Episode 1 Saints and Sinners: Britain's Millennium of Monasteries

When we think of monasteries in Britain,

we think of Henry VIII and the Dissolution.

But their story stretches back 1,000 years before Henry

was born, to the most remarkable of beginnings.

The monastic system that will be torn apart by Henry began

as a cult of extreme isolation on rocky islands and in desert caves.

From these origins,

the monasteries grew to dominate every aspect of public life.

The story of Britain's Millennium of Monasteries is one of devotion

and faith but also of ambition, violence and greed.

As the monks grew in power, they transformed society,

but they also absorbed its corruption.

The difference between their original austere ideals and this,

the palatial opulence of a high medieval monastery, is breathtaking.

It's a contradiction they would never fully escape

and one that would eventually lead to their destruction.

In this episode,

we trace the evolution of British monasteries from desolate

privation on seaside rocks to the heart of Anglo-Saxon power.

We follow the holy struggle,

posing monastic ideals...

..the home-grown Celtic tradition of spiritual suffering...

..and the Roman model of discipline and regimented worship.

The ascetic mystics versus God's army.

This stunning but inhospitable rock is called Skellig Michael.

It lies ten miles off the west coast of Ireland.

From as early as the sixth century,

it was home to a community of monks, and near its summit

is one of the best-preserved ancient monasteries in Europe.

Both the words monk and monastery

come from the Greek monos...

..meaning alone.

For people wanting to be alone,

I can't think of anywhere more suitable than this.

Even in a boat with a modern engine, it's been hard getting here.

It could be very treacherous,

the way that the swell bashes against these rocks.

If they managed to make the dangerous journey, the early monks

that came here faced more than a 600-foot climb up to the monastery.

Skellig is an example of early Christian monasticism,

a cult of extreme isolation and self-deprivation that had spread

across Europe from the Middle East in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Wow.

This is just the most incredible place.

I can't believe the view, and then to find this

all this way up.

Incredible.

These cells, they're still...

They're so intact, over 1,000 years being hit by the elements...

..still standing.

The early monks that came to this rock in the middle

of the ocean were emulating the example of Christian hermits

that had retreated into the deserts of Egypt and Syria.

There are no deserts in Ireland, so the sea is the next best thing.

And these desert hermits were taking inspiration from Christ's struggle

with Satan in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights.

God's favour, they believed, could be gained through privation.

The first of these desert fathers was an Egyptian named Anthony.

From around the year 270, he lived alone in a desert cave

where for 20 years, he battled the demons of greed

and lust.

His feats of hermetic self-deprivation gave him

the spiritual strength to fight the Devil's temptations

and his suffering in this world would be rewarded in the next.

Anthony first attracted sightseers then followers seeking salvation.

Soon, the deserts were said to have been filled with hermits.

These colonies of hundreds of hermits soon evolved

into loose-knit communities.

They lived solitary lives in scattered caves and shelters

but they would share their communal buildings, like the bakery

and the church, coming together once a week.

And as these communities became more organised, the central and

possibly contradictory idea at the very heart of monasticism was born.

It's a place of isolation and solitude combined with community.

Monks came together to be alone.

I am meeting archaeologist John Sheehan to discover what life

was like for the zealot monks of Skellig.

John, what would possess a person to come and live up here?

Well, obviously, the monks who came out here were driven

by some sort of ideal - the ideal of isolation, seeking isolation.

Is there a sense in which they are emulating

-the suffering of Christ, perhaps?

-Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there was pain involved in being a monk.

Sometimes it was inflicted, perhaps it was chosen as well,

and perhaps that's what we're looking at, too.

Life in the desert was hard and obviously life here was going

to be hard too, so pain came with part of being a monk

in a location like this.

And in fact, we know from the burials that have been excavated here

that the monks had a very harsh lifestyle.

A lot of the human remains, the spine,

the vertebrae and so on show that they suffered injuries,

they carried great weights, they probably died in a great deal

of pain. And of course, they weren't all adult monks

because we have a significant number of child monks found

-and represented among the burials here as well.

-How young?

Between 9 and 12 years of age.

-Gosh, 9 to 12-year-olds living up here.

-Absolutely, and dying here.

-And dying here, and having to do all the labour, as well.

-Absolutely.

What do we see on the bones to indicate that they were

-pushing their bodies hard?

-A variety of things.

For instance, you see evidence for malnutrition

in some of the skeletons. A deficiency of iron also shows up

in the bones. Predominantly they were eating fish,

which of course they caught off the rocks around us,

they ate a lot of sea birds - they seem to have been roasting them -

and that would explain to some extent the iron deficiency when they died.

