He is said to have been a slave and to have been appointed king at the command of St Cuthbert, who appeared to Eadred the abbot of Carlisle in a dream.
About the year 919 the country was invaded by Raegenald (Rdgnvaldr grandson of I'varr), a Norwegian king from Ireland, who seized York and occupied the lands of St Cuthbert.
The strictures of a critic in the Monthly Review of July 1763 drew from him a pamphlet called Man in Quest of Himself, by Cuthbert Comment (reprinted in Parr's Metaphysical Tracts, 1837), "a defence of the individuality of the human mind or self."
It has been usually supposed that John Napier was buried in St Giles's church, Edinburgh, which was certainly the burialplace of some of the family, but Mark Napier (Memoirs, p. 426) quotes Professor William Wallace, who, writing in 1832, gives strong reasons for believing that he was buried in the old church of St Cuthbert.
He was a man of learning, writing in favour of Henry's divorce, and with Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, a treatise against Cardinal Pole.