a similar combination of elements, with both areas of interlace and, in the four corners, a simple plant motif with a central bud or leaf and a spiral shoot on either side. The combination of different types of ornament within a panelled framework is highly typical of Northumbrian art, above all the Lindisfarne Gospels. Interlace may well have still been believed to have some quasi-magical protective power, which seems to have been its function in pre-Christian Germanic art. The vine motif here differs from the common continuous scroll type in that the stems cross over each other twice on each side, but crossing stems are also seen on the upper north face of the Bewcastle Cross and a cross in the church at Hexham. Meyer Schapiro compares the motif with one in an initial in the later Book of Kells. It was suggested by Berthe van Regemorter that in the St Cuthbert Gospel this design represents Christ (as the central bud) and the Four Evangelists as the grapes, following , "I am the vine, ye are the branches", but this idea has been treated with caution by other scholars. The two panels of interlace use the same design, of what David H. Wright describes as the "alternating pair thin-line type" which he calls "perhaps the most sophisticated of Insular interlace types". The panels are symmetrical about a vertical axis, except for the left end of the upper panel, which is different. Whereas the other ends of the pattern finish in a flat line parallel with the vertical framing line, part of a shape like an incomplete D, the top left finishes in two ellipses pointing into the corners. The lines forming the interlace patterns are coloured in the dark blue/black and the bright yellow, but differently. In the lower panel the yellow colours the left half of the design, but the upper panel begins at the (deviant) left in the dark colour, then switches to yellow once the pattern changes to that used for the rest of the panels. It continues in yellow until the central point, then changes to the dark colour for the right hand side of the design. The transition between the top left, perhaps where the artist began, and the standard pattern, is somewhat awkward, leaving a rather bald spot (for an interlace pattern) to the left of the first curving yellow vertical. The change in