Hild's Double Monastery

The monastery at Streoneshalh was founded about 657 on the cliff above the harbour and was a double house of monks and nuns living under one rule and one head, an arrangement common in early Anglo-Saxon England and always headed by a woman. Its abbess was Hild, a member of the Northumbrian royal house who had been baptised at thirty three and had spent her middle years founding and governing religious houses. Bede says that kings and princes came to her for advice, and that five men trained in her monastery became bishops, which places the house at the centre of the Northumbrian church rather than at its edge. The best known story attached to it concerns a cowherd on the estate.

Caedmon left a feast because he could not take his turn at the harp, slept in the byre, and was told in a dream to sing about the creation; he woke with the verses, Hild had him tested by scholars and received him into the community, and the nine lines of Caedmon's Hymn are the earliest English poem whose author is known by name. Danish raids ended the house in the ninth century, and the ruin standing above the harbour today belongs to the Benedictine abbey refounded after the Norman conquest. Hild died in 680 after seven years of illness, and Bede reports that a nun in a daughter house saw her soul carried up in a light at the moment of her death. Her successor Aelfflaed, daughter of the king who had presided at the synod, kept the house in the same position of influence for another generation.