The Cuthbert Gospel is the smallest surviving book of the early medieval west and the oldest one that has never been taken apart: a pocket volume of ninety-four vellum leaves, 137 by 95 millimetres, carrying the whole of the Gospel of John in a single hand, and still wearing the goatskin cover moulded over its boards when it was made in Northumbria in the early eighth century. The book was buried with a hermit who died in 687, opened in his coffin at Durham in 1104, carried into exile by private collectors and a Jesuit college, and bought by the British Library in 2012, where it is now shelved as Add MS 89000. The binding is not packaging around the text but the record of how the text travelled, and the story of that binding has been retold so often, and so wrongly, that it is worth setting down what the evidence actually supports.
A Book Made in the North
Where the book was made is no longer a matter of guesswork. The British Library’s own catalogue places its origin at Wearmouth-Jarrow in the early eighth century, and the reason is the handwriting and the text together. On the banks of the Tyne, in the 670s, two twin monasteries had been founded a short walk apart: Wearmouth, where Benedict Biscop gathered books and men from Italy, and Jarrow, where his colleague Ceolfrith worked with the Roman mission that Theodore of Tarsus had brought to England in 668. The library they built was the most ambitious in the Anglo-Saxon world, and its scriptorium produced the Codex Amiatinus, a six-volume pandect of the Bible in uncial capitals whose Ezra is shown at his desk among shelves of books bound in red. That miniature is worth pausing over, because the red geometric bindings in it are the closest the eighth century comes to an illustration of what this book is. The miniature was probably copied from a lost Italian Bible imported to Jarrow, and the Cuthbert Gospel’s cover belongs to the same visual conversation: a crimson goatskin field, an interlace panel and a chalice from which vine stems climb, a double-armed cross on a grid, all picked out in two colours.
The date has moved, and the movement has changed the story. T. Julian Brown, whose edition of 1969 was for decades the standard account, dated the script to the end of the seventh century. Richard Gameson, in the study published in 2015, dates it instead to about 710 to 730, and Leslie Webster dates the cover decoration to about 700 to 730. The consequence is easy to miss: if the book was written in the second or third decade of the eighth century, it was made after Cuthbert had died in 687, and probably after the community had raised his relics in 698. A book made for the elevation, or made in the hermit’s lifetime, is no longer the likeliest explanation of what lies at the head of his coffin.
The physical description is austere. The codex is of parchment, foliated fos. ii plus 90, with a late thirteenth-century court roll of the prior of Durham inserted at the front and the original pastedown behind it. The catalogue gives its dimensions as approximately 137 by 95 millimetres, while other descriptions give 138 by 92, a difference that tells the reader how little such figures can be pinned down. The only ornament inside the book is a set of red initials marking the openings of sections, and Sir David Wilson used this manuscript to argue that some books are so beautifully written that illumination would only spoil them. Julian Brown, who had handled the book for years, wrote that the capitular uncial of this Gospel owes its beauty to simple design and perfect execution, and that the decorative elements in the script never interfere with the letter forms but arise naturally from the slanted angle at which the pen was held. Nineteen lines fill a page until folio 42, where the plan changes to twenty, and two sorts of vellum are used, which suggests that the change was forced by the shortage of the finest material rather than chosen.
For the history of the transmission of the text, the manuscript’s value is as a witness rather than as an ornament. The text is a very good and careful copy of the Gospel of John belonging to what is called the Italo-Northumbrian family, whose other members include the Codex Amiatinus, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Gospel Book now catalogued as Royal MS 1 B VII. The family is thought to descend from a gospel book brought out of Naples by Adrian, the companion of Theodore, and probably held at Wearmouth-Jarrow. This book is therefore not a local attempt at a text but a copy of a text that had already travelled from Italy to Northumbria, and it is one of the few surviving physical links in that journey.
The binding is the oldest intact Western binding, and very nearly the only decorated Insular leatherwork to survive. The boards are the same size as the leaves, almost certainly birch, cut on the quarter, the left about 2.4 millimetres thick and the right about 1.5. Shallow slots were cut in both faces to take the thread, which was flax with an S-twist; there were no thongs and no cords, and the thread alone joined the boards to the sections and the sections to one another. The covering is tanned goatskin about 1.3 millimetres thick, stained a deep crimson, stuck to the boards and moulded over the foundations of the design while it was still damp. Lines were engraved with a sharp pointed tool and filled with orpiment and indigo.
