The Rule and the Life

The shape of the common life Hilda established at Streanæshalch (Whitby): a community ordered on the Ionan pattern she had received through Aidan, in which all things were held in common after the example of the primitive Church, Scripture was diligently studied, and the virtues of justice, devotion, and chastity were taught. This file sets out that life, Hilda’s governance of it as abbess, the open question of what written rule (if any) the house observed, why Bede’s sources called her simply “mother,” and how the community became a nursery of clergy for the wider English Church.

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

The Ionan Inheritance

The life Hilda established at Streanæshalch did not spring up newly invented; it was the continuation of a tradition she had received. Bede tells us that Hilda was instructed in the faith and the religious life under the influence of the Irish mission, and her formation as a monastic stood in the line that ran from Iona through Aidan of Lindisfarne, the apostle of Northumbria (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). When she came to order her own communities — first at Hartlepool, then at Streanæshalch — she transmitted the ethos of that Columban inheritance: the austerity, the centrality of prayer and Scripture, and the common life that Aidan and his Ionan brethren had brought from the island monastery of Columba into the kingdom of the Northumbrians (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.5, III.26, IV.23; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 1971). It is this inheritance, more than any single written code, that gives the life at Whitby its distinctive character, and that places the house squarely within the Celtic-Roman world of the seventh-century English Church before the settlement of the Synod of 664.

The Common Life After the Primitive Church

The heart of Bede’s praise of Whitby is its observance of the common life. He records that Hilda established there a regular discipline “after the example of the primitive Church,” in which no one was rich and no one was poor, for they had all things in common, and nothing was the private property of any (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The phrasing deliberately echoes the description of the Jerusalem community in the Acts of the Apostles, where the believers “had all things common” and “neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own” (Acts 4:32; cf. Acts 2:44–45). Bede’s point is precisely that Whitby reproduced the apostolic koinonia: the abolition of private possession was not an incidental austerity but the constitutive mark of the community, the visible sign that the house was a return to the pattern of the first Christians (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

This renunciation of private property is the one feature of the Whitby observance that Bede states with full clarity, and it situates Hilda’s house within the central stream of Christian monastic ideal, where the holding of all things in common — the koinobion, the common life — distinguishes the monastery from any looser association of ascetics (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Foot, Veiled Women, 2000). Whatever else is uncertain about the daily ordering of the house, Bede leaves no doubt that its economic and spiritual foundation was the apostolic community of goods (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

The Study of Scripture and the Teaching of Virtue

Alongside the common life, Bede stresses two things: the diligent study of Scripture and the deliberate cultivation of virtue. He writes that Hilda compelled those under her care to give so much time to the reading of the Holy Scriptures and to the works of righteousness that many among them were found fit to be ordained and to serve at the altar (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The community was, in effect, a school of holiness and of the sacred text, in which biblical learning was not an ornament but a discipline imposed by the abbess upon her household (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England, 1984).

Bede also names the specific virtues Hilda taught. She established at Streanæshalch the observance of righteousness or justice (iustitia), of devotion and piety (pietas), of chastity (castitas), and of the other virtues, but above all of peace and charity, after the example of the primitive Church (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The ordering of these virtues is itself instructive: justice and piety frame the community’s relation to God and to one another, chastity guards the monastic vocation, and peace and charity crown the whole, so that the catalogue is not a random list but a description of a rightly ordered common life (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Foot, Veiled Women, 2000). It is on the strength of this discipline that Bede holds up Whitby as a model house and Hilda as a model superior.

The Question of the Written Rule

What Bede does not tell us is the one thing a modern reader most wishes to know: what written rule, if any, the community at Whitby observed. Bede praises the regularis vita — the regular, that is rule-governed, life — that Hilda established, but he never names a rule, and no source preserves the actual text or code by which the house was governed (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Foot, Veiled Women, 2000). The temptation to fill the silence must be resisted. In particular, it would be an anachronism to assert that Hilda’s community followed the Rule of St Benedict: the Benedictine Rule had not yet become the dominant or normative code in the English Church of Hilda’s lifetime, and there is no evidence that it governed Whitby (Foot, Veiled Women, 2000; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 1971).

The most that can be said with confidence is that the life was in the Ionan, Columban tradition Hilda had received through Aidan, and that it reproduced the apostolic common life Bede describes. [Disputed: no surviving source preserves the actual rule observed at Whitby; the house's life was certainly in the Ionan/Columban tradition Hilda received from Aidan and was built on the apostolic common possession Bede describes (Bede, *Ecclesiastical History* IV.23), but whether any single written rule was used at all — and if so, which — is unknown, and the once-common assumption of a Benedictine observance is an anachronism unsupported by the sources (Foot, *Veiled Women*, 2000; Stenton 1971).] The honest conclusion is that we know the ethos of the Whitby life from Bede in some detail while remaining ignorant of its written constitution, and the two must not be confused.