It's a beautiful day today and it's been harsh enough getting up here.

I can't imagine what it must be like in the depths of winter.

Yeah, I mean, obviously we are out in the Atlantic,

we're miles from the mainland. The wind, the rain, the storms

and all of that, so it would have been...

It's very difficult to imagine what it would have been like.

But the beehive cells, they're well designed, aren't they?

They hold out the elements.

Absolutely. Very, very thick walls, they're waterproofed

because all of the storms and they tilt outwards slightly,

so they would be the best quality housing that you could have had

in a location like this, by far.

-I can't imagine one night, let alone a lifetime up here, you know?

-Yeah.

Well, of course, the lifetimes that the monks spent up here

may not have been all that long.

The oldest aged skeleton excavated here was in his 50s. He did well.

Now, he also suffered a lot, I suspect,

from the bones in his final years, but he was the oldest.

Most of them tend to die in their 20s and 30s.

To try to understand what attracted monks to this hard life of isolation

and self-denial, I've come to Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire.

Founded in 1835,

it's a community where the brothers

have committed themselves to a permanently cloistered life

dedicated to solitude, prayer and penitence.

I'm meeting the Abbot, Father Erik Varden.

I suppose one of the things people would think about choosing

a monastic life is all the things you give up,

all the rules that are imposed to restrict freedoms, you might say.

The things that we give up as monks are things

we give up in order to be more fit and more focused in the pursuit

of what is our deepest desire and what is our real purpose.

So it's not as though that some great sacrifice that we dwell on

or feel the pain of, but it's rather a matter

of shedding excess baggage, if you like.

What you most want is...

..to enter into a living communion with God to become...

..by grace, and even starting with the most unpromising raw material,

to become Christ-like.

Is there the empathy for his suffering that comes through

more strongly when you dedicate your life to monasticism?

An early definition of the monk or an early

description of the monk is that of the monk as a crucified man,

which sounds like a terrifying proposition

and indeed it is a terrifying proposition,

and what that means is that you actually see the world with the eyes

of Christ and you see the world with His compassion and with His mercy.

Is enclosure very important to a monastic life,

this idea of being protected with...inside the cloister?

Sure enough, the monastic enclosure cuts us off from a certain

number of, if you like, superficial temptations,

but it is within the enclosure and staying...

..increasingly enclosed also within ourselves

that we encounter deeper and much more insidious temptations,

and that is where the real battle is joined -

the battle against pride, against selfishness,

against my primary appetites...

..and it is that engagement with what the early monks called

the passions which is the real work and travail of the monk,

and enclosure plays a crucial part

in keeping him engaged in that battle

and keeping him from running away when it becomes difficult.

By going into solitude, into the wilderness, what the monk aspires

to do is to go deep in himself, and that can sometimes be a painful

business because not all the things we find in our heart are agreeable.

It is interesting talking to you, Father,

because to me it is such a balancing act, being a monk.

It must be a challenging life at times.

But that's also why it's such a beautiful life.

Because...

it is a life that holds out to us,

a well-tried and tested way of becoming whole and healed

and so to be able to respond

ever more fully to the call of God,

and perhaps even to be able to provide

a little bit of light for others in their search.

Christianity, and probably monasticism,

first arrived in Britain during the Roman occupation.

But when the legions departed,

pagan Anglo-Saxon invaders pushed Christianity to the western fringes.

Throughout this time,

monasteries were being established across Gaul - that's roughly

modern-day France - where the Roman Empire had lingered a little longer.

One source says that the man credited with bringing Christianity

here to Ireland, St Patrick,

actually studied in one of these Gaulish monasteries.

In reality, Christianity had arrived here somewhat earlier -

it had seeped over from Roman Britain.

But monasteries, like this one at Labbamolaga, began to appear

across Ireland soon after Patrick's missions of 432.

Because they were disconnected from mainland Christian Europe,

in particular Rome and the papacy, the monasteries that developed

across Celtic lands were rather different to those on the Continent.

Monasticism on the Continent evolved as part of the existing Roman church

hierarchy, but the Romans hadn't come to Ireland.

It was a rural, pagan society with power vested in great families.

Celtic monasticism grafted itself on to this existing clan system

and began to serve as their conduits to God.

It's no coincidence that this monastery was built

on the site of a pagan ritual monument.

You can see the ancient stones out there in the field.

This reflects what is unique about Irish monasteries.

