In Our Time - St Hilda

Episode Date: April 5, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 7th century saint, Hilda, or Hild as she would have been known then, wielded great religious and political influence in a volatile era. The monasteries she led in the north of England were known for their literacy and learning and produced great future leaders, including 5 bishops. The remains of a later abbey still stand in Whitby on the site of the powerful monastery she headed there. We gain most of our knowledge of Hilda's life from The Venerable Bede who wrote that she was 66 years in the world, living 33 years in the secular life and 33 dedicated to God. She was baptised alongside the king of Northumbria and with her royal connections, she was a formidable character. Bede writes: “Her prudence was so great that not only indifferent persons but even kings and princes asked and received her advice”. Hild and her Abbey at Whitby hosted the Synod which decided when Easter would be celebrated, following a dispute between different traditions. Her achievements are all the more impressive when we consider that Christianity was still in its infancy in Northumbria. So what contribution did she make to establishing Christianity in the north of England? How unusual was it for a woman to be such an important figure in the Church at the time? How did her double monastery of both men and women operate on a day-to-day basis? And how did she manage to convert a farmhand into England's first vernacular poet?With John Blair, Fellow in History at The Queen's College, Oxford; Rosemary Cramp, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at Durham University; Sarah Foot, Professor of Early Medieval History at Sheffield University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, today we'll be discussing the 7th century St Hilda, or Hild, as she would have been known then. She wielded considerable religious and political influence in a volatile era.

The monasteries she led in the north of England were known for their literacy and learning and produced great future leaders, including five bishops. The remains of a later abbey still stand in Whitby on the site of the powerful double monastery she headed there. We gained most of our knowledge of Hilda's life from the venerable Bede, who wrote that she was 66 years in the world, living 33 years in the secular life and 33 dedicated to God.

She was baptised alongside her kinsman, Edwin, the king of Northumbria, and Bede writes, her prudence was so great that not only indifferent persons, but even kings and princes, asked and received her advice. Hild and her abbey at Whitby hosted the famous synod which decided when Easter would be celebrated following a dispute between different traditions.

Her achievements are all the more impressive when we consider that Christianity was still in its infancy in Northumbria. So how do we weigh the contribution she made to the establishment of Christianity in the north of England? How unusual was it for a woman to be such an important figure in the church at this time?

And how did her double monastery, both men and women, operate on a day-to-day basis and how did she manage to convert a farmhand into England's first vernacular poet? Join me to discuss the life and works of St. Hilda at John Blair, following history at Queen's College Oxford, Rosemary Cramp, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at Durham University, and Sarah Foote, Professor of Early medieval history at Sheffield University. John Blair, can you give us an overview of what was going on politically and generally in the early 7th century in Northumbria? Well, it's a time when English.

society was changing very rapidly and very fundamentally, and so was kingship. We don't know much about English kingship before 600, and it may have been quite complex, but we can say for certain that there were fundamental changes which were causing the emergence of kingship over very large areas and more stable dynasties, and also the accumulation of enormous amounts of wealth in the hands of royal families, as we can see most spectacularly in the Sutton Hoo's ship burial in Suffolk. In the case of Northumbria, we can see the emergence of two kingdoms, essentially what's now Yorkshire, the Kingdom of Deira,

and everything to the north of that, going up well into modern Scotland, into Lothian, the Kingdom of Benissia. And at the time we're talking about, both of those had quite recently been brought under English control from the British kingdoms, which they'd evidently been. and the dynasties of Dera and Benicia were competing for supremacy. It's a time when there was intense rivalry, often very ruthless rivalry between dynasties, when the members of families that were not in the ascendancy

had to go into exile to avoid being killed by the temporarily dominant family. And that was a context in which princesses and princes of families temporarily out of power necessarily travelled very widely, went to other courts elsewhere in England or even in Francia. So we're talking about a very powerful part of, let's call it Britain, and they're pushing north into the British land,

and they're pushing west into what was British. So when you say English, you mean the people of Venetia and Dera, that's the way you're using English at this moment. I mean the people who consider themselves and identified themselves with the people who had settled on the east coast of England in the 5th century from Scandinavia and northern Germany and who came to see themselves as Angles and Saxons

as distinct from the existing inhabitants of Britain. That's right, I was just clearing that up because people might have worried about your juxtaposing English and British in that particular way. So they're expanding, they're powerful, they're very wealthy, and they have these royal families. Can you tell us how Hilda fitted in to, when I say these royal families, because there's more than one here,

