildings, the symbolism and meanings it holds for us. I want to explore how in my experience, heritage functions to enrich and shape not only the lives of the people fortunate enough to inhabit it, but more specifically, the mission of the institution to which this acropolis is home, this Cathedral at the heart of this peninsula.

It is not the first time we have lived in a house that warrants an entry[2] in Pevsner’s Buildings of England. In the 1970s we occupied the medieval Hall of the Vicars Choral in Salisbury Close, so we had some experience of the interface between heritage and human living. Indeed, you get to know a building’s personality in a unique way when you begin to fill it up with children. Here in Durham, with children having long flown the family nest, we share the historic Deanery with student lodgers in the eyrie upstairs, and Godiva the cat. And, it seems, a visitant. This genius loci, whoever he is (and I am reliably informed that it is a ‘he’), makes himself known mostly to women on the north side of the house where it looks out on to the Chapter House. He is benign, but even I have known doors close and lights be switched on or off when I have known for certain that I have been alone in the house. Who is to say what guests these old buildings entertain unawares?

The Deanery was short-listed in a Country Life article in 2003 as part of a quest to find Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited house.[3] It was reluctantly disqualified on the grounds that before the Reformation, the Prior’s Lodging was not strictly speaking a private residence. But the evidence of hundreds of years of continuous occupancy is indeed one of its features. When I show visitors round, I tell them that every century from the 11^th to the 21^st has left its mark on the building. This is not the place to linger on the details which are a lecture in themselves. However, it is worth mentioning the contribution modernity has made to this, one of England’s greatest clergy houses. Dean Waddington had converted the medieval library into a Victorian gentleman’s study complete with fitted bookcases, tall sash windows and his own heraldic achievement above the great fireplace. For centuries deans still slept in a Tudor tester bed in the famous King James Room, so-called because the Scottish monarch had occupied it during his southward progress on acceding to the English throne in 1603. Kitchin’s book has photographs that record the house as it was at the turn of the 20^th century with its heavy over-furnished late Victorian and Edwardian interiors. The biggest transformation to happen after his time was Hensley Henson’s introduction of the colourful Chinese wallpaper that adorns the solarium, the room in the Deanery that everyone remembers, which Dean Spencer Cowper had converted from medieval solar to fashionable salon in the mid-18^th century. The story is that Ella, Henson’s wife, found the prospect of living in this vast and dreary Deanery unsupportable without colour. This the solarium abundantly provided. On sunlit days I doubt there is a more beautiful room in North East England.

The imminent arrival in 1974 of Eric Heaton as Durham’s first modernising Dean launched large-scale alterations to the Deanery. The Priors’ Hall was separated off for use for Cathedral use though it is still legally a part of the house. A new internal staircase halved the time it took to get from one floor to the next. A striking new entrance was created by George Pace with a spiral castellated stairway and a new front door opened up in the west wall of what had once been the Priors’ Chapel where there had once before been a door. The magnificent 15^th century paintings were uncovered on the north wall of the chapel, together with evidence of 13^th and 14^th century decoration and an array of medieval graffiti which continue to be recorded and studied today. The tantalising glimpse of the Virgin Mary’s skirts at the east end of the series tells us that there are more paintings that have yet to be exposed. In this period the interiors were extensively modernised for 20^th century family living. Finally, in 2011, we dedicated the Chapel of the Holy Cross in the 13^th century undercroft, a beautiful space with a Cistercian feel to it, lovingly furnished by local Durham woodworker Colin Wilbourn. Hensley Henson had created a chapel there in his day, and the Cathedral choristers famously slept in it during the war because its stone vault offered the best air-raid shelter in the College.

All this gives you a sense of the Deanery’s art and architecture. But what is it like to live there? You may not think this is worth lingering on: your home is your home, whether it is a medieval building in a Cathedral precinct, a Victorian vicarage, a 1930s detached house or an Edwardian villa in an elegant suburb – to summarise the clergy houses we have lived in for the past 40 years. However, if you are interested in the interaction between the built environment and human life, how we have configured our surroundings and how they to some extent configure us, then it is worth reflecting on the experience of living in such a remarkable house as the Deanery. Furthermore, because the Deanery is attached to the cloister and therefore to the Cathedral itself, living and working in the Deanery is almost an encapsulation, and maybe also a metaphor, of how I have experienced the Cathedral too.
 
The first thing to say is that like George Kitchin, I am not sure that even after 12 years I have fully taken in what it is to live in a house such as the Deanery. The experience of putting on hat and coat by the wall-paintings, answering emails in a grand Victorian library under its mellow 15^th century ceiling, chairing meetings in the King James Room surrounded by portraits of deans from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries, watching TV against the backdrop of 13^th century lancet windows with evidence of Islamic-inspired decoration, walking to evensong along the length of a rococo-gothic corridor created above the space where the original monastic dormitory latrine drains ran, celebrating a family Christmas in front of a big homely fire in the priors’ solar – I could go on and on. The chief thing, I know, is never to take any of this for granted. To occupy such surroundings is to realise the need to be more present to them, pay attention to their artistry, their memory, and indeed their spirituality. You should not live in a house such as this without becoming more of a contemplative, someone who in Thomas Hardy’s words ‘used to notice such things’. This is part of what I call ‘inhabiting’ the house.

I do not want to leave you with the impression that it is always straightforward to occupy a part of the nation’s heritage. It belongs to many more people than simply the family who live there. A deanery or a vicarage is always to some extent not entire your own, but you feel the sense of guardianship when it wears its history so palpably on its sleeve. Then there is the price you pay: the easy conveniences of modern living. In winter, we (and I include Godiva the cat in this) scuttle from one warm space to another along long, unheated corridors. The wifi won’t penetrate the great medieval walls beyond the office. Mobile phone signal is patchy because of the way the bulk of the Cathedral just yards away vastly distorts the aether like a huge star influencing space-time in general relativity theory. If you forget that your freshly laundered pyjamas are in the airing cupboard in the undercroft, it is 53 steps down and up again from the bedroom. If you burn the toast, the ultra-sensitive smoke alarms go off and the fire brigade is outside before you can say mea culpa. When the west wind blows fiercely, bits of sandstone drop off the eroded exterior like meteorites, sometimes outside the front door where people go in and out. I could go on. Life in a medieval deanery is nothing if not eventful.

There is one aspect of life in the Deanery that is almost (not quite) unique in England. This is its physical attachment to the Cathedral itself. When people who don’t know Durham ask me where I live, I often reply that it is in an end-of-terrace or semi on the south-east corner of the cloister. This is architecturally the case, despite the Deanery’s character as a medieval manor house complete with hall, solar, chapel and library all constituting the required piano nobile. This means that the Dean of Durham lives not so much above the shop as in it. This has its convenient aspects: I can be in my stall for matins and evensong in less time than it takes to get to the College gate, let alone to the shops. What is more, I have a dry decanal foul-weather route to prayer while my Chapter colleagues are exposed to wind and rain on the way across the precinct into the cloister. But it also raises questions about where ‘work’ space ends and ‘personal’ space begins; inevitably, the boundaries are porous much of the time. The medieval priors who once occupied the house would not have understood the concept of ‘personal’ or ‘private’: there was no such thing when a Benedictine community lived together under rule. Every parish priest faces the same dilemmas if his or her house is close to the church and perhaps connected to it by means of a dedicated path through the church yard. So the ‘attachment’ of the Deanery to the Cathedral symbolises something that is deeply embedded in the concept of vocation: a dean belongs to his or her cathedral in an inalienable way, tied to it by an inviolable umbilical cord.