They were adaptations of the pre-existing druidic religion

and this was to have a profound effect on monasteries

throughout the British Isles.

Druids were inextricably linked to the royal families of Ireland -

they drew their priests from them.

So when a clan king converted to Christianity, he simply replaced

his druids with monks that were also recruited from his own family.

He would endow them with land for them to build their monasteries

and then they would operate almost as co-rulers of the clan.

The greatest figure in early Celtic monasticism,

the monk Columba, epitomised this aristocratic character.

He was a prince of Ireland's most powerful family,

but after his clan lost a battle, he was forced into exile.

Columba sailed across the Irish Sea and established

a monastery in the Celtic tradition on the island of Iona.

In the sixth century, the Western Isles of Scotland

were part of the Irish kingdom of Dalriada.

Iona had been endowed to Columba by its king, who was also a relation.

With political connections like that,

it's not surprising that Iona became a powerhouse,

spreading its Celtic style of monasticism

first to the Pictish tribes,

then to continental Europe and to the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons.

In the mid-seventh century,

the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of all was Northumbria.

The king, Oswald, had been exiled for many years

with the Dalriada clan and had converted to Christianity

on a visit to Iona.

When Oswald won back his kingdom, he invited the monks of Iona

to establish a monastery in Northumbria.

Here, the relationship between the monasteries

and the aristocracy would grow ever closer.

This is the land endowed by King Oswald to the monastery,

Lindisfarne. It fitted the bill perfectly.

It's an island, and so it's only accessible at low tide

across this often treacherous causeway.

In terms of its isolation,

it suited the hermetic ideals of the Celtic Church.

But it's not as isolated as it looks.

Just over there is Bamburgh Castle, the royal palace of King Oswald.

Lindisfarne was intertwined financially

and politically with the ruling dynasty.

Celtic monasticism was now no longer purely a cult of isolation.

Monks were warriors of God,

defending the immortal souls of their Anglo-Saxon

aristocratic patrons.

Through their prayer and suffering, monks accumulated spiritual capital

which they could expend on themselves or on others.

This reflected a real change in the very nature of monasteries.

These places now weren't just for an individual to pursue their own

personal salvation, a monk's prayers had become a valuable commodity

and monasteries were becoming factories of divine favour,

working away on their benefactor's behalf.

Monasteries could also save the souls of the aristocracy

by issuing penance for sins they had committed.

This is a medieval penitential.

It was written by the seventh century Irish monk,

Cummean, and it's a tariff.

It gives details of the sorts of atonements people had to do for

various sins, including drunkenness, gluttony, sodomy and murder.

You can see here, if a layperson defiles his neighbour's wife

or virgin daughter,

he has to do penance by eating only bread and water for a year

and not lay with his own wife.

This was an invention of the Celtic monasteries.

It mirrors secular law.

If somebody is wronged, they would expect financial compensation.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, this is known as "wergild", a "man price."

It's blood money, essentially,

and in the case of sin, it is God who is the wronged party,

so the monks had to determine what compensation He'll be paid

in terms of penance.

Those Catholics across the world that still do penance today

take the origin for this idea from Celtic monasteries.

Monasteries also became increasingly entangled with the aristocracy

by supplying them secular services.

The Christian Church was the only institution to survive

the fall of Roman civilisation in Britain.

In the barbaric Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,

monasteries were the last bastions of classical learning and literacy.

The stone ruins at Lindisfarne are of the later medieval monastery,

which was constructed on the site of the original 7th century monastery.

Like all Anglo-Saxon settlements, it was built of timber.

At its centre were enclosures of sacred buildings...

..but surrounding this was a large settlement

containing farm buildings and workshops.

The monks would have spent much of their time alone

in their small, individual cells,

coming together occasionally to work and worship.

A set of guidelines issued by an Irish abbot,

Columbanus,

gives an insight into the life of a Celtic monk.

His food was to be coarse,

consisting of cabbage, beans, flour mixed with water,

and a biscuit taken towards evening.

He should be subject to a superior he does not like...

..rise before he's had sufficient sleep,

and speak only when necessary.

The slightest breaches would be punished with the lash.

But despite the harshness of the life,

Celtic monasteries began to spread across Northumbria.

Monasteries flourished because they merged the religious

and the secular interests of the ruling elites.

Anglo-Saxon life could be short and brutal,

but the idea of heaven could be a tonic

to the harsh realities of daily life

and monasteries were the pathways to salvation,

but they were also centres of power, knowledge, trade and industry

that could support a dynasty here on earth too.

