Eleven years after his death, the remains of Cudberct were enshrined, and, as the custom of enshrining the relics of their saints was now beginning in the Irish Church, the circumstances here detailed are very instructive. The Divine power, Bede tells us, ‘put it into the hearts of the brethren to raise his bones, which they expected to have found dry, as is usual with the dead when the rest of the body has been consumed and reduced to dust, in order that they might enclose his remains in a light chest; and they intended, for the sake of decent veneration, to deposit them in the same place, but above instead of below the pavement. When they expressed this their desire to Eadberct, their bishop, he assented to their proposal, and commanded that they should remember to do this on the day of his deposition, which occurred on the thirteenth of the kalends of April, or the 20th of March. This they accordingly did; but, on opening the sepulchre, they found his whole body as entire as when he was yet living, and more like one in a sound sleep, for the joints of the limbs were flexible, than one who was dead.’ They hastened to inform the bishop, who was at the time dwelling as a solitary in the island of Farne, of what appeared to them a miraculous preservation of the remains, and he desired them ‘to gird the body with fresh wrappings instead of those which they had removed, and so place him in the chest they had prepared.’ The monks did as they were commanded; ‘and the body having been wrapped in new raiment and laid in a light chest, they deposited it upon the pavement of the sanctuary.’[415] This is a very early example of enshrining, and shows that the shrine they had prepared was large enough to receive the entire body, and that the custom then was to inter a saint in a stone coffin under the pavement, at the right side of the altar; but to place a shrine, enclosing his remains, above the pavement.[416] [Sidenote: A.D. 688. Strathclyde Britons conform to Rome.]