What is Big Brother doing in Durham Cathedral?

I have just got back from overnighting in Durham. I had a gig talking to a splendid Summer School – 100 schoolkids and adults giving up a week of their vacation to learn Latin and Greek (and some heroic teachers giving up a week of theirs to teach them).

Shamefully I hadn’t been to Durham ever before. The somewhat grumpy taxi driver who picked me up at the station didn’t really see why I was bothering.

After all, he opined, Durham was just like Cambridge – only smaller.

He was wrong, of course. They might both be overrun with students (“posh” students as he put it). But Durham’s got the cathedral . . .

. . . which is where I headed in the half hour I had before supper yesterday.

I didn’t have a guidebook with me. But one of the advantages of being married to an art historian is that you always have the equivalent of your Pevsner at the end of the mobile phone. So I quickly found out that I should be looking at the ribbed vaulting and the treasury.

In fact by the time I arrived, the treasury was closed and choral Evensong had started. So I did my duty  on the vaulting and stuck to the west end – which included a terrific Father Smith organ and a Lady Chapel featuring the (nineteenth-century) tomb of the Venerable Bede (on the right). This is inscribed with some ghastly Latin doggerel: hac sunt in fossa Bedae Venerabilis ossa. As an eminent Latinist friend has explained to me, this is a medieval “leonine hexameter” and it does have the advantage of being simple enough for even the  beginner to translate. But, all the same, it must be making the learned Bede turn in his . . . fossa. Touchingly, yesterday there was a “best wishes” card to the Saint displayed on top, from a class of children at a “St Bede’s” school.

I haven’t plodded round many English cathedrals for years (though I have now discovered that the East coast main line gives you a fantastic ringside view not just of Durham, but of Ely, Doncaster and York too).  When I do set foot on consecrated ground these days, it’s much more likely to be in Italy or Greece -- and for no more holy purpose than to see the Caravaggio in the third chapel on the left. That said, for anyone (believer or not) brought up in the traditions of mainstream Anglicanism, there remains something comfortingly familiar about the whole thing. I walked in at what was obviously the Second Lesson of Evensong – Peter had just denied Jesus again and the cock was about to crow. It was a script I already knew.

But as I looked round, the place turned out to be “familiar” in a much more surprising, more institutional and more disconcerting way. And much less like the cathedrals I remember. For a start, they had obviously got caught up in disability legislation – so every possible set of steps was kitted out with a ramp (I accept that when I come to be in a wheel chair I may be grateful for all these ramps – but I hope that even then I will prefer to have the building left in peace and a couple of burly guys to give me a lift).

Then I found that they had latched onto the idea of the mug-shot photo gallery at the way in, just like every university department in the land. For some reason the Bishop himself wasn’t included in this (was he too grand?), but everyone else it seemed was there -- from the Dean and Chapter, down to the vergers and the Development Director (so it really WAS like a university…).

But the final straw of familiarity for me was the CCTV (“CCTV operates in this cathedral” ran the noices, just as they do in college). What I wondered was Big Brother trying to spot? Someone nicking the candlesticks? Inappropriate behaviour in the Lady Chapel? Or was it the religious police, homing in on those not joining in with the hymns or saying the creed with enough conviction?

Give me back some of the mystery, I thought. 

Comments

[Matthew Kluk]

Marvelous article, marvelous comments, God bless England!

[Xjy]

Durham plays a very dramatic part in Bernard Cornwell's (so far) trilogy about King Alfred vs the Vikings, The Last Kingdom etc. "Home" in the novels is in fact the north-east, for a bracing change - Bamburgh and Lindisfarne.

Rattling good yarns (for men, at least, they read themselves), pretty good on the history and context, excellent on the mutability of institutions and their dependence on force to get set up and kept up.

[Mary]

Alan Myers -- I THOUGHT I meant Doncaster. I certainly went through Doncaster on the return, and what I believed to be Doncaster cathedral was visible from the window, Perhaps I was on te wrong side of the train to catch Peterborough.

[Alan Myers]

In 1417 two Newcastle women, Margaret Usher and Matilda Burgh, dressed up as men and approached the shrine of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral. Good for them.

Edward III's queen, Philippa, had inadvertently done something of the sort in 1346, and was much distressed.

