were becoming influential in France. When he became an earl with wide lands in Southern Scotland, he invited communities of these men to found monasteries in the Tweed Valley.
In 1124 Alexander I died without an heir and his younger brother, Earl David, succeeded. Anxious to strengthen the bounds of his new kingdom and to retain control of the Church, a key engine of royal government, the king had a problem with Old Melrose. With the cult of Cuthbert securely anchored in England at Durham, where the spectacular new cathedral had risen on the river peninsula of the Wear, many of the sites associated with the saint were claimed by the prince-bishops, including Old Melrose. But David wanted to re-found the monastery there and he had invited a group from the order of Cistercians to come to the Tweed Valley. To appease Durham, he exchanged St Mary’s Church in Berwick-upon-Tweed for the ancient site – and immediately ran into another problem. For reasons now lost, Abbot Richard and his Cistercians refused to build on the river peninsula, even though it was the holiest and most famous church in the Borders, a place where saints had walked and worshipped. They preferred to found their new monastery at a place called Little Fordell, two and a half miles to the west, beyond the ruins of the Roman depot at Trimontium, on the southern bank of the Tweed. But probably at King David’s insistence, they kept the name of Melrose.
Folk toponymy associates it with the mels or the mallets used by masons to build the abbey and the Rose Window at the east end of the church. But in fact it is a synthesis of two Gaelic words. Rhos, or Ross in the anglicised spelling, means ‘a promontory’ and describes the old river peninsula, but maol is more obscure. It can mean ‘bare’ and many believe that the definition ends there. ‘Bare promontory’ was how Old Melrose looked in the seventh and eighth centuries, long before the mighty trees of the nineteenth-century estate were planted. But, in fact, that is a misreading, and the reality is more interesting. Maol can also mean ‘bald’, and the old Druidic tonsure cut across the crown of the head made Celtic monks look bald. And from that, it acquired a further meaning that can be detected in the Christian name of Malcolm. It comes from Maol Choluim and means ‘a follower of St Columba of Iona’. And so in Gaelic, maol became a term for a monk, ‘a bald man’, and so Melrose was ‘the promontory of the monks’.
Cuthbert and his servant arrived at the monastery with a great deal more dignity than I had managed, but I believe he entered it at approximately the same place. Hidden in woodland to the east of an old track that was once a drove road in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lies all that remains of the fabric of Old Melrose. Across the narrow neck of the peninsula, the monastic vallum was dug and its shallow ditches on either side of a central bank can still be made out amongst the lush green ferns and the willowherb. Much deeper when Cuthbert first saw it and almost certainly topped by a wooden palisade rammed into the compacted earth of the upcast, it marked a boundary between worlds. To the west lay the world the young man was leaving – the fields, farms and woods where men and women toiled, where warbands rode and killed, and where devils lurked in the dark places. Beyond the vallum was a place of light where the peace of God bathed the land, where the air was daily purified by the power of prayer and where holy men walked. Old Melrose was a portal, a place where monks strove through privation and contemplation to know the mind of God, where they looked with longing to the sky, hoping to approach Him and His angelic hosts more closely.
When I came at last to the vallum, I saw that it was crossed in two places and guessed that where I stood, the point at which the modern, tarmac road runs up to Old Melrose House, was the original gate, what Cuthbert would have understood as the first door to paradise. It lies closer to the track from Monksford. Here is Bede’s account of what took place when Cuthbert and his servant arrived:
Now Boisil himself, who was standing at the gates of the monastery, saw him first; and foreseeing in spirit how great the man whom he saw was going to be in his manner of life, he uttered this one sentence to those standing by: ‘Behold the servant of the Lord!’ thereby imitating Him who, looking upon Nathaniel as he came towards Him, said: ‘Behold an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile’. Thus is wont to testify that pious and veteran servant and priest of God, Sigfrith, who was standing with others near Boisil himself when he said these words . . . Without saying more, Boisil forthwith kindly received Cuthbert on his arrival, and when the latter had explained the reason of his journey, namely that he preferred the monastery to the world, Boisil still more kindly kept him. For he was Prior of that same monastery. And after a few days, when Eata of blessed memory arrived, who was then a priest and the abbot of the monastery and afterwards both abbot and bishop of the church at Lindisfarne, Boisil told him about Cuthbert, declaring that his mind was well disposed, and obtained permission from him for Cuthbert to receive the tonsure and to join the fellowship of the brethren.
Much moved to find myself standing almost certainly in the same place where this momentous exchange took place, I sat down by the wrought-iron railings of a grass park to re-read Bede’s account of the meeting at the gates. Aside from any other interpretation (was the entry of Cuthbert to Old Melrose agreed beforehand? Was there a payment?), what struck me most forcibly was the role, presence and voice of Boisil.
Probably a Gaelic-speaking Irish monk who came with Aidan from Iona when he founded the mother house at Lindisfarne in 631, Boisil is sometimes credited with the establishment of the first community at Old Melrose. But as Bede was careful to note, he was not abbot and not able to admit Cuthbert without permission from Eata. Unlike his contemporaries, Boisil may have adopted his name. It is a Gaelicised version of Basil. An early bishop who led a famously ascetic life in the provinces of the Near East, what was becoming the Byzantine Empire in the fourth century, St Basil fought against heresy but eventually died, exhausted and enfeebled by the fasting and rigours of his exemplary life.
Boisil’s own piety was much revered, and not only by Cuthbert. Three miles to the south of Old Melrose lie the villages of St Boswells and Newtown St Boswells, both named to honour the old monk. Their local pronunciation seems to get closer to him. Borderers call St Boswells, Bowzuls. At Benrig, a pretty hamlet half a mile from the older village, there once stood St Boisil’s Chapel, only demolished in 1952. And a further link with Old Melrose was embedded in an ancient place-name. St Boswells used to be know as Lessudden, and it means ‘the place of Aidan’. How and when one was supplanted by the other is long forgotten, but what the names signify was probably ownership. At some point in the history of Old Melrose, beginning soon after Cuthbert’s coming, land was gradually gifted to the monks in return for certain privileges.
In the early Middle Ages and beyond, the idea of holy ground was not metaphorical. Where holy men had walked and prayed was literally physically sanctified and if a body was buried inside the monastic precinct of Old Melrose, and indeed many other sites where monks or priests had defeated demons and made the land sacred, it was believed that the earth itself would wash away mortal sin as the flesh rotted down to bone. Wealthy people were prepared to give lavish gifts in return for burial beyond the monastic vallum.
Much later, Anglo-Norman noblemen sometimes endowed a monastery on condition that they be admitted to the community as novices as the end of their days drew near. That meant they were guaranteed burial inside the sacred precinct, perhaps even under the floor of the church and close to the high altar. This was known as taking vows ad succurrendum, which translates as ‘at the run’ or ‘in a hurry’. Robert Avenel, Lord of Eskdale and Richard de Morville of Lauder both became novices at the new abbey of Melrose and were buried under the floor of the church. Such privileges did not come cheap, and in 1216 Sir Alan Mortimer made over half of his estate to the old diseart that became the abbey of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth if the monks would allow him to be buried in the church.
After re-reading Bede’s account of Cuthbert’s coming to the monastery, I walked through the sunshine up the road to Old Melrose House. It sits close to the highest point of the plateau and stands at what was the heart of the seventh-century community. In a copse beyond the house lie the ruins of an early medieval chapel dedicated to St Cuthbert. Under the shade of the trees, there is nothing much to see now; the only animation came from a group of small
