As a result, the monastery grew in power and wealth, attracting grants of land from kings and nobles as well as gifts of money and precious objects. Miracles were soon reported at St Cuthbert’s shrine and Lindisfarne was quickly established as the major pilgrimage centre in Northumbria. His remains were elevated to a coffin-shrine at ground level, and this marked the beginnings of the cult of St Cuthbert, which was to alter the course of Lindisfarne’s history. To their delight they discovered that Cuthbert’s body had not decayed, but was ‘incorrupt’ – a sure sign, they argued, of his purity and saintliness. Eleven years later the monks opened his tomb.

The ultimate success of the monks’ mission, together with the long-term wealth of their monastery, was founded on their proximity to the royal dynasty of Bernicia.Ĭuthbert died on 20 March 687 and was buried in a stone coffin inside the main church on Lindisfarne. Oswald’s gift of Lindisfarne, 6 miles up the coast from Bamburgh, to the monks from Iona enabled them to establish a monastery and a bishopric in the political heart of the Northumbrian kingdom.

Oswald’s accession in 634 focused Northumbrian power in Bernicia, around the royal palaces at Yeavering, Mælmin (Milfield) and Bamburgh. Northumbria consisted of two parts: Deira, centred on the old Roman city of York, and Bernicia further north. By the 7th century Oswald’s Northumbrian kingdom dominated Britain. Oswald granted Aidan and his companions the small tidal island of Lindisfarne on which to found a monastery.įollowing the general collapse of Roman military rule in the early 5th century, Britain had fragmented into numerous small kingdoms, many ruled by Anglo-Saxon warlords. In 635 the Northumbrian king, Oswald (reigned 634–42), summoned an Irish monk named Aidan from Iona – the island-monastery off the south-west coast of what is now Scotland – to be bishop of his kingdom. Lindisfarne is intimately connected with the history of Christianity in Britain. Early Christianity in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria

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