A Meditation on Aidan, Bede and the Saints of Northumbria

A MEDITATION ON AIDAN, BEDE AND THE SAINTS OF NORTHUMBRIA
By HIBERNICUS

For I am very much God’s debtor, who gave me such grace that many people were reborn in God through me and afterwards confirmed, and that clerics were ordained for them everywhere, for a people just coming to the faith, whom the Lord took from the utmost parts of the earth, as He once had promised through His prophets…Hence, how did it come to pass… that those who never had a knowledge of God, but until now always worshiped idols and things impure, have now been made a people of the Lord, and are called sons of God, that the sons and daughters of the kings… are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ?—Confession of St Patrick

FOR SOME YEARS I have been a regular visitor to the North-East of England, especially Sunderland; and grew interested in its early saints, Irish and English, whose story is recorded by St Bede the Venerable. As an amateur of no special expertise I offer some thoughts on what their story–particularly the lives of the early Irish missionary St Aidan and of Bede himself–tell us today.

Bede (672-735) was a monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow (on the Rivers Wear and Tyne). In his Ecclesiastical History of England, completed c.731, he describes the history of the Faith in England, with particular reference to the conversion of his own people, whom we call the Anglo-Saxons. During the collapse of the Roman Empire these arrived in England, driving the native British (the Welsh) westward.  Bede is hostile to the Welsh for a variety of reasons including their failure (unlike the Irish) to evangelise the Saxons; he claimed they wished their conquerors to go to Hell. (I have met people with a similar mind-set in the present day.) Of the many stories he preserves, I tell only a few.  The Saxons were divided into many small kingdoms whose ruling dynasties and their war bands fought wars of mutual extermination. Over time, larger kingdoms emerged; in the early seventh century the Kingdom of Northumbria (northern England and much of the Scots Lowlands) was disputed between two dynasties; one, in the north, associated with the great fortress of Bamburgh where a seam of hard rock jutting into the sea forms a natural stronghold, one in the south very loosely associated with the old Roman settlement of York.

In 563 St Columba founded the monastery of Iona in the Western Isles of Scotland, and after his death in 597 his kinsmen supplied the abbots; from 623-652 Segene was abbot and collected traditions incorporated in the life of Columba written by a later abbot, St Adamnan. In 597 Pope St Gregory the Great sent missionaries to Kent, led by Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury (then the capital of the kingdom of Kent, whose king Augustine converted).  Missionary activity extended (with some setbacks) to the neighbouring kingdoms. In the 620s Northumbria was ruled by Edwin of the southern dynasty (the sons of his ousted northern predecessor fled to the Scots, and were baptised in Iona). Edwin married a daughter of the Christian king of Kent, who came accompanied by Bishop Paulinus; in 627, after some hesitation, Edwin was baptised. Bede depicts the king and his courtiers debating whether to accept baptism, and presents a nobleman comparing human life to a bird flying out of the dark and storm into a lighted dwelling and then flying out none knew where, and suggesting that if the new religion offered knowledge and hope it should be accepted. Quite recently I read a review of a film depicting and implicitly justifying euthanasia for the senile, in which a character suffers delusions that a bird has entered the house; the reviewer noted an odd echo in this new pagan despair of Bede’s story of hope.
Many apostasised
In 634 Edwin was killed in battle with a Welsh king Cadwalla and the pagan Saxon ruler of Mercia (the English midlands), Penda. The evangelisation sponsored by Edwin proved superficial, and many converts apostasised; Paulinus and the surviving members of Edwin’s family fled to Kent, and a bloody struggle ended in 634 with the defeat of Cadwalla by the northern exile, Oswald. Oswald attributed his victory to St Columba, and appealed to Segene for missionaries.

