Cuthberht must himself have been a child under eight years at the time, and he actually told the story of himself ! What is not less remarkable is Bede's filling so large a space in his history with the tale, and being evidently in full sympathy with its moral, namely, that it was wicked for children to romp and play. It is remarkable that a thousand years later the same theories in regard to children were revived again in the same form, and are known to us as Puritanism!
The story here told from Bede is not contained in the earlier biography of the Lindisfarne monk. Of Cuthberht's early life, as there reported, we only know that he was brought up from about the age of eight by a widow named Kenswith or Kensped, at a village called Hruringaham or Ruringaham. Mr. C. Bates suggests the possibility that the harrying of Northumberland by Caedwalla and Penda after the death of Ædwin in 633 may easily have left him an orphan and Kenswith a widow.[1]
The first incident reported of Cuthberht, both in the Anonymous Life and by Bede, represents him as a shepherd-boy tending his master's flock
- ↑ "The Home of St. Cuthberht's Boyhood," Arch. Ael., new series, x. 155. The same ingenious writer says that this Ruringaham was probably represented by a farm called Wrangham on high ground, about a mile and a half to the north-east of Doddington, in Glendale, on the way to Lindisfarne, and he contests the claims of the Scotch writers who favour a village six miles east of Melrose. The former is generally called Wrangham in the Dryburgh muniments. Mr. Bates says that one of the wells at Doddington is dedicated to St. Cuthberht, while a cave called Cuddy's Cave, which, according to uniform tradition, was once inhabited by the Saint, is situated near the village of Holborn in a direct line between Wrangham and Lindisfarne (ib. 158).
