Durham, very potted history

Once again, I need to get this clear in my head so I may as well write it here. No guarantees of accuracy.

St Cuthbert was a good guy – hermit, priest, abbot living at Lindisfarne , an island NE of here ( except there are some reports that he was opposed to women being anywhere other than in the kitchen) . He died in 687AD and told his monks not to leave his body if they had to leave the island.

The Vikings arrived in 875 so the monks set off carrying his body, which, as the story goes, had not decomposed. They stopped here and there for 140 years or so until they, or rather their replacements, came to Durham. The monks were a secular group – i.e. they had wives. Anyway , in 1093, a Bishop William de St Carileph laid the foundation stone of a the cathedral.

Separately, in 1072 William the Conqueror stayed in Durham on his journey north to Scotland and thought it would be good to build a castle .It remained uncaptured in the next 400 years of border warfare. Different people added different bits over the years. So it started life as a fort but quickly became the castle home of the Prince Bishops. If a king did not have enough representatives in an area he would make the Bishop a Prince Bishop so that he, the Prince Bishop that is, could raise an army and mint coins etc. . In 1837, William de Mildert ( William was a popular name) , the last Prince Bishop, gave the castle to the university which he helped establish 5 years before that and it is still a residential part of University College, the most prestigious of the colleges at Durham uni.