St Cuthbert's coffin

[1] Cuthbert died on 20 March 687 in his hermit's cell on Inner Farne Island, two miles from Bamburgh, Northumberland, and was taken back to the main monastery at Lindisfarne to be buried.

For seven years they carried it with them to various places in modern Scotland and Northumbria before settling it in the still existing St Cuthbert's church in Chester-le-Street until 995, when another Danish invasion led to its removal to Ripon.

By then there were up to four layers of coffin in fragmentary condition, taken to date from 1541, 1041, 698 and 687, housing a complete skeleton, and other human remains, though many of the contents had been removed earlier.

[9] From the several thousand fragments collected in 1899 the art historian Ernst Kitzinger pieced together in 1939 a selection of 169 to make the fragmentary montages of the 7th century coffin now exhibited in the museum in Durham Cathedral, with engraved figures of Christ[10] surrounded by four Evangelists' symbols on the lid, on one end the earliest surviving iconic representation of the Virgin and Child outside Rome from the medieval art of the Western Church,[11] with the archangels Michael and Gabriel on the other.

[1] The coffin also contained the Stonyhurst or Saint Cuthbert Gospel (now British Library) and the best surviving examples of Anglo-Saxon embroidery or opus Anglicanum, a stole and maniple which were probably added in the 930s, and given by King Athelstan.

[12] Other probable possessions of Cuthbert found inside are an ivory comb, a portable altar, and a pectoral cross with gold and garnet cloisonné, a rare and important early example of Christian Anglo-Saxon jewellery.

The Christogram is notably in runic writing, ihs xps ᛁᚻᛋ ᛉᛈᛋ, with the h double-barred in the continental style, the first attestation of that variant in England.