Aidan, Cuthbert

Bede, Hilda

Exclusive Extracts From

In Search of the Northern Saints

by Simon Webb

Published by The Langley Press

2011

ISBN 978-0956455185

Also available as a Kindle e-book

This selection © Simon Webb, 2013

For more resources from

The North East Religious Learning Resources Centre

Visit our website at:

www.resourcescentreonline.co.uk

CONTENTS

1. Aidan

2. Cuthbert

3. Bede

4. Hilda

1. Aidan

King Oswald naturally sent to Iona for a missionary to bring his Northumbrians round to Christianity – the Celtic Christianity of the island was what he knew, and he probably associated the Roman variety with his enemy the late King Edwin. Corman, the first missionary the Iona community sent, was an utter failure. He had to be sent back, because his teaching was too harsh and he found Oswald’s subjects crude and intractable.

There is no doubt that there was an element of culture-shock for Corman, who may never have encountered Angles, or the indulgent life of a royal court, before. On Iona, the monks were supposed to dedicate all their time to serving Christ, even when they were doing such mundane tasks as bringing in the harvest or mucking out the horses. In Oswald’s court, those people who regarded themselves as Christians probably managed to be good Christians in church of a Sunday, but would have been hard-drinking warriors some of the time as well.

Some of Oswald’s followers were probably still pagans, or had reverted to paganism after the fall of Edwin. The irascible first missionary from Iona would have regarded these ‘backsliders’ with particular scorn, always supposing that he was able to work out who believed what among these people with whom he would not have shared a common language.

If we assume that there was fault on both sides, then it may be that Oswald and his court just weren’t ready for the advent of Corman and his party of monkish brothers from Iona. Perhaps the new king’s closest followers had no idea how to treat these humble, plainly-dressed new arrivals with respect.

It is possible that in this and other ways, the failed mission and its unfortunate leader became trapped by the strange paradox of Western Christianity at this time. The paradox lay in the fact that, in many places, the centres of missionary work were monasteries. Although they were often made into bishops, many of the great missionaries of the time had spent some time as monks. As Augustine, Paulinus and others no doubt discovered, the sheltered life of the monastery was very different from the exposed, mobile life of the missionary, especially when some of this life was spent rubbing shoulders with boorish thanes.

Corman may have tried to apply some of the disciplines he had learned in the monastery to life among Oswald’s thanes. It was traditional in some monastic orders to give newcomers to the community a hard time, and to frighten them with tales of the hardness and deprivations of the cloistered life. It may be that the leader of the first mission to Oswald’s court tried this approach with the residents of the Bamburgh fortress, only to find that it was inappropriate: few if any of them would have wanted to become monks.

The way that many of the missionary monks operated was to take with them a microcosm of their monastery, in the shape of a small group of monks with whom they could live. This was certainly Augustine’s approach, and even Gregory the Great had his own coterie of brothers within the Vatican. This would be a way to turn the paradox of life as a missionary monk into a strength, since we know that some extremely active people are often sustained by the islands of peace and rest that they create and maintain in their lives. Returning from a long day negotiating with the barbarian hordes, the prayerful atmosphere of his mini-cloister would, in the modern phrase, have re-charged Gregory’s batteries.

It may be that Oswald didn’t cater sufficiently for the need of the monks of the first mission to have a place to retreat to. If he built or set aside a house for them on top of the rock at Bamburgh, they would still have been able to see and hear the raucous goings-on at the court of the new king. But when Iona sent him a second missionary, Oswald was better prepared than he had been for the first.

When Corman got back to Iona, a sort of post-mortem was held, at which the reasons for the failure of the mission to Oswald’s Angles were picked over. Anyone who has ever attended a committee will find something familiar in what happened next. One of the monks stood up and suggested that Corman should have fed the Angles the ‘milk of easier doctrines’; that he should have started them off slowly, in other words, and sugared the pill. This monk, whose name was Aidan, had just ‘volunteered’ himself as Corman’s replacement. He was chosen by Ségéne, the then abbot of Iona, to become a bishop and lead the second assault.