can you tell us how Hilda fitted into that? Hild was a member of the Royal Family of Deiara, which was dominant in Northumbria from the 610s to the 630s. When she was growing up, her great-uncle Edwin was king of Northumbria, and she would have been very much associated with royal circles in Northumbria itself. But also she would have been connected with the other royal families, with whom the Northumbrian dynasties had alliances. And Bede tells us that she spent some time at the Court of East Anglia very soon after the Sutton Hubertal was deposited,

and there she learnt about the monasticism that was becoming fashionable from Frankish directions. I think there's one important point to be made about these dynasties, which is that it's very much an East Coast society. If you look up the eastern coast of England, going northwards from Kent to Essex to East Anglia, to Lindsay to Northumbria, we can see the emergence of a series of powerful heartlands

that were connected in some ways much more with each other than they were with territory further to the West and also connected across the channel. It's been shown by trials of a replica of the Sutton Hoo's ship that one could get from York to Canterbury in two days, which is really quite a short time. And I think one should imagine Hilders belonging to a community of very high-status people, many of them female,

who were often travelling, up and down the coast and across the channel. Thank you very much. Rosemary Cramp, what sources do we have for the life of Hild? Well, we have some sources that are quite slight, like calendars which record her death in 680 and the anniversary of it on November the 17th. But on the whole, the major source, as you said at the beginning,

is Bede's ecclesiastical history. And it is there. Probably he was using a life of Hild, which is now lost because he gives a whole chapter to this. But it is there he talks about the really difficult circumstances into which she was born. Her father was in exile. Herrick was in exile among the Britons at that stage

and was poison there. We don't quite know how. And her mother had a dream. And this dream was that she was looking feverishly and for her husband. She'd lost him. And she looked and looked and looked couldn't find him.

And then she looked down and under her gown, she saw a wonderful jewel, almost like a necklace, perhaps, or a jewel. And as she gazed at it, the light seemed to illuminate the whole of Britain. Bede does say Britain. He doesn't just say England. And that, of course, was Hild and the way in which she illuminated the whole, at least, of her kingdom.

Bede was writing quite close to the time of Hild, wasn't it? I mean, she had died in six hours. and it's not very long afterwards that he's writing this great history. No, he would have met people. He would have met people who had known her. I mean, she herself bridges things because she was born a pagan and lived as a pagan until she was 13. One forgets how near all these things are.

But when she died, of course, Christiani was well established. So yes, he would have met people who knew her. How full would you say his account? His account of her... I mean, there's so much to say about this. Rosam McRampton, you know so much about it. People fear that it's mere hagiography in certain cases. Where does hagiography end and biography begin?

Well, you have to use your hagiography and they relate it to what you know. I mean, I don't think, as he lived so near to that period, he could have really said things that people would have said, goodness, that's absolutely wrong. But nevertheless, I think that his view of Hild was obviously coloured by what. what a saint should be.

What were the main characteristics he brought out in his view of her? His view of her was that she was, well, well organised, obviously, but mainly that she was wise and kind. Everybody called her mother, it was said, and she was somebody who everybody could say was pious, kind, and accessible. Sariford, John Blas talked about the one and Rosemann. as is taking it up the way that Hild began as a pagan and then she ends as someone who was on route to being a saint, as it were. But there was a great takeoff of Christianity in England

in the 7th century. Can you describe how fast that happened and why you think it happened so very quickly? When Edwin was in exile among the East Anglians, he first encountered Christianity at the Court of Redwald. And when he regains his kingdom and the Roman missionary Paulinus comes with him. Edwin clearly thinks that there's enough in this religion that he might be able to persuade his followers to adopt it, but instead of saying I think we should believe this and you should do it

too, he decides to try and effect this change by consensus. And Bid tells us a long story about how he calls a council of all his leading men, some of them warriors and some of them priests in the old religion. And he says, listen to the teachings of this man and Paul Linus

explains the tenets of the faith and then he says, so what do you think about this? and the high priest of the religion, Coifie, talks about how he feels that everything that he's invested in his whole life has been in vain when he listens to the teachings of the Christian religion and the promise of eternity. And then one of the secular Thanes at the court stands up and says, I think this makes sense to us. Think about it from the point of view of our lifestyle. Imagine you're in the King's Court and it's winter and we're feasting and we're sitting in his hall and outside it's snowing and the wind is blown. and inside it's warm and light and we're all happy together. Into the hall flies a sparrow.

