Cuthbert's cult began eleven years after his burial, when the Lindisfarne community opened his tomb in 698 to elevate his bones and found, the sources report, a body undecayed. Incorruption was the medieval signature of exceptional sanctity, and the discovery, joined to the miracles recorded at the shrine, made Lindisfarne a pilgrimage center and Cuthbert the premier saint of northern England. For him or by him the community produced treasures that survive: the Lindisfarne Gospels were made in his honor within a generation, and the tiny gospel of John found in his coffin, the St Cuthbert Gospel, is the oldest intact European book still in its original binding.
The Viking descent on Lindisfarne in 793 began the strangest chapter. The monks eventually left the island carrying the coffin, and for over a century the community moved through northern England with its saint, settling at Chester-le-Street, then in 995 at Durham, where the cathedral was raised around his shrine. The tomb was opened repeatedly across the centuries, the body reported whole as late as 1104, and the shrine stripped at the Reformation though the burial remains in the cathedral. Bede, who wrote Cuthbert's life twice, fixed his image for the Middle Ages; the modern St Cuthbert's Way, walked from Melrose to Lindisfarne, retraces the country of his beginnings in his name.