We do not know whether Oswald had offered Corman the island of Lindisfarne as the headquarters of his mission, but this place was either offered to or claimed by Aidan. Lindisfarne is just north of Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast, and Oswald, standing on the walkway at the top of his rampart, would have been able to see the island on reasonably clear days. Bede implies that Aidan himself chose Lindisfarne as his headquarters in Bernicia - if so, Oswald would still have had to have the vision to grant him this semi-island, which his forebears had sometimes used as a last retreat when Bamburgh was overwhelmed by enemy forces.

Lindisfarne offered Aidan a more easterly version of Iona, the island where he had previously lived as a monk. It also represented land on which to build a new monastery, and proximity to his patron, King Oswald. The king and the bishop did not, however, have to live in each other’s pockets. Especially at high tide, their neighbouring domains were comfortably separated, but if either needed the other, contact was not too difficult.

It must be understood that though Aidan bore the title of bishop, he would not have regarded himself in the same way that Roman Catholic bishops would have at that time. Celtic bishops like Aidan were still very much monks, and as such were under the control of the abbot of their home monastery. Celtic bishops were more like high-status missionaries than the princes of the church that Roman Catholic bishops sometimes became.

When it came to preaching to Oswald’s thanes, Aidan’s first problem was of course the language barrier. Although he had travelled only a few hundred miles to get to Bernicia, he was at first unable to understand the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons, his native tongue being the Celtic language of the Scots. In the early days, Aidan was forced to preach through Oswald, who knew both languages and, it would seem, was able to carry out a simultaneous translation. If Aidan had sufficiently sharp ears, he would probably have picked up some useful bits of Anglo-Saxon when the king translated his words.

The fact that his sermons arrived at the ears of his thanes via Oswald’s own mouth must have given Aidan’s words a great deal of extra authority, and also a political edge. Any thanes listening to such preaching could not have missed the fact that their new king was anxious to re-establish Christianity in Northumbria, and that he was prepared to go to considerable trouble to do it.

While Oswald was spreading his sphere of political influence, Aidan was spreading the Gospel from his base at Lindisfarne. Aidan knew how to lead by example, and his way of life was as inspiring as his preaching, if not more so. He travelled around his new diocese on foot (probably not alone, but attended by some of his fellow-monks), and would approach complete strangers and try to convince them of the truths of the Gospel. If the people he met were already Christians, he would try to strengthen their existing faith.

Aidan took little part in the rowdy high-life of Oswald’s royal court, and if he was invited for a meal in the great hall at Bamburgh, he would leave with his monks as soon as possible. The holy men would then return to prayer and study.

When Oswald’s visits to Lindisfarne coincided with meal-times, the king would join the monks in a simple meal of bread and water. There is no doubt that the king and the bishop enjoyed a very special relationship, and since Aidan had his own separate little kingdom on Lindisfarne, it seems to have been more a relationship of equals than that between, for instance, a king and his paid chaplain.

As Cadwallon had done after the defeat of Edwin, Penda now tried to see how much damage he could do to the Northumbrian Angles, while there was no king to rally them.

From his base on Lindisfarne, Bishop Aidan saw smoke issuing from Bamburgh, and began to pray for the safety of Oswald’s fortress. What had happened was that Penda and his troops had dismantled part of the nearby village and piled up its flammable materials against the bottom of the rock, probably at the north-west end. This suggests that Penda had failed to take the fortress by other means, or had quickly realised that fire was the only option. It is to be hoped that look-outs placed on the ramparts of Bamburgh had managed to warn the villagers of the approach of Penda’s marauders, in time for them to get inside the fortress, or flee elsewhere.

