If we were to go by modern political boundaries, we would think of St Cuthbert as a Scotsman. For the first instance Bede gives of the power of his prayers occurred at the mouth of the little river Tyne between North Berwick and Dunbar, and it was presumably in that district that he was born and bred. When he became a monk a few years later, it was at the abbey of Melrose. But then modern political boundaries have nothing to do with the case; those were the days, after all, when the Scots were the inhabitants of Ireland. In fact Cuthbert was a Northumbrian Angle , and the kingdom of Northumbria stretched along the whole East coast from the Humber to the Forth.