Rethinking Ripon: Cuthbert’s Tonsure and Northumbrian Ecclesiastical Geography

Abstract

This article reconsiders the motivation of the author of the anonymous Life of Cuthbert to insist that the saint received the Petrine tonsure at Ripon instead of (the more likely Irish tonsure) at Melrose, as Bede recounts. While scholars widely agree that this detail was meant to provide Cuthbert with a Roman background less contentious than his actual Irish-influenced upbringing, I will propose a parallel motivation from the perspective of ecclesiastical geography. I argue that the anonymous author used the tonsure as one further method of attempting to expand Lindisfarne’s sphere of influence in early medieval Northumbria.

Keywords:

• Cuthbert
• Ripon
• tonsure
• Bede
• Wilfrid
• Anglo-Latin hagiography
• ecclesiastical politics
• Northumbria

Notes

1 Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, ed. and trans., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), v.21. Hereafter, abbreviated HE.

2 For more on the history of hair and tonsure in the Middle Ages, see Robert Bartlett, ‘Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages’, TRHS, 4 (1994), pp. 43–60; Robert Mills, ‘The Signification of the Tonsure’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Toronto, 2005), pp. 109–26; Ian Wood, ‘Hair and Beards in the Early Medieval West’, Al-Masāq, 30.1 (2018), pp. 107–116; Roberta Milliken, ed., A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages (London, 2019).

3 HE, v.21. The letter then goes on to claim that Ceolfrith was so eloquent on the virtues of the Petrine tonsure that he even persuaded Adomnán of its value (though that abbot could not convince his fellows in Iona).

4 For more on the insular context, see Edward James, ‘Bede and the Tonsure Question’, Peritia, 3 (1984), pp. 85–98; William Sayers, ‘Early Irish Attitudes toward Hair and Beards, Baldness and Tonsure’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 44 (1991), pp. 154–189; Daniel McCarthy, ‘On the Shape of the Insular Tonsure’, Celtica, 24 (2003), pp. 140–67.

5 See HE, iii.25.

6 HE, iii.26.

7 For editions of these Lives, see Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Two Lives of St. Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940); Michael Lapidge, ed. and trans., Bede’s Latin Poetry (Oxford, 2019), pp. 184–313.

8 These include the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory the Great (c. 704–714), Stephen of Ripon’s Vita Wilfridi (712–714), the anonymous Wearmouth-Jarrow Life of Ceolfrid (c. 716), and Bede’s Historia abbatum (his History of the Abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow, c. 716) and Historia ecclesiastica (c. 731). For editions, see Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great (Lawrence, 1968); Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge, 1927); and Christopher Grocock and I. N. Wood, ed. and trans., Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Oxford, 2013), pp. 21–76, 77–122, for the Historia abbatum and the Vita S. Ceolfridi. For an overview of the earliest Anglo-Latin literature, see Michael Lapidge, ‘The Anglo-Latin Background’, in A New Critical History of Old English Literature, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder (New York, 1986), pp. 5–37; Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899 (Rio Grande, 1996); Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 900–1066 (Rio Grande, 1993).

9 Colgrave established the dating range for the VCA based on internal evidence from the text. He takes 699 as his terminus post quem because the anonymous relates a posthumous miracle quod in praesenti anno factum est (‘which happened only this year’) after several other sequential events (Cuthbert’s body being found incorrupt eleven years after his 687 death and other miracles not given temporal qualifications). The terminus ante quem of 705 is based on a reference to Aldfrith (d. 705), qui nunc regnat pacifice (‘who now reigns peacefully’). See Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, pp. 13, 104–5, 136–37. For a recent overview of the VCA’s influences, see Christiania Whitehead, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert: Place, Texts and Ascetic Tradition, 690–1500 (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 16–20. For more on influence, see D.A. Bullough, ‘Columba, Adomnan and the Achievement of Iona: Part I’, SHR, 43 (1964), pp. 111–30; Bullough, ‘Columba, Adomnan and the Achievement of Iona: Part II’, SHR, 44 (1965), pp. 17–33; Clare Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary’, in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community to A.D. 1200, ed. Gerald Bonner, David Rollason, and Clare Stancliffe (Ipswich, 1989), pp. 21–44; Alan Thacker, ‘Lindisfarne and the Origins of the Cult of St Cuthbert’, in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community, pp. 103–22; Stancliffe, ‘Disputed Episcopacy: Bede, Acca, and the Relationship between Stephen’s Life of St Wilfrid and the Early Prose Lives of St Cuthbert’, Anglo-Saxon England, 41 (2012), pp. 7–39; Elizabeth M. G. Krajewski, ‘The Anonymous Life of Cuthbert: A “Celtic” Account of an Anglo-Saxon Saint?’ Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 37 (2017), pp. 172–184.

