his physical remains—and those of his eight saintly companions—in the floor of the cathedral, where the shrine had once stood.
Somewhere along the line, a legend grew up that Cuthbert hated women, so none was allowed to approach his tomb too closely. Given his regular and apparently cordial dealings with abbesses during his lifetime, this feels like an unjustified slur invented by misogynistic monks. A second legend was that at some point in the late seventeenth century, his body had been stolen and replaced. In 1827 the dean and chapter decided to see if they could locate the body under the cathedral floor. After a long search they eventually came across a coffin whose exterior closely resembled the one described in the 1104 account. They lifted the lid. Inside, wrapped in five layers of silk, was an ordinary skeleton, an ivory comb, a portable silver altar, and, lying on the skeleton’s ribcage, a beautiful square Anglo-Saxon gold cross, inlaid with garnet, which has now become the emblem of Durham University.
In 1899–1,212 years after Cuthbert had died and the year Bede finally got his sainthood and his doctorate— the coffin was opened for the last time and medical tests were made on Cuthbert’s bones. These matched the known details of his life—such as they were—and they suggested that the body had been mummified for a long period after death. More recent scholarship has speculated that the combination of Cuthbert’s emaciated state at the time of his death and the high sand-and-salt content in the Lindisfarne soil might well have resulted in mummification. In any event, his legend started a trend and there are now more than a hundred Christian saints who have been reported as “incorrupt” at some time after burial, although few have endured such a busy posthumous schedule as Cuthbert.
In 1835 the remains of an expatriate Englishwoman were exhumed from the cemetery in the hamlet of Watervliet in upstate New York. In this case, the reason for the exhumation wasn’t to see if the corpse was “incorrupt,” but to check that it was there at all. Ann Lee (1736–84), known to her followers as Mother Ann, or “Ann the Word,” was the leader of the Shaker movement in North America. Her personality was so dominant that even though she was a woman, many of her followers believed she was the resurrected Christ and simply refused to accept that she could ever die.
Ann Lee was born in Toad Lane, Manchester. The illiterate daughter of a blacksmith, she came from a large, poor family who sent her out to work as a velvet cutter when she was only five years old. The job involved hours of walking backward and forward with a special knife, slitting open the tightly woven loops of silk to create a velvet pile. In the course of a day, a velvet cutter might expect to cover twenty miles. By the age of eighteen Ann was working as a cook at the new Manchester Infirmary. She was a strong, big-boned girl with light chestnut hair and intense blue eyes. Despite her good looks, she conceived a deep hatred of sex from an early age, and most of the visions she witnessed (from her early teens onward) focused on the depravity of human nature and the evils of lust. As second youngest of eight children, she had grown up in a tiny house with her elder siblings, several of whom were cohabiting with their spouses. It may have been this exposure to sexual activity at close quarters and at an early age that was the source of Ann’s revulsion. She had such a compelling gift for persuasion, however, that she managed to get her own mother to take up celibacy. This infuriated her father, who threatened Ann with a whip.
Her own marriage confirmed Ann’s worst suspicions. She had avoided it until she was twenty-six, when her father forced her to marry one of his employees, Abraham Standerin, a junior blacksmith. He was also illiterate and the couple each signed their marriage certificate with a cross. Ann and Abraham would go on to have eight children in quick succession, though four of them were stillborn and none made it past the age of six.
In the meantime, Ann had joined a fledgling religious sect called the Wardley Society. Started by James and Jane Wardley, two married tailors from Bolton, it was colloquially known as the Shaking Quakers (or Shakers for short). The Wardleys had developed the belief that the soul could be purified of its lusts only by the action of the Holy Spirit, which manifested itself by violently shaking the physical body of the sinner. The greater the sin, the more extreme the shaking—and thus the more noise produced in the supplicant. As a result, Shaker meetings were deafening: They could sometimes be heard several miles away:
One will fall prostrate on the floor, another on his knees and his head on his hands, on the floor; another will be muttering articulate sounds which neither they nor any body else can understand… others will be shooing and hissing evil spirits out of the house; all in different tunes, groaning, jumping, dancing, drumming, singing, laughing, talking and stuttering, shooing and hissing makes a perfect bedlam; this they call the worship.