No doubt Penda’s soldiers started the fire with their shields slung across their backs, while the followers of the late king Oswald threw spears, stones and javelins, and fired arrows at them, in an attempt to frustrate their plan. In the event, Aidan’s prayers were answered and a change of wind-direction thwarted Penda’s attempt at arson.

Unlike the fall of Edwin, the fall of Oswald did not result in the chaotic collapse of his dynasty. The survival of Bernicia, at least, can be put down to the efforts of Oswald’s brother Oswiu. Oswiu became king in 642, and ruled for twenty-eight years, nineteen more than his brother. After a year, he felt confident enough to ride to Maserfelth and recover Oswald’s head and arms. The head was buried on Lindisfarne, but one of the arms, which seemed to be in a state of miraculous preservation, was displayed as a holy relic in St Peter’s Church at Bamburgh. The legend of the ‘incorruption’ of the arm contributed to the holy reputation of Oswald, and helped him achieve the status of a saint.

The arm was supposed to be incorrupt because it had been blessed by St Aidan. The story goes that when Oswald and Aidan were sitting at dinner at Bamburgh one Easter Sunday, a servant came in and told Oswald that there were some beggars at his door. Oswald sent out all the food that he was just about to eat, together with the silver dish it had been served on, which he ordered to be divided up among the beggars. This could easily have been done at Bamburgh, where archaeologists have discovered evidence of metal-working. Aidan was so delighted with the king’s charitable gesture that he blessed the generous hand and arm of the king.

One hundred and fifty years later, the hand was examined by the cleric Alcuin, who found that it was still flexible, and that the finger-nails were still growing.

Although the crown of Bernicia seems to have passed to Oswiu without much trouble, Deira slipped out of the new king’s hands. It came under the control of Oswine, a son of King Osric, who had been killed by Cadwallon shortly after he gained the throne of Deira. This Osric was a cousin of Edwin. In the person of Oswine, therefore, Edwin’s dynasty was restored, though only for seven years.

Despite the renewed split between the southern and northern parts of Northumbria, Aidan was able to remain bishop of the whole area, and to spend time with the new king of Deira. By all accounts, Oswine was tall and handsome, open-handed and popular. The nature of his relationship with Aidan is revealed in a famous story about a fine horse the king gave the saint to assist his journeys around the kingdom.

Aidan accepted the horse, with its magnificent saddle and tack, but gave it away to the first needy beggar he encountered. When Oswine heard about this, he was furious, but soon made it up with the saint.

Aidan’s decision to give the horse away can be interpreted in several different ways. A horse would undoubtedly have been of use to him, especially since he may have been in his forties or even fifties by this time. His habit of going about on foot did, however, put him on the same level as any strangers he happened to encounter on the way, whereas a horse would have put him in a superior position, forced to look down his nose at any pedestrians.

Aidan might have associated a magnificently-saddled horse with warfare, and it was warfare that had robbed him of his great patron, Oswald. Accepting the gift of the horse might also have associated Aidan rather too closely with the Deiran royal house, and as his use of Lindisfarne as his own independent base demonstrates, he didn’t want to get too cosy with any of the warlords of the time. Giving the horse away to a beggar might also have directed attention to the plight of the poor in Oswine’s kingdom – people who had probably been made poorer by the disastrous effects of war.

When Oswine and Aidan made up their quarrel over the horse, Oswine was surprised to see Aidan crying. In that moment of reconciliation, the saint had seen Oswine’s death – a premature death that would come upon the king because he was so much humbler, and altogether better, than all the other kings Aidan could think of.

Aidan lasted only twelve days after the death of Oswine. He died, propped up on the supporting post of a church near Bamburgh, on the last day of August, 651. As the seventeenth century Durham writer Robert Hegge puts it, Aidan thought it a sin to live after so good a king had died. Aidan’s head is thought by some to be among those that share a tomb with Cuthbert and Oswald at Durham.

