Hilde Of Whitby

aegiandyad - 22 Feb 2012 17:48:05 (#227 of 377)

Hilde of Whitby (c.614-680) was a pagan at age 13 and became a nun at 33 because her sister, who was queen, trained in a great Paris monastery. Hilde wanted to follow but Aiden called her back to England. Northumbrian Christianity was influenced by Iona and Lindisfarne. Aiden, its most successful bishop, came out of Iona, since the Celtic Church as such did not exist. Hild was sent to Hartlepool where she put the first community of women in order.

It appears to have been a double house, where both sexes lived together but did not necessarily pray together. This concept of the double house was shared by Anglo-Saxons and the Frankish Kingdoms. Archaeological investigations show a large cemetery filled with men women and children. The monastery filled the headland. Extensive sites have been excavated, finding stone foundations and half timbered buildings, the centre of which were the Church and the liturgical buildings.There seem to have been peripheral buildings where people came to work. There was a super abundance of wealth at the expense of other Anglo Saxon settlements.

Jewelry was imported in exchange perhaps for leather, cloth, wool and possibly slaves. The large monasteries were the towns of their time. Some people retired there. 2 and 3 year olds were sent there to be brought up. Five bishops and many abbesses came out of Northumbria. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, was Greek by origin and was disconcerted that men and women lived together. He said that even though the practice was not known by Greeks, he wouldn't ban it. Bede says 600 brothers led a semi monastic life but were tied to the monastery in semi economic ways, so there were many servants of god labouring, as in Cistercian monasteries. They were not monks as such but peripheral members. Whitby minted its own coinage.

Many of these monasteries were run by princesses who were part of the royal family. They held huge lands on which they were given tax relief because it was religious land. Princess-abbesses were powerful. It was said that some princesses were treating their places as courts rather than abbeys. Relations could leave land to heirs. One great abbess had ships moored in London while being supported by lay people.

Hilde lost her power because she no longer had peripheral people to help her. Bede stresses that Hilde set up Whitby as a place of learning. Texts from the period are in short supply but one text - an 8th century life of Gregory the Great – did survive. It might have been women who worked in the Scriptorium because women certainly ran many of the abbeys of the time. Hild laid the foundation for the books that were produced in her successors' time. The first English poems came from there.

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