Ann’s reports of her visions entranced the group, and the moral leadership of the sect passed to her from the Wardleys. To be a Shaker meant plain and simple living, common ownership of property, and most important of all, complete rejection of sexual activity—even for married couples. Men and women were expected to live and work apart to avoid the temptations of lust, and children were separated from their parents and fostered by other believers. This liberated Shaker women from their roles as wives and mothers and made them the equals of men. The Shaker god was male and female, both father and mother, and not “a trinity of three men.” Since no one had sex, they rapidly ran out of children to pass the faith on to: Shakerism could grow only by making converts.
By the early 1770s the Manchester Shakers had grown in number to about sixty and their odd behavior and unsettling social practices made them deeply unpopular with regular churchgoers. Their meetings were disrupted by mobs and they were pelted with dung on the street. Ann was arrested for disturbing the peace and imprisoned in a small stone cell. She later claimed she survived only because another leading Shaker, James Whittaker, fed her a mixture of wine and milk smuggled inside in his clay pipe. While in jail Ann had her most powerful vision, which she called “a special manifestation of Divine Light,” showing her that the second coming of Christ was imminent.
Ann’s imprisonment enhanced her authority, and when she emerged, the other Shakers (including the Wardleys) began to refer to her as their “Mother in spiritual things.” In 1774 she had a new vision where she saw that she must take the most faithful followers and set up a new community in America. Only nine of the sixty made the voyage. At one point their singing and dancing were so annoying that the other passengers threatened to throw them overboard. However, the weather turned rough, and the captain later claimed it was only the Shakers’ faith that kept the vessel afloat. The community of less faithful Shakers, left behind in Manchester and without the sustaining intensity of Ann to lead them, rapidly disintegrated.
In her vision, Ann had seen, in precise detail, the place that was destined to be the home of the new community. Once in New York, the tiny Shaker group wasted no time in finding the house that Ann had described and presenting themselves to the family living there. The family listened patiently to Ann’s tale of how she had been directed there by an angel and invited the whole group in. The unexpected arrangement worked, perhaps because Abraham brought his skills as a blacksmith and Ann was an excellent housekeeper. As a female journalist reported at the time:
The women are the ugliest set of females I ever saw gathered together, perhaps their particularly unbecoming dress added to the plainness of their appearance; it seems to be adapted to make them look as ugly as art can possibly devise… their petticoats are long and trolloping, and there is nothing to mark the waist. They are, however, most scrupulously clean.
After two years in New York, the Shakers moved out to the countryside near Albany, where their community began slowly to grow and develop its special character. The center of their devotions was the meeting room, where they kept at their spiritual labors around the clock, operating a shift system for meals. As one group ate and drank, the other brethren sang and danced in front of them. An eyewitness recorded that when they were spinning, the women’s skirts would become “full of wind to form a shape like a tea cup bottom up.” There was also a regular program of intensive exorcisms. One man was spun around off his feet for more than three hours, while all about him there was “yelling, yawing, snarling, pushing, elbowing, singing, dancing.” The observer concluded that “the worst drunken club you ever see could not cut up a higher dash of ill behavior.”
In the middle of it all, though rarely participating in the shaking, was Mother Ann herself. She ruled with a rod of iron, making sure that there was no backsliding. Like St. Cuthbert she hardly ate at all, scraping the “driblets” off other people’s finished plates but upbraiding others for not eating enough. She was also obsessive about cleanliness, claiming “there is no dirt in heaven.” At the merest hint of familiarity between men and women she would regale them with her vivid visions of hell, where molten lead was poured on the genitals of the lustful. After a
