ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



but we know that it was not far from Carlisle, as he had undertaken to 

 rejoin the Queen next day. Not long after he was called to the same 

 city to ordain priests and to give benediction to the Queen herself, who 

 had taken the veil in that monastery. It was on the occasion of this 

 visit that the venerable priest and friend of St. Cuthbert, Herebert by 

 name, came from his seclusion in an island of the large marsh in which 

 the Derwent rises, the lake now called Derwentwater, as he used to do 

 every year to receive from the saint admonitions in the way of eternal 

 life. Bede's narrative supplies a beautiful picture of the state of the 

 Church as it existed in the district towards the close of the seventh cen- 

 tury, and rests on the surest historical basis, for Bede was recording 

 events which had happened in his boyhood, and his account of St. 

 Cuthbert was submitted for revision to men who had been well ac- 

 quainted with what had taken place. 



It was political wisdom on the part of the Northumbrian rulers to 

 use the organization of the church as the basis on which the many 

 races of the kingdom might be united into one nation. For this reason, 

 no doubt, local usages, such as the incidence of the Easter festival and 

 the mode of tonsure, were abandoned in favour of a more universal 

 custom. Whatever sort of submission was involved by the compromise 

 at Whitby in 664 it did not obliterate the essential features of the Scottish 

 Church. The whole tone of the church in the northern kingdom was 

 Celtic. The early associations of the bishops of Lindisfarne, the train- 

 ing of St. Cuthbert in the Celtic monastery of Melrose, the well-known 

 objections of the King and Queen to the claims of Wilfrid, need not to 

 be repeated here. The old features of the Celtic Church were retained, 

 and chief amongst them was missionary monasticism. We have no 

 trace of a parochial system in this portion of Cumbria before the 

 Norman settlement in the twelfth century. The centres of ecclesiastical 

 work were monastic rather than parochial while the district remained 

 under English rule. The monastery of Carlisle and its school were 

 centres of educational effort, in which clergy no doubt were trained, and 

 from which they were sent forth to minister in the surrounding district. 

 In Bede's day there was also a monastery near the river Dacore or Dacre, 1 

 not far from Penrith, which was ruled by Abbot Thridred. The Celtic 

 character of the Church in Cumberland about the eighth century is still 

 further illustrated by the legendary life of St. Bega, who is said to have 

 landed in a certain province of England called Coupland, and to have 

 taken up her abode in a dense forest, where she spent many years in 

 solitary devotion." 



1 Hist. Eccles. iv. c. 32. There seems to be no doubt that the Dacre in Cumberland is the place 

 meant here, and that it was a monastery of considerable importance. It must have been in existence 

 as late as 926, in which year it appears to have been the scene of the famous agreement between the 

 three kings, when Eugenius, Ewen or Owen, king of the Cumbrians, and Constantine, king of Scots, 

 made submission to king Athelstan. William of Malmesbury calls the place of meeting Dacor (Gesta 

 Regum [Rolls Series], i. 147), but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (i. 199) says that the peace was con- 

 firmed at a place called Eamont. The collocation of names, seeing that Dacre and Eamont are so close 

 together, is sufficient to identify the place as belonging to Cumberland. 



* Cotton MS. Faustina B. iv. ff. 122-39. 



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