St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071-1153 by William M. Aird

Abstract

606BOOK REVIEWS J. L. Nelson, the province of Normandy has attracted the attention of medievalists . The relative abundance of sources, the relative stability of the duchy under William the Conqueror, and the obvious importance of Normandy for English political, social, and constitutional history after 1066 help to account for this interest . Every generation of scholars asks new questions of the documents, or at least rephrases old ones. The book under review seeks to answer two questions: why did the Normans, descendants of ninth- and tenth-century Vikings who had largely destroyed the ecclesiastical structure of the region, restore, rebuild, and rejuvenate the monasteries ? How did the movement of monastic revival aid Normandy's regional and cultural identity and promote its political cohesion? After a critical analysis of the sources, the author gives a general survey of monasticism in western Neustria, and then explores the pattern of ducal and aristocratic gifts to religious houses. Benefactors' motives, Potts argues, combined traditional piety and political pragmatism. Gifts of lands, mills, markets, fairs, exemptions from tolls on rivers and roads, the tithes of parish churches wove the religious houses into the economic fabric of the region. Some monasteries accumulated cash and acted as banking houses; others, such as MontSaint -Michel, served as stabilizing influences in contested frontier regions. Most of this information is generally known, but the author provides new examples supporting her generalizations. Through their loyalty and obedience to the duke, the Benedictine houses formed a major component in his process of "state building." There is almost no information on houses of women, nothing on the monastic horarium or internal spirituality—theoretically their raison d'être. The contribution of this book rests on its synthesis of a large amount of recent literature, on its lively and engaging style, and on the significant detail it adds to the broad picture. That the book goes much beyond "The Ecclesiastical Revival," chapter 5 of Douglas's William the Conqueror, is open to debate. Bennett Hill, O.S.B Georgetown University St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071-1153- By William M. Aird. [Studies in the History of Medieval Religion,Volume XIV] (Rochester, NewYork: The Boydell Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 31 1. $75.00.) This book is the first major work on the far north of England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to appear since W. E. Kapelle's The Norman Conquest of the North was published in 1979· Aird endorses its findings in several key areas. His own work examines the region from the perspective of the Church of Durham, whose inmates were custodians of the powerful cult of St. Cuthbert, the seventh-century missionary bishop of Lindisfarne. BOOK REVIEWS607 Extensive estates were gradually accumulated by St. Cuthbert's community from 635, when King Oswald of Northumbria (634-642) founded a religious community on the tidal island of Lindisfarne. After Cuthbert's death in 687, his cult attracted rich donations of land, and the resulting wealth enhanced the power of the bishops of the Church of St. Cuthbert. Gradually there was created a great power block, the Land of St. Cuthbert, stretching south from the River Tyne to the Tees. Aird suggests that it was an intentional buffer zone between English Northumbria and ScandinavianYork. Aird argues that the wanderings of St. Cuthbert's community between 875 and 883 reinforced both the cult of St. Cuthbert, by perambulating his relics over a wide area, and also the claims of the community to its extensive lands. The community settled in Chester-le-Street, a convenient center from which to administer the growing estates toward the south, but in 995 relocated to its present site on the massive rock almost encircled by the River Wear. The community negotiated in turn with the Scandinavians ofYork in the late ninth century and very early tenth; with the conquering kings of the house of Wessex; the comital House of Bamburgh, successor in the region to the kings of Bernicia, and with King Cnut (1016-1035). The effective government of the Norman invaders did not extend beyond the Tees in the 1070's, and perhaps not even by 1086. Successive campaigns led by William I and his sons against...