Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

Æthelwulf was a monk in a monastery near Lindisfarne, and his poem in 619hexameters tells of a series of abbots and the events affecting the monastery during their time as abbots. The poem contains visions and miracles.

Here excerpts are given from an Anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, and from the Life of Cuthbert written by Bede, both in verse and prose. Two stories are chosen, one about Cuthbert meeting the otters on the beach, and the other about him foreseeing the death of a worker on the monastic estate.A brief excerpt from Alcuin’s poem on the bishops and saints of York shows how he condenses into two hexameters one of the stories recorded by Anonymous and Bede.

Of the three known offices or historiae for St Columba (Colum Cille), one is Irish and two are Scottish. The Irish office is found in three manuscripts spanning the fifteenth century. Proper processional material is found in a fourth. One full copy of the Scottish office is in the Aberdeen Breviary (1509); the second in the Inchcolm Antiphoner (c. 1400), which, although fragmentary, shares some material with the former. A unique hymn is found in a twelfth-century source now in Vienna. Although few in number, the sources reflect the wide Insular reach of the Columban familia, from Ireland, through Scotland, to Continental Europe, including modern-day France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Columba’s Continental cult waned with the withdrawal of the Irish communities but remains vibrant up to today in the Insular area, particularly in Ireland and Scotland where he is patron of numerous churches. His cult was also strong in Lindisfarne (originally an Iona foundation) and Durham, which held some relics even if no liturgical sources have survived.The texts of the offices highlight Columba’s image as a beloved patron, a learned and holy man, teacher, and physical and spiritual protector of his monks against the forces of nature (in particular the sea and the wind) and from warfare and human attack.

This chapter sets the early vitae of Cuthbert in their historical and compositional contexts, and focuses upon his eremitic construction within them. It unpicks their Irish and Gregorian sources, demonstrating the importance of Gregory’s life of St Benedict, but argues that whereas the Anonymous Vita promotes a more heroic and individualistic understanding of Cuthbert’s asceticism, Bede uses Cuthbert’s Farne years to demonstrate the close links between the solitary vocation and the coenobium, and to illustrate monastic ideals of stability, pastoral edification and labour. Turning to Cuthbert’s depiction in the Historia ecclesiastica, it argues that Cuthbert’s eremiticism is placed centre stage there, and used to negotiate Northumbria’s relation with other polities and ecclesiastical rivals, suggesting that Bede’s ambitions for Cuthbert as a saint for the gens Angli are specifically eremitic ones.

This chapter examines the most apparently troubled episode in the history of Cuthbert’s community – its intermittent perambulations around northern England in the ninth and tenth centuries – through the lenses of its earliest historical record, the anonymous Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. Noting the irrelevance of Cuthbert’s asceticism to this narrative, it argues that his life and posthumous miracles are used as vehicles to authorize the land claims of the Lindisfarne/Chester-le-Street community during this period of prolonged insecurity. In the course of consolidating and adding to these landholdings, Cuthbert demonstrates a readiness to work flexibly with the Danish elite where necessary – respect for land trumps ethnic difference. Where crossed, however, he is mercilessly retributive, a far cry from Bede’s pastoral and ecological saint. In addition to these local negotiations, the chapter explores how the Historia ambitiously sets Cuthbert to work as a kingmaker on a national level, insinuating him into the West Saxon narrative of hereditary English monarchy, while the West Saxons manifest a devotional interest towards him in turn to help strengthen their foothold in the north.