The monasteries' increasingly important status

as repositories of learning and industry is embodied

in an incredible work of art created at Lindisfarne.

This is a facsimile of the famous Lindisfarne Gospels,

in my opinion, one of the most beautiful objects anywhere.

It's an incredible achievement

and in terms of what it shows us artistically,

it really is the story of the development of English monasticism.

In the patterns, the techniques that are used here,

you can see the Celtic world,

the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon world

and the new, exotic Christian world of the Continent

all being brought together.

In the centre, you can see red, gold, blue shapes,

all mimicking those patterns that you get in Anglo-Saxon jewellery,

the gold and garnet cloisonne you get.

Then around the edges here,

there's Celtic knotwork.

Also, these spirals,

very familiar from Celtic metalwork.

In the panels, there's birds and beasts,

their bodies elongated and twining around one another.

It recalls this fascination with the natural world

that predates Roman Christianity.

Here in the Lindisfarne Gospels,

all these different elements are being brought together

to create a really magnificent work of art.

The process of the Gospels' creation was a wonder in itself.

It wasn't illuminated in the tranquil cloisters

of a majestic cathedral abbey.

They would not be built for another 300 years.

The Lindisfarne Gospels were actually made

in a building more like this.

This is a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon hall.

It's made of wood, wattle, daub and thatch.

Now, when I think about the creation of a beautiful medieval manuscript,

I tend to focus on the creative genius that went into it,

but before quill even touched vellum,

there was a whole sequence of processes

that had to be worked through

in order to provide the materials necessary.

Professor Richard Gameson has researched

the potentially lethal ingredients

that needed to be gathered from across Europe.

These are the pigments that were used in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts as a whole

and in the Lindisfarne Gospels,

though its selection was slightly richer than this.

The common colours that you used as a matter of course

were a red, a yellow and a green.

How do you make your red?

Well, you started with lead, and lead is available locally.

This is galena, widely available.

The way of making, turning it into pigments, is slightly disgusting.

You take sheets of the lead,

you wrap them in the pressed remains of wine or beer,

and you suspend those sheets over little pots filled with urine

-or with vinegar and you bury it in manure.

-Oh, lovely(!)

Then after two to three months,

the heat from the manure causes the vinegar to evaporate

over the sheets of lead and it turns into a white crust like that

and if you then roast it,

stirring with an iron spoon or adding a rusty nail,

it gradually turns orange and then red,

a beautiful colour, but deadly,

because, of course, lead is a cruel poison that the body can't exude.

The yellow - this is actually a mineral and we have a sample there.

-Beautiful, bright colours.

-It is, called orpiment.

Now, in fact, it's a trisulphide of arsenic,

so this really is deadly.

Handling the mineral itself will cause ulceration of the skin

and ingesting this sort of quantity could be fatal,

so the key thing was if you're an illuminator making a pigment,

don't sneeze! SHE LAUGHS

-And I guess don't lick your fingers as you're going along.

-Absolutely.

That would be as a matter of course.

But orpiment, this beautiful yellow colour,

was only available from sources like Italy,

so you're importing it and you're reliant

on quantities of the mineral coming in at infrequent intervals.

So monasteries are connected internationally,

they've got these trade links

that are bringing in the materials they need...

And they are skilled chemists. They are hubs of activity,

because in fact even if one man is writing the book,

the whole community is implicated in the process of making these pigments.

-It's like a factory.

-It is a factory, effectively.

-A factory in praise of God.

-Yes!

Once the ink had been prepared,

the manuscript was created in the challenging environment

of an Anglo-Saxon building.

Satwinder Sehmi creates illuminated manuscripts

using traditional techniques.

Gosh, Satwinder, that's absolutely stunning.

-Thank you.

-Is it hard working in these conditions?

Yes, it's very uncomfortable,

because everything that could go wrong with a piece of work

will go wrong.

The wind is blowing, my hands are getting cold,

the vellum is absorbing moisture, it's cockling up,

it's got to be held down, the paint is drying in there,

so yes, you've got to juggle, not just with the work itself,

but with the conditions to get it right.

I'm amazed that the Lindisfarne Gospels were actually created,

because the amount of work it must have taken, the planning,

the execution, is outrageous.

And I think it's really interesting to think about these monks

doing it not just to produce the texts,

but actually as part of their ascetic suffering.

-Yes.

-And there is that pleasure and there is that joy in it.

You don't actually consider it to be suffering.

