Hilda of Whitby (614–680)

Founding abbess of the noted double monastery of Whitby in the ancient British kingdom of Northumbria, a center of learning where five future English bishops were educated, who was described by the Venerable Bede as "the blaze of light which filled all England with its splendor." Name variations: Hild; Saint Hilda. Born in 614 in the kingdom of Deira, Northumbria; died at Whitby (Streaneshalch or Streonaeshalch) on November 17, 680; daughter of Hereric (a nephew of Edwin, king of the Northumbria kingdom of Deira), and Berguswida (Breguswith), origin unknown; never married; no children.

Baptized at York on Easter Sunday (April 2,627); became abbess at Whitby (657); hosted the Council of Whitby (664); educated five future English bishops; sponsored Caedmon, the illiterate cowherd who first retold the stories of the Bible in Old English verse and became known as the Father of English Poetry; founded monastery of Hackness (680).

On a night in early 7th-century England, a lonely young woman dreamed that she went in search of her absent husband. Although she did not find the man she sought, she did discover a brilliant necklace, hidden in the folds of her gown, which shone so brightly that its light filled the house. This prophetic dream is the earliest story told about Saint Hilda of Whitby. The young dreamer is Berguswida , then the pregnant wife of Hereric, a nephew of King Edwin of the Northumbrian kingdom of Deira. Sent to spy for the king in a foreign court, Hereric would be poisoned by his host and die far from home. Hilda, the daughter born after his death, was believed by the chronicler of the dream to be symbolized by the gleaming necklace as one who would one day light all of England.

In 614, the year of Hilda's birth, Northumbria, like most of England, was pagan. Christianity had been introduced by the Romans but had largely vanished with Rome's departing legions, and subsequent Anglo-Saxon invasions had brought the island a Germanic religion with its own idols and temples. Celtic Christianity survived only in the far north of Britain.

It was toward the beginning of the 7th century when Pope Gregory the Great is said to have asked about the handsome, fair-complexioned youths he saw in the slave markets of Rome; told that they were pagan Angles, the pope responded that they had the look of angels. In 596, Gregory concluded that the Angles deserved to receive the good news of Christianity and directed Augustine, a Christian missionary, to travel with a band of 40 monks to their island home to carry out their conversion.

The missionaries were not happy about the assignment. They thought of England as a grim and alien land, peopled with hostile heathens, and could not take consolation in the alluring description yet to be written, some hundred years later, by a scholarly Northumbrian monk known as the Venerable Bede, who was to become the Father of English History. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, the monk would write:

Britain, an island in the ocean, formerly called Albion … excels for grain and trees, and is well adapted for feeding cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in some places, and has plenty of land and water-fowls of several sorts; it is remarkable also for rivers abounding in fish, and plentiful springs…. Britain has also many veinsof metals, as copper, iron, lead and silver; it has much excellent jet, which is black and sparkling, glittering at the fire, and when heated drives away serpents…. The island was formerly embellished with twenty-eight noble cities, besides innumerable castles…. And from its lying almost under the North Pole, the nights are light in summer, so that at midnight the beholders are often in doubt whether the evening twilight still continues, or that of the morning is coming on…. This island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine law was written, contains five nations, the English, Britons, Scots, Picts, and Latins, each in its own peculiar dialect cultivating the sublime study of Divine truth.

Augustine would in fact become head of a flourishing English mission with its center at the great church and school of Canterbury. But in the year of Hilda's birth, Northumbria was still dominated by the fierce pagan ruler Ethelfrith. When Hilda was two years old, Edwin succeeded Ethelfrith. Edwin, who was still a pagan and said to be counseled in his youth by a wizard, proved to be a strong ruler who brought peace and union to the small kingdoms of Northumbria. Edwin rode among his people with a standard bearer before him in the old Roman way, brass cups were hung at crossroads where there were springs so that travelers could slake their thirst, and it was said that a woman with her child in her arms could walk in safety across the land.

