Abbess of Hartlepool

Recalled from her intended pilgrimage to Gaul, Hilda received from Bishop Aidan a small holding of about one hide on the north bank of the River Wear, where for a year she led the monastic life with a few companions, before being set over the monastery of Heruteu (Hartlepool) — a house founded a little earlier by Heiu, said to be the first woman in Northumbria to take the veil. There Hilda reordered the community on a regular pattern, under the continuing guidance of Aidan and other devout men who loved her. This file gathers what Bede records of that first abbacy and what the archaeology of the site, cautiously read, adds to it.

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

The Hide on the Wear

Hilda’s first monastic settlement was a thing of the smallest beginnings. When Aidan recalled her from the path to Chelles (the recall and its background are treated in the companion file: see The Turn at Thirty-Three), Bede reports that on her return to Northumbria the bishop “gave her a place to live in for a year, with a few companions, on the north bank of the River Wear; here, too, she led a monastic life with very few helpers” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The grant, Bede specifies, was of “the space of one hide” (possessionem unius familiae) — that is, the land reckoned sufficient to support a single family, the basic Anglo-Saxon unit of assessment (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). It was a deliberately modest endowment, enough for a tiny ascetic household and no more, and Bede passes over it in a sentence; the exact site on the Wear is not identified by him and has never been securely located on the ground (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Foot 2000). This year of obscure beginnings is itself a comment on the manner of early Northumbrian monastic foundation: a bishop’s gift of a small holding, a handful of companions, a regular life begun in poverty and quiet before any institution of note took shape (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003). As elsewhere in this period, the cite is provided by Bede’s relative chronology rather than by any dated charter; the year on the Wear is conventionally placed about 648–649, though the figure is calculated and not recorded (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Yorke 2003).

Heiu and the Foundation of Heruteu

After that year, Bede continues, Hilda “was made abbess in the monastery called Heruteu” — Hartlepool — a house that “had been founded not long before by the devout servant of Christ, Heiu, who is said to have been the first woman in the kingdom of the Northumbrians to take the vows and habit of a nun, being consecrated by Bishop Aidan” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The notice is precious for more than Hilda’s biography: it preserves the name of Heiu and the claim that she was the very first Northumbrian woman to be veiled, the pioneer of female monasticism north of the Humber, and that her veiling too came from the hand of Aidan — binding the origins of Northumbrian nunnery-life, like Hilda’s own vocation, to the Ionan-Lindisfarne mission (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Foot 2000; Yorke 2003; on that mission see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne). Bede adds that Heiu, “not long after she had founded the monastery, departed to the city of Calcaria, which the English call Kælcacæstir, and made her dwelling there” — Calcaria being generally identified with Tadcaster — so that the abbacy of Heruteu fell vacant and passed to Hilda (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Why Heiu withdrew, Bede does not say; he records the move and nothing of its reason, and the surviving testimony to this foundational figure of Northumbrian women’s monasticism is confined to these few lines (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Foot 2000).

The character of Heruteu as a house follows the pattern that Hilda would carry to Whitby: it was a “double monastery,” a community of both women and men under the rule of an abbess, a form that was widespread in seventh-century England and Gaul and especially associated with the great royal and noble women’s houses of the age (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003; on the form, The Rule and the Life). At Hartlepool Hilda first exercised the kind of governance — the rule of an abbess over a mixed regular community — that would later make her one of the most consequential figures in the English Church (Yorke 2003; Mayr-Harting 1991).

Hilda’s Ordering of the Community

Bede represents Hilda’s accession not merely as a succession but as a reform. On becoming abbess, he says, “she immediately set about establishing there a regular life (regularem vitam), in all respects as she had been instructed by learned men” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The phrase implies that Heruteu under Heiu had been a foundation of more rudimentary discipline, and that what Hilda contributed was the imposition or completion of a settled monastic rule — a regular pattern of common life, prayer, and observance — drawn from the instruction she had received (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991). Bede does not name a written Rule; the “regular life” of the Ionan tradition was shaped by the customs of the Columban houses rather than by the Rule of St. Benedict, which had not yet displaced earlier monastic codes in Northumbria, and it is best understood as a disciplined common observance rather than adherence to any single later text (Mayr-Harting 1991; Colgrave 1940; on the monastic life generally, Monasticism).