Robert Stevick’s analysis of the two covers found that their designs follow a geometric scheme laid out with compass and straightedge, using the ratio between Pythagoras’ constant and one and the golden section. The main motif on the front is raised, which is unusual among the handful of early medieval bindings that survive, and it appears to have been made over a clay-like substance beneath the leather. Whether the binder worked at Wearmouth-Jarrow or at Lindisfarne is still argued; the plant scrolls on the cover can be compared with those on the portable altar found in the same coffin.
Two of the familiar stories about this book do not survive contact with the evidence, and they concern its writer and its glossator. The first is the naming of a scribe. There is no colophon in the Cuthbert Gospel at all. The famous inscription that names Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, as the scribe of the Lindisfarne Gospels, that names his successor Aethelwald as the binder and Billfrith the anchorite as the metalworker, was added a century later to a different book, and the identification of the hand of the Cuthbert Gospel with Eadfrith’s is a hypothesis rather than a fact. It was long the accepted one, but the later dating of the script to the second or third decade of the eighth century makes it harder to sustain, since the two books were then written only a generation or two apart.
The second story concerns an Old English gloss, and here the correction is more complete. The Cuthbert Gospel carries no interlinear Old English gloss. The great interlinear gloss belongs to the Lindisfarne Gospels, where an Old English rendering runs between the lines of the Latin throughout, written in the third quarter of the tenth century by Aldred, priest of Chester-le-Street. The attribution of that gloss to King Alfred, or the identification of Aldred with a bishop of Durham of that name taught by Alfred, was a conjecture that scholarship has abandoned; Aldred’s own colophon claims only that he was born of Alfred, a formula much debated which in any case asserts nothing about authorship by the king.
Cuthbert and the Book
The man whose coffin the book shared was born in Northumbria in about 635 and died on the island of Farne in March 687, and the community that cared for his body never let it rest for long. He entered the monastery at Melrose, served under Aidan at Lindisfarne, became prior there, was elected bishop in 685, and gave up the see a year later, which is the point at which the stories begin and the point at which the cult was already taking shape. He is conventionally known as Saint Cuthbert, and for most of the Middle Ages the two names were a single fact: the hermit of Farne and the shrine at Durham.
After his death the community buried him at Lindisfarne, and in 698 his relics were raised in a wooden chest and translated with ceremony to the church there. Viking raids in the ninth century drove the body inland again; the community carried it to Chester-le-Street and then, in the last years of the century, to Ripon, and at the close of the century to Durham, where Bishop Aldhun raised a wooden church for the body in 995 and where the shrine of the present cathedral stands. Every one of those moves is a transfer of a container: a chest, a coffin, a shrine, and the book travelled inside that sequence.
What the evidence actually says about how the book came to be in that coffin is surprisingly precise, and all of it is later than the event. On the verso of the second leaf a note of the thirteenth century reads: “Ewangelium Iohannis quod inuentum fuerat ad capud beati patris nostri Cuthberti in sepulcro iacens anno translacionis ipsius”, the Gospel of John which was found at the head of our blessed father Cuthbert, lying in his tomb, in the year of his translation. A near-identical note in a twelfth-century hand was erased in the upper margin of the first leaf, and the collection of miracles written at Durham in the 1120s or 1130s records that when the outer lid of the coffin was raised in 1104, the monks saw a book of the Gospels lying at the head of the board.
Flambard’s sermon on the day of the translation adds a detail that tells how the book was handled. The bishop showed the people a Gospel of John in miraculously perfect condition, and it was carried in a satchel-like container of red leather with a badly frayed sling made of silken threads. A relic of this kind was not a book on a lectern but an object in transit, and the frayed sling is the wear of a thing handled and carried from place to place over years. James Raine’s account of the coffin, published in 1828, lists among the objects found a burse of the same kind, a gold cross lying on the breast, a comb, a girdle, and the coffin itself enclosed in an iron chest.