We have a note by a monastic scribe

who says, "If you don't know what scribal work is like,

"you think it is no task,

"but let me tell you, it bows the back,

"it brings pains to the kidneys, it makes the eyes water,"

and then he concludes by saying,

"And so, gentle reader, keep your hands away from the letters,

"don't destroy them." LAUGHTER

-I completely agree with him!

-LAUGHTER

I wish I'd come up with that quote!

Celtic monasteries spread across Northumbria.

22 years after Lindisfarne,

one was established 100 miles down the coast at Whitby.

In the Celtic tradition, the land was endowed by the king...

..and a member of his family was put in charge.

But the abbey founded here was rather different to Lindisfarne.

Whitby Abbey was a double monastery.

That means it contained both monks and nuns

and in charge of them all was a woman.

Women, like Abbess Hild of Whitby,

had been part of the monastic cult from its earliest days.

They'd lived as hermits in the deserts

and some of the first European monasteries were nunneries.

Double monasteries became popular in the 7th century.

INDISTINCT CONVERSATION

To find out how they operated,

I'm meeting Professor Sarah Foot.

So these are the ruins, the famous ruins of Whitby Abbey,

-but they're later, they're 13th century.

-That's right.

The original Anglo-Saxon abbey was here,

more or less where you can see the current ruins,

but the monastery's estates covered the whole of this headland.

-A huge amount of land.

-Right the way out to the coast.

-Yes.

So how is this working?

How are these nuns and these monks coexisting?

Well, it's a very interesting kind of institution.

It's not unique to Anglo-Saxon England,

but it's unique to this period.

The idea that you would put men and women together in a single enclosure,

so the whole of the abbey is enclosed by really quite a large ditch,

but then inside,

the men and the women are going to be kept completely separate,

so people always say, "What are the men for?"

I think a variety of different things -

of course, to do the heavy manual labour

and the things that the women themselves couldn't manage.

I think they're there to act as protection.

It's not the wisest thing in the world

to put a bunch of women in this very isolated spot by themselves

and, of course, there's a really important thing

that only a man could do.

Women could take major responsibilities

in the church and Hild did,

but she couldn't say Mass.

But it suggests that in Anglo-Saxon England there's no difficulty

about the idea that women might be allowed to have authority

-and to have authority over men.

-Mmm!

That's one of the fantastic things

about the 7th century English Church -

you see women empowered and enabled

and taking on really important spiritual as well as practical roles.

The aristocratic character of Hild and her monastery

is revealed by the archaeological discoveries made at Whitby.

They include many ornate clothes pins.

These look to me like high-status objects.

Yes, Hild's of royal birth

and the women and men who gathered round her

will also have been from royal and aristocratic backgrounds,

so the things that we're looking at here which were made on this site

are not necessarily the things you might have expected to find

in the most austere sort of monastery,

but if we look at that one closest to you,

that's very beautiful and lovely decoration on the top of that,

so you could imagine an aristocratic girl living outside a monastery

having and prizing a pin like that.

This is aristocratic, this is a palatial place, almost.

I think that's one of the reasons why monasticism is so successful

for the Anglo-Saxons, because they find this way of using the traditions

that have come to them out of the Egyptian desert,

but adapting them to a way that young girls and men brought up

in a royal or aristocratic background would still feel at home.

There's other objects in front of us here that indicate that women

could also gain knowledge, couldn't they, here?

-Across the top there, we've got a stylus.

-Yes. I must uh...

..just get a sense of that there, so if I lift it up,

we can see it's a beautiful object.

If you had a wax tablet, then you can make the shapes of the letters

with the tip of the stylus and you can practise what you want to say

before you then commit yourself to the massive cost

involved of writing with ink on prepared parchment.

And if they made a mistake, they could turn round...

-They could just rub it out...

-Rub it out!

-..and start again.

Such a beautiful thing.

While the Celtic monasteries were being established in Northumbria,

a very different rival form of monasticism

had been spreading from Canterbury.

The monastery had been established there around 600 AD by Augustine,

an Italian monk sent to Kent by the Pope.

These southern monasteries were beholden to Rome

rather than to Ireland.

They were organised along a precise system of rules

that were being observed in Roman-controlled monasteries

on the Continent.

A manuscript containing these rules

is one of the treasures of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

This is an 11th century copy of a much older text.

It's the Rule of St Benedict,

written by Benedict of Nursia in the monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy

in the 6th century.

What it gives are a set of guidelines

for how a monastic community should be organised,

how an abbot should be elected, what sort of food they should eat,

how they should organise their time,

so if you look over here,

there's an entire chapter on the decanus,

that is the deans of the monastery.

