TRINITY / ADVENT · 17 NOVEMBER ◆ Celtic Saint
Saint Hild of Whitby
Abbess & Foundress · Mother of the Northumbrian Church · c. 614–680
Hild — HILD, one syllable (i as in hill) · Streanæshalch — STRAY-an-esh-alch · Cædmon — KAD-mon · Paulinus — paw-LY-nus
O God, who didst call thy servant Hild from the courts of kings to be a mother to thy Church in the North; Grant that like her we may give freely of our learning and our wisdom to all who seek thee, nurturing in others the gifts thou hast not given to ourselves, until all thy creation breaks into the song for which it was made; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Hild was baptised at the age of thirteen in the River Glen, along with her great-uncle King Edwin of Northumbria and the whole of the Northumbrian court, by Paulinus (paw-LY-nus) of York in the Easter of 627. It was a mass conversion of the kind that the early medieval Church both celebrated and quietly feared — the king believes, therefore the kingdom believes — and it would not hold. Edwin was killed in battle four years later, the Pauline mission collapsed, and the new faith was driven back to its margins. Hild survived all of it. She was not a woman whose faith depended on the faith of the court around her, and the long years between her baptism and her vocation were years of formation rather than of waiting, the deep rootedness that would later make her immovable.
She was thirty-three when Aidan recalled her from her intention of joining her sister Hereswith (HAIR-es-with) in a Frankish monastery, and gave her instead a small plot of land on the north bank of the River Wear. Within a year he had placed her at the head of an existing monastery at Hartlepool. Within a decade she had founded the great double monastery at Streanæshalch (STRAY-an-esh-alch) — the place the Danes would later rename Whitby — on the headland above the North Yorkshire coast where the abbey ruins still stand against the sky. It was a house for both monks and nuns, governed by a woman, producing bishops, poets, and scholars in such number that Bede can barely contain his admiration. She required of everyone in the community — regardless of rank or education — the study of the scriptures and the practice of justice. She received kings and princes as readily as she received the illiterate cowherd who slept in the stable. She made no distinction in the quality of her attention.
The cowherd was Cædmon (KAD-mon). He was a man without education or musical training who had always slipped away from the communal harp-singing of the hall because he had nothing to contribute. One night he dreamed that a figure stood beside him and told him to sing of the Creation. He protested that he could not sing. The figure said: Nevertheless, thou shalt sing. And Cædmon sang — verses of such beauty and correctness that when he woke and repeated them, and later composed more, Hild and her scholars recognised in him a gift that was not his own. She persuaded him to leave the secular life and enter her community, and for the rest of his life Cædmon turned the whole of scripture into English verse — the first named poet in the English language, the first to make the sacred stories available in the tongue of the common people. Hild did not compose the hymns. But she saw the gift, named it, protected it, and gave it room. This is precisely the form of holiness her feast commemorates: the abbess who creates the conditions in which other people’s gifts can become what they were always meant to be.
She hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664, when the Celtic and Roman traditions met in her house to settle the question of the Easter dating that had divided the Northumbrian Church. She argued on the Celtic side — the tradition of Aidan who had formed her — and when the Roman side prevailed, she accepted the decision with the same faithful obedience that she had always practised and always required of others. It cost her something: the monks of Lindisfarne withdrew rather than submit, and the Celtic world she had loved began its long yielding to Rome. But she did not withdraw. She remained at Whitby and governed it for another sixteen years, dying in 680 after six years of illness during which she never once ceased her work of teaching and counsel. At the moment of her death a nun at the monastery of Hackness, thirteen miles away, saw in a vision the soul of Hild ascending to heaven in the company of angels, wrapped in a great light. Five of the men she had trained became bishops: Bosa (BOH-sa) of York, Ætla (ET-la) of Dorchester, Oftfor, John of Beverley, and Wilfrid II of York. The woman who was given a small plot of land on the bank of the Wear by Aidan of Lindisfarne had, by the time of her death, shaped the episcopate of the English Church. She is the most powerful figure in the Northumbrian series, and the least known. Her feast falls at the year’s edge, in the dying of the light before Advent — which is exactly where she belongs: the one who in darkness nurtures what will grow into morning.
O God, who didst endow thy servant Hild with the gift of governance and the grace of wisdom, and didst make her monastery a school of the saints and a cradle of the English Church; Grant that we, following her example of faithful learning and generous counsel, may so order our lives that others may find in us the encouragement they need to become what thou hast made them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.