By the middle of the twelfth century the book was already being shown as part of the shrine’s evidence. Reginald of Durham, writing in the 1160s or 1170s, records that William FitzHerbert, archbishop of York, was shown a manuscript, apparently this one, when he visited Cuthbert’s tomb at Durham in 1153 or 1154. The association is therefore not a medieval invention prompted by curiosity; it runs continuously with the community’s own account of what was in the coffin, and by the thirteenth century the note on the second leaf was being written as a kind of title for the object.
What remains open is whether the book was ever in the hermit’s own hands. On the older chronology, made at the end of the seventh century and used at the elevation of 698, it could have been his, and the marginal marks for the dead would then record the actual ceremony of his raising. On the later chronology the book is a gift from the community to the shrine of its founder, or a deposit made when the coffin was opened. Both readings are live in the literature, and the difference matters, because a book owned by a hermit and a book given to his memory are two different objects for the history of reading.
Four passages are marked in the margins beside John: at John 5:21 and John 6:37 the note reads pro defunctis, and at John 6:51 and John 11:21 it reads de mortuorum. These are the readings used for Masses for the dead in the Roman lectionary of the mid seventh century, and they were added in a hurry, the offset marks on the opposite pages showing that the book was closed before the ink was dry. Whatever else it was, this book was used at a Mass for the dead, held open in the hand, and shut again in a hurry.
What the 1104 opening yielded was not a library but a group of objects, and the group is what makes the book intelligible. The coffin held the body, the head of King Oswald, bones of bishops including Aidan, Eadberht and Eadfrith, the portable altar with its silver cover, and a linen bag said to contain the remains of Bede. The book’s association with the hermit is therefore a shrine association: it is one of the things the community chose to place at the head of its founder, and it belongs with the altar and the bones rather than with a study.
One further mark on the leaves deserves mention. Small holes in the folds of each gathering have been read as the traces of a temporary sewing of the pages, and one explanation offered is a journey made with the leaves unbound. If that is right, the book was carried in sections at some point and put back together on arrival, long before the leather was ever put on.
The Shrine and Its Contents
The shrine of 1104 was built in the choir of a cathedral that was itself new. Bishop William of St-Calais had begun the great Norman church at Durham in 1093, pulling down the timber church that the community had raised for the body, and by 1104 the choir stood far enough advanced to receive the coffin. William died in 1096 and his successor Ranulf Flambard, the bishop who would be remembered as a tax collector and a bully, had been in charge since 1099. The translation was the moment when a Northumbrian cult was handed over to a Norman establishment and re-founded in stone.
The date of the opening is worth stating precisely, because it is usually given loosely. The British Library’s catalogue says the coffin was opened in September 1104; the contemporary narratives are more exact. The anonymous account of the translation has the monks pray and fast through the night of 24 August and then raise the outer lid, and the translation itself took place on 29 August 1104, which is the date Battiscombe gave to the document when he published a translation of it. Other retellings give the opening as 25 August. The sequence is late August with the translation on the 29th, and the September in the catalogue smooths a precise and much better attested series of days.
What the monks found, according to the accounts, was a second lid raised on three transverse bars, the body lying on its right side and supple after more than four centuries, and the book lying at the head of the board. The community was not itself convinced. The anonymous account records the fear of the brethren on touching the holy relics, and the doubts of the assembled clergy, who had to be shown a body that was not merely bones. The rain that fell during the translation is told as a trial.
No separate inventory of books survives from 1104, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because the list of what lay in the coffin is one of the most attractive documents of the period and it is not a list at all. What survives is a narrative, written by the community decades afterwards, in which the objects are described as they were seen rather than itemised. The shrine’s holdings are better served by the Old English poem Durham, written in the first decade or so of the twelfth century, which catalogues the relics in the minster: the hermit himself, the head of King Oswald called the lion of England, Bishop Aidan with Eadberht and Eadfrith, Aethelwold, Bede and Abbot Boisil. The poem does the work of an inventory, in verse.
