From here, or other headquarters, let us set forth to explore the city, planted on a craggy site looking down upon the encompassing Wear that flows deep down between rocky banks clothed thickly with woods. To enter the city proper from “Old Elvet,” one must needs cross Elvet Bridge, still narrow, although the subject of a widening by which its width was doubled in 1805. How the earlier coaches crossed it is therefore something of a problem.
It has often been claimed for Durham that it is “the most picturesque city in England,” and if by that contention we are to understand the site of it to be meant, the claim must be allowed. Cities are not so many that there is much difficulty in estimating their comparative charms; and were it even a question of towns, few might be found to have footholds of such beauty.
The Wear and that rocky bluff which it renders all but an island, seemed to the distracted monks of Lindisfarne, worn out with a century’s wandering over the north of England in search of safety from the marauding heathen Danes who had laid waste the coast and their island cathedral, an ideal spot; and so to the harsh necessities of over nine hundred years ago we owe both this selection of a site and the building upon it of a cathedral which should be an outpost for the Lord in the turbulent North and a castle for the protection of his servants. It was in the year 995 that, after a hundred and twenty years of constant wandering, the successors of those monks who had fled from Lindisfarne with the body of their revered bishop, the famous Saint Cuthbert, came here, still bearing his hallowed remains. Their last journey had been from Ripon. Coming near this spot, the Saint, who though by this time dead for over three hundred years, was as masterful as he had been in life, manifested his approval of the neighbourhood by refusing to be carried any further. When the peripatetic bishop and monks found that his coffin remained immovable they fasted and prayed for three days, after which disciplinary exercise, one of their number had a vision wherein it was revealed to him that the Saint should be carried to Dunholme, where he was to be received into a place of rest. So, setting forth again, distressed in mind by not knowing where Dunholme lay, but hoping for a supernatural guidance, they came presently to “a place surrounded with rocks, where there was a river of rapid waves and fishes of various kinds mingling with the floods. Great forests grew there, and in deep valleys were wild animals of many sorts, and deer innumerable.” It was when they were come to this romantic place that they heard a milkmaid calling to her companion, and asking where her cow was. The answer, that “she was in Dunholme” was “an happy and heavenly sound to the distressed monks, who thereby had intelligence that their journey’s end was at hand, and the Saint’s body near its resting-place.” Pressing onward, they found the cow in Dunholme, and here, on the site of the present Cathedral, they raised their first “little Church of Wands and Branches.” The Cathedral and the Castle that they and their immediate successors raised have long since been replaced; but the great Norman piles of rugged fame and stern battlemented and loopholed fortress crowning the same rocky heights prove that those who kept the Church anchored here had need to watch as well as pray, to fight secular battles as well as wage war against the devil and all his works. It was this double necessity that made the bishops of Durham until our own time bishops-palatine; princes of the State as well as of the Church, and in the old days men of the sword as well as of the pastoral staff; and their cathedral shadows forth these conditions of their being in no uncertain way. There is no finer pile of Norman masonry in this country than this great edifice, whose central tower and east end are practically the only portions not in that style, and of these that grand and massive tower, although of the Perpendicular period, is akin to the earlier parts in feeling; nor is there another quite so impressive a tower in England as this, either for itself or in its situation, with the sole exception of “Boston Stump,” that beacon raised against the sky for many miles across the Lincolnshire levels.
Woods and river still surround the Cathedral, as Turner shows in his exquisite view from the Prebend’s Bridge, one among many other glorious and unexpected glimpses which the rugged nature of Durham’s site provides from all points, but incomparably the best of all. It is here that, most appropriately, there has been placed a decorative tablet, carved in oak, and bearing the quotation from Sir Walter Scott, beginning—
Half House of God, half Castle; ’gainst the Scot;
a quotation that gains additional point from the circumstance of the battle of Neville’s Cross having been fought against the invading Scots, October 17th, 1346, within sight from the Cathedral roofs. This view is one of Turner’s infrequent topographically accurate works. Perhaps even he felt the impossibility of improving upon the beauty of the scene.
Still, annually, after evensong on May 29th, the lay clerks and choristers of the Cathedral ascend to the roof of the great central tower, in their cassocks and surplices, and sing anthems. The first, Farrant’s “Lord, for Thy tender mercies’ sake,” is a reference to the national crime of the execution of Charles the First, and is sung facing south. The second, “Therefore with angels and archangels,” by V. Novello, expressing the pious sentiment that the martyred king shall rest in Paradise, in company with those bright beings, is sung facing east; and the third, “Give Peace in our time, O Lord,” by W. H. Callcott, facing north.
The origin of this observance was the thanksgiving for the victory of Neville’s Cross, a famous and a complete success, when fifteen thousand Scots were slain and David the Second, the Scottish king and many of his nobles, captured. It was to the special intervention of St. Cuthbert, whose sacred banner was carried by Prior John Fossor to Maiden Bower, a spot overlooking the battlefield, that this signal destruction of the enemy was ascribed. The Prior prayed beside it, but his monks are said to have offered up their petitions from the more distant, and safer, vantage-point of the Cathedral towers. Perhaps they had a turn of agnosticism in their minds; but, at any rate, they took no risks.
The original tower-top Te Deum afterwards sung on the anniversary seems to have been discontinued at the Reformation. The revival came after the King’s Restoration in 1660, when the day was altered to May 29th, to give the celebration the character of a rejoicing at the return of Charles the Second. This revival itself fell into disuse in the eighteenth century, being again restored in 1828, and continued ever since.