And just briefly, from the winter outside, he comes into this place of light and peace and warmth and calm. And then he flies out again into the night and his gorn. We know nothing about what came before us. We're in the windy, snowy wilderness. We know nothing about what will come after us. But if we follow the teachings of this man, we're given the hope of an eternal life and a life.

afterwards and that seems to me to be a reason to subscribe to this new faith. The first great image and one of the greatest images in English literature. Can I just come back to John Blair for a moment, still trying to Esper once more, why the aristocracy took it up? Could it be anything to do with the, as it were, the ancestry that came to them? I mean, after all, Paulinus had come from Canterbury, he'd been sent by Rome, there was an idea of tradition and massive history was that. Did that have an impact on Edmund?

Did he think he was joining up with some great ancestral empire? Well, I agree with everything that Sarah has said, but I do think there is also a wider context, which is that, of course, Britain had been the periphery of the Roman Empire, certainly, as viewed from the Southern Mediterranean, the English were very much... You're talking about the Roman military empire, before we get to the Roman ecclesiastical empire.

Indeed, indeed so, yes. And viewed from the point of view of the Roman ecclesiastical empire, viewed from Italy or even from the south of France. The Anglo-Saxons are very much at the back of beyond. There is much more survival in southern Europe of Roman ways of life, even though still very reduced. There is some survival of cities and of city life and of bishoprics and cathedrals.

There's much more continuity, and it's a more complicated world. And as the people of England became more and more aware of this, it must have seemed very exciting. Now, one interesting thing is that just at the time that Christianity, which of course is a Mediterranean religion becomes popular in England, so do Mediterranean dress fashions. We start to see Roman or Byzantine Jewry

appearing in rich graves in the early 7th century. And although I think everything that Sarah has said is right, I also think that this sense of reconnection with what had once been a great power and a great civilisation now in some ways rebuilding itself was terribly important to the English. Rosemary you were coming in. I was just going to say that, of course, a certain amount of pressure was put from outside by letters and gifts and things like that,

but also talking about Roman things in Northumbria, if one knows the site of Edwin's palace and the palace is at Yevring, there is perhaps the best example of a link with the Roman past in this great amphitheatre in which they gathered, to look like a Roman amphitheatre there. And so I think even in the buildings and in the sites, there was the recreation of a link to the Roman amphitheatre. past and to the continent.

Can we also remember that there's another whole tradition behind Northumbrian Christianity, which doesn't come from Rome and the Mediterranean at all, but comes from Ireland via Iona. And Hild's place in this story is significant in that many of her personal contacts are with the

Ionian mission and specifically with Aden and his mission to Lindisfarne. And some of her introduction to Christianity has been through people who come from that rather different context. Can you tell us then, John, about what we know about her decision, Hill's decision to take up the monastic life. She doesn't take up monastic life until she's 33. What happened in those 20 years to put her in that direction?

Well, one formative influence was the Court of East Anglia where she went and where her sister, in fact, was the queen or had been the queen. And that dynastic link, in turn, opened up a monastic one because her sister had trained as a nun in one of the grand. in one of the great Frankish monasteries near Paris along the River Seine and Hild, according to Bede, was enthusiastic enough about it to want to take up that career and she was just about to go to France but then she was invited back to Northumbria by Aden and set up... One of the Irish monks. Yes.

A very powerful and important one. Indeed. We'd come in when after the influence of Polinus had lapsed and he'd taken it up again and it was the Irish drive which drove Christianity forward from then on. Absolutely. Aidan was the first successful bishop sent by Iona to Northumbria. I think there's an important point that comes out of that.

People sometimes talk about the Celtic Church as against the Roman Church. Now, I think that the phrase Celtic Church is one that ought to be absolutely banned because there's no such thing as the Celtic Church. For a start, the British and Irish churches were very different, often would have been mutual incomprehension or indeed dislike. And secondly, there were individual Irish churches, as there were individual ecclesiastical traditions in Italy and in Gaul. But look at somebody like Hild, who was exposed to both of those,

and grew up with both of those as very important forces in her making. One really can't see her as fitting into either of those camps. No, but they're both there. But it is useful to say that, as Sarah said, and as Rosemary, I think, is not, that the Irish did come in extremely powerfully as a church from a different source, when the Roman mission, even though Edwin had been, baptized had failed in the sense it grounded to a halt

and the Irish came in and Aiden was the one who plucked, hilled out of East Anglia and she went a house on the weir first, a very small house, let's put that at once outside after the year, she went to Hartlepool which is the first religious house founded for women in the north of England as I understand it. Can you tell us what she did there, Sarah Foote?