What was taken from the shrine, and by whom, is better documented for the later openings than for 1104. At the Dissolution the crown’s visitors stripped the shrine of its treasures, and the monks had already hidden the saint’s body in a secret place that has been traced and untraced ever since. In 1827 the clergy of the cathedral opened the tomb again, with its librarian, Dr James Raine, present, and the discovery was at once contested: Dr Lingard challenged the identification of the body found, and Archbishop Eyre, writing in 1849, allowed that the coffin was undoubtedly the saint’s but thought that the body had been removed and other remains substituted. Raine’s book of 1828 remains the principal account of what was in the chest that year.
The ceremony itself was public and Norman in its architecture. The coffin was carried into the new cathedral, the relics were laid in a shrine behind the high altar, and Flambard preached, holding up the Gospel in its red leather satchel so that the congregation could see a book that had lain in a grave for four centuries and had not decayed. The community wrote the poem and compiled the miracles to set the new house in order. What is often called the Norman translation of the relics was thus also a rewriting of the shrine’s inventory: a chest of relics in a wooden church became a feretrum in a stone cathedral, with a catalogue, a poem and a set of legal claims attached.
Where the book sat within that arrangement is not recorded, and it is worth noticing what the sources do not say. The accounts of 1104 list bones, the altar and the burse; the poem lists the saints whose relics were present but does not name the Gospel. The book’s status in the shrine is attested by the notes on its own leaves, which record its finding at the head of the body, and by nothing else. It was, in other words, a relic with an identity of its own, inscribed on the object itself rather than in the community’s books.
After the dissolution of the priory in 1540 the body stayed in Durham, in hiding and then in the open, while the book began to move. It was owned by Thomas Allen of Oxford, who died in 1632, and by the early eighteenth century it had reached George Henry Lee, third Earl of Lichfield, who died in 1772. The last half of the book’s journey to the present was made without any shrine at all, and it was made as a private possession rather than as a relic.
Rediscovery and the Binders
There is a story that this book was rediscovered in the late eighteenth century by a librarian at Durham, who found it in poor condition and had it rebound by a local binder who pulled the book apart, destroyed the original sewing and made a new one. It is a good story, and it has the advantage of being wrong in every particular. The Durham librarian was Dr James Raine, and he opened the tomb in 1827, not the book; and the book was never rebound at all. The Friends of the National Libraries, which helped to buy it, record that it has never been restored or resewn, and the binding had not been taken apart for examination before the Library acquired it.
What did happen in the eighteenth century was a change of owners and one small intervention in the binding. The book passed from the third Earl of Lichfield to the Reverend Thomas Phillips, a Jesuit and canon of Tongres, and in 1769 Phillips gave it to the English community of the Society of Jesus at Liege, whose rector was John Howard. The record of that gift is the paper pastedown at the lower board, which the catalogue describes as an eighteenth-century pasted paper leaf carrying the donation in Latin. Everything else about the eighteenth century is silence: the book was in private hands and then in the library of a college in exile.
What ended the silence was not a librarian but a clergyman with a printing society behind him. On 5 June 1806 a letter from the Reverend John Milner was read to a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in London and printed in Archaeologia in 1812, with a facsimile of the leaf. Milner followed the medieval note in relating the book to Cuthbert, and compared its script with that of the Lindisfarne Gospels, then in the British Museum. On the binding he judged that the book seemed to be of the time of Queen Elizabeth, and that judgement stood for more than a century.
Milner’s lecture has a postscript. After the reading, the book took some years to return to Stonyhurst, because an intermediary forgot to forward it, and for a time it was lost to the college that owned it. The episode marks the point at which the book entered the world of scholarship rather than of collecting.
It is easy to see how Milner went wrong. A red goatskin binding with tooled lines and a flat spine is exactly what a sixteenth-century English binding looks like, and the book had no inscription, no date and no recorded history to correct the impression. The correction came slowly, through studies of English binding: Sarah Prideaux in 1893, William Salt Brassington in 1894, W. H. J. Weale in 1898, Jean Loubier in 1904 and G. D. Hobson in 1929 all discuss it. The decisive work was technical, and it came with the examinations made at Stonyhurst and in the British Museum from 1950 onwards by the binder Roger Powell, who examined the structure without altering it, and by Peter Waters, who photographed and measured it.