Here it says that the dean, the decanus, should oversee ten monks.

Benedict has taken this term decanus

directly from the Roman military

and in that context, it referred to a soldier

who oversaw ten other soldiers,

so that same sense of military precision

that made the Roman Empire so successful

is being applied here in a monastic context,

so it's about keeping discipline right the way through.

They're sleeping in dormitories together,

they're eating together. In contrast to the Celtic system,

where they're coming together to be alone,

this is pure community,

this is guiding community living on all levels.

When we look at the way that the abbots are elected,

it says here that the abbot should be elected

according to his merits, "merito",

and "sapientiae doctrina", the wisdom of his teachings.

It contrasts with the Celtic system,

where the abbacy is inherited, almost.

It's done on blood, rather than merit.

These two conflicting approaches

really are not going to be able to coexist happily

and one is ultimately going to have to triumph.

Crucially, the Roman and Celtic systems

celebrated Easter on different days,

which caused problems for people who mattered.

In 664, the Northumbrian king, Oswiu,

used the Celtic date, but his wife, Enfleda, used the Roman.

This meant that while one of them was merrily feasting for Easter,

their spouse was still fasting for Lent.

This wasn't just an embarrassing situation or a minor issue.

The date of Easter

was of fundamental importance to Christians.

It was the date that Christ died,

the date when all these important issues -

resurrection, salvation, forgiveness from sin -

they all culminate,

so if one group of Christians are celebrating it on one day

and another group are celebrating it on another,

this shows that the Church is not unified,

but it also shows that one group must be orthodox

and the other must be heretical.

King Oswiu really needed to resolve this issue,

so he called together representatives from both parties

here at Whitby Abbey.

The meeting would determine the future of monasticism in England.

The clerics chosen to represent the two sides at the Synod of Whitby

epitomised the different systems.

On the Celtic side was Colman, an Irishman educated on Iona

who was Abbot of Lindisfarne.

On the Roman side was Wilfrid. He'd been educated in Canterbury and Gaul

and he'd visited Rome, where he met the Pope.

During his time in Europe,

Wilfred was immensely impressed by the Roman system -

its organisation, its discipline, its civilisation.

He made it his stated ambition to root out the poisonous weeds

planted by the Scots.

His victory at the Synod of Whitby,

against Colman and his more rustic Celtic monastic system,

was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

King Oswiu had very little to gain

from throwing his hat in with the Celtic monasteries,

but the great European union of monasteries would give him access

to classical knowledge and to a diplomatic network.

It would also placate his wife, which is never a bad thing.

The Celtic loser, Colman,

immediately resigned as abbot of Lindisfarne.

Someone else would now face the onerous task of enforcing

the regimented Roman rules of Benedict

on monks used to the hermetic, Celtic monasticism.

The man ultimately chosen was Cuthbert,

a Celtic monk who had accepted the Roman system.

Cuthbert was to become one of the most revered saints in Britain,

and the cult surrounding him grew to be the most potent in the country.

40 years after his death, the monk Bede wrote his hagiography.

It mostly consists of the miracles accredited to him,

but Bede also tells us of the resistance that Cuthbert faced

here at Lindisfarne when he tried to introduce the rule of Benedict.

Bede wrote, "There were some brethren

"in the monastery who preferred their ancient customs

"to the new regular discipline.

"Cuthbert got the better of these by his patience and modest virtues,

"so that, at length, he brought them to the better customs."

But Bede also tells us Cuthbert became fatigued

by the bitter taunts of those who opposed him.

And after a few years struggling with the reticent monks,

he'd had enough.

He resigned, but didn't go very far.

He left the monastery of Lindisfarne, over there,

and sailed about five miles along the coast,

to the uninhabited island of Inner Farne, over there.

Cuthbert was getting back to basics.

Like the desert fathers and the monks of Skellig before him,

he wanted to perform an extraordinary feat

of hermetic self-deprivation.

Cuthbert's life here would have been punishing,

and motivated by a desire to commune with God.

Fantastic, thanks.

But I believe he also had some more earthly motivations.

By his feats, Cuthbert was earning the respect of the wayward brothers

he was trying to bring round to the Roman system.

Here, he was living the Celtic monastic ideal of ascetic isolation.

But we know from Bede that there was a constant flow of visitors here,

seeking his advice and wisdom.

It was just a short boat journey from Lindisfarne,

and the king's palace of Bamburgh was even closer.

