1 - THE ENGLISH ZION: AN INTRODUCTION TO SAINT CUTHBERT AND HIS CITY

Summary

… he that hath seene the situation of this Citty, hath seene the map of Sion, and may save a Journey to the Jerusalem.

In their own eyes and those of their contemporaries the monks of early fifteenth-century Durham needed little justification other than that they were the’ mynistres of Saynt Cuthbert’. The identification of an ecclesiastical corporation with its patron saint is one of the commonplaces of medieval history; but nowhere in England was such an identification made to seem so complete as at Durham, and nowhere did it prove so powerful and enduring. During the priorate of John Wessington, an assault on the persons and possessions of the Durham monks was ipso facto an act of aggression against the greatest of the northern saints. The convent's books were, as a matter of course, the ‘libri Sancti Cuthberti’ just as its strenuous legal battles were fought on the saint's behalf and in the ever-present hope of his personal and supernatural intervention. The closeness of the relationship between seventh-century saint and fifteenth-century monk needs particular emphasis, for without an awareness of its fundamental importance much of the history of the convent will always remain literally inexplicable. Only the belief that they were fighting Saint Cuthbert's war explains the willingness of prior and chapter to engage in the long, tortuous, unrewarding and eventually unsuccessful campaign to prevent their cell at Coldingham from falling into the acquisitive hands of Scottish clerks and magnates.