She had been living in a community of women on the river Weir for a year since she left East Anglia and then she was invited by Aidan to go to Hartlepool, which Hugh, Hayu, had founded as the first religious house for women in the north. We don't know a great deal about what kind of rule of life there might have been there when Hayu was running the house,

but what B tells us is that what Hill did with Hartlepool is to set it in order and to organise a regular way of life for the community there, a community that was almost certainly of both men and women. This notion of the double house, which is one of the distinctive characteristics of Anglo-Saxon-Crolet. Christianity, but something that's shared also with Frankish monasteries.

And after just a few years, she then went on to Whitby, which is massively associated in the public memory and imagination, Rosembury Cramp. There seems to be some confusion in Bede whether or not she founded it, whether she arrived there and built up something that was there. But can you tell us about this monastery and what she did there and why it figures so largely in his history and in her life? Well, I think he was quite right, perhaps, to be ambiguous to it, whether she either went to found or to set in order something,

because recently in the archaeological investigations, which haven't yet been published, they have found very much to the south, about 120 yards to the south of the monastery church, a large cemetery of men, women and children, which could date back to before Hill came. It could well be there was some form of religious, community there and she gave it a regular rule as she had done at Hartlepool. And one has to

remember about these monasteries. That's why you get the success of Christianity, because they are stable fokey in the landscape instead of a bishop travelling round with a king. You've got these folkies which are powerhouses for learning, teaching, economic exchange and so on. So there'll be a multitude of buildings there all going into the centre of the least accessible part of the monastery, which would be the church and the main liturgical buildings. John Blair, let's come back to this wealth, the issue of wealth, which you, a phrase you use, there was a superabundance of wealth at the time. Where did that superabundance come from, and why was it directed at the monasteries,

and how was it directed at Whitby? Where it came from, I think, is a combination of, on the one-hand plunder, and on the other hand, trade, especially overseas trade. These powerful dynasties were expanding, particularly the expense of the British, but also at the expense of other Anglo-Saxon groups, an amassing tribute, booty, slaves, no doubt, plunder of various kinds.

That's, as it were, looking westwards. Looking eastwards and southwards, though, they were also expanding in terms of overseas trade. And one reason that some of this jewellery is coming in is no doubt because rich objects were coming into the English kingdoms in exchange for whatever was going out, and we don't know very much about what was going out. Now, how does that work get organised?

It's worth remembering that this is really a society without towns. When Hild died in 680, a small number of specialised coastal trading emporia were just coming into existence. But apart from that, the towns were the monasteries. Can I ask you about the rule? It's been mentioned. The word rule has been mentioned two or three times.

Now, as I understand it, Held learned from the rule of St. Cumbanus and there were St. Benedict and those companies, which do you know about the rule that she imposed? We don't know exactly about the rule of any of the houses because they did seem to be an amalgam of what was learnt and then it's the rule of the founder which goes on. But the rule of life would probably be to do with how often you prayed and that was in common.

and also what you emphasised in your monastic life and that was learning at Whitby. Sarah Foote, can you just explain what the double monastery meant at Whitby? Because there are two versions, as I understand it. One is that it's a double monastery. There are men and women there almost equally engaged in the rule, as Rosemary said, and prayer and learning and so on.

These tend to be run by women at that time. The other is that it's mainly for women and the men are there as labourers and some of them there as priests to do the offices. Now, which do you think it was? Now, my view is that double houses are equal communities of men and women where both sexes are engaged in the central liturgical activity of the community.

But they didn't necessarily pray together. We have descriptions from some other double houses such as a barking where the women and the men prayed in different parts of the church. But they're still full members of the community. Obviously, if you've got some large lumps of stone that need to be heaved onto the site from the river, you're going to turn to the men in your community to help organise the moving of those, but you also have large numbers of lay people living on the estates as tenants of the monastery

who will, I think, be much more engaged in the physical hard labour of the house than producing an argument that says you've only got men in a double house simply because there are things that the girls couldn't manage to do by themselves. Can we emphasise or discuss for a little while? The literacy, the emphasis on that at Whitby, as I understand it, there are fine. Well, Rosemary, you know. The archaise, a great scriptorium being there and so on.

And then we bring in Cadman, the first English poet and so on. Can you just give us some notion of the strength of the literacy? Obviously it's a tiny, tiny percentage of the population, but it is powerful and focused. Beat stresses to a considerable degree to the extent to which he'll set up Whitby to be a place where learning was one of the things that was most studied there. And there are archaeological finds of style and clear evidence that they were writing things there.