And this leads me on to what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the ‘living’ dimension of my title ‘living and working in a World Heritage Site’. This umbilical connection to a sacred space, that is, the Cathedral, has affected the way in which I have felt about the Deanery. In a sacred space, behaviours are modified, calibrated to what is appropriate to a place dedicated to encounter with the divine, this mysterium tremendum et fascinans as Rudolph Otto famously called the ‘idea’ of the holy. To be architecturally, psychologically and ethnographically connected to a shrine like Durham Cathedral poses questions about the meanings attached to this house, the symbolism it carries. It speaks to the soul, fertilises the imagination.  But the paradoxes are even sharper than that. For one thing, the north side of the house where benign presences have been felt and reported, stands on or near the site of the place where Cuthbert’s coffin may have been placed from 1093 to 1104 when the new shrine, sanctuary and quire of the Romanesque cathedral were being built. If this is right, then plausibly the house holds a memory of being inhabited for a while by a saint, indeed, for the same length of time – a dozen years – of my own occupancy. In its more recent history, the present hallway and PA’s office occupy what was once what was once Prior Melsonby’s Chapel, as I have mentioned in connection with the wall paintings. It was probably Thomas Comber, the dean installed in 1691 to replace the nonjuring Denis Granville who had been ejected in the Glorious Revolution of 1689, who is said to have ‘improved’ the Deanery and converted the obsolete chapel into living quarters[4].

So the dean and his family live, not adjacent to a sacred space, but to some extent inside one, or the memory of one. Where the chapel once was, family and guests come in and out. My PA works on her computer and manages the Dean. Upstairs, the family entertain, relax, watch TV, enjoy a late night whisky, shower, bathe, dress, undress and sleep. Too much information, you may say. But it raises interesting questions about the interface between sacred and profane, especially when it comes to the functions associated with a bathroom situated in what was once a place of prayer. Sacred memory and secular reality intersect intriguingly. I don’t want to become obsessive about this, but I do believe that an important aspect of heritage is the honouring of memory. How to do this responsibly and well is a question has never been absent from my mind for very long. It’s one dimension of living and working in this World Heritage Site.

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Let me turn now to the Cathedral itself. Here again, as with the Deanery, I want to reflect on the personal experience of ‘living and working’ in Durham Cathedral and how my own persona has been to a great extent shaped during these dozen Durham years.

I have been fortunate in the ecclesiastical buildings I have worked in over four decades of public ministry. I was ordained 40 years ago this June beneath the Romanesque chancel arch of St Andrew’s, Headington in Oxford. Then followed six years in the Close at Salisbury where, in addition to lecturing in Old Testament studies, I was an honorary vicar choral at the peerless 13^th century Cathedral. After this came five years as Vicar of Alnwick in Northumberland, a sturdy late-gothic building near the Castle, complete with ducal emblems on the capitals of the elaborate chancel, and a mini-bastle above the sanctuary, a look-out against Scots raids from the north. I then enjoyed eight years at Coventry Cathedral as Precentor and Vice-Provost, followed by another eight as Dean of Sheffield. Thence to Durham. All fine buildings of many different epochs and styles. If you know your geology you will recognise in this list more than 30 years of sandstone of various hues, from the lovely pink-red of Warwickshire to the blackened millstone grit of South Yorkshire, and the golden but friable sandstones of Northumberland and County Durham. When it comes to cathedrals, I am wholly a sandstone dean. I have a distant memory of finely-wrought limestones in the south. But I am now a habitué of the north of England’s rougher-hewn sandstones: always beautiful to look at, always responsive to the changing seasons and the shifting light, always lovable; but there is no denying the conservation challenges they pose. More of this towards the end.

I first visited Durham in 1966 as a schoolboy applying to read maths here. Out of the recent experience of having been baptised a Christian, I was awed by the Cathedral, even on that bleak November day under the kind of sullen, steely sky the North East does so well. Could I have even entertained the thought that my future lay here? Hardly, given that on that first ever visit, I managed somehow to walk right round the Cathedral without discovering St Cuthbert’s shrine. Perhaps after 12 years here it is time to own up to this extraordinary and shameful omission. But in my defence, there is something ‘apart’ about the feretory, like a little Farne Island set in the great sea that is the 13^th century Chapel of the Nine Altars. In 2003, I asked to be installed on St Cuthbert’s Day, and perhaps this went some way towards saying sorry to our saint.

As we know, the Cathedral, the city, the University would not be here were it not for the travels of Cuthbert’s Saxon community who arrived on this rock in 995 and erected the first shrine to house the relics of their saint. In my book about the Christian heritage of this part of England, I described the Cathedral as the ‘mystic heart’ of the North East.[5] I believe this to be true as a matter both of history and of what I have called sacred geography. On reflection, there is another more personal level of meaning in this phrase in that I have discovered how the Cathedral is the ‘mystic heart’ of my own spirituality and Christian identity.  I don’t mean this to sound like the kind of purple prose clergy resort to in the pulpit. I mean that any great building has the propensity to mould and shape the people whose life and work is intensely focused on it or in it. When the building is a sacred space like a cathedral, church, mosque, temple or synagogue, then its symbolism, history, memory and a great deal else becomes enfolded in those people’s worship and prayer. Some of it is conscious, as in the worthy if undistinguished hymn ‘We love the place O God / wherein thine honour dwells’. Much more, I suspect, is subliminal, unconscious. A lot of it has to do with our psyche, the Jungian ‘soul’ where the archetypes reside and which is the seat of our projections and transferences. A cathedral is heavily freighted with symbolism for everyone in a thousand different ways. When it is Durham Cathedral, and when the core of the job entails being present at the twice-daily prayers in addition to the countless other engagements in and around the building every day brings, you will see why I use this elevated language. And living as I do in a Deanery whose northward, westward and eastward prospects are all dominated by the huge bulk of this immensely powerful presence, it is understandable that it comes to shape the life of the person who is the head of its foundation.

That phrase ‘mystic heart’ focuses on what Christian discourse calls ‘spiritual formation’. In this building that is beyond words when we try to capture what we love about it, this formational dimension of the cathedral is one of its charisms, a gift of grace. It touches all of us for whom it is our place of work. For example, when I sit down as I always do with the cohort of choristers who are leaving us at the end of their time in the choir, I ask them what effect the building has had on them. What comes across is that it has become something extraordinarily precious to them. There is much that is hard for them to leave behind at the summer choir farewell service, but the prospect of losing the easy familiarity with a great building that they have come to feel at home in is one of the aspects of this, and of course it symbolises so much else that this rite of passage represents for them. For me as dean, this ‘mystic heart’ has shaped my practice and language of prayer in the ways that have been prominent in the long spiritual history of Durham: the intense discipline of Saxon Christianity as embodied by Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede; the ordering and patterning of human life according to the Rule of St Benedict that was followed here throughout the monastic centuries; and the catholic Anglicanism of the post-Reformation settlement especially as it was lived out by Durham’s greatest bishop, John Cosin. It is not that these aspects of spiritual ‘character’ were not already present when I came here as dean. But they have all become a lot more explicit, better understood, and I hope more intelligently integrated into this particular person’s life as a Christian and a priest of the 21^st century.

