The Cowherd Poet

The most famous story to come out of Hilda’s Whitby is not, strictly, a story about Hilda — it is the story of Cædmon, an aged and unlettered cowherd of her monastery who received in a dream the gift of Christian song and so became the first named poet of the English language. Yet the narrative turns on an act of Hilda’s own judgment: it was her discernment that recognised the gift as from God, her authority that received the herdsman into the community, and her order that set him to learn the whole of sacred history and turn it into verse. This file sets out the Cædmon narrative as Bede tells it, pinned carefully to his text, together with the place of Cædmon’s Hymn in the history of English poetry and the textual question its survival raises.

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

The Place of the Story in Bede

The whole of the Cædmon narrative is the property of a single source: Bede, who placed it in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the chapter immediately following his account of Hilda’s death (Bede, HE IV.24, ed. and trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). A word on the numbering is owed at the outset, because the reader who consults different editions will meet it in two forms. In the modern critical edition of Colgrave and Mynors the Cædmon chapter is IV.24, and Hilda’s own life and death are narrated in the preceding chapter, IV.23; in the older chapter-division of Plummer and earlier editions the same chapters appear, respectively, as IV.22 (Cædmon) and IV.24 (Hilda) — so that a citation of “IV.24” can refer to either episode depending on the edition, and the reader should attend to which numbering an author follows (Colgrave & Mynors 1969, with their concordance to the older divisions). Throughout this collection the Colgrave–Mynors numbering is used: Cædmon at IV.24, Hilda at IV.23.

This placement is itself part of Bede’s meaning. He has just told of the holy abbess and the visions that attended her passing (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969); he turns at once to the great wonder of grace that her house had harboured. “In the monastery of this abbess,” he begins — In huius monasterio abbatissae — and the genitive binds the whole story to Hilda: the miracle of Cædmon happens within her governance, under her rule, and is brought to its fruit by her decision (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede did not write a life of Cædmon as a freestanding saint; he wrote the episode as a sign of what God did in Hilda’s monastery.

The Herdsman Who Could Not Sing

Cædmon, Bede relates, was a man already advanced in years who had lived the secular life until that time, a layman attached to the monastery — by the common understanding of Bede’s account a herdsman, a keeper of the monastery’s cattle — and one who had so completely neglected, or never learned, the art of song that whenever a feast was held and it was agreed that all should sing in turn for the company’s pleasure, he would rise from the table when he saw the harp approaching and go home in shame (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The detail is exact and humanising: the passing of the harp from hand to hand at the feast, each guest expected to take it up and sing, and the old man’s quiet retreat before his turn could come. Bede stresses that Cædmon “had never learned any songs” — nil carminum aliquando didicerat — and that this is why he left (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). His later gift is therefore framed from the first as something he did not possess and could not have acquired by craft.

On the night that became the turning-point, Bede continues, Cædmon had left such a feast and gone out to the byre of the cattle, the care of which had been assigned to him for that night, and there, at the proper hour, he lay down and slept (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The setting — the cattle-stall, the sleeping herdsman — is one that later readers have not failed to compare to the Nativity, though Bede himself draws no such comparison; he reports only the place and the sleep.

The Dream and the Command to Sing

What follows, Bede tells, came to Cædmon in a dream. A man stood beside him, Bede relates, and greeted him by name: “Cædmon, sing me something” — Caedmon, canta mihi aliquid (Bede, HE IV.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Cædmon answered that he could not sing, and that it was for this very reason that he had left the feast and come away. The figure replied, “Nevertheless, you shall sing to me” — Attamen mihi cantare habes. Asked by Cædmon what he should sing, the man said: “Sing of the beginning of created things” — Canta principium creaturarum (Bede, HE IV.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). And then, Bede relates, Cædmon at once began to sing in praise of God the Creator verses he had never heard, of which Bede gives the sense.

It must be held clearly, as the methodology of this repository requires, that this is reported as Bede’s narrative claim and not asserted here as an independent historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Bede presents the dream, the heavenly visitant, and the sudden gift of song as what was related of Cædmon in his monastery; the present account reports them as Bede’s testimony — “Bede relates that,” “according to Bede’s account” — and pins the whole to HE IV.24 rather than vouching for the wonder itself. Bede is himself careful: he writes that Cædmon received the gift gratis, freely, by the gift of God and not learned from men, and he sets the marvel forward precisely as a work of divine grace (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The Orthodox reader receives it as Bede gives it — as a charism, attested in the source, to be weighed as the source’s claim.

