Founding Abbess of a Double Monastery

Hilda, a member of the Northumbrian royal house, was baptised at the age of thirty three alongside King Edwin's court and spent the following years, according to Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, planning to join a monastery in Gaul before Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne recalled her to Northumbria instead, setting her on a different course. She went on to found and govern several religious houses before becoming founding abbess of the monastery at Streoneshalh, the site now known as Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast around 657. The house Hilda built there was a double monastery, housing communities of both monks and nuns under her single governance, a common arrangement in the period and one that placed real institutional authority in the hands of an abbess rather than any male superior. Bede records that Hilda's household became known specifically as a center of learning, so much so that five of the monks trained under her went on to become bishops, and it was at Whitby that Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman who received the gift of poetic composition in a dream, was recognized, sheltered and encouraged by Hilda herself to become the first named poet in the English language whose work survives.