I want to say something about liturgy in Durham Cathedral. As in all great Romanesque cathedrals, you find in Durham a sense of ‘massive enclosure and strong verticality’.[6] Whereas the gothic cathedral, inspired by the Abbé Suger’s vision at Saint Denis and embodied in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, is a casket of light that embodies heaven itself[7], Romanesque suggests the fortress, a place safe from the assaults of demonic principalities and powers. In some places, Romanesque churches provided a safe place where people could gather for protection against threats posed by a human enemy closer at hand: ‘half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot’. The ancient right of sanctuary at Durham was an example of this protective function. This ‘defensive’ character of Durham serves to demarcate its sacred space with particular clarity. This is why, I think, the Chapter of Durham has always been careful to protect the church from inappropriate use: the idea of the sacred may be more generously defined now than in the middle ages, but it always carries the danger of violating it, consciously or unconsciously. To the Chapter, charging visitors for admission would imply such a compromise. This is why, in my time, we have not wavered in our resolve to maintain free access to what is not, after all, our space but God’s.

Worship is a kind of theatre, a Wagnerian Gesammtkunstwerk or ‘total art form’ in which dramatic action, words, silence, music, colour, space and audience interact in a way that is always unique to a particular time and place. If you asked people why they worship at the Cathedral, many would speak about the character of the building itself as the setting for liturgy. ‘The place is almost as much the thing as is the play’ says one writer on theatre design. He is wholly correct but for the word ‘almost’[8]. The Cathedral was built by Benedictines whose central vows focused on the words stability, obedience and conversion of life. You would expect their church, constructed when English Romanesque had reached its maturity, to embody those values. So the sense of solid enclosure echoes the change of attitude and aspiration implied by crossing the threshold into the sacred space; the hierarchical structure of the west-east axis from Galilee and font to bishop’s throne, high altar and saint’s shrine speak of obedience; and the huge drum piers and stone vault of stability and permanence. This, at least, is the way I have come to ‘read’ the church not as an architectural masterpiece so much as a building replete with many layers of spiritual value and significance.

It’s impossible for me to do justice to the ways these insights have touched me personally. But here are a few themes. First must come the divine office, celebrated twice daily in the monastic quire every day in the year. We occupy Bishop Cosin’s stalls each weekday morning and evening, just as the Priory monks gathered in the same place during the Benedictine centuries. In the evening the office is sung by the Cathedral choir. I can’t stress enough the significance of this thousand year continuity of prayer. It has been broken only once, when there was no Cathedral foundation during the Commonwealth. People sometimes ask me what I think is the most important thing I do as Dean. My answer is always: the lead the Chapter and community in its rule of daily prayer as the head of the Foundation. And if there is one gift that I can barely contemplate living without after these decades of cathedral ministry in four different places, it is choral evensong.

Daily prayer on weekdays is often an intimate occasion. You may be surprised to think that prayer as an intimate community of laity and clergy is possible in a great cathedral, but it is. And intimacy is a word I use to describe how I have become more familiar with it, even at large-scale acts of worship. For example, I have got to know the 14^th century Neville Screen that separates the sanctuary from the shrine quite well through presiding at the high altar at close proximity. It is likely that the greatest of high medieval architects Henry de Yvele built it: for the Nevilles, only the best would do. There are angels carved into the Caen limestone that were spared the destructiveness of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. One in particular, right in the centre, has a seraphic smile that I have come to love. I love the way the light plays on the nave vaults in midwinter at the Sunday eucharist, and the pillar above the Precentor’s stall that glows with a golden light at matins on sunny solstice days.   I love the symmetries of the Cathedral that are palpable when you stand at the nave altar at the intersection of all three axes in the crossing and sense that you are at the still centre of an extraordinarily dynamic building. I love the great liturgical processions up the central nave aisle, particularly at Advent, Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, or at the Miners’ Gala Service and Matins for the Courts of Justice, when the piers and high vaults suggest a noble avenue of great trees with their canopy spread out above. I love the screens that mark thresholds that we cross on our long march from west to east, the journey that recalls the pilgrimage to the shrine and that speaks of the spiritual journey from our beginnings at the font to the vision of God at the high altar and shrine. I could rhapsodise about stained glass and floors and textiles and sculpture and much else. I think you will get my meaning. 

However, there is a shadow side to everything. When your work is almost wholly bound up in an institution with a high public profile, when its building is emblematic (I do not say iconic) to millions of people across the world, I can experience the Cathedral as demand as well as gift. I think every dean will say the same, but not all deans live in umbilical connection with their cathedral I have talked about, or are faced with its profile rearing massively and sometimes darkly up just outside the kitchen window. I need to analyse what I am and am not saying about how this ‘mystic heart’ exercises a pull on this dean that he does not always welcome. It is to do with its thereness. It never goes away. Its requirements are never ending: it is insatiably greedy in its hunger for money, resources, time, energy, engagement. Your commitment to it has to be all or nothing. I say to myself: this is like Christian discipleship itself. If it is worth giving yourself to it, you don’t hold anything back. It is for life. It is life.

The history of Durham tells us that this mighty Romanesque cathedral was not always welcomed as a benign presence. To the Saxons, it represented the naked power of the invader, erected as it was in the brutal aftermath of the Conquest. Its defensive position next to the Castle reinforced the message of political hegemony, a Northern clash of civilisations. The hitching of St Cuthbert’s ensign to this mighty Norman battleship was a shrewd political move and in time had the desired effect of winning over the Saxons to accept the new regime. But I doubt that the Saxons ever loved it. We can confidently say, given Cuthbert’s reported unwillingness to be buried even on Lindisfarne, that he would have been baffled if not profoundly dismayed at the idea that he would be entombed in the Norman Cathedral. What it later became for the Counts Palatine (as we should call the Prince-Bishops) simply reinforced the distance Christianity in the north had travelled from its simple beginnings on Iona and then Lindisfarne.

To my mind, this history of ambivalence is a necessary corrective to an unduly romanticised notion of Durham Cathedral. Necessary, because we are not true to buildings, including cathedrals, if we do not acknowledge the less endearing features of their history and name their darker aspects. To the Saxons, the Cathedral represented a power and control which there was no negotiating. In the high middle ages and well into the industrial period, the Cathedral’s enormous wealth was perceived as alienating and even corrupting. To the Scottish prisoners incarcerated inside it in the winter of 1650-51, left there by Cromwell’s troops to make do without food, drink, fuel or even rudimentary sanitation, it was a terrible place of hunger, disease and death. I am not saying that these memories should unduly colour our perceptions today. But when William Blake said, famously, that ‘joy and woe are woven fine’, this is as true of places and buildings as it is of human life. There are tears in things as well as joy. And sometimes, the Cathedral can seem to re-exert a more primitive kind of power, a more insistent and uncompromising demand, over us who inhabit it than our millions of visitors and pilgrims perhaps imagine. It is especially important that we who worship and work in cathedrals should not collude with rose-hued fantasies about them. Whatever else it is, Durham Cathedral must be a place of truth. Without personifying it, I believe that only when we are in an entirely honest relationship with it can it perform this heart-work of shaping human and Christian character.