2. Cuthbert

During his life, Aidan helped to inspire and educate a new generation of Christians in his monastery on Lindisfarne, and at the moment of his death he is supposed to have inspired Cuthbert, one of the great stars among the northern saints. In fact, Bede so respected Cuthbert’s memory that he wrote a separate book and a long narrative poem about him, as well as including him in his Ecclesiastical history.

The story goes that, when Cuthbert was working as a shepherd, he saw and heard a vision of Aidan’s soul being lifted up to heaven by angels. This inspired him to travel to the abbey at Melrose, and to become a monk. The shepherd aspect of the story would seem to imply that Cuthbert was a man of humble origins, but the fact that he was raised by a foster-mother, a lady called Kenswith, suggests that he was from an aristocratic family. It was the custom for Anglo-Saxon parents of the more privileged class at this time to farm their children out to foster-parents, rather as some middle-class English parents today pack their children off to boarding schools.

There is an old Irish tradition that Cuthbert was born in Ireland, but his name would suggest Anglo-Saxon rather that Celtic origins.

Having begun with a miraculous vision, Cuthbert’s spiritual journey continued to produce miracles, many of which have a rather homely feel about them, because they involve food, and also animals.

On his way to Melrose, Cuthbert had to shelter for a night in a stable, where his own horse uncovered some bread and cheese that were hidden in the roof (the fact that he rode to the monastery on his own horse is further evidence of his wealthy background). Cuthbert shared his dinner with the horse.

When Cuthbert was the monk in charge of the guest-house at Ripon, he went to get fresh bread for a visitor: on his return he found the room full of bread baked in Heaven. The visitor had of course been a angel.

Later Cuthbert and a companion were brought fish to eat by an eagle, and a dolphin grounded itself on the shore so as to serve as a meal for the saint. In line with the self-punishing habits of the Celtic monks, Cuthbert would pray while standing up to his neck in the sea. On one occasion, sea-otters came to dry his feet after one of these bone-chilling prayer sessions.

Plague hit the abbey at Melrose in 664, and carried off Boisil, the prior. This plague would have been of the notorious bubonic variety, against which the Anglo-Saxons would have had little defence, and which carried off many of them during its frequent visitations. We know now that this form of plague is carried from animals to humans by rats, and the people of this time, who lived in close contact with their animals, probably dreaded the plague even more than they dreaded war itself.

Cuthbert succeeded the plague-stricken Boisil as prior, and later filled the same office at Lindisfarne. He could not, however, resist the lure of a nearby rocky island called Inner Farne, where he established himself as a hermit.

Inner Farne lies off the coast just east of Bamburgh, and Cuthbert is supposed to have scared away all the demons that once lived there. Bede’s contemporary St Guthlac had the same problem with demons, who had ‘great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses’ teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries’. Cuthbert even managed to grow barley to make his own bread on the island, despite sowing it at the wrong time of year.

Cuthbert was not alone in choosing an island for his solitary hermitage, but because of the geography of Britain, not all of its island-hermits were forced to live out at sea. Cuthbert’s friend St Herbert lived on the island that was later named after him in the middle of Derwentwater in the Lake District (also known as Owl Island). The aforementioned St Guthlac, an East-Anglian monk, lived in a converted burial-mound in the fens near Cambridge. Cuthbert, Herbert and Guthlac all had to use boats to get to and from their islands.

Although he was not prepared to tolerate demons around his hermitage, Cuthbert was very happy to see eider ducks nesting on it. He even laid down regulations that these birds should not be molested – an early example of conservationist legislation. In honour of Cuthbert, these hardy sea-ducks are known as ‘Cuddy ducks’ in the north-east.

Although he was far less well-travelled than some of his contemporaries, including in particular the cantankerous St Wilfrid, Cuthbert’s life was extremely varied. He was sometimes a hermit, but sometimes also a brave and adventurous preacher who would spend days away from the monastery, preaching in villages and trying to wean the people away from the superstitions that still survived among them from pagan times.