Cædmon’s Hymn

The verses Cædmon sang in the dream are the poem now called Cædmon’s Hymn: nine lines in praise of the Creator, beginning in the West Saxon form Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard — “Now we must praise the Guardian of the kingdom of heaven” — and going on to bless “the Measurer’s might and his mind’s purpose,” “the work of the Father of glory,” the eternal Lord who made first for the children of men heaven as a roof and then the middle-earth, middangeard, mankind’s Guardian (the Old English text and a literal rendering in Mitchell & Robinson, A Guide to Old English; for the poem’s standing in the corpus, see Godden & Lapidge, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature). Bede himself reproduces the Hymn only in a Latin paraphrase, and he prefaces it with a caution that has become famous in its own right: this, he says, is the sensus, the sense, of the verses, “but not the actual order of the words that he sang in his sleep; for it is not possible to translate verse, however well composed, literally from one language into another without some loss of beauty and dignity” (Bede, HE IV.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede gives the meaning and warns the reader that the meaning is not the music.

The significance of these nine lines is difficult to overstate. Cædmon’s Hymn is the earliest documented and securely datable poem in the English language — composed at Whitby during Hilda’s abbacy, that is between her foundation of the house and her death (c. 657–680) — and Cædmon is therefore the first named poet in the whole history of English (O’Donnell, Cædmon’s Hymn, 2005; Godden & Lapidge, eds., Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature). Where the great body of Old English verse — Beowulf above all — comes down to us anonymous and undatable, here, uniquely, is a poem with a named author, a place, and a span of years. It marks the moment at which the inherited Germanic craft of alliterative verse, the diction of the mead-hall and the harp, was turned to the praise of the Christian God; and Bede presents that turning as having begun in a cattle-byre at Hilda’s monastery (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. 1991).

The Question of the Surviving Text

A genuine scholarly problem attends the survival of the poem, and honesty requires that it be set down. Bede, as noted, gives only a Latin paraphrase. The Old English text of the Hymn that readers know — in its Northumbrian and West Saxon recensions — survives not in Bede’s own composition but as a vernacular addition entered in the margins or body of manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History: the Northumbrian text appears, most famously, in the eighth-century “Moore” Bede (Cambridge University Library Kk.5.16) and the “Leningrad” or St Petersburg Bede, and West Saxon copies accompany later manuscripts of the Old English translation of Bede (O’Donnell, Cædmon’s Hymn, 2005). The relationship of these surviving vernacular verses to the words Cædmon actually sang is [Disputed: whether the Old English text preserved in the manuscripts represents Cædmon’s own composition, faithfully transmitted, or was instead retro-translated back into the vernacular from Bede’s Latin paraphrase by a later scribe, is debated — O’Donnell (Cædmon’s Hymn, 2005) surveys the question and the manuscript evidence; the difficulty is intrinsic to the case, since Bede himself supplies only a Latin paraphrase and expressly warns that verse cannot be rendered word-for-word across languages without loss (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969)]. What can be said without controversy is that the poem is bound to Bede’s narrative from the earliest manuscripts, that it is composed in correct and accomplished Old English alliterative metre, and that it is by any reckoning among the oldest English poems we possess (O’Donnell 2005; Godden & Lapidge, eds., Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature).

Hilda’s Discernment

For this collection the decisive moment of the story is not the dream but what was done with it, and that was Hilda’s doing. When Cædmon woke, Bede relates, he remembered all that he had sung and added more verses in the same manner; in the morning he came to the vilicus, the steward or reeve set over him, and told him of the gift he had received, and the steward brought him to the abbess (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Then, Bede continues, Hilda — praesente abbatissa — bade him in the presence of many learned men tell his dream and recite his song, that they might examine and judge of what kind and whence it was; and it was the unanimous verdict of all that “the grace of God had been conferred on him by the Lord” — gratia ei esset divinitus concessa (Bede, HE IV.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). To test the gift further, they expounded to him a passage of sacred history or doctrine and asked him, if he could, to render it into verse; he agreed, went away, and returned in the morning having turned what he had been given into excellent poetry (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

This examination is an act of abbatial discernment, and Bede attributes the decision to Hilda. It was she who, having heard the herdsman’s account, discerned that the grace of God was upon him — that the gift was no trick of the harp nor learned art but a true charism from God — and she who, on that judgment, received him into the community as a brother (in societatem cottidie fratrum) and ordered that he be instructed in the whole sequence of sacred history (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The pattern is the classic monastic one: the spiritual mother who tests a gift, recognises its source, and channels it into the life and obedience of the house (on the discernment proper to the spiritual elder and the monastic governance within which it operates, see Monasticism). Cædmon did not appoint himself a poet of the Church; Hilda, by her authority, made him one (on the scope of that authority, see A Woman of Authority).