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This experience of living and working in a World Heritage Site has helped to shape my thinking about the place of heritage in today’s world. A dean has to give a great deal of time and effort to his or her Cathedral as part of the nation’s heritage. You have to love your cathedral for its fabric, architecture and art as well as for its community, its liturgy, its music, its outreach and everything else it represents. If you don’t relish this task, if you don’t care for ancient buildings, if you see them as a distraction from the church’s mission, don’t become a dean. Trust me.

In Durham, I have wanted to lead the Chapter and community in asking the question, how can we make much more of the outstanding heritage we have in this cathedral, whether its medieval buildings and spaces, its incomparable library and collections, its music and arts, and, intangibly, its history and significance in the development of Christianity in the North East? During the past 12 years, we have, I believe, added to the ‘legacy’ in ways that I hope will prove not only important but enduring. In terms of the ‘heritage’ you can see, I should highlight the Paula Rego painting of Queen Margaret of Scotland that stands by her altar; the window given by the Friends in memory of Bishop Michael Ramsey, representing the transfiguration of the Lord; the Pietà by Fenwick Lawson which, although it has been in the Cathedral for many years, has now been bought for us, thanks to the Friends; the Lama Sabachthani crucifix in the north quire aisle by Kirill Sokolov, the Deanery Undercoft Chapel of the Holy Cross, the nave choir stalls, the Laus Deo organ and the Lenten and ‘New Creation’ hangings and vestments. All these are motivated by the belief that the church needs to speak to today’s and tomorrow’s generations in the discourse of the present as well as the past.

Meanwhile, conservation of the fabric has continued throughout this time, and will increase significantly in pace as we follow through the latest quinquennial inspection report by the Cathedral architect. As every dean will tell you, it is like painting the Forth Bridge. The job is never done. I could say much about that; and I could also speak about less tangible heritage that has added to the Cathedral’s mission: the girls’ top line in the choir, commissions for new choral music, putting Cuthbert back into the legal title of the Cathedral five and a half centuries after Henry VIII had summarily excised it, the return to the library of medieval manuscripts and early printed books that had been lost at the Dissolution. There has also been a spate of books and writings about the Cathedral culminating in the great volume just published that will be the definitive survey of its heritage for decades, Durham Cathedral: history, fabric and culture.

But one development has dwarfed all the others. It was with the prospect of the Lindisfarne Gospel Book visiting Durham in 2013 that we embarked on the development we have called Open Treasure. The aim has not been simply to open up the marvellous claustral buildings and display some of the best artefacts we have to exhibit. It has been to try to say something significant about what it has meant to be Durham Cathedral in past generations, and in the present. In an era that is increasingly distanced from organised religion, baffled and often alienated by what it represents, and not well informed about even the simplest aspects of Christian belief, we need to present ourselves as more than simply a place of heritage. We could put it this way: the challenge is to identify and interpret the ‘intangible assets’ of this piece of Christian heritage, the values which are to do with the religious character of the Cathedral as a living, working, breathing building: who and what this community of faith has been, and is now, and aspires to be in the future. This, briefly, is Open Treasure. We have already reconfigured the beautiful undercrofts where the restaurant and shop are housed. The monastic dormitory, the great kitchen and a new gallery linking them are being transfigured as we speak into exhibition spaces that will take our guests along a timeline that will present our heritage as best we know how. You will see for yourselves when they open to the public in 2016.

So why this extraordinarily costly investment into heritage? In a perceptive essay, the former Dean of Christ Church Oxford considers the relationship between religious faith and heritage.[9] He warns against three abuses of heritage. First, heritage can be used to tell a story selectively, editing out those aspects of it that are ambiguous or with which contemporary concerns and attitudes are out of sympathy. This has been a particular challenge to us at Durham where we have tried to interpret our remarkable religious heritage intelligently in a secular age and persuade (successfully) the Heritage Lottery Fund and other agencies to support us. Then heritage can obscure the ‘sheer pastness of history’ so as to make it accessible and marketable. It can be presented in a nostalgic way that may reassure the public but which also obscures its truth. What I have learned at Durham is that the past is indeed another country where they do things differently. The Benedictine period, and still more the Saxon era of St Cuthbert, are worlds that it takes a great deal of intellectual effort and spiritual imagination to envisage. We should not cut corners, nor think that in all respects these pasts are to be imitated by us today. Thirdly, Lewis warns against the innate conservatism of attitudes to heritage that require it to be for ever fixed in the form in which we inherited it or imagine it once to have been. The presumption against change, especially in a heritage asset as prominent and universally loved as Durham Cathedral, is a complex matter when the building also represents a faith that is always renewing itself, as the history of the building itself evidences.

A sacred building is of course very much more than a physical edifice. It is a rich cluster of symbols, metaphors, meanings, transferences and projections. It holds value for people who may never worship there or anywhere, yet who are responsive to its complex human, aesthetic and spiritual texture. It is, in the proper use of the word, ‘iconic’, a physical entity that is ‘written’ into not only a particular landscape and cultural environment but on to the hearts and souls of human beings. It is a sacramental quality, a ‘mystery better articulated by poetry than rational argument.’[10]And as John Inge says, this can never be fully described or analysed: ‘places have a “personality” as a result of people’s interaction with them…. As with a human personality, [it] will defy analysis.’

The opportunity, for all of us who care for our spiritual heritage, is to cherish this uniquely precious symbol that is not only extraordinarily beautiful, and not only indispensable to the history of the North East, but is, as I have said, its mystic heart. It is not the building and its environment, but the inhabited entity and the experience of the people who come here that make it a living part of our heritage. It belongs to us all. And when the time comes for me as dean to move on from this hermit-crab’s shell I have occupied for a dozen years, it will not belong to me any less than it does now. If I have learned one thing in my time here, it is that the World Heritage Site is a gift for life to treasure, to honour and to love, and to go on ‘inhabiting’, if not in the way I have been privileged to during these wonderful twelve years, then always, till I die, in memory, imagination and thankfulness.

---

[1] Kitchin, G. W., The Story of the Deanery, Durham, 1070-1912, Durham 1912, 9-11.

[2] Pevsner, N., revised Williamson, E., The Buildings of England: County Durham, London 1985, 206f.

[3] Goodall, John, ‘As Old as the Halls’, Country Life, 28 August 2003, 38ff.

[4] Hussey, Christopher, ‘The Deanery, Durham’, Country Life 26 November 1938, 526ff.

[5] Sadgrove, Michael, Landscapes of Faith: the Christian heritage of North East England, London 2013, 61.

[6] Seasoltz, R. Kevin, A Sense of the Sacred: theological foundations of Christian architecture and art, London 2006, 120.

