A Review of the Context of Abbess Hild's Life, Her Religious

chapter 5 In Search of Hild: A Review of the Context of Abbess Hild’s Life, Her Religious Establishment, and the Relevance of Recent Archaeological Finds from Whitby Abbey

Penelope Walton Rogers

The North-East of England has fostered an unusual number of young girls who grew up to specialise in the early medieval period. Elizabeth Coatsworth was one, from County Durham, and Leslie Webster, Susan Youngs, Gale Owen-Crocker, and the present author were all near-contemporaries, educated in the schools of Newcastle upon Tyne. None of us can recall being taught much of the subject in formal lessons, but perhaps our interest was activated by Sunday School, where Bede, Caedmon, Cuthbert, and Hild featured alongside Bible stories; or by the educational trips to Jarrow, ostensibly to learn about the 1936 Jarrow March, but inclusive of a visit to the church where Bede had worshipped. Or perhaps it was the annual St Aidan pilgrimage, when charabancs of working people from Tyneside were decanted at Beal, ready to cross over to Holy Island as the tide rolled out. Bishop Hugh striding barefoot across the sands in cope and mitre, crozier in hand, with the acolytes scampering behind; the service in the ruins of Lindisfarne priory, our voices whipped away by the wind; kittiwakes wheeling above and Bamburgh Castle emerging in the distance from behind the strands of a sea fret: these things leave a lasting impression on a young mind. Elizabeth (Betty) must have known all these places in her childhood. It is no accident that these memories consistently tie the early history of Northumbria to the Church: the two were inextricably linked (Northumbria is used here in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the kingdom North of the Humber). When, there- fore, it came to selecting a topic on the theme of Art and Worship, the finds from recent excavations at Whitby Abbey instantly came to mind. Here, craft equipment, garment accessories, and other artefacts have yielded material evidence for life in a Northumbrian religious community. The archaeology provides a physical context for the 7th- to 9th-century historical sources and especially for the life of the first abbess, Hild. Hild ruled this double, male and female, house at a time when Northumbria was starting to emerge from an agglomeration of smaller kingdoms, and while Christianity was still a new religion to the Anglo-Saxons. At Streanæshalh (Whitby) she established a place of stability, where she hosted a synod and introduced sound teaching practices.

As a prominent figure in an increasingly male-dominated world, her wisdom and kind- liness were recognised by her peers. Her influence lived on long after her death, in the abbesses who succeeded her and in the bishops whom she had guided as novices in her house. This archaeological-historical exploration of the context of Hild’s life and the religious community she founded, together with a review of the most recent finds from the Whitby excavations, is offered as a token of respect for Elizabeth Coatsworth, in recognition of the scholarship and kindness which she herself has displayed in her long career. ∵

A Princess in Deira

Hild was born into the Deiran royal house in AD 614. She was the younger daughter of Hereric and Bregoswith and great-niece of Edwin, who was the son of Ælle, the first confidently identified king of Deira.1 This was an Anglo-Saxon dynasty, whose ancestors are likely to have arrived in the region in the 5th century (as illustrated by the large cremation cemetery at Sancton),2 either direct from the northern Continent, or by way of Lincolnshire or East Anglia.3 They became rulers of an area that incorporated the North York Moors, the Vale of Pickering, the Yorkshire Wolds, and the Vale of York (Fig. 5.1). The ruins of the Roman regional capital at York lay inside Deira’s western margin, but its own

1 Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, www.pase.ac.uk, HILD 1 (accessed 20 February 2020). Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, 4.23; Venerabilis Bedae, Opera Historica, ed. Charles Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896), 1, p. 252. Plummer’s Latin-only edition was used by the author because the standard modern edition was not accessible during the COVID-19 lockdown. Since Plummer’s detailed footnotes on the English MSS proved to be a particu- larly useful resource, references to his edition have been retained here. The reader may pre- fer to consult the more recent Latin-English edition, B. Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969). 2 Jane Timby, “Sancton I Anglo-Saxon Cemetery: Excavations Carried Out Between 1976 and 1980,” Archaeological Journal 150 (1993), 243–365. The new chronology of the Spong Hill, Norfolk, cremation cemetery has probably moved the start dates of cemeteries such as Sancton into the earlier part of the 5th century: Catherine Hills and Sam Lucy, Spong Hill Part IX: Chronology and Synthesis (MacDonald Institute Monograph) (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 229, 338–39. 3 Nicholas Higham, The Kingdom of Northumbria: AD 350–1100 (Stroud, 1993), pp. 66–68; David Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1000: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), p. 47; Thomas Pickles, Kingship, Society and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire (Oxford, 2018), pp. 16–24.