The Turn at Thirty-Three

At the age of thirty-three Hilda resolved to give up the secular life and serve God as a monastic, intending first to leave Britain altogether and live as a stranger for the Lord’s sake in the Frankish monastery of Chelles, where her widowed sister Hereswith was already living under rule. Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne recalled her to Northumbria, and from that recall her whole monastic vocation flows out of the Ionan-Lindisfarne mission rather than the Roman one. This file traces the conversion itself, the abandoned Gaulish plan, the year among the East Angles, and the decisiveness of Aidan’s intervention — while marking the points at which Bede falls silent.

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

A Life Divided in Two

Almost everything that can be said with confidence about Hilda’s call to the monastic life rests on a single chapter of Bede, the obituary-like notice he gives her at her death in 680. Bede frames her whole life as a diptych of equal halves: she passed, he writes, thirty-three years “most nobly in the secular habit” (nobilissime in habitu saeculari) and dedicated the remaining thirty-three years “still more nobly” to the Lord in the monastic life (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The symmetry is so clean — thirty-three and thirty-three, a life of sixty-six years cut exactly at the midpoint — that it carries the weight of Bede’s interpretive art as much as of bare chronology; the number thirty-three inevitably recalls the traditional span of the Lord’s earthly life, and Bede’s hagiographical instinct for such patterning should be kept in view (on the reading of such patterned notices as narrative claims rather than bare data, METHODOLOGY §3.5). The chapter that contains this notice is numbered IV.23 in the Colgrave–Mynors edition, but appears as IV.24 in the older numbering of Plummer; this dual citation, noted here once, applies throughout the Hilda material (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23 [= IV.24 Plummer]; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

What Bede does not say is as significant as what he says. He gives no account whatever of Hilda’s years between her baptism — received, he tells us elsewhere, with King Edwin and his household in 627, when she was about thirteen — and this turn at thirty-three (Bede, Ecclesiastical History II.14, IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Twenty years of her adult life vanish into the single phrase “most nobly in the secular habit.” Nor does Bede offer any motive for the conversion: no vision, no bereavement, no sermon, no crisis. He simply records that, having lived nobly in the world, she “resolved to give up the secular habit and to serve God alone” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The silence is characteristic. Bede was writing roughly half a century after the events, drawing on the memory of the Whitby community and of those who had known Hilda, and his interest lay in her sanctity and her public role in the English Church, not in the interior drama or domestic circumstances of a Northumbrian noblewoman of the 640s (Mayr-Harting 1991). Modern historians have filled the gap with informed conjecture — that she had likely been married and perhaps widowed, on the analogy of her sister and of the general pattern of royal and noble women who entered religion in middle life — but Bede himself supplies nothing, and the honest report is that her years from thirteen to thirty-three are simply unrecorded (Yorke 2003; Foot 2000).

The First Resolve: Pilgrimage to Gaul

When Hilda did turn, her first intention was not to found or join a community in Britain but to leave the island entirely. Bede is precise: she journeyed to the kingdom of the East Angles, “for she was a relative of the king,” intending from there to cross over into Gaul, “to forsake her native land and all that she had and to live as a stranger for the Lord’s sake in the monastery of Cale” — that is, Chelles, near Paris — “so that she might the more easily attain to the eternal kingdom in heaven” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Her stated motive for choosing Chelles in particular was personal as well as ascetic: her sister Hereswith, “the mother of Aldwulf, king of the East Angles,” had already withdrawn there and was “living a regular life under the discipline of the Rule” — a widowed queen turned nun — and Hilda wished to be near her (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Hilda spent a full year in the kingdom of the East Angles, where Hereswith had been queen, waiting upon this design before it was overturned (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The plan is historically illuminating quite apart from its abandonment. It belongs to a well-attested seventh-century current by which noble Anglo-Saxon women, before England had a developed network of houses for women, crossed the Channel to take the veil in the Frankish double monasteries of the Paris basin and the Pas-de-Calais — Chelles, Faremoutiers-en-Brie, and Andelys foremost among them (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). Bede himself notes the practice in the same breath as Hilda’s story elsewhere, observing that in the days before there were many monasteries in England, those who wished to live the regular life would go to the Frankish or Gaulish realms, and that fathers sent their daughters there to be instructed and wedded to the heavenly Bridegroom, “especially in the monasteries of Brie, Chelles, and Andelys” (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.8; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Hereswith’s own withdrawal to Chelles is the direct evidence for this Anglo-Frankish channel at the level of the Northumbrian and East Anglian royal kin, and Hilda’s intended journey would have set her squarely within it (Foot 2000; Yorke 2003). That she came within a year of becoming a Frankish-trained nun, and that her sister actually did so, is a reminder of how nearly the foundress of Whitby might have spent her life on the Continent.

