Baptism with Edwin, 627

Hilda was baptized as a girl of about thirteen on Easter Day, 12 April 627, when King Edwin of Northumbria, his nobles, and a great part of his people received baptism from the Roman missionary Paulinus at York, in a wooden church of St Peter built for the purpose. Bede sets her baptism within the central conversion-story of his Ecclesiastical History — Edwin’s long deliberation, the counsel of his nobles, the destruction of the heathen temple by the high priest Coifi — and presents Hilda as one of the very first generation of English Christians. That first planting was fragile: within six years Edwin was dead, Paulinus had fled south, and the Roman mission in Northumbria had collapsed, to be re-founded from Iona.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic-Roman; abbess of Whitby)

Hilda Among Those Baptized with Edwin

Bede states plainly that Hilda received baptism together with King Edwin and his court. In his obituary notice he writes that she was baptized at about the age of thirteen, “with all the people of the Northumbrians” — that is, with Edwin and those who were baptized with him — through the ministry of the bishop Paulinus, of blessed memory (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). This single sentence is what fixes Hilda within the founding moment of Northumbrian Christianity, and it is the reason her early life can be dated at all: because Bede ties her baptism to Edwin’s, the well-attested date of the king’s baptism gives a date for hers (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.14, IV.23; Mayr-Harting 1991). At about thirteen she was old enough to remember it, and the woman who would later govern a great monastery had her own Christian beginning in the wooden church at York on an Easter morning.

The full narrative of how that baptism came to pass belongs to an earlier book of Bede’s History — the long account of Edwin’s conversion runs across Book II, chapters 9 through 14 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.9–14; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969) — and it is worth setting out, because Hilda’s own baptism is one drop in the flood Bede there describes, and because the story is among the most famous in all of early English literature.

Æthelburh and the Coming of Paulinus

The conversion of Edwin began, in Bede’s telling, with a marriage. Edwin sought as his wife Æthelburh, daughter of King Æthelberht of Kent — the first English king to receive baptism, converted through the Roman mission of Augustine — and the Kentish royal house consented only on condition that Æthelburh, a Christian, be free to keep her faith and that Edwin himself give serious consideration to Christianity (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.9; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). With Æthelburh there came north, as her chaplain and protector, Paulinus, whom Bede records as having been consecrated bishop for the purpose, that the queen and her household might not be deprived of the Christian sacraments in a heathen land (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.9; Mayr-Harting 1991). The Christianization of Northumbria thus arrived, as it so often did in this age, in the train of a royal bride — the same pattern by which Kent itself had been opened to the faith a generation earlier (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003).

Bede surrounds Edwin’s deliberation with signs and pressures: an assassination attempt survived, the safe birth of a daughter whom Edwin allowed Paulinus to baptize as a pledge, a victory in war, and a letter from Pope Boniface, all pressing the king toward the font (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.9–11; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). These are reported here as Bede’s narrative of the conversion, the providential reading his History gives the events, and not as independently established cause and effect (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Edwin, Bede insists, would not be hurried; he weighed the matter, took counsel, and resolved to lay it before his chief men (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.12–13).

The Council of the Nobles

The set-piece of Bede’s account, and one of the treasures of the Ecclesiastical History, is the council at which Edwin put the new faith to his advisers. Two speeches dominate it. The first is from Coifi, the chief of Edwin’s heathen priests, who argues — with a striking candor Bede gives him — that the old religion has brought him no profit despite his diligent service of it, and that the king should examine the new teaching and, if it prove better and truer, accept it (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.13; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

The second is the celebrated speech of an unnamed counsellor, the parable of the sparrow. The present life of man on earth, the noble says, compared with the time that is unknown to us, is as if a sparrow should fly swiftly through the king’s hall on a winter’s night, when he sits at supper with his men by the fire, while the storms of rain and snow rage outside: the bird enters by one door and quickly passes out by another, and for the brief moment it is within it is safe from the winter weather, but after that little space of calm it vanishes from sight, out of the winter and back into the winter again. So this life of man appears for a short while, says the counsellor, but of what follows or what went before we are wholly ignorant; if this new teaching can tell us anything more certain, it deserves to be followed (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.13; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The speech is rightly famous as an evocation of the pagan apprehension of mortality and of the appeal Christianity made to it, and Bede preserves it as the decisive turning of the council’s mind (Mayr-Harting 1991; Stenton 1971).

Coifi then carries his own argument into action. Asking who should be the first to profane the altars and shrines of the idols he had once served, he answers his own question: he himself, casting aside the prohibitions of his former office, took arms and a stallion — both forbidden to a heathen priest — and rode to the temple at Goodmanham, where he cast a spear into it and ordered it burned (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.13; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The desecration of the temple by its own high priest is, in Bede’s hands, the dramatic seal on Edwin’s decision, and it is reported here as Bede’s narrative of the conversion’s climax (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Easter at York, 12 April 627

Edwin then received baptism. Bede records that the king, with the nobles of his people and a great number of the humbler folk, was baptized at York on Easter Day, the twelfth of April, in the eleventh year of his reign, and that the baptism took place in the church of St Peter the Apostle, which Edwin had hastily built of wood for the purpose while he was a catechumen and being instructed for the font (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.14; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The year was 627. Around the wooden church Edwin afterward began to raise a larger basilica of stone, the seed of what would become York Minster, but it was in the timber church that he and his court were christened (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.14; Stenton 1971; Mayr-Harting 1991).

