The Contemporary St. Cuthbert’s Banner

This paper reports on the context for the creation of a contemporary St. Cuthbert’s Banner, replacing the original artifact, which was willfully destroyed in the mid-1500s. The four-year project concluded on the saint’s feast day, March 20, 2012, when the banner was dedicated in a ceremony in Durham Cathedral and welcomed into its new resting place, at the shrine of St. Cuthbert. The men and women of Northumbria have a long history of marching under banners, both through the centuries of warfare fought mainly against the Scots, and more recently in association with the vast coal mining industry that once flourished in North East England. This paper aims to contextualize the new St. Cuthbert’s Banner as an important artifact, and attempts to frame it within the North East’s legacy of banner-bearing. These writings report on the use of banners, primarily as tools of a movement and latterly as material culture to be displayed and appreciated as art. KEYWORDS: banner, St. Cuthbert, Durham Miners Gala, material culture, textile semantics