Peregrinatio pro Christo: The Ideal She First Embraced

The language Bede uses of Hilda’s first resolve is the language of a particular ascetic ideal. To “forsake her native land and all that she had and to live as a stranger for the Lord’s sake” (pro Domino peregrina) is the formula of peregrinatio pro Christo — pilgrimage, or self-exile, for Christ’s sake — the voluntary abandonment of homeland, kin, and inheritance that was the hallmark of Irish and Ionan spirituality (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; on the Ionan-Columban context, Colgrave 1940). For the monks of the Columban tradition, to leave one’s own land was itself an ascesis — a white martyrdom, a self-deprivation of the most natural human goods, undertaken so that the soul, having no city here, might the more wholly seek the city to come (Mayr-Harting 1991; Colgrave 1940). It was this ideal that had carried Columba himself from Ireland to Iona, and his successors and disciples — Aidan among them — from Iona into Northumbria (see St. Columba of Iona; St. Aidan of Lindisfarne; Colgrave 1940).

That Hilda’s first monastic instinct should take precisely this Ionan form is telling, and it is consistent with the milieu in which her faith had been planted and would be formed. Bede’s own phrasing — that she might “the more easily attain to the eternal kingdom” by becoming a stranger — renders the inner logic of peregrinatio exactly: the renunciation of the homeland as a means to the heavenly homeland (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). It is one of the quiet ironies of her life that the ideal of leaving Britain for Christ was the very thing that Aidan, by recalling her, asked her to set aside, redirecting her self-offering from geographical exile into the founding and ruling of houses on Northumbrian soil. The peregrinatio impulse was not so much abandoned as transmuted: the stranger for Christ became the mother of monasteries at home (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003).

Aidan’s Recall and the Ionan Mission

The decisive intervention came from Lindisfarne. Bede reports that Bishop Aidan recalled her home, and that on her return she received from him a small plot of land — about one hide, the holding of a single family — on the north bank of the River Wear, where with a few companions she led the monastic life for a year before being set over the monastery of Hartlepool (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The mechanics of that settlement and the abbacy that followed are treated in the companion file (see Abbess of Hartlepool). What matters here is the source of the recall and what it determined. Aidan was the Irish monk-bishop sent from Iona at the request of King Oswald to evangelise Northumbria, the founder and first bishop of the island monastery of Lindisfarne, and the leading representative in England of the Columban monastic tradition (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.3, III.5; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991; Colgrave 1940). His episcopate at Lindisfarne ran from 635 until his death in 651 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.14, III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