C.S. Lewis preferred Durham to both Oxford and Cambridge, and sets his novel That Hideous Strength there.

As for the visibility of cathedrals from the main east coast line, does Mary Beard perhaps mean Peterborough rather than Doncaster?

[Oliver Nicholson]

Surely the York Minster fire was blamed on the fact that David Jenkins had been consecrated there as Bishop (for Durham) and he had been reported in the papers as saying that the Resurrection was a conjuring-trick with old bones. Never mind that what he had actually said was that the Resurrection was NOT ONLY a conjuring-trick with old bones (but also a sign of God's favour and goodness towards us and the basis of a sure and certain hope in the resurrection of the rest of us and so forth). That was not allowed to stand in the way of a good headline in the days B.G. (Before Gledhill) when much newspaper reporting of religion was caricature (one excepts of course C. Longley of this parish). In any case, anyone who thinks God really works in such a (knee)jerk way would profit from a perusal of the first 5 books of Augustine's City of God.

The 'three monks' story about Cuthbert seems to me worthy of the imagination of J.K. Rowling or Cardinal Gasquet. But I am pretty certain I recall that Symeon precentor of Durham (who witnessed the 1104 translation) attests to the incorrupt character of the relics. There are four early sources for Cuthbert's life: Bede's verse life, Bede's account in Hist. Eccl. IV, the Anonymous life (in an unprecedented 4 books) and Bede's Prose Life. The last two are easily available in a C.U.P. paperback with en regard translation under the title "Two Lives of Cuthbert". The learned editor is said to have received a telegram on publication day from the then Dean of Durham reading "Resent Implication. Yours, Cuthbert".

Am I not also right in recalling that S. Cuthbert had rather unreconstructed views about the presence of ladies near his shrine, and that in the Middle Ages it would not have been merely Evensong which would have coralled Mary in the Galillee Chapel with the amiable Bede. As she says the Leonine line is not nice, but the more modern epitaph (taken from Bede's Commentary on Revelation) is beautiful: "Christus est stella matutina qui nocte saeculi transacta lucem vitae sanctis permittit et pandit aeternam".

[David Ganz]

The bishop was the Reverend David Jenkins: one of his sons is Dean of Jesus Cambridge.
Given Bede's own verse compositions he might not have shared Mary's shock??

[Katharine Edgar]

If you had turned up half an hour before dinner in your wheelchair, though, the burly men would probably have gone home and you would have not got to see the cathedral at all, mystery or no mystery.

I can't believe that the ramps have interfered with the ancient fabric of the building. Surely any building will have a history of a changing succession of temporary structures and devices designed to make the lives easier of the people who actually used it, many of which won't have left many traces in the archaeological record - ramps are just what we have today, reflecting our concern with not 'excluding' particular groups.

Anyway, speaking as a member of one of the groups that gets 'included' by the presence of ramps (mother with young children in buggies) I'm quite keen on them!

By the way, Candadai Tirumalai, the previous Bishop of Durham was appointed Archbishop of York the year before the lightning strike - wasn't it him (John Hapgood I think) who had questioned the literal truth of the resurrection?

[Eileen]

oooh, three monks-- spooky, spooky--reminds me of the three Brahmin guardians of The Moonstone. do you suppose that Wilkie Collins got the idea from Cuthbert legends?? and traveling down the trail of derivation, what about the ring in Help? were the Beatles giving a nod to Collins? just wondering.

[Anna]

Thanks for coming, Mary, we loved your talk. Although I'm still perplexed as to how one would attach a phallus to a chariot. Looking forward to the new book.