St Aidan was the bishop who led these missionaries.  For reasons we shall see, Bede’s knowledge of him is fragmentary and coloured by his own agenda; but Bede emphasises Aidan’s humility, simplicity of life, and concern for the material and spiritual needs of the poor. He settled at Lindisfarne, an island connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway, its proximity to Bamburgh (across a bay) emphasised his royal sponsorship.  At times Aidan retired to a hermitage on the rocky Farne islands off Bamburgh, where his prayers were said to preserve the royal stronghold. Before Aidan learned Anglo-Saxon Oswald sometimes translated his spoken sermons (a forceful hint to the audience; a story about St Cuthbert later in Bede’s History suggests many ordinary people resented the new religion imposed onthem). Aidan did not, however, simply rely on royal favour. His monks were more like friars or missionary priests of later centuries, travelling the countryside from their base at Lindisfarne, than contemplatives. Aidan travelled on foot, so that he could speak with the ordinary people, rather than on horseback as noblemen did (when St Cuthbert, a later bishop of Lindisfarne, from being a warrior became a monk, it is emphasised that he gave up his horse). Bede emphasises his fasting and humility, his urging Oswald to be generous to the poor, his use of church funds to ransom slaves (many later ordained). Like St Patrick (of whom Bede was unaware) Aidan sponsored women’s religious communities (the first in England) under Hilda, a kinswoman of Edwin. Oswald was a warrior king (Bede’s account of his sanctity includes hints of a more ruthless side); in 642 he died in battle with King Penda (and was venerated as a martyr). His kingdom re-divided. His brother Oswy succeeded in the north; in the south Oswin, a kinsman of Edwin, became king. According to Bede, Oswin was on particularly good terms with Aidan and presented him with a particularly fine horse, which Aidan gave to a poor man. When they next met, Oswin protested, and Aidan asked whether he valued the son of a mare more highly than the son of God.  Oswin spent some time gazing thoughtfully into the fire; then publicly prostrated himself before Aidan, declaring that he would never again value the son of a mare above a son of God. Blessed Frederick Ozanam singled out this story as symbolising the effect of Christianity on the barbarian peoples; but this underplays the continuing violence of Anglo-Saxon politics. For Bede also describes how as bishop dined with the king, one of Aidan’s priests asked in Irish (which Oswin and his men did not understand) why Aidan was sad after Oswin had honoured him. Aidan replied (also in Irish) that he never saw a humble king before and feared Oswin was too good for this wicked world.
War to rescue mankind
In 651 Oswy attacked Oswin. Oswin’s outnumbered army dispersed; Oswin hid but was betrayed by a trusted follower and put to death on 19 August. (The Anglo-Saxons saw Jesus as a king waging war to rescue mankind and the Apostles as a sworn warband, who should die rather than abandon their leader; Bede’s account of Oswin’s fate echoes this.)  Oswy’s wife, a kinswoman of Oswin, persuaded him to found a monastery to expiate Oswin’s death; Bede’s mentor Abbot Ceolfrith began his monastic career there, and may have been Bede’s source.  Because Bede recorded Oswin’s justice and humility, the king was venerated as a saint; until the Reformation his shrine was at Tynemouth, and beside its ruins is a small brick Catholic church dedicated to Our Lady and St Oswin.  Twelve days after Oswin’s death, Aidan died after a long illness, in a tent beside the wooden church near Bamburgh. The spot is marked by a small shrine and stained-glass window in the present church (now Anglican) where pilgrims leave seashells and bits of paper with prayers.

It was said that as a young man watching sheep on the Melrose hills, Cuthbert saw Aidan’s soul ascending to heaven and this determined him to become a monk. This may symbolise how Aidan’s example influenced others.

The figure of this dog who is the angel’s messenger and companion should not be taken lightly… it signifies the Church’s teachers… So the dog ran ahead because the teacher first preaches salvation, and then the Lord as Illuminator cleanses the hearts (St Bede the Venerable, Commentary on the Book of Tobias).

Synod of Whitby
The Northumbrian church underwent many changes between the death of Aidan and the completion of Bede’s History. The greatest concerned differences between Irish and Roman usages, particularly concerning the calculation of the date of Easter. St Columbanus, working on the Continent at the beginning of the seventh century, encountered difficulties because of this discrepancy; in the 630s much of southern Ireland adopted the Roman usage. The leading opponent of this change, who denounced its proponents as heretics, was Segene, the abbot who sent Aidan to Northumbria.

Oswy’s queen, a daughter of Edwin brought up in Kent, followed the Roman usage. Those influenced by her circle included a young monk of Lindisfarne called Wilfrid, who travelled to Kent and then to Gaul and Rome. Observing the Gaulish bishops, who lived in great state, pontificated in great and beautiful churches and wielded considerable power and influence, Wilfrid decided this was more befitting to the glory of the Gospel.

