Hosting the Great Synod

In 664 King Oswiu of Northumbria summoned a council to his own kingdom’s foremost double monastery, Streanæshalch — Hilda’s Whitby — to settle the long-running divergence between the Ionan-Celtic and the Roman observances of Pascha and the monastic tonsure. This file sets out Whitby as the venue, the question genuinely at issue (a matter of practice, not of faith), the reason it came to a head through the royal household, the protagonists who spoke, and Hilda’s twofold place as host of the synod and sympathizer of the Celtic cause.

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

The Venue: Hilda’s Monastery

The synod that English historians have called the Synod of Whitby met in 664 at the monastery of Streanæshalch, the double house of monks and nuns that Hilda governed as abbess on the cliff above the North Sea (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). That the council was held in Hilda’s monastery is itself significant: it was among the most prominent religious houses of Northumbria, a royal foundation closely tied to the dynasty of Oswiu, and a natural place to gather kings, bishops, and clergy of both observances under one roof (on the house and its standing, see Founding Streanæshalch). The choice of venue placed Hilda, as hostess and as abbess of the house, at the physical centre of the most consequential ecclesiastical assembly in seventh-century England (Mayr-Harting 1991; Stenton 1971).

Bede, our principal narrator, is the source to be read with care here. Writing some two generations after the event from within the Romanizing Northumbrian church that the synod’s outcome did much to consolidate, he is frankly a partisan of the Roman observance, yet he is also a scrupulous reporter who preserves the arguments of the losing side and who venerates the Irish saints whose practice was overruled (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25–26; Mayr-Harting 1991). His account of the synod stands at Ecclesiastical History III.25, with its aftermath at III.26; Hilda’s own chapter falls later, at IV.23 in the Colgrave & Mynors numbering (the same chapter is cited as IV.24 in the older edition of Charles Plummer, a dual numbering worth noting once and keeping in mind throughout this collection).

The Question at Issue: Pascha and the Tonsure

It must be said plainly, because it is so often misunderstood, that the Synod of Whitby was not a dispute about the faith or about any article of dogma. It concerned two matters of ecclesiastical practice and discipline: the method of calculating the date of Pascha (Easter), and the form of the monastic tonsure (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Cubitt 1995). On the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the creeds, the two parties were wholly at one; what divided them was custom, computus, and the shape of a haircut — disciplinary differences that had nonetheless grown into a visible breach in the common life of the Northumbrian church (Cubitt 1995; Mayr-Harting 1991).

The dating of Pascha was the weightier of the two. The older tradition carried into Northumbria from Iona kept an 84-year Easter cycle inherited from the holy founders of the Irish and Ionan mission, while the Roman observance — descended from the mission of Augustine of Canterbury and by this date the practice of the wider Latin and Greek Church — followed the Alexandrian computation transmitted through Dionysius Exiguus on a 19-year cycle (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Stenton 1971). Because the two cycles fell out of step, the feast of the Resurrection — and with it the close of the Great Fast — could be kept on different Sundays in the same year by Christians in the same kingdom (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991; on the calendar’s place in Orthodox life more broadly, see The Church Calendar).

The tonsure was the second point. The Ionan-Celtic clergy wore a tonsure that, on the usual reconstruction, shaved the front of the head from ear to ear, leaving the hair behind — a form Roman polemic disparaged as the “tonsure of Simon Magus.” The Roman party wore the coronal or “Petrine” tonsure, shaving the crown to leave a ring of hair in imitation, as they held, of the crown of thorns and the practice associated with the Apostle Peter (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.26 and V.21; Mayr-Harting 1991). Like the Easter question, the tonsure marked outwardly which tradition a monk belonged to, and so it too became a sign of the wider divergence the synod was called to heal.

Why It Came to a Head: The Divided Royal Household

What turned a tolerable difference of custom into a matter requiring a royal council was that the divergence ran straight through the household of the king. Oswiu of Northumbria, baptized and formed in the Ionan tradition brought to his people by Aidan of Lindisfarne, kept the Ionan reckoning of Pascha; but his queen, Eanflæd, had been raised in Kent within the Roman observance and kept it still, together with the chaplain she had brought north with her (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Stenton 1971). The result was the scandal Bede records with quiet force: it could happen that the king had finished his Paschal fast and was keeping the feast of the Resurrection while the queen and her household were still fasting and observing Palm Sunday in the same palace (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991). A division that might be borne between distant churches was intolerable under one roof and one crown, and it was this domestic and royal pressure, as much as any abstract concern for uniformity, that moved Oswiu to summon the synod to Hilda’s Whitby in 664 (Cubitt 1995; Stenton 1971).

The Protagonists

The assembly Bede describes gathered the leading churchmen of the Northumbrian world. Presiding and ultimately judging was King Oswiu himself, joined by his son Alhfrith, sub-king of Deira, who had come under the influence of the Roman party and was its royal patron at the synod (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Stenton 1971).

