A kind of Noah’s ark: Aelred of Rievaulx and national identity

Extract

Aelred of Rievaulx was born of English parents at Hexham in about 1110, that is only thirty years after the final Norman punitive harrying of the north and thirty-four years after the execution of earl Waltheof, grandfather of Aelred’s lifelong friend, Waldef. Aelred’s father was the last of a long line of English ‘hereditary’ priests of Hexham, a foundation of Saint Wilfred which lay within the patrimony of Saint Cuthbert; Cuthbert and Wilfred were kept alive in Northumbria by the writings of Bede whose bones Aelred’s great-grandfather had stolen in a dawn raid on Jarrow and brought to Durham, where Aelred’s father ended his days as one of Cuthbert’s monks. Such a background could be expected to have given Aelred a strong sense of the difference between Norman and Englishman and of his own Englishness. But national identity in Northumbria in the first half of the twelfth century was a complex affair.