But the contemporary writings don't primarily talk about

Cuthbert's monastic fundamentalism or political struggles.

They mostly tell the tales of the miracles he performed.

In his time on Inner Farne,

Cuthbert was said to have spoken to the birds.

He persuaded them not to eat the seeds he had sown.

A pair of crows then came to him, bowed down in front of him,

and offered him food as compensation.

Saints' miracles served a purpose.

Almost all display their power over the natural world.

These stories were written to convert a people

steeped in animist pagan religion,

so Christian saints needed to prove the superiority of their God

by possessing the power to control nature.

The greatest miracle attributed to Cuthbert

occurred nine years after his death.

When his coffin was opened to extract bones as relics,

it was discovered that his corpse had not decomposed.

Cuthbert's victory over the ravages of death

resulted in the explosion of his cult.

He also served as useful propaganda -

an emblem of how Celtic Christians should, like him,

accept the Roman system.

Here, you can see the scale of Cuthbert's cult.

Durham's great cathedral was built in the 11th century

on the very site of Cuthbert's tomb.

Cuthbert's coffin was reopened countless times.

One monk regularly combed the saint's hair.

In 1827, it was opened again.

Now, this is Cuthbert's pectoral cross.

It was found around the neck of the saint.

The skill that's gone into making it -

each of those garnets has been cut so small

to fit perfectly inside the cell, the gold cell.

There's no glue, there's no adhesive holding those in place.

This beautiful piece of metalwork really gives

an indication of how full of treasures, metalwork,

precious things, these early Anglo-Saxon monasteries were.

It gives another dimension to this complex character of St Cuthbert.

Yes, he is the ascetic hermit,

taking himself away to Inner Farne and battling against the elements,

but he's also someone of very great importance

within Anglo-Saxon society.

Along with Cuthbert, two other clerics played a crucial role

in the Roman system's domination of Anglo-Saxon monasticism.

One was Wilfrid, the victor at the Synod of Whitby.

The other was an abbot named Biscop.

Like Wilfrid, he was from an aristocratic family.

He was incredibly well-travelled and well-connected.

These weren't monks,

dedicating decades to contemplation in cells on sea-soaked islands.

Biscop made an incredible five trips to Rome,

each one a long and dangerous journey.

There, he grew so enamoured with the Benedictine system,

he even took the name Benedict.

On his return, he established a monastery here, at Jarrow.

It would be truly Roman, guided by rules of Benedict.

The monks would live communal, ordered lives of limited austerity.

It would also be built in the Roman way.

Benedict Biscop had grand ambitions.

He had set eyes upon the wondrous classical architecture of Rome,

with its towering basilicas.

That was the future - or, in England's case,

the not-too-distant Roman past.

The crumbling ruins of mighty Roman fortifications and towns

were scattered across the English landscape -

a constant reminder of the Anglo-Saxons' relative barbarism.

No large stone buildings had been built in Britain for 250 years.

Monasteries would be the first to build them again.

Benedict Biscop's stone monastery at Jarrow

also became a great centre of classical learning.

Vast numbers of manuscripts were imported from the Continent,

and the abbey was home to the most important historian of the age -

the monk Bede.

Soon, the monastery was even creating manuscripts

and sending them back to Rome.

Just look at the scale of this manuscript.

It's enormous.

This is very exciting for me -

it's the only full-size replica of the Codex Amiatinus,

which is the oldest single surviving copy of the Bible.

It...takes two people to lift it,

weighs the same as a Great Dane,

and it spent many centuries in an Italian library.

It was thought to be Italian - it looks Italian.

The achievement of putting the whole Bible together in one binding -

at that time, it was thought it could only have happened in

and around Rome and the papacy.

Now, here it says that the manuscript is dedicated

by Peter of the Langobards.

That places it in and around Italy.

But we can see from the colour of the ink, here,

that something has happened to this name.

Some palaeographical detective work was done on the manuscript,

and they discovered that this line had actually been erased

with a knife, and the name Peter of the Langobards had been put on top.

What was underneath originally?

Well, the original reference was to the abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow.

So, suddenly this magnificent manuscript

wasn't being made in Italy,

it was being made at the edge of the known world,

just outside Newcastle.

It's an incredible feat,

because you've got these full-page empurpled vellum

written on in gold,

and then this famous image,

the Ezra page, where you can see the scribe hard at work

in front of the monastic library.

And it's a testament to the work that was taking place

in this monastery.

It was like an amazing publishing house.