In time, King Edwin married a Christian princess from Kent, in the south of England. When the young queen Ethelberga of Northumbria came north, she was accompanied by her priest, a Roman missionary who set about trying to Christianize Northumbria. A letter from the pope also urged Ethelberga to bring her husband to the true faith.

The Venerable Bede would write of the questions Edwin addressed to his wise men. Should Northumbrians abandon the religion of their fathers and accept the new God? One advisor replied:

The present life of man, oh King, is like the swift flight of a sparrow through a room where you sit at supper in winter, beside a hot fire, while rain and snow beat outside. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out another, is safe from the winter storm while he is inside, but after this short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he came. So this life of man appears for a little while, but we know nothing at all of what went before or what is to follow. If this new religion tells us something more certain, it deserves to be followed.

Accepting this wisdom, Edwin became a Christian. He ordered the construction of a wooden chapel in the old Roman city of York which was his headquarters, and on April 2, Easter Sunday, in the year 627, he was baptized there with members of the royal household, including the teenaged Hilda.

The years of Hilda's young womanhood have gone mysteriously unreported. In 632, King Edwin was killed in battle, and paganism again took hold in the region. As a member of the royal family now out of favor, Hilda may have lived in quiet retreat. Since marriage was typically the only life open to a royal princess, and since the Venerable Bede, who gloried in writing about holy virgins, wrote about Hilda with great admiration but never in those terms, it has been suggested by one modern scholar that she may have accepted a pagan husband. The one certainty is that Hilda remained a Christian.

Around 647, Hilda's life sprang into the full light of history when she was 33 and journeyed south to East Anglia, where her sister Hereswitha 's son was king. Hilda had intended to join Hereswitha in a journey to the noted monastery of Chelles in France, to spend the rest of her life in study and devotion. But Hereswitha had already departed across the Channel, and Hilda remained briefly in East Anglia under the protection of her nephew.

While still in East Anglia, she encountered Aidan, a pious counselor to Northumbrian kings and abbot of the austere monastic community of Lindesfarne, off the Northumbrian coast. Aidan was a monk out of the Celtic tradition, who lived an ascetic life, traveling about England on foot, speaking the truth as he saw it to both the mighty and the powerless. Persuaded by the monk's eloquence and no doubt by her own heart, Hilda gave up her dream of a secure and scholarly life and followed his advice that she return to her native Northumbria and begin the challenging task of organizing religious communities among her own people. According to Aidan's instructions, she was first given a small estate, apparently on the banks of the River Wear, where she headed a group of nuns. Next she was called to Hartlepool, originally presided over by Hieu, the first Northumbrian woman to have taken the veil. There Hilda became abbess of a small double monastery, where both men and women lived under her religious rule.

In 657, Hilda's great life work began when her cousin King Oswy granted her ten "hides" of land to found and develop another double monastery, on a promontory where the River Esk flowed into the storm-tossed North Sea. Since the Danish invasions at the end of the 8th century, the site has been known as Whitby, but in Hilda's time it was called Streaneshalch, which has been translated as the Place of the Light, or, according to the Bede, the Bay of the Lighthouse, a name which may have been both symbolic and literal in meaning.

England in the 7th century saw the founding of a number of double monasteries under the rule of powerful abbesses, who were often members of a royal family. The practices within these institutions differed widely. In some, men did the heavy work of farming, raising the barley, oats, wheat, and flax needed to feed and clothe the community, while monks and nuns lived wholly apart. The abbess sometimes lived in seclusion, never speaking directly to a man. At Hilda's monastery, the ruins are too fragmentary to tell us just how the community was arranged, but Bede's writings suggest that considerable openness and freedom existed there. Certainly Hilda could not have remained in seclusion. Men and women called their abbess "Mother" and revered her for her virtue and for her wisdom, a quality much valued in Anglo-Saxon women. All monastery property was communally owned. Small crosses carved of the gleaming black jet dug from the cliffs at Whitby, or taken from the streams nearby, may have been the chief personal possessions of the people in the order.