After Oswy crushed the pagan king Penda in 655 the question of which usage should prevail caused political as well as religious tensions. In 664 a synod was held at Whitby, the monastery of Abbess Hilda, to decide the matter. Hilda, Cuthbert and others supported Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne in arguing for the usage of Iona; Wilfrid argued for the Roman observance. Oswy ruled in favour of Rome–because of the primacy of Peter, according to Bede, but political considerations were also involved. Colman, with those Irish and English monks who would not accept the decision, divided the relics of Aidan with those who remained (including Cuthbert) and left Lindisfarne for Iona and then Mayo, where they founded two monasteries. Wilfrid was later nominated bishop of Paulinus’ see at York. Bede had no doubt that the decision of Whitby was correct, but his account of the debate (imaginative rather than literal) allows Colman some cogent arguments and presents Wilfrid as more willing to concede the good faith of Columba and his followers than seems plausible (a biographer states Wilfrid called them heretics, whereas Bede emphasises that Aidan held the same faith as followers of the Roman observance). When describing the final departure of Colman and his monks Bede emphasises the austerity of their lives and their simple wooden dwellings.

The long and stormy career of St Wilfrid, involving many quarrels, exiles, travels to Rome and reinstatements, can only be touched on here. He was a bishop of a type which recurs in church history (there are prominent examples in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland), more Roman than the Romans, confident of his own authority and righteousness, a great builder of stone churches in Hexham and other places, an amasser of wealth (used to influence kings to assist the church’s work; Wilfrid was personally austere). Wilfrid asserted justice as he saw it even against kings who previously supported him; in one of his exiles he conducted successful missionary work among the South Saxons and assisted them during famine; in his last years he worked with Irish churchmen to send English missionaries to the German pagans. During the great Irish Famine of 1845-49, when the Catholic bishop in York, John Briggs, divested himself of most of his possessions to help the Irish, a priest in Connaught wrote that he had shown himself the true successor of St Wilfrid.
The influence of Rome
Roman influence appears at its most attractive in Benedict Biscop, founder of the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow dedicated to SS Peter and Paul.  As a young nobleman Biscop accompanied Wilfrid on his first visit to Rome; as abbot of a monastery founded with a land grant obtained from the king, he returned several times. Biscop brought from Rome a wide range of books, making Wearmouth-Jarrow the greatest library and centre of biblical learning in northern Europe; its scriptorium for the production of biblical and other texts were far-famed. Biscop brought craftsmen who embellished the new stone monastic church with biblical paintings and stained glass (the first manufactured in Northumbria); a cantor from St Peter’s in Rome taught liturgical chant.  His works recall the “devotional revolution” of the nineteenth century in Ireland—the enthusiasm over new and ornate churches replacing smaller and nondescript houses of worship, and the propagation of colourful and intense continental devotions. Bede praises Biscop as one of those who give up earthly possessions to receive the kingdom of God, and a wife and family to foster spiritual children including Bede himself. In the nineteenth century St Benedict’s Catholic church was built to the north of the River Wear in Sunderland, a short distance from the Anglican church which incorporates the few remains of the Wearmouth monastery; for a long time it was served by Redemptorists (many Irish) and I attended it several times before realising that the St Benedict to whom it is dedicated is Biscop.
Ornament of Jarrow
The brightest ornament of Wearmouth-Jarrow was Bede himself. He was born on tenanted land owned by the monastery, and at the age of seven (when a warrior would begin his apprenticeship) was sent to the monastery where he spent the remainder of his life, latterly as deacon and priest; he saw himself as dedicated to God from infancy like the prophet Samuel. Bede is remembered as a historian, but he was above all an expounder of the Bible, writing commentaries on most of its books (several of which had not previously been systematically expounded).  These profoundly influenced later mediaeval commentary, and through English scholars at the court of Charlemagne (late seventh and early eighth centuries) passed into the main tradition of Biblical commentary and the Church’s Office; almost twelve centuries after Bede’s death, Pope Francis took his motto from Bede’s remarks on the calling of St Matthew, incorporated in the Office of that apostle. To the scholars of Charlemagne’s time, the age which had produced a Bede, whose last days had been recorded by a disciple in one of the classic descriptions of a holy Christian death, was truly a golden age.

