Until the hallowed cross salutes the skies,
And the blest city, free henceforth from foes,
Beneath that sacred shadow finds repose.”
All this happened nine hundred years ago. In counting upon rest, St. Cuthbert and his brethren had reckoned without the Scots and the Normans. Aldune’s low and crypt-like structure did not last a century. It was rebuilt in statelier form by Bishop William de Carilepho, and Turgot the Prior; Malcolm of Scotland, then on his way to meet Rufus at Gloucester, also laying a foundation stone. Normans and Scots thus set their hands to the work of repairing the ruin they had made. It was the way of Durham and St. Cuthbert’s shrine to thrive more by the assaults of enemies than by the benefits of friends. In the meantime, the fame and importance of the place had vastly increased. King Canute had made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the patron saint, having travelled the distance from Trimdon to Durham, by way of Garmondsway, with naked feet and clad in pilgrim’s weeds. He added liberal gifts and fresh franchises to the see, and encouraged the monks to bring the remains of the Venerable Bede, the father of English Church and secular history, from Jarrow Monastery to be laid beside those of Cuthbert. Another great conqueror and sinner—William of Normandy—after he had wreaked terrible vengeance on the town that had become the centre of Saxon feeling in the north, and that had slaughtered his Norman garrison and his Norman Bishop, showed great respect for the shrine and patrimony of the saint; he even wished to look with his own eyes upon the incorruptible body, but a timely illness that seized him after saying mass in the cathedral baulked his purpose. Flambard, Pudsey, and the other successors of Carilepho, were not so much churchmen as great feudal lords, exercising almost regal sway on the Borders and a powerful influence at court. The privileges and revenues of the Prince-Bishops of Durham were a prize that the Sovereign himself might covet. They raised armies, coined money, levied taxes, appointed sheriffs and other judicial officers, and, in spite of their vows, exercised the right of presiding in court when sentences of life or death were adjudged upon criminals. In other respects their sacred office sat lightly upon them, and they caroused and hunted and intrigued and plotted on a grander scale than any baron of their time. Besides being Bishops of St. Cuthbert’s See, they were titular Earls of Sadberge, and they found it easy to shuffle off the sacred for the secular character, or the secular for the sacred, as suited them. At the same time they never forgot the tradition of their patron saint, or failed to seize an opportunity of magnifying the office and increasing the dignity and power that centred in the “Haliwerk,” or Castle, and the Cathedral. Thus Flambard divided his energies between building strong castles and completing the great church, and endowing public hospitals and his own bastard children. Hugh de Pudsey’s wealth—such of it as the rapacious hands of the Anjou kings left—was spent on similar objects; to him Durham town owes its first charter, and the Cathedral its famous “Galilee Porch,” or Lady’s Chapel, an ingenious compromise, as we are told, between the inveterate ascetic prejudice of St. Cuthbert against the presence of women, and the necessity of allowing the sex access to the chapel dedicated to the Virgin. In Bishop Anthony Bek’s days the See may be said to have reached the zenith of its splendour. He was little less than a Sovereign within his extensive domains; was right-hand man of Edward I. in planning and in seeking to carry out the subjugation of Scotland; led the van with his Northumbrian levies at Falkirk, and carried away the Stone of Destiny from Scone to Westminster; and, dying, left all he had to St. Cuthbert and the Church.
DURHAM CATHEDRAL AND CASTLE.
CHESTER-LE-STREET. / DISTANT VIEW OF LAMBTON CASTLE.
Signal revenge did the Scots work for these wrongs in the time of later bishops; England was never engaged in foreign war or domestic broil but they seized the opportunity of crossing the Border, and the See and the city of Durham caught the brunt of their attack. That was a crushing check, however, which they suffered in 1346, in the days of the learned Bishop Hatfield, when David of Scotland, taking advantage of Edward III.’s absence on his French wars, crossed the Border and with a great host of hungry horsemen was harrying the country up to the gates of Durham. England was not altogether defenceless; for the king had left behind him able guardians of the North Country, in the persons of his Queen Philippa and the Prince-Bishop. The “Haliwerk folk” assembled for the protection of their beloved fane, and the Nevilles and other great lords called together their retainers to fight under the standard of St. Cuthbert. The two armies met at the Red Hill, a broken and hilly piece of ground a short distance west of the city; and after having hung long doubtful, the fortune of war went utterly against the Scots, who left their king in the hands of the victors. A group of monks took up their position at the “Maiden’s Bower,” and signalled to another company upon the central tower of the Cathedral how it went with the battle; and when at length the invaders were put to rout, a solemn “Te Deum” was chanted, and this commemorative custom was continued almost to our own day. Lord Ralph Neville, who led the protecting troops, caused the monument to be raised which has given its name—“Neville’s Cross”—to the battle; his body, with that of other members of the great family that once ruled at Brancepeth and Raby, is buried in the nave; and over his grave was placed, with his own standard, the banner wrested from the King of the Scots. Though Queen Philippa was so good a friend to Durham, yet the churlish patron saint could not brook her presence near his shrine, and when she took up her quarters in the Prior’s house she had to flee hastily in the night in her bed-gear. Not more hospitable was the welcome given to Margaret of Anjou, when fortune went finally against the House of Lancaster and she fled for refuge to Durham. The town and the Prince-Bishops had ventured and suffered much for the Lancastrian cause in the Wars of the Roses; but they dared not risk the vengeance of the victorious side, and hurried the despairing Queen across the Border into Scotland. More troubles awaited Durham at the time of the Reformation. For six years Cardinal Wolsey held the diocese, but confined his duties to drawing its rich revenues. His successor, Tunstall, was a man of rare moderation for his time. Though a Reformer, like his friend Erasmus, he was inclined to remain attached to the “old religion,” and he suffered at the hands of both parties as they successively came uppermost. In his days the monasteries—including that of Durham and the older foundations of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, which had long been annexed to it as “cells”—were suppressed; and the curious reactionary movement known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace” may be said to have had its beginning at Durham. It was renewed, with like disastrous consequences, in the time of the first Protestant Bishop, Pilkington, in the famous enterprise of the “Rising of the North,” when Queen Elizabeth’s partisans, the Bowes of Streatham, rose to notice over the ruin of the Nevilles and Percys, Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland. The Bishopric was temporarily suppressed during the Commonwealth; and the Cathedral interior suffered from being the place of confinement of the Scottish prisoners from Dunbar. But amends came at the Restoration, and whatever can be said against the personal or political character of Bishops Cosin and Crewe, they were princely builders, entertainers, and benefactors of the Cathedral and city. Other eminent men have since occupied the episcopal throne and palace—chief among them for learning and good works being Butler, the author of the “Analogy”; but since the year 1836 almost the whole of the old temporal distinctions and franchises have been stripped from the “Fighting Bishopric,” and Her Majesty is the Countess Palatine of Durham, and keeps “the peace of St. Cuthbert” as well as that of the Sovereign.
Durham and its cathedral have an aspect worthy of their history. No such grandly imposing combination of massive Norman strength and solemn religious beauty is presented by any other architectural pile in England. Seen from Framwellgate Bridge or any other of the many favourite points of view, it looks, what it has been in the past,