Hilda’s Governance as Abbess

Hilda ruled Streanæshalch as abbess for some twenty-two years until her death in 680, and Bede’s portrait of her governance is one of wisdom, gravity, and prudence (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). He records that so great was her prudence that not only ordinary people but kings and princes sought and received her counsel, and that she governed her community with a discipline that bore fruit in the holiness and the fitness for ministry of those she formed (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, 2003). Her authority extended over the whole double community of men and women, including the priests whose ministry the house required, and her rule of so substantial and so prominent a foundation is itself testimony to the standing that an abbess of royal connection could hold in the seventh-century English Church (Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England, 1984; Yorke 2003).

Bede frames her last years as a long illness borne with patience: she suffered from a fever for six years before her death, yet never ceased in that time to give thanks to her Maker or to instruct the flock committed to her, both in public and in private (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The governance of the house was thus, in Bede’s telling, of a piece with the virtues he says she taught: justice in rule, piety in suffering, and charity toward those she led (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23). These details are reported as Bede’s narrative of her life rather than as independently verifiable fact, and they are pinned here to his testimony as the methodology requires of hagiographical material (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Why She Was Called “Mother”

Bede gives a single, memorable detail about how Hilda was regarded by those who knew her: all who knew her, he says, were accustomed to call her “mother” (mater), on account of her singular grace and devotion (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The title is more than affectionate convention. In Bede’s account it expresses the relation in which the abbess stood to her whole community — the men and women of the double house, the kings who sought her counsel, and the many she formed for the Church’s service — a spiritual maternity recognized by all who came under her influence (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Foot, Veiled Women, 2000). That the same word should be applied to a woman whose authority embraced ordained men, and whose counsel was sought by princes, captures the peculiar dignity of the great abbesses of the age, and Bede’s preservation of the title is one of the surest signs of the regard in which Hilda was held (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England, 1984; Yorke 2003).

A House That Produced Clergy

The fruit of the Whitby discipline, in Bede’s judgement, was the men it gave to the wider Church. He states that the study of Scripture and the works of righteousness Hilda required produced many fit for ordination and the service of the altar, and he names from the house no fewer than five who became bishops — among them Bosa, Ætla, Oftfor, John, and Wilfrid II — all of them, he says, men of singular merit and holiness (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). This is a remarkable testimony: under Hilda, Streanæshalch was not a community turned inward upon its own sanctification alone but a seminary for the Northumbrian and English episcopate, a place from which the Church drew its leaders (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 1971; Yorke 2003). The common life, the study of Scripture, and the teaching of virtue thus issued in service to the whole Church, and the abbess who ruled the house stood, in Bede’s account, at the head of one of the most influential nurseries of clergy in the early English Church (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23; Foot, Veiled Women, 2000).

See Also

• Founding Streanæshalch — the foundation and the double-monastery form within which this life was ordered
• The Nurturing of Learning — Whitby as a school of Scripture, song, and bishops
• Counsellor to Kings and Bishops — the spiritual maternity that made Hilda “mother” to a kingdom
• St. Aidan of Lindisfarne — the bearer of the Ionan tradition Hilda received
• Monasticism — the monastic ideal of the common life behind Whitby’s discipline

References

• Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (IV.23 [= IV.24 in Plummer’s numbering] for the regular life “after the example of the primitive Church,” the common possession of all things, the diligent study of Scripture, the virtues of justice, piety, and chastity, the fitness of many for ordination and the five bishops, the title “mother,” Hilda’s prudence and her six years’ illness; III.5, III.26 for the Ionan/Columban inheritance through Aidan.)
• Foot, Sarah. Veiled Women. 2 vols. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. (The common life and the silence of the sources on any written rule; the anachronism of a Benedictine observance; the standing of abbesses.)
• Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (Hilda’s governance, her counsel to kings, and Whitby as a producer of bishops.)
• Fell, Christine. Women in Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. (The authority of the abbess over the double community and the standing of women in the seventh-century Church.)
• Stenton, Frank M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. (The Ionan mission and its discipline; the place of Whitby among the houses that supplied the English episcopate; the non-normative status of the Benedictine Rule in Hilda’s England.)
• The Holy Bible, Acts of the Apostles 2:44–45; 4:32. (The apostolic community of goods echoed in Bede’s description of the Whitby common life.)