Accepting the Decision

When King Oswiu, on hearing the argument from the keys given to Peter, pronounced the Synod of Whitby for the Roman observance, the council’s verdict went against the very tradition Hilda and her monastery had favoured. This file follows the judgment and its aftermath — Colmán’s peaceable withdrawal to Iona and Ireland, and Hilda’s acceptance of a ruling against her own leanings — and sets the Roman and the Celtic cases side by side as fairly as the sources allow, with the dispute kept in its true character: disciplinary, not dogmatic, and resolved without any breach of communion.

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

Oswiu’s Judgment: The Keys of Peter

The synod ended not with a vote but with the verdict of the king. When Wilfrid had grounded the Roman Easter in the universal practice of the Church and in the words spoken by Christ to Peter — “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18–19) — Oswiu turned to Colmán and asked whether the Lord had indeed spoken these words to Peter; and Colmán acknowledged that he had (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Oswiu then asked whether any comparable authority had been given to Columba; and when no such word could be alleged, the king gave his judgment. Since Peter was the keeper of the keys and the doorkeeper of heaven, Oswiu said, he would obey Peter’s commands in all things, lest when he came to the gates of the kingdom there should be none to open them, the one who holds the keys having turned away (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991). The court assented, and the synod resolved in favour of the Roman computation of Pascha and, with it, the Roman discipline (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Cubitt 1995).

It is worth weighing what this argument was and was not. Bede, who tells the story, plainly approves the outcome and shapes the narrative toward it; the appeal to Peter is given the last and decisive word (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). The decision was a royal one, rendered by a king for his kingdom, and it bound the Northumbrian church to the practice already kept by the wider Latin and Eastern Church — it did not invent a doctrine but enforced a uniformity (Cubitt 1995; Stenton 1971). All of this took place within the undivided Church of the first millennium, long before the later estrangement of East and West that would give the “keys of Peter” their sharper and more contested sense (see The Pre-Schism Church).

Colmán’s Withdrawal

Colmán would not accept the ruling. Unwilling to abandon the tradition he had received from the founders of his church, he withdrew from his see of Lindisfarne and returned to Iona, taking with him his Irish monks and a number of the English who shared their observance, and afterward removed to Ireland, settling at length on the island of Inishbofin off the western coast (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991). His departure is the measure of how seriously the Ionan party held its practice — and also of how the dispute was conducted, for Colmán left in peace and not under anathema (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26; on his later life see St. Colman of Lindisfarne).

Bede records the aftermath with notable warmth toward the man and his house. Colmán’s departure cleared the way for fuller Roman conformity in Northumbria: Tuda succeeded briefly to the episcopate before his early death, and within a decade the arrival of Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury would knit the English churches into a single ordered province on the Roman pattern (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26 and IV.1–2; Stenton 1971). Yet Bede pauses to praise the frugality and holiness of Colmán and the Irish clergy he led away, and his admiration is a standing reminder that the synod’s winners did not regard its losers as anything but Catholic Christians and holy men (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991).

Hilda’s Acceptance

Here the figure of Hilda comes into its own. Bede had placed her squarely with the party that lost — she and her followers had preferred the customs of the Irish (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). Yet when the ruling went against her leanings, Hilda did not follow Colmán into exile. She remained at Whitby, kept her abbacy, and brought her house into conformity with the decision of the synod, staying within the unified Church of Northumbria rather than withdrawing with the Ionan remnant (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25–26; Yorke 2003). The contrast with Colmán is instructive: where he held his tradition to be inseparable from his communion and departed sooner than abandon it, Hilda judged that the matter, being one of practice and not of faith, did not warrant a parting, and she accepted the order of the Church she belonged to (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003).

This is the portrait the sources sustain: the loyal churchwoman who, having favoured one side, submitted to the verdict for the other and went on serving the one Church (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23 [= IV.24 in the older Plummer numbering], where Bede’s whole account of Hilda is governed by her exemplary fidelity; Yorke 2003). Her acceptance was not the indifference of one who had no convictions but the obedience of one who held her convictions in their proper proportion — a disciplinary preference yielded for the sake of the Church’s peace and unity (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Cubitt 1995). Hagiographically, it is precisely this obedience that Bede holds up; the historical fact pinned to its source is that Bede, our earliest witness, presents Hilda as remaining in the unified Church after the ruling (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25, IV.23; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Two Cases, Set Side by Side

Because the Synod of Whitby is so easily turned into a partisan story — a victory of Rome over the Celts, or a tragedy of the Celtic church overrun — it is worth setting the two cases out as fairly as the sources permit, letting each speak in its own terms.