To say that Hilda’s whole monastic formation falls within the Ionan-Lindisfarne stream is therefore not an inference but a reading of Bede’s plain narrative: it was Aidan who recalled her from the path to Gaul, Aidan who gave her her first land, Aidan who set her over Hartlepool, and Aidan — together with “other devout men who knew and loved her” — who visited, instructed, and counselled her thereafter (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Her spiritual lineage runs back through Aidan to Iona and to Columba, not through Augustine, Paulinus, and the Gregorian mission from Rome (Mayr-Harting 1991; see St. Columba of Iona). This matters intensely for the next great episode of her life. When, a quarter-century later, she hosted at her own monastery of Whitby the synod of 664 that debated the dating of Easter and the form of the tonsure, she stood with the Ionan party of Bishop Colmán against the Roman usages — and she did so because the Ionan tradition was the tradition in which Aidan had formed her and the one to which her whole vocation was native (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25, IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991; see Hosting the Great Synod). The recall of a single noblewoman from a Channel crossing thus has consequences that reach to the heart of the English Church’s seventh-century crisis of usage.

The Problem of Dating

Bede gives no absolute dates for the conversion, the East Anglian year, the recall, or the Wear settlement; all must be reconstructed from his relative chronology and from the fixed points of Aidan’s episcopate. Since the recall, the gift of the hide on the Wear, and the appointment to Hartlepool all stand within Aidan’s lifetime (he died in 651), and since the symmetry of Hilda’s “thirty-three and thirty-three” places her birth around 614 and her conversion accordingly around 647, scholars conventionally locate the recall and the Wear settlement around 647–649 and the Hartlepool abbacy from about 649 onward (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; Yorke 2003; Foot 2000). These figures, however, are calculated rather than recorded. [Disputed: the precise dating of Hilda's conversion, recall, and first settlements is inferential, derived from Bede's relative sequence and from the limits of Aidan's episcopate, 635–651 (Bede IV.23, III.14, III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969); scholars accordingly give ranges rather than fixed years — Yorke (2003) and Foot (2000) place the recall and the Wear community c. 647–649 and the Hartlepool abbacy c. 649, while emphasising that no source supplies an exact year]. The most that can be said firmly is that the whole episode falls in the second half of the 640s, under Aidan and within the orbit of Lindisfarne.

What is recoverable, then, is a shape rather than a calendar: a noblewoman of about thirty-three, baptised in childhood into the faith brought first by the Roman Paulinus but now living in a Northumbria re-evangelised from Iona, resolving to spend the rest of her life for God; reaching, in her first ardour, for the highest Irish ideal of exile for Christ; turned back at the threshold of Gaul by the Irish bishop who would make her a monastic at home; and so set, by Aidan’s hand, on the road that would lead from a single hide on the Wear to the abbacy of Hartlepool and at last to Whitby. The interior reasons are hidden; the providential outline, as Bede tells it, is not.

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The Hilda obituary at IV.23 [= IV.24 in Plummer’s numbering]: the “thirty-three and thirty-three” division of her life, the resolve to serve God alone, the East Anglian year, the intended peregrinatio to the monastery of Cale/Chelles, the sister Hereswith and her son Aldwulf, Aidan’s recall, the hide on the Wear, and Aidan’s continued instruction. The baptism with Edwin at II.14; the Anglo-Frankish channel and the houses of Brie, Chelles, and Andelys at III.8; Aidan’s mission from Iona at III.3 and III.5; Aidan’s episcopate and death, 635–651, at III.14 and III.17; the Synod of 664 at III.25.)
Foot, Sarah. Veiled Women. 2 vols. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. (The seventh-century traffic of noble Anglo-Saxon women to Frankish houses; Hereswith at Chelles; the conjectural reconstruction of Hilda’s secular years; the inferential character of the early dating.)
Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (Royal and noble women’s entry into religion in middle life; the Anglo-Frankish monastic connection; the dating ranges for Hilda’s recall and first settlements.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. London: Batsford, 1991. (The Ionan-Columban mission of Aidan and Lindisfarne; peregrinatio pro Christo as an Irish ideal; the significance of Hilda’s Ionan formation for the Synod of 664.)
Colgrave, Bertram, ed. and trans. Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940. (The Lindisfarne-Ionan milieu, the Columban tradition, and the ascetic ideal of exile for Christ within which Aidan and Hilda stood.)