Bede did not think he inhabited a golden age.  Apart from the endemic warfare of Anglo-Saxon England, the great works of the scriptorium could only be sustained from the labours of tenant farmers, and Bede was deeply concerned that the church should not lose sight of its responsibility to evangelise the people. Some think he himself was the son of tenant farmers, others that he was of noble birth, perhaps a kinsman of Benedict Biscop. Bede supported the efforts of successive abbots (some related to Biscop) to keep the abbacy from becoming a perquisite of the founder’s family. Believing monks should be like Melchisedec with no recorded earthly kindred, Bede did not record his own ancestry. Bede was concerned that the splendour of churches could be bought by laxity (he records a terrifying story of a skilled metalworker employed by an abbey which tolerated his vices because of his skill, who when taken ill cried out that he had seen hell and died in despair to the horror of all) and at the expense of evangelisation (he thought more, hence poorer, bishops, were needed for pastoral effectiveness). Worse still, since land grants to noblemen were generally resumed by the king at their deaths, whereas monastic land was held in perpetuity and exempt from tax, some noble families established bogus monasteries in which a few nominal monks, presided over by a supposed abbot, acted as frontmen for the real owners, thus scandalising religion and weakening the kingdom.
Ezra as model
In his last years Bede took as role-model Ezra the scribe who preached renewed observance to a people who had forgotten the law of the Lord. He reminded them of the missionaries who evangelised the English; he recalled the injunctions of Pope Gregory the Great in his works on the priesthood and his injunctions to Augustine’s missionaries; and Bede held up for imitation, in implicit contrast to contemporary misplaced opulence, the ascetic simplicity of the missionaries inspired by Columba. (Shortly before Bede wrote, Iona accepted Roman usage through a variety of influences, including contact with Northumbria; Bede saw this as a divine reward for Irish evangelisation of the English. Bede probably met Adamnan, who visited Wearmouth-Jarrow twice when Bede was a monk; Adamnan wrote an account of the physical lay-out of the Holy Land after meeting a Gaulish bishop who had visited it, and Bede later rewrote the book for the use of students of the Scriptures.) Bede visited Lindisfarne, still a centre of varied influences and pre-eminent for the cult of St Cuthbert, who after serving as abbot and later being called back from his hermitage to become a bishop, finally returned to Aidan’s former hermitage on the Farne Islands and died there in 687. The discovery some years later that Cuthbert’s body remained incorrupt (possibly through desiccation in dry sandy soil) cemented his cult, and he became the pre-eminent saint of the North of England. Bede wrote two versions of the Life of Cuthbert (adapting a pre-existing text) who is one of several great exemplars of the ideal churchman held up for imitation in Bede’s History; but behind Cuthbert Bede discerned another exemplar, Aidan. Since Cuthbert accepted the decision of Whitby, whereas Aidan died in the Columban usage, Aidan’s memory had been underplayed and the information available to Bede was fragmentary. His
account of Aidan is not just conventional history but resembles a modern brief for canonisation, intended to show how despite his liturgical practices Aidan exemplified the pastoral virtues needed in Bede’s own day.

Without Bede’s history Oswald, Cuthbert and Wilfrid might be remembered; Aidan and others would be mere names, or forgotten. Through Bede their memory spread across Latin Christendom (including Ireland; surviving Irish accounts of Aidan’s mission derive from Bede, with embellishments).  In the long, dark history of the relations between our two islands, the evangelisation of Northumbria and the interaction of its Irish and English saints is one of the brighter spots. The saints were remembered in the later Middle Ages, often in contexts combining devotion and brutal political power; they were remembered in the era of the Reformation, where Catholic controversialists emphasised Bede’s account of Pope Gregory as evangeliser of the English and the links with Rome renewed by Wilfrid and his disciples, while Protestants claimed Aidan and Columba as upholders of a purer Gospel. (Visitors to their shrines will also find copies of Orthodox icons, since they lived before the Schism.) The comfort many Christians outside the sheepfold have drawn from the Northumbrian saints is another fruit of their mission and Bede’s labours.
Work of Irish navvies
The recusant Catholics of Northumbria, when they had not enough priests of their own, preferred to look to the Continent rather than to Ireland, but from the early nineteenth century, as Irish immigrant labourers were drawn to the growing region whose mining industry was the technological seedbed for the invention and development of the railways, Irish missionaries accompanied them. The present cathedral of the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, designed by Pugin, stands near Newcastle Central Station; it was built by Irish navvies, and its inner walls are decorated with the names of saints–on one side, reformation-era martyrs; on the other, the Northumbrian saints (Colman as well as Wilfrid). In the cathedral crypt is buried William Riddell, of a recusant family, Catholic bishop in Newcastle in 1847 when he died of typhoid caught while ministering to famine Irish.

