A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



touched with Irish influences ; they aimed by simple piety and con- 

 secrated skill to impress the facts of the Christian faith on the simple 

 Northumbrians. 



A large number of fragments of wood, found with the coffin, await 

 arrangement. One series, when put together, forms an arcade of semi- 

 circular arches ; it may be part of the outer case mentioned by the 

 anonymous writer in the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, as existing at the time 

 of the translation in 1104. Or it may have been made at that time. 1 

 Other pieces of mouldings may belong to the coffin of 1 542. 



THE BODY OF ST. CUTHBERT 



Whether or no Durham Cathedral is still in charge of the genuine 

 remains of St. Cuthbert is a question that has often been discussed with 

 some unnecessary warmth. We shall find that very little certain evidence 

 is to be had ; the question rests on circumstantial arguments, and these always 

 leave things in some doubt. This case, however, is one in which the 

 balance of probabilities will be found to strengthen the belief that the bones 

 found in the Cathedral in 1827, and seen again in 1899, are those of the 

 saint. The contrary view can neither be proved nor disproved. The state- 

 ment that the Benedictines of the Cathedral House removed the saint and 

 concealed him in some other part of the Cathedral, while they substituted 

 for him the bones of a monk taken from the ' Gentry Garth ' hard by, is still 

 often made. It is said that between 1537 and 1542 St. Cuthbert's body 

 was reburied somewhere near the west end of the Cathedral, and that either 

 ' St. Cuthbert's treasure ' or his body, or relics of him, (for all these phrases 

 are used of it) formed a secret and a mystery which at the time of the Re- 

 formation was entrusted to three Benedictines ; and that these brethren, when- 

 ever one of them died, appointed another ; and that thus the secret has been 

 faithfully kept from the sixteenth century to our days. 3 The three are well 

 known in the Benedictine Order. Sir Walter Scott in the early part of last 

 century, when visiting Mr. Surtees at Mainsford, often came over to 

 Durham, and must have heard this tradition ; for he refers to it in the well- 

 known lines of Marmion : 3 



He chose his lordly seat at last 

 Where his Cathedral huge and vast 



Looks down upon the Wear. 

 There deep in Durham's gothic shade 



His relics are in secret laid, 



But none may know the place, 

 Save of his holiest servants three, 

 Deep sworn to solemn secrecy, 



Who share that wondrous grace. 



This is the Benedictine tradition. 



The 'secular tradition' is found in a MS. of the seventeenth century, 

 which was in Archbishop Eyre's hands in 1867; it is also in a paper ii 



1 Haverfield and Greenwell, Catalogue, 155. 



8 Those interested in the subject should read Rev. W. Brown, Where is St. Cuthbert Buried? (Durhan_ 7 

 1897); Monsignor Eyre (Archbishop of Glasgow), The History of St. Cuthbert (London, 1887); Canon 

 Fowler in Arch. 57, i. 1 8, 19 ; and Raine, St. Cuthbert (Durham, 1828). 



8 Scott, Marmion, ii. 14. 



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