Other books in the same family did not fare so well, and the contrast is instructive. The Lindisfarne Gospels lost the jewel-like cover made for it by Billfrith the anchorite, and the volume was rebound in the middle of the nineteenth century by Smith, Nicholson and Co. of Lincoln’s Inn. Roger Powell himself, who worked on this binding without touching it, went on to rebind the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow. The nineteenth-century binders had the materials and the confidence to take old books apart; what they lacked, and what this book had the luck to keep, was an owner who cared enough to leave it alone.
Because the binding was never taken apart, what the scholars and binders learned came from the book’s own looseness. The paste that had once fixed the leaves to the inside of the covers had failed, and the wear at the joints allowed non-intrusive inspection of much of the structure. That is how the slots cut in the boards, the S-twist flax thread, the absence of thongs and cords, the different thicknesses of the two boards, and the raised motif sitting over a clay-like foundation were all established. The examination confirmed rather than corrected: the binding was original, early eighth-century work, and it had survived because it had never been rebuilt.
Brown’s edition of 1969, with its technical description of the binding by Powell and Waters, was the first full account and the first facsimile, and remains the base description. The Society of Jesus placed the book on loan at the British Library in 1979, where it was consulted for decades as Loan MS 74, and in 2012 the Library bought it. The last stage of the book’s history is the only stage in which it has been examined by more than a handful of people, and the only stage in which nothing was done to it at all.
The Conservation and the Meaning
The purchase was the most expensive the British Library has ever made. The single largest donation was 4.5 million pounds from the National Heritage Memorial Fund; the Art Fund and a long list of private supporters followed, and the Friends of the National Libraries, whose grant record puts the cost of the item at 8,999,999 pounds, contributed 25,000 pounds of it. The book was digitised in full and displayed open to the public at St Pancras for the first time in its history, in the spring of 2012.
The conservation decision was the hardest of all, because every intervention in an object this fragile is a subtraction. The published account of the campaign is that the book was not restored and not resewn, and the approach has been to stabilise, to support and to record. The binding is displayed on a cradle, with the boards opened only to the angle the sewing allows, and the policy has been to alternate display with periods of rest, since light and handling are what an eighth-century goatskin cannot survive. The exhibition record is long: the loan show at South Kensington in 1862, the great exhibition of English illuminated manuscripts and bookbindings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1920 and 1921, Durham in 1987, the Lindisfarne Gospels at Palace Green Library in 2013, Bound to Last in 2014 and 2015, and Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms in 2018 and 2019.
The modern scholarly statement of the case is the volume published in 2015, The Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John, edited by Claire Breay and Bernard Meehan and launched at the British Library and at Trinity College Dublin in June of that year. Its chapters cover the materials, text, layout and script by Richard Gameson, the history of the manuscript to the Reformation by Gameson again, and a technical description of the binding by Nicholas Pickwood. For anyone who has read only the older literature, the effect of the volume is to move the manuscript forward by twenty years and to relocate it in the history of the text rather than in the history of a relic.
The most striking of the new techniques was the computed tomography scan, carried out at the Natural History Museum and described by Christina Duffy for the Library’s collection care blog. The manuscript and a facsimile were scanned with the book rotating through 360 degrees, with X-ray projections taken at half-degree intervals, and the results visualised in open-source volume-rendering software. The Library’s team and Pickwood examined the data, and his conclusion revised the older account: the raised motif on the front cover, thought to be made with cord or gesso, appears to have been formed over a clay-like material beneath the leather. Non-intrusive imaging had found something that visual examination of a closed book could not.
The pigments were analysed at the same time, and for the first time, by Raman spectroscopy. The yellow is orpiment and the grey-blue is indigo, and the earliest descriptions, which recorded the dark colour as blue, were recording it as it was. Roger Powell had speculated that the pale lemon yellow might once have been green, giving a scheme of blue, green and yellow on the crimson ground; the recent testing does not support that, and the balance of the design has been altered by the greater fading of the dark pigment. The cover has therefore changed colour in the last thirteen centuries, and the scheme now visible is a palimpsest of the one the binder made.
