‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery’: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625)

Abstract

Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.