Part of the point of Cuthbert’s story is that his long periods of solitude did not drive him mad, or make him unsuited to human company in any other way. Both his solitude and the time he spent among people were part of the larger purpose of his life.

Cuthbert’s fame grew the longer he lived at his hermitage, and, thanks in part to a visit from King Ecgfrith, he was persuaded to become bishop of Lindisfarne in March 685. The same Ecgfrith, who had inherited the throne from his father Oswiu, granted valuable lands for the support of Cuthbert’s diocese.

Cuthbert died almost exactly two years after he became bishop of Lindisfarne, by which time he had returned to his beloved Inner Farne. His status as a saint was enhanced by the fact that, years later, when the monks on Lindisfarne opened his tomb to recover his bones to use as relics, his body was miraculously preserved.

In later years, the incorrupt body of Cuthbert went on extensive travels until it finally became the reason for the building of successive churches, and at last a Norman Cathedral, at Durham.

3. Bede

Bede tells us that he was eleven years old when Cuthbert died. By this time, he would already have spent some four years in the monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow. He was probably born in north Northumbria, but there is some evidence to suggest that he was somehow related to the kings of Lindsey, an ancient kingdom roughly equivalent to modern Lincolnshire. As a boy, Bede is thought to have survived a disastrous visitation of the plague at Jarrow, which nearly wiped out the entire monastery.

Even in years when the plague didn’t come, life in monasteries like Jarrow must have been tough, especially in winter. There are stories of ink freezing in the monks’ ink-wells, and the makers of illuminated manuscripts being unable to carry on their marvellous work because they could no longer move their fingers. The wood and wattle-and-daub buildings that typically made up an early Anglo-Saxon monastery must have suffered badly in tough weather, and they were also very susceptible to fire. From the ninth century, monasteries in coastal locations were vulnerable to attack from the Vikings. Of course, many of these drawbacks would also have applied to the secular communities of the time.

The monastic life did, however, have many advantages. The monks were not expected to fight in wars, and, except where they lived with their wives and children, they were able to escape the embrace of family life, which does not suit everyone. Many monasteries enjoyed the protection of powerful local rulers, and were sometimes even headed by members of the ruling dynasties. The monks often lived off the profits from lands donated to them by aristocrats, who wanted to keep the church on their side.

Monasteries were the places to go for a good education in those days, and the literate monks enjoyed contact, through books, with a wider world of history, science, literature and theology. It is no surprise, then, that some powerful people, including kings and courtiers, treated the monasteries as rest homes or retirement homes.

Bede himself dedicated his Ecclesiastical History to King Coelwulf, who had given up his crown for a monk’s cowl. King Sigeberht of East Anglia also became a monk, but when the kingdom he had given up was invaded by Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, the people dragged him to the battle-field in the hope that he would inspire the East Anglian army. Sigeberht refused to arm himself with anything more than a staff, and was soon killed.

Aristocrats such as Hilda turned the spiritual life into a second career, and other nobles placed their children in monasteries so that they could be monks or nuns for their entire lives. This practice of giving a child to a monastery must have been less heart-breaking in those days, when people had lots of children, but it does seem a little like sacrificing a child to the new Christian God. In any case, these aristocratic ‘donated’ children frequently ended up as leading figures in the church, since the advantages of their birth often stayed with them.

Not everybody approved of the special treatment children of the nobility received in religious houses. In his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, Bede makes it clear that some aristocrats who became monks did not check their noble status at the door, and expected quick advancement and other forms of special treatment. Bede gives us the contrasting example of the seventh-century abbot Eosterwine, who had once been a thane of King Egfrid, but then became a monk of remarkable humility, rolling up his sleeves to help with mundane tasks in the monastery and on its land. On his death-bed, Eosterwine’s friend St Benedict Biscop issued a stern warning against the practice of appointing abbots by birth rather than merit.

