Among the possession buried with St Cuthbert was a bone comb. This was because there was a belief that “by combing his hair a man tidied the brains which lay beneath it”.
Alcuin writes to the archbishop of Mainz about 790:
“I send you as many thanks as the number of teeth I have counted in your gift — a wonderful creature with two heads and sixty teeth, not as big as an elephant but of beautiful ivory. I have not been frightened by the horror of the creature, but rather delighted by its appearance, though I was afraid that it might rather bite me with its gnashing teeth. Yet I smiled upon it with gentle flattery to appeare the hairs of my head.”
(P.H. Blair, Northumbria in the Days of the Bede, Victor Gollancz, London, 1976, from p. 136-7)
From the same text I learnt that: “When Benedict Biscop was building his foundation at Wearmouth and Jarrow, he wanted their churches to be in the Roman not the Scottish style, in mortared stone not in wood, but in order to make them so he had to send to Gaul for men who knew how to make mortar – caementarii, as Bede calls them.” (p. 122)
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