Here you see the Medieval 12th century ruins of the monastery at Lindisfarne. These remains, old as they are, predate Saint Cuthbert, whose cult grew up around this area after his life of preaching and asceticism in the seventh century (see Medieval illumination of Cuthbert on the second slide). But 300 million years before the holy man lived and died, tiny plants from the Crinoid class existed, whose stems fossilized and then broke apart into the shapes you see on the third slide, which then were discovered by local peoples and given the name “St Cuthbert’s beads.” I have seen them for sale on the interwebs.
Move forward, millennia and centuries ahead, to the 1600s. By now stories about St Cuthbert’s beads appear in scientific writings. In 1671 a nascent paleontologist called John Ray recorded around Holy Island (aka Lindisfarne) that the people in that area called those stones “St Cuthbert’s beads, which are nothing else but a sort of entrochi.”
The fossil crinoids are related to modern starfish, but what remains is like a horizontal cut of the ancient stem, hollowed out. To Medieval and Early Modern English people, they looked like the beads on a rosary, and many equated them with a rosary necklace that Cuthbert himself might have sported (although he couldn’t have, because rosaries weren’t around in England until after the saint’s lifetime). Sir Walter Scott even wrote a poem referring to them, _Marmion_ (1808):
“But fain Saint Hilda’s nuns would learn/ If on a rock, by Lindisfarne,/ St Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame/ The sea-born beads that bear his name . . . ” (Canto 2 verse 6)
Cuthbert was so famous that the people living near his body in the eleventh century were called “haligwerefolk,” or “folk of the holy man.”
Move forward, millennia and centuries ahead, to the 1600s. By now stories about St Cuthbert’s beads appear in scientific writings. In 1671 a nascent paleontologist called John Ray recorded around Holy Island (aka Lindisfarne) that the people in that area called those stones “St Cuthbert’s beads, which are nothing else but a sort of entrochi.”
The fossil crinoids are related to modern starfish, but what remains is like a horizontal cut of the ancient stem, hollowed out. To Medieval and Early Modern English people, they looked like the beads on a rosary, and many equated them with a rosary necklace that Cuthbert himself might have sported (although he couldn’t have, because rosaries weren’t around in England until after the saint’s lifetime). Sir Walter Scott even wrote a poem referring to them, _Marmion_ (1808):
“But fain Saint Hilda’s nuns would learn/ If on a rock, by Lindisfarne,/ St Cuthbert sits, and toils to frame/ The sea-born beads that bear his name . . . ” (Canto 2 verse 6)
Cuthbert was so famous that the people living near his body in the eleventh century were called “haligwerefolk,” or “folk of the holy man.”
Sources: “The legend of St Cuthbert’s beads: a paleontological and geological perspective,” N. Gary Lane and William I. Ausich, _Folklore_, 112 (2001), pp 65-87