[Tony Francis]

Perhaps the most accessible information on the status of St. Cuthbert comes from Joan Carroll Cruz' book, "The Incorruptibles" from Tan Publishers. She mentions the "three monk theory", whereby the Saint's body was secreted away after the time of Henry VIII. Three Benedictine monks are always aware of the site of the secret burial. She gives a reference for this: "The History of St. Cuthbert" by Charles, Archbishop of Glasgow, Burnes & Oates, Ltd. London and Catholic Publications Society Co., New York, 1887; pp. 337-338. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1953) mentions nothing about an incorruptible state, or the possibility of the body being hidden. Butler's Lives of the Saints also mentions the "three monk theory", but says nothing about an incorruptible state. Butler's never seems to mention much about an incorruptible state of many saints, such as Catherine of Siena and Francis Xavier. (Butler's indicates the body may be hidden in Durham Cathedral, and that three Benedictine monks are always aware of its location.) I am of the impression that many in the hierarchy of the RCC would just as soon the incorruptible issue would just go away. It seems to me that some of these incorruptible saints have been surreptitiously embalmed. But others are hard to explain, like Saint Cecilia who died in 177, and was reported to be incorrupt the last time anyone checked (in 1599). Others seem to be incorrupt for a while, then begin to decay. Some may be simply mummified. I don't really have an opinion about St. Cuthbert, his incorruptible state, or the three monk theory. But it is an interesting story. Everyone writes that the best history comes from the Venerable Bede. It is an interesting side light that the Russian Communists were obsessed with the incorruptible issue. They insisted that such luminaries as Lenin and Stalin, among others were incorruptible. It was an odd position for atheists to take. The Chinese may also feel this way about Mao.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Durham makes me think not so much of cross-rib vaulting as of Jacob's words after his dream: "non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli"
Was the exhumation of S. Cuthbert's body in 1827 actually not undertaken by the Dean and Chapter precisely to disprove the rumours (put about when RC Emancipation was in the air and many Irish RCs were going to Co. Durham to work in the mines and on the railways) that S. Cuthbert was hidden away at the Reformation ? There was also a scientific excavation in c. 1890, and I think that it was at that date that the remains of the original 8th century carved coffin, which had travelled all the way from Lindisfarne via Chester-le-Street to Durham at the time of the Vikings, were taken up and stored (in the triforium). They were not reassembled, so I was told, till the young Ernst Kitzinger came to Durham as a refugee from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. There is an immense OUP book on the Relics of S. Cuthbert from the mid-1950s. The conference of 1987 marking the 1300th anniversary of his death has been published (edd. G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Standliffe) and contains loads of info - I may remember wrong (I could not afford the book !) but I think little of it would support the secret burial theory mentioned by the erudite Dr. Francis. This was easily the most moving academic conference I have ever attended.

[Tony Francis]

Durham Cathedral may or may not be the resting place of St. Cuthbert. He had been the bishop of Lindisfarne, which is now a ruin. There were many miracles attribed to the Bishop Cuthbert before his death in 687. He was buried in the Cathedral of Lindisfarne. Eleven years later, the coffin was opened and St. Cuthbert was reported to have been incorrupt. The coffin was removed several times due to invading Norse, and other warring factions. It was finally placed on September 4,999 in the Church which would become the Norman Durham Cathedral. William the Conqueror requested to view the body in 1069. The local bishop refused. In 1104, several local bishops disputed the condition of the Saint's body. The coffin was opened and the body was reported to be in perfect condition. Henry VIII sent several doctors to destroy the body in 1537. When they opened the coffin, they found the body incorrupt. The coffin was filled with gold and gems. In the process one of the legs was broken. The doctors could not bring themselves to destroy the body. Benedictine monks re-buried the relic in 1542. The grave was opened in 1827, where the remains had skeletized. The mass vestments which were placed on the corpse in 1104 were still recognizable. There is a legend that the Benedictines secreted the body to a safe place after the incident with Henry VIII, and eventually lost track of where it was. Or, perhaps the skeleton is St. Cuthbert, who remained incorrupt for 850 years. Plenty of reason for both mystery and CCTV.

[dr venables preller]

The cctv would be needed to help prevent antiquity theft or damage, both more prevalent than formerly.

The mugshot gallery, although efficient in a modern way, can add the community touch in personalising the personnel for the benefit of visitors.

At least the Father Smith has not been replaced with a device enabling its simulation by digital reconstruction, though such equipment is useful for practice purposes.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

When the Cathedral in York was struck by lightning about 15 years ago, some held that was on account of the Bishop of Durham's heterodox views, such as his denial of the physical resurrection of Jesus, but his supporters pointed out that if that was the case God had chosen the wrong cathedral.

[anthony alcock]

Why would you need anyone to tell you what to look at in the cathedral?