The Nurturing of Learning

Beyond the single famous story of Cædmon stands a larger and more sober achievement of Hilda’s Whitby: it was a school of the Church. Bede records that the house was so given to the study of Scripture and the works of righteousness that many of its members proved fit for holy orders, and that no fewer than five men trained under Hilda went on to become bishops — Bosa, Ætla, Oftfor, John of Beverley, and Wilfrid II — every one of them, in Bede’s judgment, of singular merit and holiness. This file sets out that record as Bede gives it, the character of the double monastery as a centre of clerical formation, and what Hilda’s seedbed of bishops shows of her formative authority in the making of the English Church.

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

The Witness of Bede

The testimony stands in the chapter Bede devotes to Hilda herself: HE IV.23 in the Colgrave–Mynors numbering — which, as the companion file notes, appears as IV.24 in the older Plummer division, the inverse of the Cædmon chapter, so that the reader must attend to which edition an author cites (Bede, HE IV.23, ed. and trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; on the dual numbering, see The Cowherd Poet). Having described Hilda’s rule and the common life of her monastery, Bede writes that she so established there the observance of righteousness, mercy, purity, and the other virtues, but above all of peace and charity, that — after the example of the primitive Church — no one there was rich and no one poor, for all things were held in common and nothing was reckoned anyone’s own (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The allusion is to the Jerusalem community of Acts, where “the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common” (Acts 4:32); Bede sets Hilda’s Whitby deliberately under that apostolic pattern, and it is within that common life that he places its learning (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969).

From this discipline, Bede continues, came the house’s intellectual fruit. So great was Hilda’s prudence, he writes, and so given was the monastery to the study of the Scriptures, that many there were found fit for the work of the altar and for holy orders (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). It is the connection that matters: Bede does not present learning at Whitby as an ornament but as a discipline of the common life that prepared men for the service of the Church. The studious house and the holy house are, in his account, one and the same (on that studious common life, see The Rule and the Life).

The Five Bishops

Bede then makes the claim concrete, and it is an extraordinary one. From this single monastery, he records, five men went on to become bishops, and he names them all and vouches for the holiness of each. They are, in the order Bede gives them, Bosa, who became bishop of York; Ætla, bishop of Dorchester; Oftfor, bishop of the Hwicce (the see later fixed at Worcester); John, known to later ages as John of Beverley, bishop first of Hexham and afterward of York; and Wilfrid — the younger Wilfrid, Wilfrid II, distinguished from his great namesake — who likewise became bishop of York (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Bede adds that of the first, Bosa, he has already spoken, and that all five were men of singular merit and holiness (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). That a single religious house should have furnished five bishops to the English Church within a generation is, by any measure, remarkable evidence of its standing as a centre of formation; it is one of the most striking statistics Bede anywhere reports of an English monastery (Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. 1991).

Of the five, Bede tells us most of Oftfor, and the detail is illuminating for the kind of learning Whitby fostered. After devoting himself, Bede relates, to the reading and observance of the Scriptures in both of Hilda’s monasteries — that is, at Hartlepool and at Whitby — Oftfor pursued a still more perfect way of life by going to Kent, to Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, and afterward even travelled to Rome; returning to Britain, he came to the province of the Hwicce and there, in time, was made their bishop (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The notice is precious because it shows Whitby not as an isolated Northumbrian house but as one feeding into the wider learned network of the English Church — and, through Theodore and the Canterbury school, into the Mediterranean learning that Theodore and Hadrian had brought to Kent (Bede, HE IV.23; Mayr-Harting 1991). Whitby formed a man; Canterbury and Rome perfected him; and the English Church received a bishop. The career traces the very circuitry of clerical education in the age of the conversion.

The Double Monastery as a School of the Church

To grasp how a monastery came to be a seminary of bishops, one must hold in view what Whitby was. It was a double monastery — a house of both monks and nuns under the single rule of an abbess — and such houses, very many of them ruled by women of the royal kindreds, were among the principal centres of learning and of clerical formation in seventh- and early-eighth-century England (Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, 2003; Mayr-Harting 1991; on the institution itself, The Rule and the Life). The presence of a community of monks within the double house meant that the abbess governed men who were, or who became, in holy orders, and that the study of Scripture pursued under her rule was at the same time a preparation of clergy. The bishops Bede names were formed in this setting: men who learned the Scriptures in Hilda’s house, lived its common life, and went out from it to the altar and the episcopate (Bede, HE IV.23; Yorke 2003).