10 For dating of the VCM, see Lapidge, Bede’s Latin Poetry, pp. 70–80; Frederick M. Biggs, ‘Domino in domino dominorum: Bede and John of Beverley’, Anglo-Saxon England, 44 (2016), pp. 17–30. The VCM is a work of 979 hexameters written in an abstract, figural language that is meant to bring out the spiritual meaning of the miracle stories in the anonymous Life. It was probably first meant to be read alongside the VCA, though Bede does note in his Preface that he intends to write something of Cuthbert’s life himself (including miracles not found in the VCA).

11 Of course, there are many other studies that posit more specific reasons for the second Life. Take, for instance, Walter Berschin, ‘Opus deliberatum ac perfectum: Why Did the Venerable Bede Write a Second Prose Life of St. Cuthbert?’ in St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community, pp. 95–102, who attends to stylistics.

12 See especially Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary.’ For a recent assessment, see Matthew C. Delvaux, ‘From Virtue to Virtue: Diverging Visions of Sanctity and Monasticism in Two Lives of Cuthbert’, Early Medieval Europe, 27.3 (2019), pp. 226–50. See also Simon J. Coates, ‘The Bishop as Pastor and Solitary: Bede and the Spiritual Authority of the Monk-Bishop’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47 (1996), pp. 601–19.

13 See Alan Thacker, ‘Bede’s Ideal of Reform’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies Presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed. Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough, and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1983), pp. 130–53; Simon Coates, ‘The Construction of Episcopal Sanctity in Early Anglo-Saxon England: The Impact of Venantius Fortunatus’, Historical Research, 71.174 (1998), 1–13.

14 As Lapidge, ‘The Anglo-Latin Background’ among others, writes: ‘Such matters [personal reminiscences and incidental details] may be of great interest to modern historians, but Bede saw that they were inappropriate in a saint’s vita. The hagiographer must demonstrate that the saint in question was a vessel of God’s grace, residing only temporarily in a human frame, but eternally a member of the community of God’s saints, who may intercede on behalf of those who pray to him. Thus it matters little whether the saint’s human form was tall or short, hairy or smooth, or whether he was born at Lichfield or Lastingham; what does matter is his efficacy as a vessel of divine virtus and his ability to demonstrate this power through virtutes or miracles. Bede systematically set out to recast the earlier anonymous vita of Cuthbert, eliminating all its local detail and drawing attention, in many homiletic additions, to the saint’s eternal virtues. Shorn of local detail, Bede’s prose Vita S. Cuthberti appealed to an international medieval audience’ (p. 20). For more on the text’s broader spiritual message, see Lenore Abraham, ‘Bede’s Life of Cuthbert: A Reassessment’, Proceedings of the PMR Conference, 1 (1976), pp. 23–32; John C. Eby, ‘Bringing the Vita to Life: Bede’s Symbolic Structure of the Life of St. Cuthbert’, American Benedictine Review, 48 (1997), pp. 316–38; Eric Knibbs, ‘Exegetical Hagiography: Bede’s Prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti’, Revue Bénèdictine, 114.2 (2004), pp. 233–52; John P. Bequette, ‘Monasticism, Evangelization, and Eloquence: Rhetoric in Bede’s Life of Cuthbert’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 48.3 (2013), pp. 325–52.

15 Thacker, ‘Lindisfarne and the Origins of the Cult of St Cuthbert’, p. 122.

16 See D.P. Kirby, ‘The Genesis of a Cult: Cuthbert of Farne and Ecclesiastical Politics in Northumbria in the Late Seventh and Early Eighth Centuries’, JEH, 46.3 (1995), pp. 383–397; David Rollason, ‘Hagiography and Politics in Early Northumbria’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany, 1996), pp. 95–114; Vicky Gunn, Bede’s Historiae: Genre, Rhetoric and the Construction of Anglo-Saxon Church History (Woodbridge, 2009).

17 Stancliffe, ‘Disputed Episcopacy.’ See also D. P. Kirby, ‘Bede, Eddius Stephanus and the “Life of Wilfrid”’, EHR, 98 (1983), pp. 101–114; Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988), pp. 235–328.

18 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, p. 269.

19 Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary’, p. 23.