At Whitby, Hilda established a regular rule for all who were in her charge. A town of many buildings was probably contained within its walls, and both monks and nuns spent much of their time studying the holy scriptures in Latin. Devotions were regular and demanding. The first thatched-roof church was soon replaced by a finer stone structure, perhaps like the church still existing at Escomb, County Durham, with altars to St. Peter and St. Gregory. King Edwin's remains are believed to have been brought there for final burial, and there King Oswy would also be laid to rest.

Hereswitha (d. c. 690)

Saint and queen of East Anglia. Name variations: Heruswith. Died around 690; daughter of Hereric (a nephew of Edwin, king of the Northumbria kingdom of Deira), and Berguswida (Breguswith), origin unknown; sister of Hilda of Whitby ; married St. Ethelbert; married Anna, king of East Anglia; children: one son who was the king of East Anglia; and daughter Ethelburga (d. 665); stepmother of Sexburga (d. 699?) and Elthelthrith (630–679).

With the consent of her second husband, Anna, king of East Anglia, Hereswitha journeyed to France around 646, accompanied by her daughter Ethelburga and her granddaughter Ercongata , and took the veil at Chelles. Another queen, St. Balthild , founder of the convent, entered around the same time. Hereswitha's feast day is September 23.

The skill of Whitby masons was much admired in their carved roadway markers and memorial stones. Other talents were also developed there. Throughout Western Europe during the 7th century, patient and talented religious devotees spent their time copying gospels, psalters, complete Bibles and scholarly works onto sheets of vellum they embellished with fine flowing script and illustrations in gold and bright colors. No manuscript from the time of Hilda is known to exist, but Northumbrian manuscripts became noted for their special beauty, and the foundation for their future fame must have been laid in her scriptorium. Men and women shared equally in the access to learning which the scriptorium and the monastery library afforded.

Hilda also established a school where five later bishops were trained, as well as an unknown number of priests. There she taught "justice, piety, chastity and other virtues." No record of her academic curriculum remains, but the excavated book clasps and brass-and-bone styluses used for writing on wax tablets suggest assiduous learning. Latin was certainly taught there; grammar, chant, and dialectic were surely studied, and possibly some rhetoric, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. Elflaed (d. 714), Hilda's successor as abbess, who was trained from early childhood at Hartlepool and Whitby, wrote a very elaborate Latin, known from a still extant letter. One modern scholar describes Whitby at the middle of the 7th century as "the preeminent center of learning in Anglo-Saxon England." The Venerable Bede called it "the blaze of light which filled all Britain with its splendor."

No woman in the Middle Ages ever held a position comparable with that of Hilda of Whitby.

—Frank Stenton

It was at Whitby that the man who was to be called the Father of English Poetry was first identified. According to Bede's story, a cowherd on the monastery grounds, named Caedmon, sat one night drinking and singing with merry companions who followed the custom of passing around a harp which each man used to accompany his own song. But when the harp came to the cowherd, he fled to the stables, too shy to sing.

In the stable, Caedmon dreamed that he was visited by a stranger who commanded him to "Sing the beginning of created beings," whereupon, according to Bede, the cowherd began a verse in praise of God, "the Maker of the Heavenly kingdom," in his native Anglo-Saxon tongue. When Caedmon wakened, he told his overseer about the hymn he had sung so miraculously and remembered. The overseer took him to the abbess, who immediately saw the missionary value in having the gospel translated from Latin into the everyday language and poetic form of the Northumbrian people. Hilda commanded the cowherd to join her monks, learn the gospel stories from them, and translate the works into Anglo-Saxon verse. For many years, much early Christian poetry was attributed to Caedmon, but scholars attribute only nine lines of the surviving original verse to him. Together, however, the abbess and the cowherd began a tradition important to the development of English poetry and to the conversion of the Northumbrians.

