County Durham
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘County Durham’
One Christmas Eve back in the twelfth century, a monk keeping midnight vigil in Lindisfarne priory watched spellbound as two great doors opened all by themselves.
During Viking raids in 793, the monastic community on Lindisfarne hastily exhumed the body of St Cuthbert (?635-687) and fled. After two hundred years of wandering they found a home for him at Durham, and in 1093 the Bishop of Durham re-established the priory on Lindisfarne. In the early days it was staffed by just a couple of Durham monks, but one Christmas, we are told, they received some visitors.
When Sir Rodbert became Brother Martin, he found the change so difficult that he began to wonder if even the saints were against him.
The following story is paraphrased from The Little Book of the Wonderful Virtues of St Cuthbert, compiled by Reginald of Durham, a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham in the latter half of the twelfth century. It tells of monk Martin, who in the world had been Sir Rodbert, a prosperous knight, but who found the simple life of the Abbey challenging and exasperated his tutors with his oddly sluggish wits.
The modern match is ignited by friction, a simple idea but one which had not occurred to anyone until 1826, when a Stockton pharmacist dropped a stick.
Until 1826, lighting a fire, a candle or a pipe was not an easy business. Matches as we know them were in their infancy, a toilsome affair requiring a man to juggle little bottles of noxious chemicals and perhaps a pair of pliers. But that year, a merry pharmacist from Stockton-on-Tees called John Walker (1781-1859) liberated us from all this, and quite by accident.
As he sat in his guest room at Durham Abbey, Ranulf de Capella could think of nothing but finding someone to rid him of his painful toothache.
Reginald of Durham was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham from about 1153 until his death some forty years later. The Abbey church housed the coffin and body (untouched by time, despite being regularly opened to view) of seventh-century miracle-working bishop St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and from the steady stream of pilgrims who came to visit the shrine Reginald collected a fund of amazing tales.
In 1770, agriculturist Arthur Young published his diary of a six-month tour of the north of England, which included a visit to the coalfields and ironworks of the Tyne.
In 1770, Arthur Young published his diary of a six months’ tour of the north of England. It included a visit to Newcastle, where he found a busy town prospering on the twin industries of the coal mine and the ironworks. Here, he gives his London readers a taste of the noisy, dirty but profitable business by the Tyne, and notes how the city’s fortunes rose and fell with the fortunes of war.
On Easter night, monk Reginald woke from a doze to find the aged hermit Godric singing lustily.
St Godric of Finchale (?1065-1170) was a bed-ridden invalid near the end of a long and eventful life when Reginald, a monk from the nearby Durham Abbey, went to see him in his hermitage in a bend of the River Wear. It was a Saturday, the night before Easter Day. Back in the Abbey church, the monks were eagerly awaiting the sunrise, but Reginald had dozed off.