20 Sarah McCann, ‘Cuthbert and Boisil: Irish Influence in Northumbria’, in Saints of North-East England, 600–1500, ed. by Margaret Coombe, Anne Mouron, and Christiania Whitehead (Turnhout, 2017), pp. 69–88, at p. 76. See also Alan Thacker, ‘Shaping the Saint: Rewriting Tradition in the Early Lives of St Cuthbert’, in The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World: Converting the Isles I, ed. Roy Flechner and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Turnhout, 2016), pp. 399–429, who argues that the ‘immediate key to the rewriting of the Cuthbertine Lives—and the very different pictures of the saint that they present—lies in tensions within the Lindisfarne community. Those tensions, which probably go back to the tearing apart of the community after the Synod of Whitby in 664, may have been heightened by arrival of monks from Melrose and by divisions inherent in a structure which separated the offices of bishop and abbot. Already seething in Cuthbert’s time, Lindisfarne’s internal enmities reached new heights with the arrival of Wilfrid, forcing the departure of many of the monks. We may perhaps envisage an episcopal and Romanizing group, ultimately favoured by Wilfrid, and a Melrose-focused group, more favorable to Irish monastic tradition. While, clearly, the promotion of Cuthbert as a saint had considerable momentum within both parties, the way in which it was to be accomplished was contentious’ (pp. 423–24).

21 See, for instance, Kirby, ‘The Genesis of a Cult’, p. 388; Rollason, ‘Hagiography and Politics in Early Northumbria’, pp. 99–103; McCann, ‘Cuthbert and Boisil’, pp. 73–4.

22 See especially A. Joseph McMullen, ‘Rewriting the Ecclesiastical Landscape of Early Medieval Northumbria in the Lives of Cuthbert’, Anglo-Saxon England, 43 (2014), pp. 57–98.

23 I use the term propaganda here very deliberately, in the tradition of scholarship on Irish hagiography. See, for example, Kim McCone, ‘An Introduction to Early Irish Saints’ Lives’, Maynooth Review, 11 (1984), pp. 26–59, who argues: ‘As far back as we can go, then, the saint’s life in Ireland seems to have been geared as a genre to political propaganda rather than to moral example or biography proper’ (p. 30).

24 For the term ‘monastic empire’, see Sarah Foot, ‘Wilfrid’s Monastic Empire’, in Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint: Papers from the 1300th Anniversary Conferences, ed. N.J. Higham (Donington, 2013), pp. 27–39.

25 VCP, pp. 174–177.

26 VCP, pp. 180–81.

27 HE, iii.25. A very similar account is presented again, later in the Historia: At ille Brittaniam ueniens coniunctus est amicitiis Alhfridi regis, qui catholicas ecclesiae regulas sequi semper et amare didicerat. Vnde et illi, quia catholicum eum esse conperiit, mox donauit terram x familiarum in loco qui dicitur Stanford, et non multo post monasterium xxx familiarum in loco qui uocatur Inhrypum; quem uidelicet locum dederat pridem ad construendum inibi monasterium his qui Scottos sequebantur. Verum quia illi postmodum optione data maluerunt loco cedere quam pascha catholicum ceterosque ritus canonicos iuxta Romanae et apostolicae ecclesiae consuetudinem recipere, dedit hoc illi, quem melioribus imbutum disciplinis ac moribus uidit (‘On returning to Britain, he made friends with King Alhfrith, who had learned always to obey and love the catholic rules of the church. When he found that Wilfrid was also catholic, he at once gave him ten hides in a place called Stamford, and soon afterwards a monastery with thirty hides in a place called Ripon. He had first offered this site to some who followed the Irish ways, so that they might build a monastery there. But when they were given the choice, they preferred to abandon the place rather than accept the catholic Easter and the other canonical rites of the Roman and apostolic church; so he gave it to one whom he found to be trained in better rules and customs’). HE, v.19.

28 McCann, ‘Cuthbert and Boisil’, p. 74.

29 Charles D. Wright, ‘The Irish Tradition’, in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Malden, 2001), pp. 345–374, writes, for example, ‘Bede’s attitude towards the Irish was profoundly sympathetic, indeed grateful and admiring…Two things above all impressed Bede about the Irish: their personal austerity and their scriptural learning’ (p. 346). See also T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Bede, the Irish, and the Britons’, Celtica, 15 (1983), pp. 42–52; A.T. Thacker, ‘Bede and the Irish’, in Bede Venerabilis: Historian, Monk and Northumbrian, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen and A.A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1996), pp. 31–59; Sarah McCann, ‘Bede’s plures de Scottorum regione: The Irish in the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum’, (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2013); Colin A. Ireland, The Gaelic Background of Old English Poetry before Bede (Berlin, 2022), pp. 229–43.

