John of Beverley

Origins and formation

John was born, the Beverley tradition says, at Harpham in the East Riding of Yorkshire, of a family of rank in the Northumbrian kingdom of Deira. He was sent to Canterbury for his education, to the school kept there by the Greek archbishop Theodore of Tarsus and the African abbot Hadrian — the school that gave the English Church its first generation of learned native clergy — and thence he returned north to enter the double monastery of Streanæshalch (Whitby) under the Abbess Hilda. Bede, who knew men who had known him, mentions this monastic formation as a matter of common knowledge, and it is the key to the man: John was a monk before he was a bishop, and he was a monk again at the end.

Bishop of Hexham

In 687, on the death of Bishop Eata, John was consecrated Bishop of Hexham by Archbishop Theodore. The see lay in the Northumbrian border country, in the generation of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and of the turbulent Wilfrid, and John's episcopate there lasted eighteen years. Two things about it are certain and both matter.

The first is that he ordained Bede. Bede records at the close of the Ecclesiastical History, in the short account he gives of his own life, that he was made deacon in his nineteenth year and priest in his thirtieth, in each case by "the most reverend bishop John" and at the direction of his abbot Ceolfrith. The whole of Bede's priestly ministry therefore descends from John's hands, which is one reason the historian writes of him with such warmth.

The second is that he kept the habits of a monk while a bishop. Bede describes his practice of retiring to a solitary house across the river from Hexham, in a clearing surrounded by woodland, to give himself to reading and prayer through Lent, taking with him a few companions and, characteristically, some poor or afflicted person to be cared for and instructed.

The wonders recorded by Bede

Bede devotes five consecutive chapters of his fifth book to John's miracles, and names his informants: Berhthun, John's deacon and afterwards abbot of Inderawuda, and Herebald, afterwards abbot of Tynemouth, who was himself one of the healed. The care with which he sources them makes this small dossier unusually solid.

• At the Lenten retreat near Hexham, John sent for a young man who could not speak and whose head was disfigured by scabs. He blessed him, made the sign of the cross upon his tongue, and bade him say "yes"; then, taking him through the letters of the alphabet and then syllables and then words, brought him to fluent speech, and had a physician heal his scalp, so that the youth went home with hair and a tongue and a comely face.
• Cwenburh, a nun of the monastery of Watton, had been bled in the arm at an hour reckoned unlucky by those who watched the moon; the arm swelled and she lay in danger. John, sent for, rebuked the folly of the reckoning, prayed over her and blessed her, and she was well by the next day.
• The wife of a nobleman named Puch, who had lain forty days unable to rise, was healed by drinking water that John had blessed at the dedication of a church on Puch's estate.
• The servant of another nobleman, Addi, lay at the point of death; John came, prayed, blessed him, and the man rose and asked for a drink.
• Herebald himself, as a young cleric in John's household, raced a horse against the bishop's express prohibition, was thrown, struck his head on a stone and lay senseless with a fractured skull. John sat by him through the night in prayer; toward morning the young man spoke, and afterwards recovered wholly. In examining him the bishop discovered that he had been baptised by a priest so ignorant that the form had probably been defective, and had him properly catechised and confirmed.

Taken together the accounts show a bishop of a particular kind: patient with the slow, scornful of superstition, insistent on doing the sacraments correctly, and personally attentive to one sufferer at a time.

York, retirement and repose

In 705, on the death of Bishop Bosa, John was translated to the see of York, the chief church of the North. He held it some twelve years, and consecrated Wilfrid II, who had been trained in his household, as his eventual successor. About 717–718, aged and wishing to end as he had begun, he resigned the see into Wilfrid's hands and withdrew to the monastery he had himself founded at Inderawuda — "in the wood of the men of Deira" — where Berhthun was abbot. There he lived as a monk until his death on 7 May 721, and there he was buried, in the porch of the church of Saint Peter.

Relics, shrine and later cultus

The settlement that grew about his grave took its name from him and from the beaver stream beside it, and became Beverley. In 1037 the relics were taken up and enshrined by Archbishop Ælfric Puttoc of York, an act which the later Beverley tradition associates with a formal canonisation at Rome under Pope Benedict IX — that is, a generation before the schism of 1054. From that translation the great church of Beverley Minster grew, with the rights of sanctuary attached to it, of which the ancient stone frith stool, the "peace chair," still survives beside the altar: a fugitive who reached it was under the saint's protection.

His banner was carried by Northumbrian and later English armies, at the Battle of the Standard in 1138 and in the Scottish campaigns; and Henry V publicly ascribed the victory of Agincourt to his intercession, the battle having been fought on 25 October 1415, the anniversary of the translation of his relics — the king afterwards making offerings at the shrine. The medieval shrine was destroyed at the Reformation, but in 1664 workmen in the nave of the Minster came upon a leaden casket inscribed with his name, containing bones and dust; it was reburied where it was found, and the spot is marked in the pavement to this day.