Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Abbess of Whitby
November 19 · d. 680
also known as Hild
Hilda was the founding abbess of Whitby and one of the great figures of the early English church. Born into the royal house of Northumbria and baptized as a girl with King Edwin's court, she turned to the monastic life in middle age and governed her double monastery of monks and nuns with such wisdom that kings sought her counsel and five of the men she trained became bishops. Under her roof the Synod of Whitby met in 664, and in her house the cowherd Caedmon received the gift of English sacred song. Her feast is November 19.
Hilda was born into the royal house of Northumbria, in the north of England, a great-niece of King Edwin, in years when that kingdom still worshipped the old gods. She was about thirteen when the king turned to Christ, and on Easter Day of 627 she went down to the water with Edwin and his whole court and was baptized by Paulinus, the Roman bishop who had carried the faith into the north. Then, for a long while, nothing more is told of her. She lived as a laywoman for twenty years, a princess of a Christian house, while the kingdom around her rose and fell and rose again.
When she was thirty-three, Hilda resolved to leave the world. Her sister had gone as a nun to the monastery of Chelles in Gaul, in the country that is now France, and Hilda meant to follow her there and end her days a stranger in a far land for the love of God. But Aidan, the bishop of Lindisfarne, called her home. He would not have such a woman spent abroad when the young church of the English had need of her. He settled her first with a few companions on the north bank of the river Wear, and then set her over the monastery at Hartlepool, on the same coast, and made her its abbess. She had never been trained for such work. She learned it, and those who watched her saw that the hand of God was on her.
In 657 Hilda founded a new monastery on the high cliff at Whitby, above the sea, a house of monks and nuns together under her single rule. She ordered it after the pattern of the early church, so that no one there called anything his own and all things were held in common. She required those under her to give themselves to the reading of Scripture and to good works, and she taught peace and charity above every other virtue. Her wisdom became known far beyond the cloister. In A. M. Sellar's translation, Bede, who wrote within living memory of her, records a woman "whom all that knew her called Mother, for her singular piety and grace." Ordinary people came to her for help, and so did the great, for kings and princes sought her out and took her counsel.
Then came the year that made Whitby famous. In 664 the church of Northumbria was divided over the reckoning of Easter. The Irish teachers who had first brought the gospel to the north kept the feast by one calendar and Rome kept it by another, so that a king could be keeping the joy of the resurrection while his own queen was still fasting in Lent. The great men of the church came to Hilda's monastery to settle the question. This was the Synod of Whitby, and it met in her house because hers was the house that all sides could trust. Hilda herself held to the older usage, the reckoning she had received from Aidan and the men of Iona who had taught her. But when the king ruled for the Roman calculation, and the synod with him, she bowed to it. She had lost the argument, and she kept the peace, and the church that might have broken in two stayed one.
There was in her monastery a herdsman named Caedmon, a man already old, who had never learned to sing. When the harp was passed from hand to hand at the feast and each man sang in his turn, Caedmon would rise and go out before it reached him, ashamed that he had no song. One night, having left the table and gone to the cattle byre where it was his turn to keep watch, he fell asleep, and someone stood over him in his dream and called him by name and said to him, in the same translation, "Caedmon, sing me something." He answered that he could not sing, that this was the very reason he had left the feast. But the other told him to sing all the same, to sing of the making of the world. And Caedmon, who had never in his life made a verse, opened his mouth and sang praise to God the Creator in words he had never been taught, true English poetry, the first that is remembered under a name. When he woke he still held the song, and more came. Hilda saw at once what had been given. She received him into the monastery, had the Scriptures read over to him, and he turned them one by one into song, so that the unlettered English could hear the whole story of God in their own tongue. The gift of Christian song in English was born in Hilda's house, and it was Hilda who knew it for what it was.
For the last six years of her life Hilda bore a wasting fever. It never kept her from her work. She laboured on, teaching and ordering her house and giving thanks to God in the fire of the sickness, and she taught those around her to serve God gladly in health and to thank him faithfully in trouble. She died before dawn on the seventeenth of November, in the year 680, having received the last sacraments and having charged her nuns to keep the peace of the gospel among themselves. That same night, in a sister house at Hackness thirteen miles away, a nun who lay sleeping woke to the sound of the bell that was rung when one of the sisters died, and saw the roof above her open and a great light pour in, and in the light the soul of Hilda carried up to heaven in the company of angels. No one had yet come to tell her that her mother in God was dead. The church has kept that story ever since, sure that heaven had not let Hilda go unattended, and that the God she had served through the long fever had carried her home.
How we know Hilda is, before anything else, how we know most of the early English church: through Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished at the twin monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow around 731, gives a full chapter (Book IV, chapter 23) to Hilda's life and death, and the chapter that follows to Caedmon. Bede was born about seven years before Hilda died, in the same Northumbria, among men who had known her, and he writes as a near-contemporary drawing on the living memory of her houses. He is the source for her royal birth, her baptism, her recall by Aidan, the monasteries at Hartlepool and Whitby, the five bishops she trained, the long fever, and the visions of her death. Almost everything told above rests on his authority.