[7] Male, Émile, The Gothic Image: Religious Art In France Of The Thirteenth Century 1899, ri New York 1958.

[8] MacKintosh, Iain, Architecture, Actor and Audience, London 1993, 4.

[9] Lewis, Christopher, ‘Christianity as Heritage’, Theology CVII/835, 2004, 30ff.

[10] Inge, John, A Christian Theology of Place, Aldershot 2007, 85-6.

Two Churches, a Bishop and a Saint: the St Cuthbert's Lecture at Darlington

It is a great pleasure to be back here in this great church to speak to you. The topic I have been given is the connections between Durham Cathedral and St Cuthbert’s Darlington. There are many, and most of them date back several hundred years, as we shall see. It is these that I want to focus on in this lecture. But not before mentioning the two literal connections that have linked Durham and Darlington in more recent centuries. I am thinking of the Great North Road, and the North Eastern Railway. The industrial development of the North East in the 19^th century owed much to both these transport arteries that ran across the region from south to north. In particular, Durham’s great railway viaduct, built by T.E. Harrison in 1857, was commissioned by the Stockton and Darlington to bring trains into their new terminus at the northern end of their line from Bishop Auckland. I include this because Darlington is one of the nation’s historic railway shrines. The County Durham coalfield would never have prospered were it not for the development of the wagon-way, and then the steam engine, in this southern part of Durham’s hinterland. 

But it is to the middle ages that the closest links between Darlington and Durham belong, and particularly (though not exclusively) between this church and the Cathedral. There are three. The first is architectural, the second historical and the third, for want of a better word, religious. To see the connections I shall try to make among these three you will need to be patient. But I want to emphasise at the outset that I believe all three ultimately feed the theological and spiritual links that exist between the two places.

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My first connection is architectural. St Cuthbert’s is one of the great parish churches in the north of England. In my book, I described it as ‘one of the best examples of a town church of [its] era not just in the north but anywhere. The grandeur of this cruciform building with its splendid tower and spire is evident from the railway line… In a market town you want the parish church to be prominent enough to [‘crown’ its setting. This Darlington does to perfection. The church is an apt commentary on the civic aspirations of this place, later to be so amply rewarded by the coming of the railway, and later still by the granting of unitary authority status, unusual for a place which, despite its growth, is still experienced as a real town and not as a sprawling industrial conurbation like most of its neighbours.’[1]

But this church is particularly distinguished for its architectural excellence. While there was a Saxon church on this site, the present building was begun in the late 12^th century and completed in the first half of the 13^th century. This was the era of the architectural style we call ‘Early English’, the first of the three principal phases of Gothic in which all our cathedrals, churches and abbeys were constructed between the 13^th and the early 16^th centuries. Darlington is a particularly pure example of this, a pioneering experiment in the new style along with the great hall at Auckland Castle. Almost all the windows are narrow pointed lancets carefully arranged round the building to create a strong sense of geometry, particularly in the three banks of windows in the east wall, and two in the west.

So this was a church on which no expense was spared: this was because throughout the high middle ages, St Cuthbert’s was collegiate, staffed not by an incumbent alone but by a dean and four canons.  This is reflected in the architecture of a proud cruciform church with a crossing tower. You only find three west doors in churches that are intended to make a grand statement. Of course, the church was added to after the 13^th century, particularly the windows in the aisles, enlarged to let in more light when the roofs were raised in the 14^th century, and the top of the tower with its spire from the same century. Since then, the building has been much restored, especially in the 19^th century in common with every other distinguished medieval church. But its essence is of the 13^th century in its purest form. If we were to list the ten best Early English parish churches in north east England, Darlington would certainly be one of them. (The great church of St Hilda at Hartlepool would be another, as would Hexham Abbey, and if we were allowed to include monastic churches, Brinkburn and Tynemouth Priories would be on the list too. Honorary mention should also be made of Ripon Cathedral which may have influenced the design of this church.)

But this lecture is about links between this church and Durham Cathedral. The reason architecture is my first connection is that the Cathedral, too, has an example of the highest achievements of 13^th Century Early English.  This is the Chapel of the Nine Altars that surrounds the shrine of St Cuthbert. We think of the Cathedral – rightly – as one of the world’s finest Romanesque churches, yet it also contains one of its highest achievements in early Gothic, ‘one of the most beautifully proportioned monuments of the Early English style at its ripest’.[2] In that mighty eastward extension of the quire, with its majestic transepts, you can see the same distinctive strengths as here in Darlington, particularly the geometrical array of lancet windows lined up along the east face surrounding the rose window in the midst.

The history of the Nine Altars is, however, rather different from St Cuthbert’s Darlington. Two motives underlay its construction. The principal reason for creating such a huge volume at the east end was to promote the pilgrimage to Cuthbert’s shrine. In the 12^th century, many thousands of pilgrims had made the journey to the shrine, for Cuthbert was without doubt England’s premier saint. However, the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 had the effect in diverting vast numbers of pilgrims southwards, as we know from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Cathedral Priory was in danger of losing large revenues that accrued from the pilgrimage. So they set about energetically promoting the cult of Cuthbert, and reorganising the space around his shrine both to emphasise its central significance for Durham and the north, and also to create better flows of large crowds around the feretory itself.

In the shrine, you can see the original Romanesque apse, the eastward termination of the Cathedral marked out on the floor round the tomb. This had already proved impracticable because of the constructed circulation space, and it did not enhance the dignity of this spiritual and emotional heart of the Cathedral. It was the 13^th century Bishop Richard Poore who instigated this new building, though he did not live long enough to begin work on it. He had been Bishop of Salisbury and had been the mind behind the construction of its great Cathedral of New Sarum. Like this church, it is an extraordinarily pure example of Early English, probably the best in England. So who better to design the new extension at Durham than Bishop Poore’s great master mason at Salisbury, Richard of Farnham (as we suppose). The result is an uncanny imitation of Salisbury, the only significant difference being that instead of the black shafts of Purbeck Marble he had used to such effect in Salisbury, here he chose the indigenous Frosterley Marble instead – not, of course, a true marble but a limestone that polishes up to produce a reflective marble-like surface.         

The second reason for constructing the Nine Altars Chapel was a direct imitation of a similar arrangement at Fountains Abbey. Here, the great Cisterician Abbey had solved the problem of how to allow each of the many priest-brothers of the community to celebrate mass at one of the Abbey’s altars within a reasonable space of time, as the priestly rule of life required. So they lined up nine altars against the east wall of the eastern transept, and this was the arrangement that suited the equally populous Benedictine community at Durham Cathedral Priory.

What is it about the Early English Gothic style that is both distinctive and compelling? Its importance lies in that it introduced an entirely new concept in both the theological vision of a great church, and the engineering principles that gave it physical expression. Great Romanesque buildings like the Cathedral had solved the problem of how to build on a grand scale without the threat of collapsing vaults and toppling towers. But this could only be achieved in the 11^th and 12^th centuries by conceiving them as a kind of fortress with thick walls, giant piers and great buttresses, with narrow windows that were sufficient to let in a certain amount of light, but small enough not to compromise the structural integrity of the wall. This matched the Romanesque concept of a spiritual castle whose role was to contain a sacred space as a safe space, securely defended against the assaults of Satanic enemies. A Romanesque church is, in one sense, a defence against fear and anxiety.