30 Whitehead, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert, p. 33.

31 See especially T.M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 391–415; Clare Stancliffe, Bede, Wilfrid, and the Irish, Jarrow Lecture (Jarrow, 2003); T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Wilfrid and the Celts’, in Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint, ed. Higham, pp. 243–259; Ireland, The Gaelic Background of Old English Poetry before Bede, pp. 235–37.

32 For more on Ripon’s founding and its place among Wilfrid’s properties, see G.R.J. Jones, ‘Some Donations to Bishop Wilfrid in Northern England’, Northern History, 31 (1995), pp. 22–38, at pp. 26–28.

33 Scott Thompson Smith, ‘Inextricabilis dissensio: Property, Dispute and Sanctity in the Vita S Wilfridi’, Mediaeval Studies, 74 (2012), pp. 163–96, at p. 165.

34 Michael Roper, ‘Wilfrid’s Landholdings in Northumbria’, in Saint Wilfrid at Hexham, ed. D.P. Kirby (Newcastle, 1974), pp. 61–79, at p. 63.

35 Bertram Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 92–93. Hereafter, VW.

36 VW, pp. 96–97.

37 VCA, pp. 76–77.

38 See especially Eby, ‘Bringing the Vita to Life’; Knibbs, ‘Exegetical Hagiography’.

39 See especially Kirby, ‘The Genesis of a Cult’.

40 Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary’, p. 23.

41 See Catherine Cubitt, ‘Memory and Narrative in the Cult of Early Anglo-Saxon Saints’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (New York, 2000), pp. 29–66; Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley, ‘Living on the Ecg: The Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts’, in A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (University Park, 2006), pp. 85–110; David Petts, ‘Coastal Landscapes and Early Christianity in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria’, Estonian Journal of Archaeology, 13.2 (2009), pp. 79–95; James Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester, 2017), pp. 141–174; Britton Elliott Brooks, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac (Cambridge, 2019); Ellen Arnold, ‘Environmental History and Hagiography’, in Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500, ed. Samantha Kahn Herrick (Leiden, 2019), pp. 351–371.

42 McMullen, ‘Rewriting the Ecclesiastical Landscape of Early Medieval Northumbria’.

43 Early in his life, Cuthbert is sent food by God in Chester-le-Street. While in the office of bishop of Lindisfarne he preaches and performs miracles in two regiones (Kintis and Æchs[a]e) that seem to be between Hexham and Carlisle, likely placing them in the diocese of Hexham. Bede removes all three of these place-names from the VCP, relocating the miracles more carefully to unnamed locations that are implied to be in the diocese of Lindisfarne. It is suggestive that the anonymous would have Cuthbert preaching in these areas.

44 See especially Richard Sharpe, ‘Some Problems Concerning the Organisation of the Church in Early Medieval Ireland’, Peritia, 3 (1984), pp. 230–70; Colmán Etchingham, ‘The Implications of Paruchia’, Ériu, 44 (1993), pp. 139–162.

45 Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History, p. 264.

46 VW, pp. 96–97.

47 Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary’, p. 23.

48 James, ‘Bede and the Tonsure Question’, p. 86.

49 Brooks, Restoring Creation.

50 Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the Polarity between Pastor and Solitary’, p. 24.

51 Cf. Nam servus Dei Wilfrithus desiderio concupiscens tonsurae Petri apostoli formulam in modum coronae spineae caput Christi cingentis, a sancto Dalfino archiepiscopo libenter suscepit (‘Wilfrid, the servant of God, in accordance with his own desire, gladly received from the holy Archbishop Dalfinus the form of tonsure of the Apostle Peter in the shape of the crown of thorns which encircled the head of Christ’); postquam seruitutis Christi iugum tonsuraeque Petri formam in modum corone spineae capud Christi cingentis Domino adiuuante susceperat (‘after he had by the Lord’s help taken upon him the yoke of bondservice to Christ and the Petrine tonsure after the shape of the crown of thorns that bound the head of Christ’). VW, pp. 14–15; VCA, pp. 76–77.

52 Stancliffe, ‘Disputed Episcopacy’, pp. 15, 19.

53 VW, pp. 36–37.

54 McMullen, ‘Rewriting the Ecclesiastical Landscape of Early Medieval Northumbria’.