The frame of the life is secure. Hilda was born about 614, daughter of Hereric, a nephew of King Edwin, which made her a great-niece of the king; her father was poisoned in exile while she was still a child. She was baptized in 627, at about thirteen, when Paulinus brought Edwin and his household to the font at York. She lived in the world until she was thirty-three, then turned to religion, meaning to join her sister Hereswith at the monastery of Chelles, near Paris, in Gaul; Aidan of Lindisfarne recalled her instead and set her first by the river Wear and then over Hartlepool. In 657 she founded Whitby, which Bede calls by its English name Streanaeshalch. The Synod of Whitby met in her monastery in 664 and decided the Easter question for the Roman reckoning; Hilda had held to the Ionan usage of Aidan, and accepted the ruling. She died on 17 November 680, after six years of illness, aged sixty-six. The feast is now commonly kept on November 19.
Around Whitby a later story grew that has clung to Hilda ever since. The shore below the abbey is full of ammonites, the coiled fossil shells of an ancient sea, and for centuries the people of Whitby called them snakestones and told that they had once been snakes: that when Hilda came to found her monastery the ground was overrun with serpents, and that she prayed, and every snake coiled up and turned to stone and was flung from the cliff. The story is late, with no root in Bede or in any early account of Hilda; it grew up among the people of the coast to explain the strange stone coils in the rock, and carvers later cut snake-heads onto the fossils to sell to visitors, while a whole genus of ammonite still bears the name Hildoceras. Yet the legend was loved and long told. Whitby set three snakestones in its coat of arms, and Sir Walter Scott gave the tale a famous turn in Marmion, where Whitby's nuns tell of a thousand snakes changed to a coil of stone at holy Hilda's prayer. Whatever the fossils are, the people who walked that shore reached for Hilda's name to account for the wonder under their feet, and remembered her as the one whose prayer had cleansed and hallowed the ground. That remembering is itself part of her history.
Hilda is kept on November 19 in the calendar of the Church of England, and on November 17, the day of her death, in the Roman calendar and among many Anglicans. She is honoured as a patron of learning and of poetry, for the school she made at Whitby and for Caedmon, whose gift she was the first to recognize. Her monastery on the headland was ruined by the Danes and refounded after the Norman Conquest; the gaunt shell of that later abbey still stands above the town of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, one of the most familiar silhouettes in England, and the parish beneath it and churches across the north and beyond carry her name. The snakestones of her legend passed into the arms of Whitby, three coiled ammonites the town bears to this day, and the ammonite Hildoceras keeps her name in the language of science. Her own name, the Old English Hild, means battle; the church that received her turned a warrior's name into the name of a mother, and Hild and Hilda have been given to English girls for thirteen centuries. She is remembered as the church first remembered her, the abbess of the high cliff whom kings and cowherds alike called Mother.
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book IV (chs. 23-24)(Latin, c. 731)
The one great near-contemporary source: Bede's account of Hilda (IV.23), the death-vision at Hackness, and the cowherd Caedmon and the birth of English sacred song (IV.24). The verbatim passages here are from Sellar's translation.
Public domain: A. M. Sellar translation (1907), CCEL, L. C. Jane translation (1903), Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham)
Hilda of Whitby: A Spirituality for Now(English, 2014)
A short, warm, believing life for the general reader, drawing Hilda's example toward the present; the natural first book for a reader who wants the saint rather than the scholarship.
Public domain: Eden (bookseller)
Primary source. Everything of substance about Hilda comes from Bede, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (c. 731), Book IV, chapter 23, with the Caedmon story in chapter 24. Bede wrote within living memory of Hilda and drew on those who had known her; his is the near-contemporary record of her birth and baptism, her recall by Aidan, the houses at Hartlepool and Whitby, the five bishops, the Synod of Whitby, and the visions of her death. It is free online in A. M. Sellar's 1907 translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and in L. C. Jane's 1903 translation at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook.
Recommended reading. Ray Simpson's Hilda of Whitby: A Spirituality for Now (BRF, 2014) is the readable modern life for a believing reader, following Hilda from Hartlepool to Whitby and drawing out what her leadership might teach the church today; it is in print and carries a foreword by the Archbishop of York. For the wider world she lived in, Peter Hunter Blair's The World of Bede (Cambridge, 1970; reissued 1990) remains the best readable guide to Bede and the Northumbrian church, and is borrowable at the Internet Archive.
Online resources. The whole Ecclesiastical History is at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (Sellar) and at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook (Jane); Book IV, chapters 23 and 24, carry the life of Hilda and the story of Caedmon.
British (Received Pronunciation): Paulinus /pɔːˈlaɪnəs/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Hilda, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.