Whitby after Hilda

What became of Hilda’s monastery once she died on 17 November 680: its continued flourishing under the royal abbesses Eanflæd and Ælfflæd, when it produced the Vita Gregorii and served as a royal mausoleum; its destruction in the general Viking devastation of Northumbrian monasticism in the later ninth century; its refoundation as a Benedictine house after the Norman Conquest; and the growth and dispersal of her cult, including the medieval claims that her relics had been translated to Glastonbury and Gloucester. The aim is to follow the house and the cult down the centuries while marking clearly where the record is firm and where it is inference.

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

The Royal Abbesses: Eanflæd and Ælfflæd

Hilda died, Bede records, on 17 November 680, in the sixty-sixth year of her life, after a six-year illness borne without ever ceasing to give thanks to God (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23, ed. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). The chapter is numbered IV.23 in the Colgrave–Mynors edition that is now standard; in the older numbering of Plummer’s edition the same chapter appears as IV.24, and both citations refer to the one passage — a divergence worth noting once, since the literature uses both. Hilda’s death did not end the standing of her house. She was succeeded as abbess by Eanflæd, the widow of King Oswiu of Northumbria and herself the daughter of King Edwin — the very queen who, baptised in the Roman observance, had been the chief partisan of the Roman calculation of Easter in the household conflict that lay behind the Synod of 664 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.25, ed. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003). After Eanflæd, the house passed to her daughter Ælfflæd, whom Hilda herself had raised in the monastery from infancy — for Ælfflæd had been dedicated to God as a child by her father Oswiu in thanksgiving for victory, and brought up under Hilda’s care (Bede, Ecclesiastical History III.24, IV.26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Whitby thus remained, generation upon generation, a house governed by women of the Northumbrian royal line.

Under Ælfflæd the monastery was no diminished thing. It continued as a major centre of learning and as a place of consequence in the affairs of the Northumbrian Church and kingdom (Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003; Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England 1984). Ælfflæd was a figure in church politics in her own right: she was active in the protracted dispute over Bishop Wilfrid, and her intervention is part of the record of the Synod of the Nidd (706), the council that worked toward the final reconciliation of Wilfrid to the Northumbrian church — a settlement in which the abbess of Whitby carried real weight (Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c.650–c.850 1995). That an abbess should appear among the principals of a synod, twenty-six years after Hilda’s death, is itself evidence of the institutional gravity Whitby retained.

A Royal Mausoleum and a House of Letters

Two further things mark Whitby’s importance in the two generations after Hilda. The first is its function as a royal mausoleum. The monastery became a burial place of the Deiran and Northumbrian royal house: the reputed relics of King Edwin — the first Christian king of Northumbria, killed in battle in 633 — were said to rest there, and Oswiu, his queen Eanflæd, and their daughter the abbess Ælfflæd were buried at Whitby (Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003). A house that held the bones of kings and that fostered the cult of a royal saint was woven tightly into the dynastic and devotional life of the kingdom, and this dynastic character is precisely what some scholars hold to be the foundation of its abbesses’ power (Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003).

The second is its standing as a house of letters. It was at Whitby, in the years around 704–714, that an anonymous monk or nun composed the Vita Gregorii, the Life of Pope Gregory the Great — the earliest surviving Life of Gregory, and indeed the earliest extant Life written by an Englishman or Englishwoman (Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003; on the text itself, The Whitby Life of Gregory). That such a work issued from Hilda’s own monastery, within a generation of her death, confirms in concrete form Bede’s report that under her Whitby had been a seedbed of learning and the formation of clergy — the same house that had produced five bishops and the poet Cædmon (Bede, Ecclesiastical History IV.23–24, ed. Colgrave & Mynors 1969; on the poet, The Cowherd Poet). The continuity from Hilda’s school of souls to the Vita Gregorii is the clearest single line by which her legacy of learning can be traced forward.

The Viking Destruction

The Anglo-Saxon monastery at Whitby did not survive the ninth century. The Danish incursions of the later ninth century — the campaigns of the Great Heathen Army, which landed in 865 and from 866 fell upon Northumbria, took York, and broke the Northumbrian kingdom — devastated the monastic life of the north (Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 1971). The great houses of Northumbrian Christianity were swept away or abandoned in this period: Lindisfarne, raided as early as 793 and finally deserted, is the type of the whole catastrophe, and Whitby shared the fate of its kind (Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England 1971; Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989). By the end of the ninth century Hilda’s monastery had ceased to exist as a living community.

It is important, in keeping with the discipline of the record, to be exact about what is known and what is inferred here. [Disputed: precisely when and how the Anglo-Saxon monastery at Whitby came to an end is not documented. No surviving source records the destruction of Whitby specifically; the end of the house is inferred from the general and well-attested Viking devastation of Northumbrian monasticism in the later ninth century (Stenton, *Anglo-Saxon England*, 3rd ed., 1971), so that the date and manner of Whitby's end are a reasonable inference from the regional pattern rather than a recorded event.] The conclusion that the house was destroyed is secure as a matter of regional history; the particulars are not on record, and the honest course is to say so.

