the cult of Saint Cuthbert on Farne is an illustration of the social context from which miracle stories could spring. Neither the sailors' miracles nor the healing miracles of Farne were in any way unusual within their genre of miracle, yet they can best be seen as the product of lay belief and practice on the island, in interaction with the hermits, the custodians of the cult of the island. The hermits cannot be seen simply as representatives of the monastic and literary milieu: Bartholomew was at least as much a representative of ‘rustic’ concerns and beliefs to the visiting monks, as was Godric at Finchale.

The story of the raven, who stole the poor couple's wax offering, was one indication of the hermit's mediating role in the creation of popular traditions. This would not be clear without the presence of multiple versions of the story and the surrounding miraculous context in each of the three writers of Farne stories. Geoffrey turned the story into an imitation miracle, linking Bartholomew to Cuthbert through comparison with the latter's chastisement of the ravens. Reginald prefaced his version of the story with reference to the same miracle, and concluded that it was ‘a wonderful and stupendous thing’ that ‘whilst brute animals sense the command of the virtue of Blessed Cuthbert, truly rational men of intelligence fear less his power’. Bede similarly felt that obedience was the key issue: ‘men should seek after obedience and humility, seeing that even a proud bird hastened to atone for the wrong that it had done to the man of God’.