St Hild at Whitby
Hild founded an abbey that poured out a stream of priests and bishops for the revitalised English Church.
?657-680
Whitby Abbey overlooking the town and the River Esk.
Introduction
Hild or Hilda was a seventh-century Northumbrian princess who at the age of thirty-three became a nun. Taught by St Aidan, she was one of the early English Church’s most respected figures and was given the care of a monastery for men and women at Hartlepool, moving to Whitby in about 657. There she trained clergy to preach the gospel and lead church services for Christians all over the kingdoms of the English.
WHEN she had for some years governed this monastery [Hartlepool],* wholly intent upon establishing a regular life, it happened that she also undertook either to build or to arrange a monastery in the place called Streaneshalch [Whitby], which work she industriously performed; for she put this monastery under the same regular discipline as she had done the former; and taught there the strict observance of justice, piety, chastity, and other virtues, and particularly of peace and charity; so that, after the example of the primitive church, no person was there rich, and none poor, all being in common to all, and none having any property.
Her prudence was so great, that not only indifferent persons, but even kings and princes, as occasion offered, asked and received her advice; she obliged those who were under her direction to attend so much to reading of the Holy Scriptures, and to exercise themselves so much in works of justice, that many might be there found fit for ecclesiastical duties, and to serve at the altar.*
* Hild was appointed to the monastery in what is now Old Hartlepool in 649, and remained there until 657 or 658, when Aidan encouraged her to move to Whitby. The monastery at Hartlepool (for both men and women, as the monastery at Whitby was) was founded by another remarkable woman, Heiu, the first nun in Northumbria. It would appear that on her arrival Hild found the monastery somewhat lacking in daily discipline, and impressed Aidan by the way she knocked it into shape.
* Bede mentions five bishops trained at Whitby, and an unspecified number of other clergy. Another of Hild’s pupils was the elderly, shy and completely unmusical farm-hand Caedmon: see Caedmon Learns to Sing. Hild also presided — a responsibility more usually left to bishops — over one of the most important councils in the history of the English Church, the Synod of Whitby in 664. See The Synod of Whitby.