The Roman case, as Wilfrid pressed it and Bede endorsed it, rested on universality and on apostolic authority. The Roman Easter was the practice of the whole Church spread across the world — Italy, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Egypt — and to keep a different reckoning in two remote islands was, on this view, to set a local custom against the common mind of the Church (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991). To this was joined the practical scandal of a divided Pascha within a single kingdom and a single household, and the theological appeal to Peter and the keys as the warrant for following the universal practice rather than a venerable but isolated one (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; trans. Colgrave 1927).

The Celtic case, as Colmán defended it, rested on the authority of the holy founders and on the antiquity and sanctity of the tradition received. The Ionan Easter had been kept by Columba and his successors, men of evident holiness whose lives bore the fruit of the Spirit, and behind them, the Irish believed, by the Apostle John himself; to abandon it was to set aside the practice of saints under whom the conversion of Northumbria had been accomplished (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; on the founder of that line see St. Columba of Iona). The force of this case is felt in Bede’s own narrative, for the same author who judges against the Irish Easter cannot bring himself to speak of Aidan, the Ionan apostle of Northumbria, except with reverence — conceding that Aidan kept the wrong Easter yet was a man of rare sanctity and learning whose memory the Church honours (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.17; Mayr-Harting 1991; see St. Aidan of Lindisfarne).

The fairest summary is the one Bede’s own treatment forces upon the reader: the question was disciplinary, not dogmatic; communion was not broken, for Colmán departed in peace and the victors went on venerating the Irish saints; and a partisan of Rome could still honour, name, and praise the holy men of the side that lost (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25–26, III.17; Cubitt 1995). The perspective from which each case is told does the work; neither party is rendered as heretical, and the sober reading is that two legitimate customs of the one Church came to a decision, and the Church remained one (on Bede as the source through whom we see all this, see St. Bede the Venerable).

The Depth of Hilda’s Celtic Sympathy

How far Hilda’s Celtic sympathy ran, and what it meant for the rest of her life, is read variously, and the disagreement is worth stating openly rather than resolving by assertion. [Disputed: Bede flatly places Hilda and her monastery with the Irish party at the synod (Bede, *Ecclesiastical History* III.25), and her later opposition to Wilfrid is taken by some — Mayr-Harting (1991) prominent among them — as evidence of a lasting Ionan loyalty and an anti-Wilfridian feeling rooted in 664; others caution that her opposition to Wilfrid in the 670s was as much a matter of Northumbrian ecclesiastical politics and of resistance to Wilfrid's wealth and grandeur as of the Easter question, which by then was settled, so that the extent of her Celtic partisanship after the synod cannot be measured from her quarrel with Wilfrid alone (cf. Yorke 2003)].

The episode that fuels this dispute belongs to the next decade. In the 670s, when Wilfrid — by then bishop of York, deposed and contesting his case — appealed to Rome, Hilda was among the Northumbrian figures who opposed him; according to his hagiographer, she sent representatives to the papal synod that heard the matter to argue against him (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; trans. Colgrave 1927; Mayr-Harting 1991). This is the one source that reports Hilda’s intervention, and it is a frankly hostile witness to her, written to glorify Wilfrid. What it shows beyond reasonable doubt is a settled coolness between the abbess of Whitby and the great Roman champion; what it does not settle is whether that coolness was the afterlife of her 664 sympathies or a separate quarrel over Wilfrid’s character and ambitions (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; Yorke 2003). On either reading, the deeper point holds: Hilda’s opposition to Wilfrid as a man and a bishop coexisted with her full membership in the very Roman-conformed church his cause had helped to build — she opposed the man, not the communion (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Oswiu’s judgment and the keys argument at III.25; Colmán’s withdrawal and Bede’s praise of the Irish clergy at III.26; Aidan’s sanctity at III.17; the work of Theodore at IV.1–2; Hilda’s chapter at IV.23, cited IV.24 in the older numbering of Charles Plummer.)
Stephen of Ripon (Eddius Stephanus). The Life of Bishop Wilfrid. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. (The Roman-partisan account of the synod, ch. 10, and the source for Hilda’s opposition to Wilfrid’s appeal to Rome.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The outcome of Whitby, the reading of Hilda’s lasting Ionan sympathies, and the anti-Wilfridian interpretation.)
Stenton, Frank M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. (Northumbrian political context and the consolidation of Roman order after the synod.)
Cubitt, Catherine. Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c.650–c.850. London: Leicester University Press, 1995. (The disciplinary character of the synod and its place among English church councils.)
Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (Hilda’s acceptance of the ruling, and the cautious reading of her later conflict with Wilfrid as ecclesiastical politics.)