Although he lived in a place that was very remote from Rome, Constantinople and the Mediterranean world in general, Bede was probably one of the best-read people in Europe. Despite the costliness of the parchment on which the monks wrote, and from which they read, Bede was able to access learning from all over the known world, and to write extensively on a wide range of subjects, including the Bible, history and time itself. He packed a lot of work into his sixty-two years, and in fact a letter written about his dying days shows him writing, translating, dictating and inspiring his brother monks right up to the end.

Bede’s undoubted masterpiece is his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he wrote in Latin and completed in 731. The book covers nearly eight hundred years of history, stretching right back to Julius Caesar’s first visit to Britain in 60BC. Today, Bede’s book exists in numerous different translations, and is still required reading for many students of history and theology.

Although the word historia appears in the title, Bede’s book is not really a history-book in the modern sense. Bede is not concerned to convey the absolute truth about everything: he wants his history to improve the reader by offering examples of virtue and piety.

The author is not above glossing over things he finds problematic, and cleaning up the dirty details of stories so that they shine a little brighter. Because his main concern is the history of the church, he gives us few details of the English paganism it displaced, although it is clear that he knows quite a bit about this subject. In his book On the Reckoning of Time he gives a charming explanation of how and why the pagan English named the months of the year – but the information raises more questions than it answers, and historians have been picking over the bones of the passage for decades.

Bede wears his biases and agendas very much on the sleeves of his metaphorical habit. As a celibate monk living according to the Roman tradition, he is keen to convey the virtues of those who lived as he did. He is also enthusiastic about showing his readers how certain personalities and events in British history mirror those found in the Bible. His fascination with chronology shows up in a concern to link events in the British Isles to contemporary events on the continent: he will sometimes begin an account of some British event with a reminder of who was pope, and who was Roman emperor, at the time.

Bede has a deep admiration for people like Aidan, who was a Celtic Christian, but it is not putting it too strongly to say that he found the Celtic technique of calculating the date of Easter quite abominable. Bede’s obsession with the business of dating Easter is one thing that can make his Ecclesiastical History a frustrating read. He returns to this question again and again, and the reader has to make an imaginative leap of historical understanding to come to terms with his fascination.

The most charitable way to see this strong thread in Bede’s great book is to try to understand that the man from Jarrow, like many modern Christians, wanted to see unity between the various Christian traditions of his time. He was therefore an early champion of ecumenism, as long as this bringing together of the various churches ended up with them all praying inside a Roman church, and singing from the same Roman hymn-sheet.

Uniform observance of Easter, which would have had all Christians celebrating this festival on the same day, would not have guaranteed automatic conformity in all aspects of belief or practice, but, Bede might have said, it would have been a good start.

In writing about groups such as the Celtic, British and Pictish Christians, Bede shows he is aware that these groups were getting Easter wrong partly because, for many years, they had lost all lines of communication with Rome. This type of isolation could of course lead to some strange ideas growing among believers, like weeds in a neglected corner of the garden. In Bede’s day, such ideas were called heresies.

A heresy that Bede mentions often is the one started by Pelagius, a Briton born in the middle of the fourth century. Pelagius, who should not be confused with the two popes of the same name, taught against the ideas of original sin, and the need for divine grace to save human beings from hell. Bede regards Pelagius as treacherous and poisonous, and his followers as mad.

Bede saw the potential for closer union with Rome as a guarantee of freedom from dangerous heresies. Once British Christians all became disciples of the pope, new ideas could be exposed to the scrutiny of the religious authorities in the Eternal City, and condemned or commended accordingly. Likewise, exciting new ideas and writings that were approved by the church could travel more easily to the British Isles, if the believers of Britain were in line with believers in the rest of Western Europe.

While he was trying to persuade the races of Britain to embrace the Roman Catholic way, Bede established a reputation throughout the Roman Catholic world that is often under-estimated by modern British people. To give just one example, the fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante, author of the Divine Comedy, placed Bede in one of the highest levels of Paradise, eternally dancing around the sun, hand-in-hand with such other worthies as King Solomon, and the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius.

