Thus religion, art, and literature, were born in Durham. In the last years of the eighth century a terrible calamity fell upon the wider province, of which Durham was only a part, when the Danes raided Lindisfarne, where had been the starting-point of the Northumbrian Church. When the mother was thus spoiled and laid desolate, the daughters trembled for their safety, but they were left for awhile, not unassailed, yet not destroyed. In those days of disturbed peace further gifts of land were made to the Church, and in these we trace large slices of Durham handed over in the ninth century to the monks of Lindisfarne by those who had the power to give. And here we must notice that the great treasure of the monastery at Lindisfarne was the body of St. Cuthbert, the great Northumbrian saint, to whom the endowments named were most solemnly dedicated. They formed the nucleus of the Bishopric--the beginnings of the Patrimony of St. Cuthbert, which is only another name for the Bishopric. Repeated invasion of the Danes at last drove the monks out of Lindisfarne, and destroyed the Durham monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth. The Lindisfarne monks left their island, and bore away for safety’s sake the body of St. Cuthbert, and after various wanderings brought it back to rest within the fortified enclosure of Chester-le-Street, and so within the confines of Durham. Here the Danish conquerors confirmed previous gifts, and added others to them, until the lands of St. Cuthbert increased very widely, whilst Chester-le-Street became a centre of pilgrimage. For 113 years Chester-le-Street was the Christian metropolis of the North, until the final fury of the Danes began to fall upon Northumbria. In 995 another exodus began, and the clergy bore off the body to Ripon, returning a few months later when the tempest seemed to have abated. Many legends cluster round this return, but in any case the fact is clear that the Bishop and his company took up their abode, not at Chester-le-Street, but on the rocky peninsula of Dun-holm, or Durham, which the River Wear nearly encircled. In this way the seat of ecclesiastical authority was changed for the second time, and Durham City now became the centre of the still-expanding Bishopric. Great prestige gathered round the Saxon cathedral in which the shrine of the saint was placed, for Kings and Princes vied with one another in doing honour to it. So Canute, walking to the spot with bare feet, gave fresh donations of Durham land and confirmed what others had bestowed.