The Fruit of the Gift

Once received and instructed, Bede relates, Cædmon turned the whole of what he learned into the sweetest verse, “recalling it all, like some clean animal chewing the cud,” and turning it into the most melodious song; and so pleasing was the sound that his very teachers became his hearers (Bede, HE IV.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede lists the matter of his songs: the creation of the world and the origin of the human race and the whole story of Genesis; the going-out of Israel from Egypt and the entry into the promised land; many other stories of holy Scripture; the Lord’s Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven; the coming of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of the apostles; and the terror of the judgment to come, the horror of hell, and the sweetness of the kingdom of heaven, with which last he laboured especially to draw men away from the love of sin (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede is careful to add that all this Cædmon did by the gift freely given him, never by human teaching, so that he could neither make nor wished to make any trivial or idle song, but only what pertained to religion; and that, though many afterward among the English tried to compose religious verse, none could equal him, for he had learned the art of song not from men nor through a man but had received it freely by divine aid (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

So Cædmon stands, in Bede’s account, as the founder of a whole tradition of Christian vernacular poetry — the first of the English to sing the Scriptures in his own tongue, and the head of all who came after (Mayr-Harting 1991; Godden & Lapidge, eds., Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature). The poems Bede lists do not survive under Cædmon’s name; the body of Old English biblical verse later gathered under the label “Cædmonian” (the Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan of the Junius manuscript) cannot in fact be ascribed to him, and the attribution is conventional rather than historical (O’Donnell 2005; Godden & Lapidge, eds., Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature). What survives demonstrably as Cædmon’s is the Hymn alone.

A Holy Death

Bede closes the chapter with Cædmon’s death, and the closing belongs to the same key of grace. Cædmon, Bede relates, having served God in the monastic life, was granted to foresee the hour of his own departure: feeling his end approach, he asked to be brought to the part of the house where the dying were cared for, conversed cheerfully with the brethren there, asked whether they had the Eucharist within, received the holy mysteries, and then, asking how near the hour was for the brothers to rise for the night office and being told it was not far off, said, “Good; let us await that hour” — and signing himself with the cross, he laid his head on the pillow, fell briefly asleep, and so ended his life in silence (Bede, HE IV.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede presents the death as of a piece with the life: a tongue that had been opened by grace to sing the praise of God closed at last in peace, having received the Body and Blood of the Lord, at the threshold of the Church’s prayer. The gift that began in a dream in the cattle-byre ended at the hour of the night office, and Bede frames the whole as the work of God in the monastery of the abbess Hilda (Bede, HE IV.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The Cædmon narrative at IV.24 [= IV.22 in the older Plummer division]: the herdsman who left the feast, the dream and the command Canta principium creaturarum, the Hymn given in Latin paraphrase with Bede’s caution that verse cannot be translated literally, the examination before Hilda and the verdict that “the grace of God had been conferred on him,” his reception into the community and instruction in sacred history, the matter of his songs, and his holy death. Hilda’s own life and death at IV.23 [= IV.24 older].)
O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multimedia Study, Edition and Archive. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. (The manuscript transmission of the Hymn — the Moore and Leningrad/St Petersburg Bedes and the Northumbrian and West Saxon recensions — and the debate over the relation of the surviving Old English text to Cædmon’s own words and to Bede’s Latin paraphrase.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Cædmon and the conversion of Germanic poetic tradition to Christian use; Whitby in the Northumbrian church.)
Godden, Malcolm, and Michael Lapidge, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Cited generally for Cædmon’s place in the Old English poetic corpus and the conventional, non-historical character of the “Cædmonian” attributions.)
Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English. Oxford: Blackwell. (Cited generally for the Old English text and a literal translation of Cædmon’s Hymn.)