The chief agents of that instruction were Aidan and his circle. Bede states that “Bishop Aidan and other devout men who knew her and loved her visited her frequently, instructed her assiduously, and loved her heartily for her innate wisdom and her devotion to the service of God” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The portrait is of a community formed under episcopal tutelage from Lindisfarne, with the young abbess herself the object of repeated, affectionate spiritual direction; her later reputation for wisdom — Bede will say that even kings and princes sought her counsel — is here traced back to its root in this early instruction by Aidan and his fellows (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991). Hartlepool was thus a school as much as a settlement: the place where Hilda was taught to rule by those who had brought the monastic life to Northumbria, and where she first ruled. It was the immediate prelude to her foundation, some years later, of the far greater house at Streanæshalch, Whitby (see Founding Streanæshalch; Foot 2000; Yorke 2003).

The Archaeology of the Site

Hartlepool is one of the few of these early Northumbrian houses where the spade has added something to Bede, though it must be read with care. Excavations in the old town of Hartlepool — notably at the sites known as Church Close and Cross Close — have revealed an Anglo-Saxon cemetery and traces of occupation consistent with a monastic community of the seventh and eighth centuries, on or near the promontory where Bede’s Heruteu is conventionally located (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). The most distinctive finds are a group of inscribed name-stones: small memorial stones marking graves, carved with Anglo-Saxon personal names — some of them women’s names — written in a mixture of runic and Roman lettering and often accompanied by crosses and the alpha-and-omega (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). These name-stones are precisely the kind of evidence one would expect of a literate, regular community of both sexes such as Bede describes, and their female names accord well with Heruteu’s character as a double monastery ruled by an abbess (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003).

The proper inference from this material is a measured one. The excavations at Hartlepool have revealed a cemetery and inscribed name-stones consistent with a seventh-century monastic community on the site; they do not, by themselves, recover the plan, extent, buildings, or boundaries of Hilda’s monastery, which remain substantially unknown (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). It would be an overreach to claim that any standing structure or precise topography of Hilda’s own house has been identified; what the archaeology supplies is corroboration that a monastic community of the right period and character existed where Bede says Heruteu stood, and a vivid, tangible witness — in the carved names of its dead — to the men and women who lived the regular life there under and after her rule (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). The honest summary is that Bede gives the institution and a few names, while the name-stones give a handful more and confirm the kind of place it was, but the monastery as a built and bounded reality is largely unrecovered.

What Can Be Reconstructed

Set side by side, the written and material evidence yield only a sketch, and the sketch is worth stating plainly because the temptation to overdraw it is strong. From Bede we have: a small grant of one hide on the Wear and a year’s ascetic life there; an existing house at Hartlepool founded by Heiu, the first veiled woman in Northumbria; Heiu’s departure to Calcaria; Hilda’s accession as abbess and her institution of a regular life “as she had been instructed”; and the continuing guidance of Aidan and his circle, who loved her for her wisdom and devotion (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). From the ground we have: a cemetery, name-stones bearing Anglo-Saxon names both male and female, and occupation evidence consistent with a double monastery of the later seventh and eighth centuries (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). Bede’s brevity is the governing fact: he compresses what may have been several years of Hilda’s first rule into a few sentences whose purpose is to carry her, and the reader, toward Whitby and the synod and the great public life that interested him (Mayr-Harting 1991; Foot 2000). The abbacy of Hartlepool is, in his telling, the apprenticeship — the place where a recalled pilgrim became a ruler of monks under the eye of the bishop who had recalled her, and from which she would presently be sent to found the house by which she is chiefly remembered (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Yorke 2003; see Founding Streanæshalch).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (All at IV.23 [= IV.24 in Plummer’s numbering]: the gift of one hide on the north bank of the Wear and the year’s life there with a few companions; Hilda made abbess of Heruteu/Hartlepool; Heiu as founder and the first Northumbrian woman to be veiled, consecrated by Aidan; Heiu’s departure to Calcaria/Kælcacæstir; Hilda’s institution of a “regular life… as she had been instructed by learned men”; and the frequent visits, instruction, and love of Aidan and other devout men for her wisdom and devotion.)
Foot, Sarah. Veiled Women. 2 vols. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. (Heiu and the origins of Northumbrian women’s monasticism; the double-monastery form; the Hartlepool excavations, cemetery, and inscribed name-stones, including female names; the measured reading of the archaeological evidence.)
Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (The pattern of episcopal grants and small foundations; Hartlepool as a double monastery; the archaeology of the site and the limits of what it recovers; the dating of Hilda’s first settlements.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991. (The Ionan-Columban character of the “regular life” in Northumbria before Benedictine ascendancy; Aidan’s instruction of Hilda; Hartlepool as apprenticeship for Whitby.)
Colgrave, Bertram, ed. and trans. Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (The Lindisfarne-Ionan monastic milieu and the customary, non-Benedictine shape of the regular life in seventh-century Northumbria.)