For the Ionan-Celtic side spoke Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne, successor to Aidan and Finan in the see that Iona had planted in Northumbria. Colmán defended the tradition he had received by appealing to the authority of its holy founders — above all Columba of Iona and the saints of the Ionan line — and, when pressed on its ultimate apostolic warrant, to the Apostle John, whose practice the Irish believed their Easter to preserve (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991; on Colmán himself see St. Colman of Lindisfarne, and on the founder of the Northumbrian mission St. Aidan of Lindisfarne).

For the Roman side the chief speaker was the priest Wilfrid, later bishop, a forceful and well-travelled advocate who had seen the universal practice of the Church in Gaul and at Rome itself. Wilfrid spoke at the request of Bishop Agilbert, a Frank whose command of English was imperfect and who therefore had Wilfrid present the Roman case in his stead (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Stenton 1971). Wilfrid’s argument turned on universality — that the Roman Easter was the practice of the whole Church across the world, from which only a remote corner of the Irish and Britons had fallen out of step — and climaxed in the appeal to Peter and the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” given to him in the Gospel (Matthew 16:18–19; Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). Wilfrid’s own partisan biographer, Stephen of Ripon, preserves a parallel and admiring account of his master’s performance (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; trans. Colgrave 1927).

Also present and named by Bede were Bishop Cedd, a bishop trained in the Irish tradition but in communion with both parties, who acted as interpreter and intermediary at the council; James the Deacon, a venerable survivor of the earlier Roman mission of Paulinus who had kept the Roman Easter in the north for decades and stood with that party; and Abbess Hilda herself, who, with her monastery, favoured the Celtic side (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991).

Hilda as Host and Celtic Sympathizer

Bede states without hedging where Hilda stood. She and her followers — the community of Whitby — preferred the customs of the Irish, the tradition descended from Aidan and Iona within which Northumbrian monasticism had been nurtured and within which Hilda’s own monastic vocation had taken shape (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Yorke 2003). Her sympathy was not eccentric but native: she had received the religious life in the world Aidan made, and the Ionan observance was the one she and her house had always kept (on the formation of that common life see The Rule and the Life; Yorke 2003).

Hilda’s position was therefore double, and the doubleness is the heart of her place in the story. As abbess of Streanæshalch she was the host of the synod, lending her house and her hospitality to a gathering whose outcome she had reason to fear; as a churchwoman she belonged, openly, to the party that would lose (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991). That she could hold both roles at once — receiving the council that would rule against her own custom — is itself a measure of the standing she enjoyed and of the disciplinary, rather than dogmatic, character of the dispute: a council could be held in the house of a partisan precisely because no one’s communion or orthodoxy was thought to be at stake (Cubitt 1995).

The Course of the Debate

Bede stages the debate as a set exchange before the king. Colmán opened by defending his Easter as the practice he had received from his elders, who had received it from Columba, and ultimately as the tradition of the Apostle John (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). Wilfrid answered for the Roman side that the Easter he kept was observed at Rome, where the apostles Peter and Paul had taught and were buried, and throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, Asia, Egypt, and the whole world wherever the Church of Christ was spread — and that the only dissenters were the Irish and the Britons of two remote islands, “and not even the whole of them,” obstinately contending against the universal Church (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25; Mayr-Harting 1991). When Colmán pressed the authority of Columba and of John, Wilfrid replied that he would not deny the holiness of Columba and his successors but that no local sanctity could override the catholic practice grounded in Peter, to whom the Lord said, “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; Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25). It was on this appeal to the keys of Peter that the debate turned, and on which the king would presently render his judgment — the subject of the companion file (see Accepting the Decision).

The whole proceeding, it should be remembered, took place within the undivided Church of the first millennium, centuries before the estrangement of East and West, and between parties who never doubted one another’s faith (on that wider setting see The Pre-Schism Church; Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25–26).

See Also

• Accepting the Decision — Oswiu’s judgment for Rome by the keys of Peter, Colmán’s withdrawal, and Hilda’s obedience to a ruling against her leanings
• Founding Streanæshalch — the royal double monastery that hosted the synod
• The Rule and the Life — the Ionan-formed monastic life within which Hilda’s Celtic sympathies were rooted
• St. Colman of Lindisfarne — the bishop who led the Celtic party whose cause Hilda favoured
• St. Aidan of Lindisfarne — founder of the Ionan mission in Northumbria, the tradition at issue
• The Church Calendar — the Paschal computation whose divergence the synod was called to resolve

References

• Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The synod at III.25, with its aftermath at III.26; the tonsure discussed at III.26 and V.21; Hilda’s chapter at IV.23, cited as 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. (Wilfrid’s role at the synod, ch. 10 — the Roman-partisan account.)
• Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The Easter controversy, the Ionan and Roman missions, and the protagonists of Whitby.)
• Stenton, Frank M. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. (Northumbrian political and ecclesiastical context; Oswiu, Eanflæd, and Alhfrith.)
• Cubitt, Catherine. Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c.650–c.850. London: Leicester University Press, 1995. (The synod as a church council and the disciplinary character of its business.)
• Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (Hilda, Whitby, and the place of royal double monasteries.)