If you want, however, to discover any of the texts that were actually written there, they are in rather short supply, there are not manuscripts that survived that we can say confidently were written at Whitby. But there is one text which we know was written at Whitby just after Hild's time very early in the 8th century. the earliest surviving saints live written in England, which is the life of Gregory the Great. And it is ten, people tend,

always to describe the authors of these texts as men, but of course there's absolutely no reason whatsoever why that Whitby Life of Gregory might not have been written by one of the women in the community there. Can I move to the Synod of Whitby? It makes us almost dangerously relevant in that it's to do with Easter.

It was designed to tackle the date on which Easter fell. And the Romans had one idea and the Irish had another. idea and they met at Whitby, significantly at Whitby, to discuss this. Sarah, do you want to say why they met at Whitby and what came out of it? Can I say just one thing about how you calculate the date of Easter? The process of calculating it is extremely complicated, but the answer is quite straightforward. Easter day should fall on a Sunday. It must fall after the full moon and it must fall after the spring equinox, the 21st of March. That bit is very

straightforward. The bit they argued about is how do you decide where the third week of the month fell in which they thought it should happen, should Easter fall between the 14th and 20th days of the moon or between the 15th and the 21st days of the moon. And the reason why they had a synod to discuss

this is that if you have two groups of people living at the same court, as you had at Oswey's court in Northumbria, who are calculating it according to different methods, you could get to the situation where they did one year, that the king, who was following the Irish method of calculating it between the 14th and 20th day of the moon.

Easter fell on the 14th day of the moon on a Sunday and he had Easter day but his wife and A.M. Flaude who'd been brought up in the Kentish tradition was doing it by the Roman method and she thought it was Palm Sunday. So he'd abandoned the Lenton Feast and was having a wonderful time at Easter and she was still wandering round fasting and celebrating Palm Sunday and that caused sufficient discontent in the court that they felt that they should meet and discuss. But as I understand it from Beads reported, I don't know, Bees long report on it, from my reading of it, John Blair.

This was, to Bede anyway, extremely important for another reason. And another reason was, were we got, were we, with English, going to be part of Rome, or were we going to be still a remote, isolated, idiosyncratic island in the furthest reaches of the known world? Yes. And this was very important for him. He puts a massive speech in the mouth of Wilfred, arguing what we assume is Bede's case, that we should be part of it.

I think one's got to remember two things about Bede. One is that he was passionately concerned with Christian unity and a unity centred on Rome, and that's not surprising given the context in which he grew up in a very Romanising monastery, Wemmouth Jarrow. But secondly, that Beed was the great expert on computistics. And it's crucial, I think, to remember it was not just a matter of unity. It was a matter of precise science, really, for Beed, that the Irish calculation of Easter was incompetent, it was wrong. and this is why Bede put such an enormously long and complicated speech into the mouth of Wilfred.

Back to Hill, though, enough I can, Rosemary. Why do you think it was housed at Whitby? Was this a great honour? Does it prove that it was a great monastery? I've always thought, and of course we can't prove this, that she was a good organiser, and they thought if it's going to go smoothly, yes. We'll put it there.

But on the other hand, Whitby is very central for many of the great monastic sites up and down the coasts there. and there must have been enough space even though now when we look at the site it looks terribly crowded and one building built on another and I suppose although she was supporting Aden and the Celtic Church there was enough of her background to say that she could have looked at both sides

and Hild as a nun will have been much influenced by the concept of obedience she was used to having those who obeyed her but she too there were authorities also that she had to obey and the idea that they should all do it the same way that uniformity of observance mattered is not something that I think Bede exaggerates

I think it's something that mattered to all of them. Really, John Baer, for the last seven years of her life we're told in Bede, Hild was very ill indeed and the last six months extraordinary. This is regarded as a testing time in the Christian view of things. She is being tested for her eternal reward. And after her death, various visions are reported. We're approaching the time when Hilde becomes St Hilda, aren't we? So can you discuss that at all?

Well, certainly the visions reported by B do look very like the earliest stages of a cult. At this time, there is no centralised process of canonisation. You don't have to go to Rome. A saint's cult is something that emerges within the community in which the person had lived. It is a very much more domestic matter tied up with the identity, the prestige, the status, the religious character of the community, than it would be later on. And so there's an important sense in which it would have been the community at Whitby itself

that made Hilda Saint because of their respect for her. Finally, Rosemary Kramm, what's your final view of Hild's contribution and of her life? Well, I'll stick with contribution at Whitby. I think we should mention her devotion to learning and literacy. And she laid a very good foundation. because the books that were produced were not produced then, they were produced in her successor's time.

There we go. We've got to finish. All right. Rose McGrath, for John Blair. Thank you very much. Next week, the Opium Wars, Britain and China. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.