The Deiran Royal House

Hilda of Whitby was born about the year 614 into the royal kindred of Deira, the southern of the two kingdoms whose union formed Northumbria; her father Hereric was a nephew of King Edwin, so that Hilda stood within a generation of the Deiran throne. Almost everything that can be said of her birth, her family, and the dynastic world she was born into comes from a single source, the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, who reports a dream of her mother during Hilda’s infancy as a portent of the daughter to come — and who then falls entirely silent on the first half of her life.

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

A Source That Is Almost the Only Source

Nearly the whole of what is known of Hilda’s origins rests on a single chapter of Bede, the long obituary notice he gives her under the year of her death (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). A note on numbering is owed here at the outset: the chapter divisions of the Ecclesiastical History differ between editions, and the chapter on Hilda is numbered IV.23 in the standard Colgrave–Mynors text but IV.24 in older editions descending from Plummer; the chapter on Cædmon that follows it is IV.24 in Colgrave–Mynors and IV.22 in the older reckoning. This file follows the Colgrave–Mynors numbering throughout. The point of substance is that for the Deiran royal background, the infancy, and the years of Hilda’s youth, Bede is not merely the earliest witness but very nearly the only one, and the historical caution this imposes governs everything that follows (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; on Bede as the controlling source for the early English nunneries and their royal women, see Yorke 2003).

Bede was writing some half-century after Hilda’s death, completing the Ecclesiastical History in 731, and for Whitby and its abbess he had unusually good information: he names his informants for parts of the History and drew on the memory of a community Hilda had founded and ruled (Bede, Ecclesiastical History, preface; Mayr-Harting 1991). His notice of Hilda is therefore among the better-sourced passages of early English hagiography. It is nonetheless a hagiographical obituary, shaped to edify, and its data on her birth and family must be read as Bede’s, weighed against what is independently known of seventh-century Northumbrian dynastic history (Kirby 2000; Stenton 1971).

Birth About 614

Bede states that Hilda died in the year 680, in the sixty-sixth year of her life, having “lived thirty-three years most nobly in the secular habit” and “more nobly dedicated the remaining thirty-three years to the Lord in the monastic life” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). From this arithmetic — a death in her sixty-sixth year in 680, with the two equal spans of thirty-three years — the conventional birth-date of about 614 is derived. The date is an inference, not an independent attestation, and it should be held as such. [Disputed: Hilda’s birth year is conventionally given as c. 614, but this rests entirely on Bede’s statement that she died in 680 in her sixty-sixth year (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23); the figure is a calculation from Bede’s round numbers and is not corroborated by any independent source.] The symmetry of “thirty-three and thirty-three” is itself the kind of patterned number a hagiographer may shape toward edification, and the resulting date is best treated as approximate.

That places Hilda’s birth in the second decade of the seventh century, in the years when her great-uncle Edwin was still in exile and the Deiran royal house was contesting its survival against the rival Bernician dynasty (Kirby 2000; Stenton 1971). She was thus a child of the convulsive politics of early Northumbria, born before the kingdom she would belong to had been securely Christian or securely united.

Hereric, Breguswith, and the Deiran Line

Bede names Hilda’s father as Hereric, and identifies him as a nephew of King Edwin of Northumbria; Hilda was therefore Edwin’s grand-niece, a member of the Deiran royal kindred at one remove from the king himself (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The Deiran royal house traced itself, in the genealogies preserved for the Northumbrian dynasties, from the line of Ælle, the king under whom Deira had emerged as a distinct kingdom in the later sixth century, and it was to this southern house, centered on the region of York, that both Edwin and Hilda belonged (Stenton 1971; Kirby 2000).

Hilda’s mother Bede names as Breguswith, and her sister as Hereswith (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The sister is the more visible of the two in the wider record of Bede’s History: Hereswith married into the royal house of the East Angles and afterward, Bede tells us, went as a nun to the monastery of Chelles in Gaul, where she was living when Hilda first resolved to take up the monastic life — it was to join Hereswith abroad that Hilda at first intended to go (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; on the East Anglian marriage and the Frankish nunneries that drew Anglo-Saxon royal women in this generation, see Yorke 2003; Fell 1984). The family is thus a textbook instance of the pattern modern scholarship has traced for the first English nunneries: they were founded and peopled overwhelmingly by women of the royal houses, whose kin-networks reached across the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and into Frankish Gaul (Yorke 2003; Fell 1984).

The circumstances of Hereric’s life and death set Hilda’s birth firmly within the violence of the age. Bede records that Hereric was living in exile under the British king Cerdic when he was poisoned — a detail Bede gives in the course of relating the dream her mother had during this exile (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Exile, dependence on a foreign court, and death by poison were the ordinary hazards of a royal claimant in seventh-century Britain; Edwin himself spent long years in exile before he won the Northumbrian throne (Kirby 2000; Stenton 1971).