In the 1830s, near the great iron bridge at Sunderland (the present bridge’s motto Spera in Deo once gave me hope at a dark time) an Irish priest built St Mary’s Church to serve the Irish who laboured in the docks and mines. It was consecrated by Bishop Briggs, encountered earlier in this narrative; beside it, where a multi-story car-park now stands, Irish Christian Brothers opened one of their first schools outside Ireland–certainly the first with a majority of non-Catholic pupils, whose parents thought any education better than none. The Irish dimension remained in later decades; there are many Irish names on the war memorial; St Patrick accompanies St Cuthbert and other English saints on the reredos; from the late 1930s to the early 1970s the parish priest was Canon O’Donoghue from Clonakilty in West Cork, who I suspect is responsible for the windows showing SS Martin de Porres and Maria Goretti, Thomas More and John Fisher. In the postindustrial city centre its congregation now come from further afield.

The story of the Catholic Irish on Tyne and Wear, with its hardships and struggles for self-betterment, should not be sentimentalised, just as the history of our own popular Catholicism, which has declined in recent decades as theirs has also declined, should not be sentimentalised. Both here and there many were flawed and some were worse. But those who in earlier life knew Catholics of an older generation and those who have studied accounts of earlier generations (even with all the limitations and selectivity of such accounts) know that some among them, and some of those who ministered to them displayed intense faith and love, and were often ill-rewarded (at least in this life) often by those who should have known better. It is the task of the Catholic present-day historian to seek in these remains (with due regard for truth, and confronting rather than wishing away what was truly false and wicked) exemplars for our own day, as Bede did for his time.
Not to be lost in darkness
It can make no difference to saints in heaven whether they are remembered on earth or not, and many saints will never be known there; but it can make a great difference to us. Through Bede’s labours, Aidan and the other saints preach still, teaching in how many different times and places the living Word shows those tempted to despair that when the bird flies from the hall it is not lost in darkness.

Lindisfarne was abandoned in the early ninth century because of Viking raids (recently depicted in a TV drama series from the Vikings’ viewpoint rather as football hooligans might regard their own rampages, with the monks seen as cowardly wimps). The monastic community settled in Durham, on an easily defended height surrounded on three sides by the River Wear. St Cuthbert is buried in the cathedral, with the skull of Oswald and other miscellaneous bones (some possibly of Aidan). The alleged relics of Bede are in the Galilee chapel (so called because when the cathedral was Catholic, eucharistic processions re-entered the cathedral through it, it was said that Jesus went before the disciples into Galilee). Over his grave a recent Anglican dean placed a quotation from one of Bede’s commentaries on the Gospel:

Christ is the morning star who when the night of this world is past brings to his saints the promise of the light of life and opens everlasting day.

This essay is dedicated to my great-uncle, once a monk of the Cistercian Order and afterwards a secular priest of the Archdiocese of Cardiff, who taught me to love the Extraordinary Form of the Mass; to his sister, a Loreto nun in Cheshire, North Wales and elsewhere in Britain, who gave her life to teaching the children of the poor and instructing converts; and to their brother, a faithful priest of the diocese of Ferns who spent ten years on the New Zealand missions. Pray for them and for all who followed faithfully in the footsteps of St Patrick, St Colmcille and St Aidan, so that through their intercession the flame of faith may re-illuminate our country.—Hibernicus

Hibernicus is a professional historian who has worked in a number of universities and higher institutes in Ireland.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 131, March-April 2014