Hilda of Whitby

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.

Hilda, a member of the Northumbrian royal house, was baptised at the age of thirty three alongside King Edwin's court and spent the following years, according to Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, planning to join a monastery in Gaul before Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne recalled her to Northumbria instead, setting her on a different course. She went on to found and govern several religious houses before becoming founding abbess of the monastery at Streoneshalh, the site now known as Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast around 657. The house Hilda built there was a double monastery, housing communities of both monks and nuns under her single governance, a common arrangement in the period and one that placed real institutional authority in the hands of an abbess rather than any male superior. Bede records that Hilda's household became known specifically as a center of learning, so much so that five of the monks trained under her went on to become bishops, and it was at Whitby that Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman who received the gift of poetic composition in a dream, was recognized, sheltered and encouraged by Hilda herself to become the first named poet in the English language whose work survives.

Whitby's abbey hosted one of early English Christianity's most consequential meetings in 664, the Synod of Whitby, called to settle a dispute that had divided the Northumbrian church for a generation: whether to calculate the date of Easter by the method used in Rome or by the older method still followed by the Ionian and Celtic tradition that had first evangelized much of the north. The two calculations could place Easter on different Sundays in the same year, an awkward and visible disunity within a single royal household, since King Oswiu himself observed the Roman date his wife's court did not. Bede's account, and his separate treatise on the reckoning of time, present the dispute as a genuinely technical argument over computus, the medieval science of calendrical calculation, rather than a merely political dispute dressed in liturgical language. Though Hilda's own sympathies before the synod lay with the Celtic practice she had been raised in, she accepted King Oswiu's ruling in favor of Rome once it was made and continued to govern Whitby afterward without recorded protest. She died in 680 and was venerated as a saint soon after, remembered today with a feast day on the seventeenth of November.