Bernicia and Deira: The Dynastic World

The kingdom into which Hilda was born was not a single ancient unit but the unstable union of two: Bernicia, the northern kingdom reaching up toward the Forth, and Deira, the southern kingdom about the Vale of York to which Hilda’s family belonged. Northumbria — “the land north of the Humber” — existed as a great power only when one dynasty succeeded in holding both together, and through the seventh century the two royal houses, Bernician and Deiran, alternated and contended for that supremacy (Stenton 1971; Kirby 2000). Hilda’s great-uncle Edwin, of the Deiran line, achieved the union in his own person: returning from exile, he overthrew the Bernician king Æthelfrith and ruled both kingdoms, extending an overlordship Bede counts among the widest any English king had yet held (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.5, II.9; Stenton 1971; Kirby 2000).

This union was repeatedly broken by violence, and the violence reached directly into Hilda’s world. Edwin himself was killed in 633 at the battle of Hatfield, defeated by the alliance of Cadwallon, the British king of Gwynedd, and Penda of Mercia; his death threw Northumbria back into division and apostasy before Oswald, of the rival Bernician house, restored it (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.20, III.1; Kirby 2000; Stenton 1971). Hilda, a girl of about nineteen in 633 by the conventional reckoning, lived through the killing of the great-uncle at whose court she had been baptized and through the collapse of the Christian settlement he had sponsored. The dynastic history is not background detail but the very texture of her early life: a royal kinswoman of the Deiran house in a generation when that house was twice nearly extinguished (Kirby 2000; Yorke 2003).

The Dream of the Jewel

To Hilda’s infancy Bede attaches a portent, and it must be read as exactly that — Bede’s narrative, told as the kind of foreshadowing a saint’s life characteristically gathers around its subject’s birth, not a fact the present account asserts (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Bede reports that while Hereric was in his exile, and his wife Breguswith was carrying or had recently borne their daughter, the mother had a dream: she seemed to be searching everywhere for her husband and could find no trace of him, when suddenly, in the midst of her most diligent search, she found a most precious jewel under her garment; and as she looked at it closely, it cast so brilliant a light that it filled all the land of Britain with the splendor of its blaze (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

Bede gives the dream its interpretation in the same breath: the lost husband stands for Hereric, who would die in his exile by poison, and the jewel that filled Britain with light stands for Hilda herself, whose life and example, Bede means us to understand, would illumine the land (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The motif belongs to a recognizable type — the prophetic dream announcing the future greatness of a saint before birth — and Bede deploys it deliberately to frame the obituary that follows. The Orthodox reader receives it as the hagiographer’s testimony, the way Hilda’s community and Bede after them read the meaning of her life back into its beginning, and not as an event the historical record independently records (METHODOLOGY §3.5; on Bede’s hagiographical method in the History, Mayr-Harting 1991).

The Silence

What is most striking about Bede’s account of Hilda’s early life is how little of it there is. Having given her birth, her parentage, and the dream, and having stated that she lived thirty-three years in the secular habit, Bede tells us almost nothing of those thirty-three years themselves (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Of her childhood after the dream, of her upbringing, of where and how she passed the decades between her baptism as a girl of about thirteen and her turn to religion in her thirty-third year, the History is silent. The next firm thing Bede records of her is the decision, late in that first half of her life, to leave the secular world — and even there he tells us only of her intention to follow her sister to Gaul before Bishop Aidan recalled her to Northumbria (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; see The Turn at Thirty-Three).

This silence is itself a fact worth marking, and it is a discipline against invention. It is a silence shared by the whole early record: Bede is the only narrative source, and where he says nothing, nothing reliable can be supplied (Yorke 2003; Mayr-Harting 1991). The years a later legend would gladly fill with edifying incident are, in the sources that actually survive, simply blank. Hilda enters the light of history twice — once at her baptism with Edwin’s court in 627, and again at her conversion to the monastic life around 647 — and between those two moments the woman who would become one of the most influential figures of the early English Church is, to the historian, invisible (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; see Baptism with Edwin, 627).

See Also

References

  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.23 on Hilda’s birth, parentage [Hereric, Breguswith, Hereswith], the death of Hereric in exile under Cerdic, the dream of the jewel, and the two equal spans of thirty-three years; II.5, II.9, II.20, III.1 on Edwin and the Bernician–Deiran dynasties. Note the dual chapter-numbering: the Hilda chapter is IV.23 in Colgrave–Mynors but IV.24 in the older Plummer-based editions.)
  • Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (The royal recruitment of the early English nunneries; Hilda’s family within that pattern; Hereswith and the Frankish connection.)
  • Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Bede’s sources and hagiographical method; the conversion-era Church.)
  • Fell, Christine. Women in Anglo-Saxon England. London: British Museum Publications, 1984. (Royal women, kin-networks, and the monastic vocations open to them.)
  • Stenton, Frank M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. (Bernicia and Deira; Edwin’s overlordship; the political framework of seventh-century Northumbria.)
  • Kirby, D. P. The Earliest English Kings. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2000. (Northumbrian dynastic history; Edwin’s exile and reign; Hatfield, 633.)