The Benedictine Refoundation

The site lay derelict for roughly two centuries. After the Norman Conquest, about the year 1078, it was refounded as a Benedictine monastery: the refounder was Reinfrid, a former soldier — by tradition one who had served in William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north — who became a monk and gathered a community on the old site, under the patronage of the Norman lord William de Percy (Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain 1000–1300 1994). This refoundation is the origin of the medieval Whitby Abbey whose ruins stand today.

A distinction must be drawn here plainly, because it is constantly confused. The dramatic ruins on the East Cliff above the town — the gaunt skeleton of the abbey church that crowns the headland and that draws visitors and has fed the popular imagination — are the remains of the later medieval Benedictine abbey, the church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not of Hilda’s monastery (Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain 1000–1300 1994; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003). Hilda’s seventh-century house has not survived above ground at all: its buildings have left no standing structure, and what is known of its physical fabric has been recovered only by excavation, which has uncovered traces of the Anglo-Saxon settlement on the headland (Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses 2003; Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989). To stand before the medieval ruin and imagine Hilda, Cædmon, and the Synod of 664 within those very walls is an honest mistake, but a mistake: those stones are four to seven centuries younger than the abbess they commemorate, raised by a different order, in a different rite, upon ground her house had once held.

The Cult and the Disputed Relics

Hilda’s cult is attested early. Her feast on 17 November appears in the calendars and martyrologies, and her memory was kept across Anglo-Saxon England as one of the best-loved of the native saints (Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989). With the cult came the characteristic medieval phenomenon of competing claims to her relics — claims that must be pinned to their attestation rather than received as historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The fate of Hilda’s remains after the Viking destruction is, in plain truth, unknown. Into that uncertainty stepped the great southern houses with their assertions. In the earlier tenth century Glastonbury claimed that relics of Hilda had been translated there — the translation being associated with the patronage of King Edmund (reigned 939–946), in the period when the West Saxon kings and the reforming abbeys gathered northern relics southward (Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989). Later Gloucester, too, claimed to possess her relics (Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989). These rival claims are typical of the age, in which prestigious houses asserted the possession of a saint’s body — sometimes the same saint’s — to enhance their standing and draw pilgrims, and they cannot all be true. They are best understood as later medieval assertions, made generations or centuries after Hilda’s death and after the destruction of her own house, and not as a secure record of where her bones went; the relics’ actual fate is uncertain (Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England 1989). The discipline here is the same as for any relic-translation claim: report what the sources assert, name the source, and do not convert a medieval claim into a historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What is not in doubt is the endurance of her memory. Churches were dedicated to St Hilda, and her name attached to places across the north and beyond; “St Hild” and “St Hilda” dedications carried her cult through the medieval and into the modern period. That a foundation such as St Hilda’s College, Oxford, should bear her name in the nineteenth century — a women’s college honouring the great abbess and patron of learning — is a late and secular echo, but a real one, of a veneration that began within living memory of her death and never wholly faded (on the modern reception of that legacy, Legacy and Assessment; on her veneration in the Orthodox Church today, The Orthodox Reception).

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’s death on 17 November 680 and her six-year illness at IV.23 [= IV.24 in Plummer’s numbering]; Edwin, Oswiu, Eanflæd and the Easter dispute at III.25; the dedication and rearing of Ælfflæd at III.24 and IV.26; the five bishops and Cædmon at IV.23–24.)
  • Yorke, Barbara. Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses. London: Continuum, 2003. (The royal abbesses Eanflæd and Ælfflæd; Whitby as royal mausoleum and house of letters; the Vita Gregorii; the dynastic character of the house; the distinction between the Anglo-Saxon and the medieval site.)
  • Cubitt, Catherine. Anglo-Saxon Church Councils c.650–c.850. London: Leicester University Press, 1995. (Ælfflæd and the Synod of the Nidd, 706, in the reconciliation of Wilfrid.)
  • Fell, Christine. Women in Anglo-Saxon England. London: British Museum Publications, 1984. (Whitby’s continued standing as a centre of women’s monastic learning.)
  • Rollason, David. Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. (The early cult and feast of Hilda; the royal relics at Whitby; the competing tenth-century and later claims of Glastonbury and Gloucester to her relics; the dispersal of northern relics southward.)
  • Stenton, Frank. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. (The Great Heathen Army from 865–866, the breaking of Northumbria, and the Viking devastation of northern monasticism within which Whitby’s end is inferred.)
  • Burton, Janet. Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain 1000–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (The Benedictine refoundation of Whitby c. 1078 by Reinfrid under William de Percy; the medieval abbey whose ruins survive.)