4. Hilda

The Abbey at Whitby, where the famous Synod of Whitby was held, had been built on one of twelve pieces of land promised to the church by King Oswiu, which were granted after he defeated Penda. By promising these estates before the battle, Oswiu no doubt hoped to encourage the church to pray fervently for his victory.

At the time of the synod, the abbey was under the control of an abbess called Hilda, a close relative of Edwin, the first Christian King of Northumbria. Hilda had been baptised by Paulinus on the same day as Edwin and many of his followers - Easter day 627. At the time, Hilda was only thirteen. Twenty years later, having perhaps been married and widowed in the interim, Hilda embraced the religious life and planned to retire to a nunnery on the Continent. Her friend Aidan persuaded her to return to Northumbria, however, and she became abbess of Hartlepool, then later Whitby.

It is interesting to note that, whereas Hilda was baptised as a Roman Christian, and originally planned to live as a nun on the Continent where the Roman way was more prevalent, yet she was content to follow a suggestion of the Celtic bishop, Aidan. It is possible that Aidan’s obvious piety persuaded her to collaborate with the other side in this way: it might also be that she felt there were no sides in the matter, and that a Christian was a Christian, whenever he or she happened to celebrate Easter. In any case, she later sided with the Celtic party against the controversial Wilfrid.

Perhaps because of Hilda’s royal connections, Whitby Abbey became an important centre, particularly for Christian education. No less than five of its students later became bishops.

During Hilda’s time at Whitby, Caedmon, regarded as the first English poet, discovered his poetic gift. This happened after an event in one of those Anglo-Saxon great halls, where chanting and singing to the harp was an important element of the entertainment. Seeing that a harp was being passed from person to person, and that everyone was expected to both play and sing, the shy Caedmon slipped out and spent the night with the cattle.

In his sleep, a voice asked him to sing. He said he couldn’t, but when he tried he found a fine original poem streaming from his lips. It was a song of the creation, and Caedmon went on to become a monk and to compose many religious poems and hymns.

Seven years before her death Hilda was struck down by a fever that gave her great discomfort for the rest of her life. At her death, the monastery bell was rung according to the custom, and it was heard thirteen miles away at Hackness. There, a nun called Begu saw the saint’s soul being taken up to heaven by angels, much as a young shepherd called Cuthbert had seen the soul of Aidan rising up nearly thirty years earlier.

The ruins of Whitby Abbey that visitors can see today are the remains of a later abbey than the one Hilda ruled over, but archaeology has revealed traces that are consistent with an Anglo-Saxon settlement and burial ground. These include doughnut-shaped loom-weights, often buried with Anglo-Saxon women, and evidence of glass- and metal-working. Other finds include fragments of Saxon crosses, a perfect little key and a gaming-piece made of the famous Whitby jet.

Archaeology at Whitby suggests that the commanding headland on which the abbey ruins stand was occupied long before Hilda founded her abbey there. The towering cliff-top is not, however, the ideal place for a long-term settlement, as the cliff itself is being eaten away at the rate of about twenty metres per century.

As well as its jet, its status as an ex-whaling port, its monastic history and its link with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Whitby is also famous for the fossils found there. These fossilised creatures, such as ammonites, were of course noticed long before Victorian fossil-hunters started collecting and classifying them, and using them in arguments about evolution.

In much the same way that fossilised sea-urchins used to be called fairy bread, ammonites used to be called snake-stones, because the spiral shape of the fossilised shell looks like the curled-up body of a snake. Learned Medieval Christians believed that the world was only a few thousand years old: they could not, therefore, have understood the great age of the fossilised ammonites, or the process of fossilisation. Their explanation was that, just as St Patrick had caused all the snakes of Ireland to die, Hilda had turned all the snakes around Whitby to stone.

Table of Contents

1. Aidan

2. Cuthbert

3. Bede

4. Hilda