The Old English Durham and the Cult of Cuthbert

The Old English Durham is a short poem in praise of the final resting place of Cuthbert, the great seventh-century Anglo-Saxon hermit saint, whose remains, after a long period of peregrination, had finally found a permanent home in Durham cathedral. The present essay argues that the poem asserts the primacy of Durham as a cult center by depicting the city as a space exceptionally suited to Cuthbert and blessed by his presence. The Durham poet presents a selective and idealized description of the city of Durham that uses a hybrid of natural and built space to echo the representation of Cuthbert’s homes on Farne and Lindisfarne in the hagiographic tradition. The result is a fusion of the eremitic space of the hermitage and the coenobitic space of the monastery, both types of the City of God, which creates a sense of continuity from Cuthbert’s life and demonstrates the fitness of Durham Cathedral as a resting place for the saint.

The poem Durham was written possibly in the early twelfth century to commemorate the translation of Cuthbert to his shrine in the new Norman cathedral, which took place on August 29, 1104, although it could have been composed at any time after about 1050, when all of the relics it names were in Durham.¹ Durham is known to have been preserved in two manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D.xx (Ker no. 223) and Cambridge, University Library, Ff.1.27 (Ker no. 14).² The Cotton manuscript was almost completely destroyed in the 1731 Ashburnham House fire, and its text of the poem is preserved only in George Hickes’s 1705 edition, based on a transcript made by the Reverend G. Nicolson.³ Prior to the fire, the manuscript was described by Thomas Smith (1696) and by Humfrey Wanley (1705); Neil Ker, working from their accounts and the surviving fragments, suggests that Cotton Vitellius D.xx originated in Durham, and dates it to the twelfth century.⁴ Christopher Norton dates the Cambridge manuscript to the 1180s and suggests that it was produced at Durham.⁵

The position and treatment of Durham in these two manuscripts, probably produced by the very community it describes, can reveal something about how the poem was perceived. Although Durham is the sole vernacular text in both manuscripts, it is not treated as marginal, nor is it a later addition. Both manuscripts have a Latin title for the work, “De situ Dunelmi et de sanctorum reliquiis quae ibidem continentur carmen compositum” (A song about the site of Durham, and about the relics of saints that are contained in the same place), creating a smooth linguistic transition between their Latin works and the Old English poem. The mixed letterforms of the text in the Cambridge manuscript and the macaronic character of some of Durham’s lines further this integration.⁶ Ker states that it is likely that the Old English poem was of the same date as the rest of the Cotton Manuscript, but as the page containing Durham (fol. 20) is not one of the remaining sixteen charred fragments, information on the situation and presentation of the poem in that manuscript is limited to what Smith and Wanley record. In the Cambridge manuscript, Durham is written in the main hand and preceded by a Latin heading. An erasure of the last two and a half lines of the page leaves the Old English poem as the final text in its section of the manuscript, where, as Norton has observed, “uniquely, extra space was deliberately provided for [the texts]”; Durham and its companion texts, then, are not merely quire-filling miscellanea.⁷ The Old English poem is the concluding item of a group of texts that are presented as being of particular significance.

In both manuscripts the poem Durham is a key component. From descriptions of the Cotton manuscript, the Old English poem was associated with texts that assert Cuthbert’s importance. According to Smith’s catalogue of the Cotton library, Durham followed hymns and offices for Cuthbert and a list of Durham’s relics...