Saint Cuthbert’s Incorruptible Body
PATRICK BARRETT
In the year of our Lord 687, in cause of an early, wet spring, the body of Saint Cuthbert was laid in the ground to rest. On the tomb were figured angels and seraphim of plain but wonderful design. And among these flitted cherubs, like apricots set into the stone. Thus carved, the tomb was set upon a patch of ground a low word’s reach from the road, where wild grass grew and flowering thyme.
But as is often the case with men and women of such holy incorporation, this was not the end of what God had planned. For not two weeks after the body was laid to rest, a certain woman passed by on the road that went through that place. Now, this woman had long wished for a child to cherish, and to dandle upon her knee, but never as yet had she been able to conceive. Passing by the tomb, she happened to murmur her wonted prayer, and went her way. And by the time she stepped across her own threshold some four leagues thence, she knew a change in her body, and felt a quickening that had not been there before. And before the year was out, she had given birth to a daughter—whom she called Murmur, for that with the intercession of the holy saint, she had by a murmur been called into life.
But such is the power of those whom God has favored that this was by no means the end of what took place. For it happened that not long after, a young man, bald as an egg, and with no hair even where on another the eyebrows might be found, walked all the way from Lincoln in order to kneel at the tomb and pray. This being accomplished, at once a mustache began to sprout upon his upper lip, and so speedily did it grow and so full that the young man rose and hurried home for fear that it should become yet thicker and cause him to fall into the sin of Pridefulness.
Nor indeed was the power of the saint yet exhausted. For this young man had been delivered in the week of Lammas, and before Saint Martin’s Day was come and gone, a little dog—lazy and intractable and altogether accounted a rather foolish dog and of little ability, so that none had a care for it nor wished for its service—chanced to stray by the place where the body was laid. Being lost, and night beginning to fall, the little dog leaped up onto the tomb all covered with angels, and curled itself up in a ball, and there fell asleep. And coming away from that place in the morning, the dog was able to sit and roll over, and to speak the French language, and to hover some inches above the ground before returning safely. All this though prior to that day it had been quite uninstructable in even the meanest study.
Yet for all that these events were surpassing remarkable, greater still were the miracles concerning the body itself. For in the year 698, in cause of a widening of the road, the body of the holy saint