The Gothic style was changing that. It emerged in France with the construction of a new cathedral at Saint Denis, now a suburb of Paris. The great Abbé Suger’s vision was of a temple that would be filled with light and splendour, an translucent casket that would reflect the glory of the heavenly Jerusalem. To achieve this, he needed to abandon the Romanesque idea of the fortress, and imagine walls built not of stone but of glass; and to emphasise not so much the length of a great church as its height through its soaring verticals culminating in a vault or tower. By the end of the 12^th century in France, structural engineering had developed to the point where this could begin to be the reality. So great churches in the new Gothic style, the continental equivalent of our Early English, sprang up all over northern France: at Nôtre Dame in Paris, at Sens and Vézelay in Burgundy and at Chartres.

Gothic crossed the Channel with the building of a new quire at Canterbury Cathedral whose mason, William of Sens, had built the great cathedral there. But it is interesting to see how slowly this style reached Northern England and Scotland. By 1170, Gothic was becoming the norm in France and was beginning to be adopted in southern England. But in Durham, they were still building in the older Romanesque style as we can see from the Galilee Chapel of the Cathedral. Here, there is a quite new concept of lightness and grace, which anticipates Gothic, yet the design is still unambiguously Norman, as it is in Dunfermline Abbey and St Magnus Cathedral, Orkney, both very late examples of Romanesque. In the north, it was only in the 13^th century that Gothic began to make itself felt. This church, and Durham’s Nine Altars are among its prime achievements; and this first of my three connections is a good reason for celebration.

*******

My second connection is historical. I have talked about the Bishop who inspired the Nine Altars at Durham. But who was behind this great Early English Church here in Darlington, and why was it significant?

The answer is: another of Durham’s bishops, a predecessor of Poore. Hugh le Puiset held office from 1153 to 1195, an extraordinarily long incumbency. He was one of Durham’s great prince-bishops who relished nothing so much as an ambitious construction project to which, no doubt, he was pleased to see his nickname Pudsey attached. He was a high-born Frenchman, a nephew of King Stephen of England and of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and one of the most influential men in the kingdom. He was elected Bishop by the Cathedral Chapter at the uncanonical age of 28, though not consecrated until the following year, owing to the hostility of the Archbishop of York who had contended the election: the ecclesiastical politics surrounding his accession to Durham is a story to go into on another occasion. In 1189 he purchased the offices of Earl of Northumbria and Sheriff of Northumberland for £2000 and paid a further £1000 for the office of Justiciar and a release from his crusading vow, though it was said that God would not be pleased with a bishop whose loyalty to both a heavenly and an earthly king was compromised. And this was a real risk, for ‘he was determined not to allow the grandeur, wealth, or magnificence to be abated one jot. Untouched by either the clerical zeal of the Gregorian reformers or the humility beloved of the Cistercians and their admirers, he pursued the life of an old-fashioned late-Frankish aristocrat’.[3]

His legacy is everywhere in North East England. By acquiring the Wapentake of Sadberge near here, which had once been part of Northumberland, he fixed the Tees as the southern boundary of his County Palatine. In addition to his castle at Northallerton, he rebuilt the border fortress at Norham in stone, in the northernmost detached parts of the Durham Palatinate, not to mention a new bridge over the Tweed at Berwick. He founded Sherburn Hospital for lepers near Durham. In his episcopal residence of Durham Castle, he constructed the gallery that runs across the inner bailey, where we have one of the best Norman doorways in England leading up into the residence proper. We owe to him Durham’s fine medieval bridge that linked the episcopal and Priory lands on the peninsula with the ancient borough of Elvet.

In the Cathedral, his outstanding achievement was to build the new Galilee as a Lady Chapel with a shrine for St Bede. The original plan had been to place this at the east end, where the Nine Altars now is, but the ground proved unstable, it was said (without foundation) because Cuthbert did not approve of a place of worship for women so close to his shrine. He also commissioned the great Puiset Bible, one of the outstanding manuscripts to have survived from the Cathedral Priory’s great library, and still in our collection as Manuscript A.II.1: four great volumes containing more than 130 square metres of parchment, nearly 7 miles of writing and with a combined weight of more than 100 lbs.[4] We do not know whether he commissioned this beautiful work for the Cathedral Priory or for his own use, nor where the writing and illumination was done.

Another of Le Puiset’s great achievements was the production in 1183 of the so-called Boldon Book. This was a survey of the estates, revenues and customs of the Bishopric of Durham in the 12^th century. It only covered lands belonging to the Bishops and which were subject to taxation by him rather than the Crown: 124 estates in County Durham and 16 in its detached parts in Northumberland. It did not include estates belonging to other land-owners such as the Cathedral Priory, itself richly endowed with property bequeathed to the Community of St Cuthbert. The book is named after the township of Boldon whose 22 tenant-farms are listed with together with their rents in money and in kind and other obligations are listed. In other places where there were episcopal villeins, their duties are listed ‘as at Boldon’. Here in Darlington, there were 48 villeins or bondmen out of 70 tenant farmers in the Bondgate community who gave their name to the street. Like the Domesday Book of the previous century, which did not cover lands north of the Tees, it is an invaluable source for our understanding of society as it was evolving in the century after the Norman Conquest.[5]

What about Le Puiset and Darlington? His achievement was substantial, and indeed could be said to have shaped the centre of this town as we now have it. He was said to have built a manor house on the site now occupied by the town hall, a southern ‘office’ for the administration of his large and complex diocese. His square market-place, the ‘borough’, was lined on three sides by burgage plots and tenements. On the fourth side, toward the east, stood the church with its churchyard skirting the River Skerne. And this church was the focus of his ambition for the town which by his time had already become a substantial centre of trade and economic activity in the Tees Valley.

I have already mentioned that St Cuthbert’s was collegiate, staffed by a Dean and four canons whose prebends were endowed by Darlington itself, Cockerton, Blackwell and Archdeacon Newton. But this foundation is the heir to a longer history that establishes another connection with Durham. Lands in Darlington had been given to the Community of St Cuthbert by the Danish-Yorkshire nobleman Styr, son of Ulf a few years after the arrival of Cuthbert’s Community on the Durham peninsula in 995. This donation may reflect shifting power-alliances in the 11^th century that consolidated Northumbria’s position.[6] But all this changed in 1066. As a result in 1083, the Benedictines were brought from Wearmouth and Jarrow to Durham as part of the Norman bishops’ project of suppressing Saxon religious communities in their cathedrals for the more rigorously disciplined life lived according to the monastic Rule of St Benedict. These displaced secular canons were dispersed to a number of other churches in the region, St Cuthbert’s Darlington, belonging to the patrimony, being one of them (a chronicler called Galfrid of Coldingham says so in his 1192 account of Le Puiset’s career).