In 664, Hilda hosted an occasion crucial to the development of the English church as an institution, when the Council of Whitby was held, attended by her royal cousin, King Oswy, as well as the leading men of the Northumbrian church. The two immediate issues presented for discussion were the tonsure of the clergy and the date for the celebration of Easter, but the larger issue they represented was the question of whether the older Celtic tradition or the Roman tradition introduced by Augustine should dominate the English church. Irish monks wore their hair cut from ear to ear, while the Romans shaved all but a narrow circlet, in memory of Christ's crown of thorns. King Oswy's own household had a lively interest in the question of the Easter date, since Oswy himself had been trained by Irish monks and his queen Eanfleda by missionaries from Rome. As a result, Easter was held twice a year in their domain, resulting in much confusion, if not acrimony, in the royal chapel and possibly in the royal kitchen.

Hilda, trained by her beloved Aidan, favored the Irish position, but Wilfrid, the chief speaker for the opposition, had been trained in Rome and was an eloquent orator, arguing that the old Irish monks had no doubt been holy men but were mistaken in their calculation of the date of the holy day and in other matters. St. Peter, the rock upon which Christ had founded his church, had stood for the Roman way. King Oswy, being a wily politician, listened to all arguments and, at length, declared that when he came to the heavenly gates, it would be St. Peter who held the keys, and the king wanted to be sure that he would be allowed to enter. The king's position proved decisive, and the long Roman rule of the English church was thus assured, with occasional setbacks, not to be ended for 900 years, until the reign of King Henry VIII. Doubtless saddened by the council's decision, Hilda dispatched an anti-Wilfrid delegation to Rome in 679, but she remained abbess at Whitby until her death the following year, on November 17, 680.

For the last seven years of her life, Hilda suffered what Bede called "a great fever" which at last "turned inward." But she remained active in performing her duties and, at the time she was dying, called her people together to admonish them to maintain "ecclesiastical peace." Bede, whose belief in miracles is hard to assess, reported that Hilda's death was marked with visions. At Harkness, a smaller monastery Hilda had founded early in that year, a pious nun named Begu lay asleep, when she heard, according to Bede, "the sound of a bell … and opening her eyes, as she thought, she saw the top of the house open, and a strong light pour in from above, looking earnestly upon that light, she saw the soul of the aforesaid servant of God [Hilda] in that same light, attended and conducted to heaven by angels." A nun at Whitby claimed to have had the same vision and called her companions together in prayer for the newly dead.

Hilda was succeeded as abbess by her cousin Oswy's daughter Elflaed, whom she had reared at Hartlepool and Whitby, and by Oswy's widow Eanfleda, with mother and daughter sharing the rule. During their time, a still extant Life of St. Gregory was written by a Whitby monk. A life of Hilda herself, though mentioned in old manuscripts, has been lost.

Like Hilda's early years, the fate of her monastery is shrouded in mystery. Almost surely, Whitby shared the devastation inflicted on other great ecclesiastical houses of northern England during the Danish raids at the end of the 8th century. Now a later Norman church, also in ruins, occupies the site. The bones of the saint may have been taken for safekeeping to the famous old abbey at Glastonbury where, according to another colorful legend, the bones of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were also laid. If so, they would have been part of the devastation wreaked at Glastonbury during King Henry VIII's reign in the 16th century.

Only a few minor miracles have been ascribed to Hilda. She is said to have turned serpents into stones and to have prevented birds from destroying the abbey crops, but no miraculous healings or magic wells, commonly ascribed to saints, have been linked to her. Her actual accomplishment was far more enduring: the protection and furthering of the growth of her church during a crucial, war-torn period of English history. To note, as Lina Eckenstein has stated, that "the desire to raise women to sainthood was essentially Anglo-Saxon and was strongest in the time which immediately followed the acceptance of Christianity" does not detract from her contributions.

sources:

Bede, Venerabilis. Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Reprint. London: J.M. Dent, 1954.

Fell, Christine E. "Hilda, Abbess of Streonaeshalch," in Hagiography and Medieval Literature—a Symposium. Edited by H. Bekker-Nielsen. Odense, 1981.

——. Women in Anglo-Saxon England. Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1984.

Fisher, D.J.V. The Anglo-Saxon Age. London: Longman, 1973.

Owen, Gale R. Rites and Religions of the Anglo-Saxons. Devon: David and Charles, 1981.

Rollason, David. Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Margery Evernden , professor emerita of English, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and freelance writer