You've got intellectual minds like Bede the Venerable,

the bestselling author of this monastery,

and then this team of scribes working together to create this.

It took the skins of 1,000 calves

just to make the one manuscript.

What are they saying by sending this manuscript all the way back to Rome?

Well, the Anglo-Saxon monks are saying,

"Now we can do it just as well as you.

"We are as Roman, as orthodox, as you.

"And look - after just a couple of generations of Christianity

"and monasticism, this is what we can achieve."

While Benedict Biscop was building his stone monastery at Jarrow,

the victor at the Synod of Whitby, Wilfrid,

was doing the same here at Hexham.

Like Biscop, Wilfrid was an evangelical believer

in the Roman Benedictine monastic system.

Wilfrid had recently been made Bishop of York,

but he's a controversial figure.

He's pompous, he's ambitious,

and he's got a real sense of his own importance.

He refused to be consecrated by his Northumbrian peers,

because he didn't think they were worthy.

So, he went over to France for his inauguration,

and in this very elaborate ceremony,

he's raised up on a throne by 12 other bishops.

This makes him the 13th, so, if you think,

it's the 12 apostles with this Christlike bishop above.

Wilfrid's admiration of Roman grandeur

inspired him to undertake a vast monastic building programme.

The current church at Hexham

is built on the site of Wilfrid's church,

which we know was a wonder of the age.

It was a copy of the great basilicas he'd seen in Italy,

which had themselves evolved from pre-Christian temples.

We're told Wilfrid's church at Hexham had three storeys and a nave,

with pillared aisles on either side.

William of Malmesbury wrote that, "Those who had visited Italy

"allege that at Hexham you see the glories of Rome,"

and this was Wilfrid's intent.

He wanted to show the people how magnificent the Roman way was,

and that the monasteries were powerhouses not just of faith,

but of classical knowledge, culture and civilisation.

The style of church architecture Wilfrid introduced at Hexham

would influence all future stone churches built in Britain.

Here at Hexham, Wilfrid also introduced

a piece of early church architecture that had never before been seen

north of the Alps - a crypt.

And it still survives intact.

Along with the one that he had built beneath his great church at Ripon,

these crypts are the only surviving intact Anglo-Saxon spaces.

Down here you really can feel

like you're walking in the Anglo-Saxon world.

In Rome, the great basilicas had been built on top

of the subterranean tombs of the earliest Christian martyrs.

Wilfrid visited them,

and brought back relics for his monasteries in England.

To house these relics,

he burrowed out this replica of a Roman burial chamber.

The crypts here are designed to replicate the mystical atmosphere

of a Roman catacomb.

There, the unplanned entrances and tunnels twist and turn.

Wilfrid wanted to disorientate his visitors to the shrine.

Here, it's all unlit, the floors are uneven,

there's unexpected corners.

This is architectural drama.

Maybe it's suggesting the soul floundering in the dark,

before coming to the light of a new Christian God.

Emerging into the light of the main chamber,

pilgrims would have seen the relics displayed in gilded splendour.

Today, this space is very rough and ready.

You can see these roughly-hewn stones.

But in the 7th century this would have been a very

different-looking space - it would have been plastered, bright...

it may have had silks hanging here -

we know that Wilfrid brought silks back from the Continent.

Perhaps icons, paintings were displayed.

For the Anglo-Saxons who are newly-converted

to the ideas of Christianity,

this place, with its wonderful atmosphere,

would have inspired awe and wonder.

Along with their rules, relics and architecture

came the Roman Church's pomp and hierarchy.

Wilfrid's lavish ostentation was in stark contrast

to the Spartan lives of the Celtic monks of Skellig.

Wilfrid was a foretaste

of what monasteries and the monks who ran them would become.

Hexham Abbey was his palace.

He would have dressed like a king, wearing the brightest vestments

made of the finest fabrics and silk brought in from the Continent.

He even had this throne made,

modelled on the sorts of thrones he'd seen

from abbots and bishops in France.

I don't think it's a coincidence

that he had it made of reclaimed Roman stone.

The Roman Empire has now become the Christian Roman Empire.

Romulus and Remus have been replaced by Peter and Paul.

And a bishop is now a spiritual king.

But, just as the monasteries were beginning to re-establish

Roman civilisation, a new wave of pagan invaders,

the Vikings,

brought devastation once again.

Next time, monasteries rise from the ashes of Viking destruction

to become dazzlingly rich and powerful.

They soon reach into every corner of medieval society,

but their influence grows too great,

and they set themselves up for a dramatic fall.