St. Cuthbert's coffin is an oak coffin in Durham Cathedral which between AD 698 and 1827 contained the remains of Saint Cuthbert, who died in 687. The coffin also contained the Stonyhurst Gospel (now British Library) and the best surviving examples of Anglo-Saxon embroidery or opus Anglicanum, a stole and maniple which were probably added in the 930s, and given by King Athelstan. Probable possessions of Cuthbert are an ivory comb, a portable altar, and a pectoral cross with gold and garnet cloisonné, a rare and important early example of Christian Anglo-Saxon jewellery.[1]
The coffin is almost the only survival of what was no doubt a very large body of Anglo-Saxon wood carving, being inscribed or engraved with linear images which have tituli in Latin lettering and Anglo-Saxon runes with names of apostles and saints. The lid shows Christ[2] surrounded by four Evangelists' symbols, and one end has the earliest surviving iconic representation of the Virgin and Child outside Rome from the medieval art of the Western Church,[3] with the archangels Michael and Gabriel on the other. The sides show the Twelve Apostles and five archangels. The coffin survives in a number of fragments, supposedly about 6,000, of which 169 are included in the current reconstruction, and many names are illegible.[4]
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Few people's remains are as well-travelled as those of Cuthbert. He died on 20 March 687 in his hermit's cell on Inner Farne Island, two miles from Bamburgh, Northumberland, and was taken back to the main monastery at Lindisfarne to be buried. Eleven years later the coffin was re-opened, and according to his biographies (including prose and verse ones by Bede from about 720) his remains were found to be "incorrupt" or undecayed. This was a traditional attribute of sainthood and helped greatly in his subsequent cult. He was reburied in a new coffin, which is described in his biographies, and matches the surviving coffin closely.
In 875 the monks managed to escape with the coffin, which was presumably in a shrine in the church, before the Vikings attacked and destroyed the monastery. For seven years they carried it with them to various places in modern Scotland and Northumbria before settling it in the still existing St Cuthbert's church in Chester-le-Street until 995, when another Danish invasion led to its removal to Ripon. Travelling once again, the cart with the coffin became stuck at Durham, which was taken as a sign that the saint wished to remain there. A new stone church—the so-called 'White Church'—was built, the predecessor of the present grand cathedral. The body was moved within the cathedral at various points; perhaps in 1041, in 1096 to escape the Harrying of the North by William the Conqueror, in 1104 when the Norman cathedral was constructed, and in 1541 when the medieval shrine which was one of the principal English pilgrimage sites was destroyed during the Reformation.
In 1827 the coffin was once again removed, having been found in a walled space at the site of the shrine. By then there were three layers of coffin, taken to date from 1541, 1041 and 698, housing a complete skeleton, and other human remains, though many of the contents had been removed earlier. The textiles were removed in 1827. The human remains were reburied in a new coffin under a plain inscribed slab, with the remains of the old coffins, which were removed in yet another opening of the burial in 1899. The coffin and most of the contents are on now view in the Cathedral Museum; the Stonyhurst Gospel is usually also on display in London.
The runic inscription reads:
The ma and possibly the eu are bind runes. The t is inverted. Then follows:
The ma is again a bind rune, then:
In Latin letters, followed by runic:
Followed by Latin:
The names of Matthew, Mark and John are thus in runes, while that of Luke is in Latin letters. The Christogram is notably in runic writing, ihs xps ᛁᚻᛋ ᛉᛈᛋ, with the h double-barred in the continental style, the first attestation of that variant in England. The monogram reflects a runic variant of a partly Latinized XPS from Greek ΧΡΙCΤΟC, with the rho rendered as runic p and the eolc rune (the old Algiz rune z) used to render chi.
