The Legend of St Cuthbert's Beads: A Palaeontological and Geological Perspective

Folklore, April, 2001 by N. Gary Lane, William I. Ausich

St Cuthbert's Beads are 300-million year-old fossil crinoid columnals found on Lindisfarne, the Holy Island. The legend associating them with St Cuthbert, either that he manufactured the beads or that they were part of his rosary, originated as early as 1671 and spread through the British palaeontological literature. The source of the legend may be small columnals scattered among shells and pebbles on the beach below the village. These weather out of glacial till. Alternatively, the origin may be related to the onset of limestone quarrying on the north side of the island beginning in 1344. Quarrymen finding the columnals may have carried them back to villagers who associated them with St Cuthbert.

We became interested in the tale of St Cuthbert's beads and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne (Figure 1), because both of us have devoted a large part of our scientific research to the study of fossil crinoids. We first learned that St Cuthbert's beads referred to the individual columnals of fossil crinoids a good many years ago. Despite the fact that reference to this old term is scattered through the palaeontological literature and that it is well known in British folklore, the origin of the legend is poorly constrained. We began actively investigating it when one of us (G. L.) first visited Lindisfarne in 1995. Since then, G. L. has travelled to the Holy Island in 1998 and 1999, and both of us visited the island in May 2000, to study the local geology. We wanted to ascertain how and when the legend originated and the geological and palaeontological basis for the legend. Summaries of the geography, natural history and human history of the island may be found in Cartwright and Cartwright (1976), Galliers (1970), and O'Sullivan and Young (1995).

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Crinoids are a class of the phylum Echinodermata, which includes living starfishes, sand dollars and sea urchins, as well as approximately six hundred living species of crinoids. Most fossil crinoids have the main visceral body raised above the sea floor by a stem, also called a stalk or column. This consists of a stack of individually secreted limy skeletal pieces called columnals, which are the hallmark of St Cuthbert's beads (Figure 2). Columnals are bound together in life by ligaments. However, when the animal dies, the ligaments decay and the column falls apart. Each columnal typically has a circular or pentagonal outline, although the circular ones are more common.

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Each columnal has a hole through its centre, which may be circular or pentagonal in outline. This hole is called a lumen, and in life, it forms a hollow tube through the centre of the column. Within this tube, there is an extension of the coelomic sac, which contains a nerve cord. In fossil crinoids, the lumen is commonly filled with rock matrix, but if this matrix weathers out, as it commonly does, the individual columnal is very bead-like in appearance.

Cuthbert and Lindisfarne

The life of St Cuthbert is very well known, based on the early Life of Cuthbert written by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century. For a modern translation of this work, see Webb (1965). Although Cuthbert was Bishop of Lindisfarne for only one year (685-686 AD), he achieved early religious fame because of his sanctity and austere life, and became the focus of an early religious cult and community (Bonner et al. 1989).

Viking raids between 793 and 875 destroyed the monastery on Lindisfarne and finally forced the monks to abandon the island, taking Cuthbert's body with them. From 875, the island was apparently uninhabited for more than two hundred years, but by at least 1122 a new church had been built on the island, and a Benedictine priory was established c. 1160 (O'Sullivan and Young 1995). Priory records still exist that mention limestone quarrying in 1344, presumably on a small scale and mainly for building stones, or for burning lime for plaster. The limestone outcrops along the northern coast of the island undoubtedly provided the rock for this early quarrying operation.

Palaeontological and Literary Citations

The earliest written reference to St Cuthbert's beads that we have been able to find is by John Ray in 1671. He visited the island and must have heard reference to the beads from the local villagers. In his itineraries, Ray stated: "July the 22nd we rode from Cheviot, or rather Waller or Wooler, to the Holy Island, nine miles, where we gathered, on the sea shore under the town, those stones which they call St Cuthbert's beads, which are nothing else but a sort of entrochi." While these remarks were not published until much later (see Lankester 1846, 150-1), Ray did publish a note about the beads in 1673: "II. Those they call S. Cuthbert's beads are found on the Western Shore of the Holy Island" (Ray 1673, 116).

In the same year, Martin Lister published the first account of British fossil crinoids, which he thought might be "plants petrified." In the lead paragraph of this paper Lister said: "In this paper I send you an account of some of the Parts of certain Stones figured like Plants, which Agricola calls Trochitae, and the compound ones Entrochi, we in English, St Cutberds beads" (Lister 1673, 6181). Lister and Ray were correspondents and Ray may have transmitted the Cuthbert legend to Lister and other British scientists after his visit to the Holy Island. Any explanation of the origin of the legend must take into account the fact that the legend was clearly firmly established by the early date of 1673. Fifteen years later, Robert Plot stated: "Many of these being perforated some with a round, others with foliated or asterial inlets of 6 or 7 points, anciently when found single or but double or treble ... they were strung like beads, particularly by St Cuthbert, which gave occasion to their other name of St Cuthbert's beads" (Plot 1686, 191). Plot surely inferred that Cuthbert would have strung the beads together to form a rosary?