Cuthbert Weaver

Lord Cuthbert Weaver (1109 – 1173) My name Cuthbert was given to me by my father, an Anglo-Saxon lord whose family lost their land and titles in the years following the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. I was born in 1109 in Hertfordshire, Southern England in the town of St. Albans, just near the abbey where the monks taught me how to read and write. The abbey cathedral was still quite new when I was born, and it was fascinating to hear the village elders recall tales of its slow but steady construction. My life revolved around a pair of the most important English saints we have ever known. While I lived in the town honoring Saint Alban the Martyr, I was named after the venerable Saint Cuthbert, and my first ever pilgrimage as a child was in 1119 to visit Durham Cathedral where Saint Cuthbert is buried. It was my parents’ goal to raise me in the ways of piety and perhaps even receive a clerical education. My second pilgrimage with my father was to the city of Jerusalem in 1124 when Baldwin II of the House of Rethel sat upon the throne as King. I was only fifteen years old, but my father was not the youthful man he once was. The journey there and back was arduous, and took so many months that some in St. Albans didn’t recognize me when I returned home. My father grew ill on our return voyage and died at sea. He was given a seaman’s burial and laid into the depths of the Mediterranean having sailed out of Cyprus. It is for him that I chose to design my coat of arms in memory of our pilgrimage to the Holy Land together. The red and white represent the Knights of the Temple who welcomed and shielded us on our final stage of the pilgrimage into Jerusalem. The four bells represent myself, my brother, and two cousins who grew up together under the tutelage of my father and uncle. The bells of Jerusalem are an unmistakable sound ringing across the holy city that a pilgrim doesn’t soon forget. Likewise, the palm tree at its center is also a feature of that time I spent there, and my father who picked up a palm leaf on the Via Dolorosa to show me how it would have been waved in joyous revelry on the original Palm Sunday a thousand years before. Before I returned home to England, I was left in Rome by the ship’s captain who had taken the last of our coin. It was several months before I could secure passage back through France and into England. I spent my time as pilgrim beggar and day-laborer, before I learned of an Angevin caravan who were making their way north to Bayeux and Calais, and then across the English Channel to London and the court of King Henry II. A compassionate French weaver among them fed and aided me on the way, and he became much interested in my tales of English wool in Hertfordshire, deciding to accompany me all the back to St. Albans. He never returned to France and settled near the abbey, eventually marrying my mother and becoming my step-father. It is from him that I take my last name Weaver though I never had a talent for the loom myself. While I did not join the abbey as a monk as my parents may have expected, I was never far from holy sites or various connected sources of employment. My knowledge of French provided me with opportunities to scribe and translate for the Norman and Plantagenet nobles in England, I eventually inherited a wool-trading business from my step-father, and my experience on the pilgrimage routes led me to become a guide for others on religious journeys to Northern England, France, or Italy. I enjoyed playing music with the monks in the abbey, as well as practicing swordsmanship in the town square. In my final years as an older man, I embarked upon the most English of pilgrimages, walking from St. Albans to the holy site of Saint Thomas Beckett’s death in Canterbury Cathedral in 1172.

Maps of England and France in the Twelfth-Century Angevin Empire: 1. Durham, England – Burial site of my namesake Saint Cuthbert 2. St. Albans, England – My birthplace and 3. Canterbury, England – Pilgrimage destination honoring Saint Thomas Beckett 4. Rouen, France – Destination of Angevin Caravan

Interests: • Making YouTube Videos about Medieval History and Tourism • Historical Research and Writing • Armor Making • Rapier Combat • Pilgrimage Walks • Classical Guitar