It is into this event that Hilda’s baptism falls. When Bede says she was baptized at about thirteen with all who were baptized with Edwin, he means precisely this Easter assembly at York — the king, the nobility to whom her own family belonged, and the people, going down into the font together under the hand of Paulinus (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.14, IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Hilda was, in the most literal sense, a member of the first generation of English Christians in the north: not the child of Christian parents reared in the faith, but one of those who, in a single dramatic season, passed from the old religion into the new (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003).

The First Generation of English Christians

The significance of this is easy to understate at the distance of fourteen centuries. The Christianity into which Hilda was baptized was a few decades old in England and brand-new in Northumbria; there was no native Christian tradition behind her, no settled Church, no monasteries of her own people, scarcely any clergy who were not missionaries from elsewhere (Mayr-Harting 1991; Stenton 1971). The faith she received in 627 had reached her by two streams that would shortly meet and clash: the Roman mission descending from Augustine’s landing in Kent in 597, of which Paulinus was the agent in the north, and — soon afterward — the Irish mission of Iona, of which Aidan would be the agent (Mayr-Harting 1991; see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne). Hilda would spend her monastic life astride the seam between these two traditions, and she would baptize a whole community’s worth of converts in her turn; but she began as one of the baptized, a girl at York in the first Northumbrian Easter of the faith (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23).

The Fragility of the Planting

The Christian Northumbria into which Hilda was baptized very nearly did not survive its first decade. Bede records that in 633 Edwin was defeated and killed at the battle of Hatfield by Cadwallon, the British king of Gwynedd, in alliance with the heathen Penda of Mercia, and that his death plunged the kingdom into apostasy and ruin (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.20; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Kirby 2000). With Edwin dead and Northumbria overrun, Paulinus despaired of his mission: taking Queen Æthelburh and the royal children, he fled south by sea back to Kent, abandoning the Northumbrian field he had cultivated for barely six years (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.20; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The Roman mission in the north collapsed almost entirely; Bede notes that only the deacon James remained behind to keep the faith alive about York (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.16, II.20; Stenton 1971).

The faith Hilda had received as a girl was therefore, within a few years, all but uprooted in her homeland. Its re-establishment came not from Rome and Kent but from the north and west: when Oswald, of the Bernician royal house, won back Northumbria in 634, he sent to Iona for a bishop, and there came Aidan, who founded the monastery of Lindisfarne and from it re-evangelized the kingdom on the Irish, Ionan pattern (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.3, III.5; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991; see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne). It was Aidan, not Paulinus, who would later draw Hilda back from her intended exile in Gaul and set her on the monastic life within Northumbria (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; see Abbess of Hartlepool). Hilda’s life thus bridges the two missions in a single biography: baptized by the Roman Paulinus, recalled and professed under the Ionan Aidan, she would at length preside, as abbess of Whitby, over the very Synod of 664 at which the Roman and Irish ways were reconciled in favor of Rome (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25, IV.23; see Founding Streanæshalch). The fragility of the first planting is the necessary background to her whole vocation: she belonged to a Church that had to be founded twice (Mayr-Harting 1991; Stenton 1971).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (II.9–14 on Edwin’s conversion: the marriage to Æthelburh and the coming of Paulinus [II.9], the deliberation [II.9–12], the council of the nobles with Coifi’s argument and the sparrow speech and the burning of the temple at Goodmanham [II.13], and the baptism at York on Easter, 12 April 627, in the wooden church of St Peter [II.14]; II.16 and II.20 on the deacon James, the death of Edwin at Hatfield in 633, and Paulinus’s flight south with Æthelburh; III.3, III.5 on Oswald, Aidan, and the founding of Lindisfarne; III.25 on the Synod of 664; IV.23 on Hilda’s baptism at about thirteen with Edwin’s people. Note the dual chapter-numbering: the Hilda chapter is IV.23 in Colgrave–Mynors but IV.24 in the older Plummer-based editions.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The Roman and Irish missions; royal marriages as vehicles of conversion; the sparrow speech and the meaning of Edwin’s conversion; the collapse and re-founding of the Northumbrian Church.)
Stenton, Frank M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. (Edwin’s reign and baptism; York; the political collapse after Hatfield.)
Kirby, D. P. The Earliest English Kings. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2000. (Edwin, Cadwallon, Penda, and the battle of Hatfield, 633.)
Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (Royal women and the marriages by which Christianity spread among the Anglo-Saxon dynasties.)