Le Puiset’s contribution was to formalise the College that held jurisdiction over the church at Darlington, and to plan for its rebuilding in a style worthy of its dignity and importance. Galfrid says that ‘amid the vicissitudes of so many storms he did not desist from the erection of the Church of Dernington...’ He did not of course live to see the church he planned, but he was its principal begetter and patron. We have already seen that his ‘church’ in Durham Cathedral, the Galilee Chapel of the 1170s, was still clearly Romanesque in style. By the end of the century, Gothic influences were beginning to be felt in the emergence of what is known as ‘transitional’: not purely Romanesque any more, but not quite Gothic either. But as this building progressed, Gothic took a firm hold, and the result is the majestic, exquisite Early English building we are sitting in, with its clear architectural links to the Cathedral’s Chapel of the Nine Altars which followed it.

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My third and final link is spiritual. You have wondered why I have taken so long to come to it. And of course, it is as much to do with history as with spirituality, yet I fancy we all this connection as the one most likely to influence the way our two churches understand and practise the Christian faith today. I am thinking, of course, of St Cuthbert himself. 

Ten years ago my lecture was called: St Cuthbert: A View From Durham.  I wanted to suggest how, viewed from his shrine in Durham, the long history of the Cathedral has added many layers of meaning to those foundation stories we tell about him that have come down to us from Saxon times, particularly through the writings of Bede. In some ways, what Cuthbert represented to the Normans who built the Cathedral as his shrine was not altogether the same as it had been for the Saxon community of monks who first arrived on the peninsula in 995. To them he was their humble saint who lived in the utmost simplicity.

The Normans never forgot this. Indeed, Cuthbert was intensely useful to them in winning Saxon hearts and minds to the new England they were inventing. To ally a native Northumbrian saint to the Norman cause, with all the spiritual authority and power he wielded, was a shrewd political act. Cuthbert remained central to the self-understanding of both the bishopric of Durham and the Cathedral Priory throughout the middle ages. When the Priory became involved in litigation in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, as it often did, the Chapter justified it on the grounds of defending the honour of St Cuthbert. However they transplanted his memory into a world where power-relations had become all-important, following the Norman Conquest, and this was a world away from the simplicity of the Saxon Northumbria Cuthbert knew. It is a matter of endless fascination how meanings acquire different depths and patinas with the passing of centuries. We shouldn’t be surprised by this: it is the same with any great historical figure who has the power to touch and change lives, not least Jesus Christ himself. So I spoke about the unease the simple Anglo-Saxon Cuthbert might have felt at the prospect of being interred at the heart of a vast fortress-like cathedral built by a people hated by the Saxons: the French Normans, the ‘Norse-men’ descended from the same war-mongering tribes who had destroyed his monastery on Lindisfarne after the community abandoned it for fear of them in 875. We know from Bede that Cuthbert wanted his body to rest on his beloved Inner Farne, but reluctantly accepted that his brothers would wish to bury him on Holy Island itself. How much more strongly would he have felt about Durham!

The link with Darlington is, historically, through this church’s dedication to St Cuthbert. That could tell us any of a number of things. It could suggest that there was a memory of Cuthbert himself preaching here, as is claimed at St Cuthbert’s Edinburgh, a Church of Scotland church that is said to be the oldest attested Christian site in Scotland. I do not think this is likely here in Darlington, although we do know that Cuthbert will have passed this way during his time as guest-master in the monastery at Ripon founded by Wilfrid in 672.

More plausible is the tradition that the Community of St Cuthbert stopped here on its final journey from Ripon to Durham in 994 or 995. Most of the medieval churches dedicated to him commemorate a site where the community halted on its pilgrimage with his body. One way of reading this extraordinary journey around the north of England is as the community’s visitation of its lands, a peregrination that, as I said ten years ago, perhaps contributed to the early sense of ‘northern’ identity, the very idea of north-England that was emerging in Saxon times. As we have seen, perhaps on the basis of their presence in Darlington, the nobleman Styr gifted estates here to the community 20 years later as part of what had become designated the ‘patrimony’ of St Cuthbert with its inhabitants being known as the haliwerfolk, the ‘people of the saint’. What we do know, as we have seen, is that when the Saxon canons were ousted from Durham by the Benedictines introduced in 1083 by William the Conqueror’s Bishop William of Saint-Calais, some were sent to Darlington on the grounds that since St Cuthbert also held estates here, they were continuing to serve the saint on his own lands.

So both the name and the history of St Cuthbert is the central link between our two churches. You may like to know that since I last came here in 2004, the Cathedral has formally recognised this. Throughout the middle ages, it had been dedicated to ‘Our Lady and St Cuthbert’, a common dedication for churches founded where Cuthbert or his community had worshipped on their travels, such as the great church at Chester-le-Street, Durham’s first cathedral. In honour of this, the Neville Screen behind the Cathedral’s high altar once had a statue of the Virgin Mary at its very centre, with St Cuthbert on the right (and on the left, St Oswald, the royal founder and patron of the Northumbrian mission whose head is also interred in Cuthbert’s shrine). In 2005 the Chapter took the decision to reverse the act of Henry VIII in removing Cuthbert's name from the Cathedral's title. This was achieved through the legal process of revising the Constitution and Statutes and renaming it as ‘The Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert of Durham’.

Symbolic of this, we also received in 2010 the Cuthbert Banner, a re-imagining by the Northumbrian Association of the medieval banner that used to hang near his shrine and which was burnt at the Reformation. It was said to be the most popular and effective battle ensign in England according to the 12^th century chronicler Reginald of Durham.[7] It is lovingly described in the manuscript known as The Rites of Durham,[8] a late 16^th century text written by someone who could remember the Priory as it had been just before the Dissolution. The banner was said by the author to have been ‘injuriously’ burned by the reforming Dean Whittingham’s wife Katharine ‘in the notable contempt and disgrace of all ancient and goodly relics’.

What then of the spirituality of St Cuthbert as we understand it both here and at the Cathedral? My last lecture here outlined how I believed St Cuthbert held abiding significance not only for understanding the history of Christianity in the North East, but for our practice of Christian faith today. You can read my earlier lecture again, if you wish, but ten years on, I do not think I would want to alter very much of it.  However, I would perhaps want to express them in a more nuanced way. So here are the insights I distil from the last decade of living in Cuthbert’s Cathedral and serving under his protection. Perhaps they can add to and nuance what I said in my Cuthbert Lecture 10 years ago.

First, I want to use the word inspiration of the way I have come to experience Cuthbert. I am sure I speak for many of you in this. I am sure that the saints are meant to inspire us in all kinds of dimensions of life. But I have the sense that in Cuthbert so many human and Christian virtues converge and cohere. I have no doubt that this is due to the sheer intensity of his spiritual vision, an aspect of his life that Bede’s writings relay to us as vivid and fervent to a degree that was legendary even in his own lifetime. Only this immediacy of spiritual experience can explain the extremes to which he took his askesis, that is, the discipline with which he shaped his entire life to equip him for the way of discipleship. This was why his memory was revered by the community he left behind, not simply those who had known him but the generations that followed, and who as an act of both piety and love bore his sacred body on their long journey as they sought for him and for themselves a permanent place to rest.