The format is pocket size; the boards are light birch; there are no thongs, no cords and no spine structure designed for a lectern; the text is a single Gospel in a small hand that fills a page of nineteen lines. The book was made to be carried and used in the hand. Then the marginal notes show it being used at a Mass for the dead, marked in a hurry, with the leaves closed before the ink was dry. Then it is buried at the head of a body, then it is lifted out and carried in a leather satchel whose silken sling has frayed through use. Reading in the early medieval west was an act that involved carrying the book to the event, not looking it up in a building.
The transmission argument is compressed into the same object. Here is a text that came to England from Italy with Adrian in the seventh century, copied in Northumbria in the eighth, buried with a hermit who was being turned into a saint, opened in 1104 as evidence in a dispute about a body’s authenticity, written into the catalogue of a Norman shrine, and then handed out of the shrine’s economy into that of collectors. Nothing in the manuscript’s quiet ownership in the twentieth century did more damage than the four centuries in which it was a relic, and nothing in its long burial did more for its survival than the reverence of the people who closed the lid over it.
It is tempting to end with the mythology, because the mythology is where the story usually starts. A Durham librarian did not unearth the book in the late eighteenth century; the book was in the shrine from 1104 and in private hands for the three centuries after the Dissolution. It was not rescued from a disastrous rebinding of the 1770s, because no binder ever took it apart. The year 1105, which still appears in reference works for the finding of the Gospel in the grave, is an error against a contemporary account that puts the opening on the night of 24 August and the translation on 29 August 1104. A scribe was not named, because the book has no colophon; and no Alfred translated it, because the gloss belongs to another manuscript and to another century.
The Cuthbert Gospel is now British Library, Add MS 89000, digitised in full, its binding catalogued down to the thickness of its boards and the twist of its thread. It alternates between display and rest, and between London and Durham, where it was shown in 2013 and again in the bookbinding exhibition of 2014 and 2015. The measure of the modern conservation campaign is not what was done to the book but how little: an eighth-century binding, examined more closely in the last decade than in the previous eight hundred years, and interfered with less than at any point since it was made.
References
- Add MS 89000: The Cuthbert Gospel (formerly the Stonyhurst Gospel) – British Library, Archives and Manuscripts catalogue record, shelfmark Add MS 89000
- Cuthbert Gospel saved for the nation – British Library, 17 April 2012
- The Cuthbert Gospel – Friends of the National Libraries, grant record for the acquisition
- Getting Under the Covers of the Cuthbert Gospel – Claire Breay, British Library Medieval Manuscripts blog, June 2015
- The Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John (published as The St Cuthbert Gospel) – Claire Breay and Bernard Meehan (eds), British Library, 2015
- A CT Scan of the Cuthbert Gospel – Christina Duffy, British Library Collection Care blog, June 2015
- Account of an Ancient Manuscript of St John’s Gospel – John Milner, Archaeologia 16 (1812), 17-21, read to the Society of Antiquaries on 5 June 1806
- Cuthbert: An Account of the State in which his Remains were found upon the Opening of his Tomb in Durham Cathedral in the Year MDCCCXXVII (published as Saint Cuthbert) – James Raine, printed for the Surtees Society, Durham, 1828
- A History of Durham Cathedral Library – H. D. Hughes, Durham, 1925
- Cotton MS Nero D IV – British Library, Archives and Manuscripts catalogue record, the Lindisfarne Gospels
- Cuthbert – Edwin Burton, The Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4, Robert Appleton Company, New York, 1913
- Medieval Graves – Durham Cathedral
- Bede, Cuthbert and the Science of Miracles (published as Bede, St Cuthbert and the Science of Miracles) – Lawrence Mathers, Reading Medieval Studies 15 (2019), University of Reading
- Why Europe’s Oldest Intact Book Was Found in a Saint’s Coffin – JSTOR Daily, on Calvin B. Kendall, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87 (1988), 507-521
- The Stonyhurst Gospel of Saint John – T. Julian Brown (ed.), published for the British Academy by the Roxburghe Club, Oxford, 1969
- The Relics of Cuthbert (published as The Relics of Saint Cuthbert) – C. F. Battiscombe (ed.), printed for the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral by Oxford University Press, 1956
- Add MS 89000, digitised facsimile – British Library, IIIF manifest
- The Cuthbert Gospel – Grokipedia, encyclopedia article
- Durham (poem) – Grokipedia, encyclopedia article on the Old English poem