care of him. When Henfrith told his monks that Cuthbert desired to be buried in his cell, they sent some of their number back with the abbot to beg him to allow them to lay his body in their church. Cuthbert granted their request, and told them that the reason why he had ordered otherwise was because he feared that if he were buried at Lindisfarne, it would be made the resort of evil men who would come thither for the purpose of claiming sanctuary. When he found that his death was drawing near, Cuthbert caused the monks to carry him back to his cell, and in the afternoon of the same day he sent for Henfrith. The abbot found him lying in a corner of his oratory over against the altar. Although scarcely able to speak, he sent the monks a farewell charge; he prayed them above all things to live a life of humility and peace, to hold catholic unity, especially in the matter of keeping Easter, and to observe the catholic commands of the fathers, and the institutes of monastic life which they had received from him, and he bade them remember that his wish was that if ever they were compelled to leave their monastery they should take his body from the tomb and carry it with them whithersoever they went. At midnight the abbot gave him the last sacraments, and when he had received the holy elements he died on 20 March 687. Cuthbert had been a monk for thirty-seven years (Symeon of Durham, Hist. Dunelm. Eccl.), and as he entered the monastic life at an early age, he probably was not sixty at the time of his death. As soon as Cuthbert had breathed his last, one of the monks who were in attendance on him took a torch in each hand and went up to the highest point in the island looking towards the mainland, and so gave the signal of his death to the brethren who were spending the night in watchfulness and prayer in their church. The monks dressed Cuthbert's body in his priest's robes, put his sandals on the feet, and placed the sacramental elements on the breast; they then conveyed the body to Lindisfarne and laid it on the south side of the altar. In spite of Bale's assertion to the contrary, there seems no reason for believing that Cuthbert was the author of any works. His life was one of asceticism rather than of labour. By far the larger part of it was devoted to the care of his own soul, and he was not remarkable either as a reformer of ecclesiastical order or as a preacher of the gospel. Yet the church held him in extraordinary veneration. It has not been thought necessary to give any account here of the numerous miracles that were attributed to him. Those recorded by Bæda were believed to be genuine by the saint's contemporaries; many of them were told to the historian by men of the greatest sanctity of life who were eye-witnesses of the facts they related, and who believed them to be evidences of Cuthbert's miraculous power. They are proofs of the high place that he held in the church even during his life. It is easy to see why this was. Although Northumbria could already boast of many men of eminent holiness, a large number of them differed from the Roman church, and held to the peculiar Celtic usages. Cuthbert was a convert to the Roman ritual, a fruit probably of the synod of Whitby; he supplied the loss that the church would otherwise have sustained when Colman turned his back on an ungrateful land, and he brought Colman's famous house into the catholic unity. Men saw in him then an embodiment of the triumph of the ecclesiastical order established in 664, and every proof of saintship that was attributed to him must have been looked on as a fresh seal to the victory of the church over her former Celtic teachers.
Eleven years after Cuthbert's death, in 698, the monks of Lindisfarne, wishing to do him honour, translated his body, and placed it above the floor of their church. On opening the coffin they found the body of the saint in a state of incorruption, and the robes undecayed. They took off the chasuble, which became a miracle-working relic, and put another in its place (Bæda; Reginald). When Lindisfarne was laid waste by the Danes in 793, the body of the saint was left undisturbed. In 875 the see was again ravaged by another pagan invasion, and Bishop Eardulf determined to flee for safety. Mindful of the saint's charge to Henfrith, he and the monks took Cuthbert's body with them in their flight, carrying it in a wooden coffin. They went into Cumberland, and intending to migrate to Ireland put the body on board a ship at the mouth of the Derwent; the ship, however, was driven back, and the bishop and his monks journeyed to the coast of Witherne in Galloway, and then again to Northumbria. Wherever the body of the saint rested during these seven years of wandering, it is said that a church or chapel was built and dedicated to him. At length in 883 Guthred, the christian king of the Danes, believing that he had been helped by the saint, gave Eardulf Chester-le-Street, a few miles to the north of Durham, for the place of his see, and there Cuthbert's body was laid in the church. The body remained at Chester for about a hundred years, until Bishop Ealdhun, fearing another Danish invasion, carried it to Ripon. After a few months the bishop left Ripon, intending to return to Chester. He and his
