On becoming prior, Cuthberht did not relax in his zeal, but, as Bede puts it, he worked hard at converting the surrounding populace far and wide. He reports how many of them had profaned religion by their evil ways, and in the time of the plague had abandoned the sacrament of the faith which they had adopted, and had had recourse to the remedies offered by their old idolatry, and by means of incantations and amulets, and other mysteries of demoniacal art, had sought to arrest the pestilence which had been sent by the Almighty. This, as it stands, reads rather like a fatalistic argument.[1]
Cuthberht used, like his master Boisil, to travel about the country, preaching and instructing the people in the neighbouring villages. "It was then the custom," says Bede, "when a clerk or priest came to a village for all the villagers to throng and hear him." Cuthberht was wont to visit remote districts situated in wild mountainous places "fearful to behold," where it was difficult from the poverty and distance to supply them with instructors, and where the old ways, no doubt, con-
- ↑ These amulets (alligaturae they are called in the biography of the Saint, while in his Eccl. History Bede calls them phylacteries) were used by the early Christians, and much patronised by them. The latter took them over from paganism, merely changing the formulae, which were supposed to have curative properties. Raine aptly quotes a modern instance from the proceedings of the Court of the Vicar-General at Durham on the 23rd July 1604, when at Wooler a man and woman were charged as common charmers of the sick, "who used to bring white ducks or drakes, and to sett their bills in the mouths of the sick persons, meanwhile mumbling uppe their charms in such strange manner as is damnable and horrible" (Raine's Cuthberht, 19, note).
