The Synod That Chose Rome Over Iona

Whitby's abbey hosted one of early English Christianity's most consequential meetings in 664, the Synod of Whitby, called to settle a dispute that had divided the Northumbrian church for a generation: whether to calculate the date of Easter by the method used in Rome or by the older method still followed by the Ionian and Celtic tradition that had first evangelized much of the north. The two calculations could place Easter on different Sundays in the same year, an awkward and visible disunity within a single royal household, since King Oswiu himself observed the Roman date his wife's court did not. Bede's account, and his separate treatise on the reckoning of time, present the dispute as a genuinely technical argument over computus, the medieval science of calendrical calculation, rather than a merely political dispute dressed in liturgical language. Though Hilda's own sympathies before the synod lay with the Celtic practice she had been raised in, she accepted King Oswiu's ruling in favor of Rome once it was made and continued to govern Whitby afterward without recorded protest. She died in 680 and was venerated as a saint soon after, remembered today with a feast day on the seventeenth of November.