We who inhabit Cuthbert’s places today are heirs to that tradition, where he remains as much an inspiration in our own era as he was in Saxon and Norman times. And in these places especially, like yours and mine, we have always honoured him for his simplicity, his humility, his holiness, his compassion for other human beings, his closeness to the natural world, his ardour for God. You could call him England’s St Francis; or perhaps it would be better to say that Francis is Italy’s St Cuthbert, so close are they in many important respects, not least the loyalty and love they have elicited in those who have followed them.  What they both had is what Jesus calls in the Gospel ‘purity of heart’[9]: being ‘single-pointed’ as Buddhists saying, having one sole purpose for being alive, to live for God, for the human family and for his fellow-creatures. 

Second, I want to speak about the need for what I call critical imitation. Being inspired by someone does not necessarily mean that we can or should emulate them in all respects. Cuthbert, who was importantly inspired by the Egyptian desert hermits and the early Irish monks, did not imitate them in all respects. For example, his call to the hermit life, which lay at the core of his understanding of himself, did not take him to the extremes of the stylites who lived as solitaries on the tops of pillars, or the Irish monks who set out to sea beyond the reach of the mainland to exist on isolated rocks and islets. Nor did the community on Holy Island regard Cuthbert’s hermit-life on the Inner Farne as something to be imitated by most of their number. Still less was this the case for the Anglo-Norman foundations that succeeded the Saxons’ whether at Lindisfarne, Durham or here at Darlington.

One of the problems with saints who are as attractive to posterity as Cuthbert and Francis is what to do with what you might call their radical goodness. One response is to distance ourselves from their age and say that such lives belonged to a simpler, less complex era and could not be lived amid the bewildering demands of modernity. The other is to transfer the distant past directly into the present and try to embody its insights regardless of greatly altered contexts. I am not convinced that either approach is workable. It seems to me important to interpret Cuthbert’s life in ways that are true to the profoundly religious spirit of his life but without necessarily emulating its more extreme manifestations. I am thinking of the Irish habit of spending whole nights in the sea reciting the psalms, an activity we know from Bede that Cuthbert engaged in.

‘Critical imitation’ means learning from the past but not allowing it to seduce us into thinking that we belong to it. It means not forgetting the century we ourselves live in, where we are called to obedience as Christian disciples. This is why the later history of Cuthbert as a Saxon saint who was adopted by the great Anglo-Norman institutions of the North such as the Cathedral and this collegiate church is so instructive. It shows us how later generations wanted Cuthbert as their patron and fellow-traveller, but as their contemporary as well as the icon of a long and noble tradition. St Cuthbert of Durham is not altogether the same as St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, as I argued last time. But he remains the source and inspiration of the Cathedral’s life where his shrine is the spiritual and emotional heart of the building, however little this would have made sense to the saint himself. In 2004 I said here: ‘Placing him within the frame of a Benedictine Cathedral Priory was a way of claiming his universal significance for times very different from his own.  It was… a paradoxical thing to do.  But it rescued him from the fate of being locked up in the remote past.  It made him a contemporary of pilgrims of all ages.’[10]

So my third and final insight has to do with how I believe Cuthbert can function as an institutional conscience for organised religion in this part of England. This, I think, is the thread that perhaps binds the perhaps disparate themes of this lecture together. What we have explored has been the relationships between two great religious institutions, this collegiate church of St Cuthbert and our Cathedral. The links between the architectural styles in both, together with the crucial part played in both by Bishop Le Puiset, both represent the achievement of what is called Christendom in both places. Christendom means the expression of Christianity as it is embedded in the public institutions of a nation’s life. The Cathedral represented a divine authority conferred on the Bishops of Durham as Counts Palatine, holding temporal as well as spiritual authority. The king’s writ did not extend into the Palatine County because the Bishop was already sovereign there. This expressed the English ideal of Christendom in its most developed form. This church too expressed an aspect of that ideal in which the whole life of this town and parish was lived out in subjection to the rule of God expressed through the persona of his Bishop. 

This was the world that Cuthbert and the northern saints could not envisage since it represented developments that, while indeed already present in the relations between Saxon rulers and the church, were only brought to fruition in an explicit, conscious way in England with the Norman Conquest. However, all institutions, even religious ones need salvation no less than individual people. The larger, wealthier and prouder they are, the more they are likely to need it. They can behave badly, be seduced by power and prosperity, become almost irredeemably corrupt. The history of Christianity leaves us in no doubt about that. So I like to think that in Anglo-Norman Durham, their cult of St Cuthbert was a way in which large complex institutions like the Cathedral could test their motives and aspirations against the purity of heart of the man who lay buried in the shrine. Perhaps this is easier to appreciate now than before the Reformation.  Then, Cuthbert’s shrine had become the elaborate construction laden with gold, silver and precious jewels that is described in The Rites of Durham. It is hard to think that it was close in spirit to Cuthbert the humble man of Lindisfarne.

However, the sacrilegious and destructive act of King Henry’s Commissioners, when they hacked down the shrine in 1537 during their infamous visitation of the Cathedral, perhaps did it a spiritual favour. They left nothing above ground, only a coffin interred underneath the raised platform called the feretory, where the shrine had been. Later, the black stone slab we see today was installed over the place. It simply bears the saint’s name: CUTHBERTUS, so much in keeping with the spirit of his beloved sea-girt places where he lived and prayed and served and loved. Today, the shrine stands as an enclosed place apart at the east end of the Cathedral. It indisputably belongs to the very centre of the Cathedral, for without the shrine, there would be no Cathedral and no Durham. At the same time, it somehow stands apart, a place in which to be still, and remember, and ponder, and see things in a fresh way, and God willing to find a new sense of connection with the island saint whose name we bear.

In this sense, Cuthbert is the redeeming conscience of the Cathedral and by extension, of his ancient Diocese that once covered the North East of England. He recalls our churches, such prominent symbols of a Christendom that has come and gone, to what must always lie at the centre of their vocation. He reminds us that we are only true to our vocation insofar as we are true to the gospel of Jesus Christ by which he lived and died. That gospel is, of course, the deepest connection between St Cuthbert’s Darlington and our Cathedral. It is all that ultimately matters.

The St Cuthbert’s Day Lecture given at St Cuthbert’s Church, Darlington, 18 March 2014

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[1] Sadgrove, Michael, Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England, 2013, 125.

[2] Pevsner, N. & Williamson, E., The Buildings of England: County Durham, 1985, 23.

[3] Barrow, G.W.S., ‘Puiset, Hugh du’  in DNB.

[4] Gameson, Richard, Manuscript Treasures of Durham Cathedral, 2010, 78.

[5] Harvey, P.D.A., ‘Boldon Book and the Wards Between Tyne and Tees’ in Rollason, Harvey and Prestwich, eds., Anglo-Norman Durham 1093-1193, 1994, 399-405

[6] Aird, William M., St Cuthbert and the Normans: the Church of Durham, 1071-1153, 1998, 49-50.

[7] Dobson, R. B., Durham Priory 1400-1450, 1973, 27.

[8] Rites of Durham, being a Description or Brief Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites and Customs belonging or being within the Monastical Church of Durham before the Suppression, Surtees Society 1903, 26-27

[9] Matthew 5.6

[10] Sadgrove, Michael, St Cuthbert of Durham: a Perspective of 900 Years, the St Cuthbert’s Lecture 2004 (unpublished).