Here a careful distinction must be drawn, and drawn even-handedly, for the modern reader is apt either to inflate or to miss the point. That Hilda formed five bishops does not mean, and must not be made to mean, that she exercised any sacramental or ordaining office: an abbess did not and could not ordain, and the consecration of these men to the episcopate was the act of bishops, not of Hilda (Yorke 2003; on the scope and limits of abbatial authority, A Woman of Authority). What the record attests is something distinct and not less significant — a formative authority: the authority of the spiritual mother and teacher under whose governance and instruction the future leaders of the Church were shaped. The prestige and reach of the great royal double monasteries, and of the abbesses who ruled them, lay precisely in this work of education and formation, and it is in that sphere, not in the sphere of orders, that Hilda’s making of bishops belongs (Yorke 2003; Mayr-Harting 1991). The honest account neither projects a priestly role onto her nor diminishes the real and considerable authority that the formation of five bishops represents (on the wider tradition of women’s ministries in the Church, see Women in Orthodoxy).

A Seedbed of the English Church

Seen in this light, Hilda’s Whitby was one of the nurseries of the English Church’s leadership. In a Church only two or three generations converted, whose hierarchy had largely to be built from the ground, the houses that could form learned and holy clergy were of the first importance, and Whitby was conspicuous among them (Mayr-Harting 1991; Yorke 2003). The men Hilda raised governed major sees — York above all, the northern metropolis, held in succession by Bosa and by Wilfrid II, both her alumni, with John of Beverley between and after them at Hexham and York (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The point is not merely that Whitby produced clergy but that it produced the governing clergy: the men who sat in the chief chairs of the northern Church had been formed in the house of a woman. Bede, who reports this without the least embarrassment and with evident admiration, treats it as one of the chief glories of Hilda’s abbacy (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; on Bede’s portrait and its purposes, Bede on Hilda).

It is worth recalling that Hilda formed these men across the very years of the Church’s struggle over the date of Easter and the Roman and Irish observances — the controversy that came to its head at the Synod of Whitby in 664, held in her own monastery. Hilda herself had been formed in the Irish tradition of Aidan and Lindisfarne; the bishops who went out from her house served the Roman order that the Synod established (Bede, HE III.25; IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991). Her seedbed thus straddled the two strands of British Christianity, and the clergy it produced carried the learning of both into the settled English Church.

The Literary Fruit: The Whitby Life of Gregory

That Whitby was genuinely a house of letters, and not merely so styled by Bede, is confirmed by a monument of its own making. Within a generation of Hilda’s death, an anonymous monk — or, on some readings, a nun — of Whitby composed the Life of Gregory the Great, the earliest surviving Life of Pope St. Gregory the Dialogist, written at Whitby in the early eighth century (commonly dated c. 704–714) (Colgrave, ed. and trans., The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby, 1968). The work is a real piece of Latin hagiography and learning, attesting both the literary capacity of the community and its devotion to Gregory, the pope who had sent the mission to the English, and to the Northumbrian royal saints whose memory the house preserved (Colgrave 1968). It is independent testimony that the studious character Bede ascribes to Whitby was a fact of the house’s life and outlived its foundress: the monastery that had discerned a poet and formed five bishops also produced the first biographer of the apostle of the English (on this text, see The Whitby Life of Gregory). Whitby’s learning, in other words, has two witnesses — Bede’s report and the community’s own surviving book — and they agree.

What It Shows of Hilda

The record of the five bishops, set beside the discernment of Cædmon, fills out the portrait of Hilda as a fosterer of souls and of learning. The two achievements are of a piece: the same governance that recognised and formed an unlettered herdsman’s gift of song formed also the lettered men who would govern the Church. Bede frames both as the fruit of her prudence and of the disciplined, scriptural, common life she established after the apostolic pattern (Bede, HE IV.23–24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). For the Orthodox reader the figure that emerges is a familiar and venerable one — the spiritual mother whose house is a place of formation, whose authority is exercised in the shaping and sending-out of others, and whose own holiness is measured partly by the holiness of those she raised. That five of them became bishops, and that all five were remembered as men of singular merit, is Bede’s measure of what Hilda built (Bede, HE IV.23; Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Mayr-Harting 1991).

See Also

References

  • Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Hilda and Whitby at IV.23 [= IV.24 in the older Plummer division]: the common life “after the example of the primitive Church” with all things held in common; the study of the Scriptures and many found fit for holy orders; the five bishops named — Bosa of York, Ætla of Dorchester, Oftfor of the Hwicce, John [of Beverley] of Hexham and York, and Wilfrid II of York — all “of singular merit and holiness”; Oftfor’s study under Archbishop Theodore at Canterbury and his journey to Rome. The Synod of Whitby and the Easter controversy at III.25.)
  • Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Whitby as a centre of learning and clerical formation; the place of the double monasteries and the Canterbury school of Theodore and Hadrian in the education of the early English clergy.)
  • Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (The double monasteries and royal abbesses as centres of learning and clerical formation; the distinction between an abbess’s formative authority and the sacramental office she did not hold.)
  • Colgrave, Bertram, ed. and trans. The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968. (The anonymous Whitby Vita Gregorii, c. 704–714, as the literary fruit and standing witness of the community’s learning.)