Durham

Cuthbert died on the island of Inner Farne in 687 and was buried at Lindisfarne. Eleven years later the monks lifted him for enshrinement and reported the body undecayed, which in the understanding of the time was the plainest possible sign of sanctity, and his cult spread across northern England.

Viking raids on the island began in 793 and by 875 the community abandoned it, taking with them the coffin, the bones of other saints and the manuscript now called the Lindisfarne Gospels. They moved for seven years, settled at Chester-le-Street for over a century, and in 995 came to a defensible loop of the river Wear; the story that a milkmaid looking for a lost dun cow gave them the name of the place is carved on the cathedral wall. The oak coffin, incised with figures of Christ, the evangelists and the apostles, survives in fragments and is one of the earliest pieces of Anglo-Saxon wood carving in existence.

The Norman cathedral raised over the shrine from 1093 is the earliest large building in Europe to use pointed ribbed vaults throughout, and it was built as a reliquary as much as a church. Access was regulated: a line of dark marble across the nave marked the point beyond which women were not permitted to go, on the strength of traditions about the saint. The shrine was dismantled in 1539 during the dissolution, and the body was reburied beneath the pavement where it lies.

Bede spent his life in the twin monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, a few miles away, and finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is the foundation of everything known about the conversion of England, and it did something else besides: Bede used years counted from the incarnation as his framework, and the popularity of the book is the main reason that convention spread through western Europe. His technical works on the reckoning of time were the standard treatment of the Easter calculation for centuries, and the dispute about the date of Easter between the Roman and Irish traditions is one of the set pieces of his history. His bones were brought to Durham in the eleventh century and lie in the Galilee Chapel at the west end of the cathedral.

Durham's bishops were not ordinary bishops. Holding a frontier against Scotland, they were granted powers that elsewhere belonged to the crown: their own courts and justices, the right to mint coin, to raise an army and to create barons, so that the county was a palatinate and the bishop's authority within it was described as a kingdom beside a kingdom. Those powers were finally removed by statute in 1836, and the bishop and chapter used part of the released endowment to found a university in the castle, the third in England.

A cathedral, a shrine, a scholar's grave and a temporal jurisdiction on one rock is the reason the place looks the way it does.