Whitby

The monastery at Streoneshalh was founded about 657 on the cliff above the harbour and was a double house of monks and nuns living under one rule and one head, an arrangement common in early Anglo-Saxon England and always headed by a woman. Its abbess was Hild, a member of the Northumbrian royal house who had been baptised at thirty three and had spent her middle years founding and governing religious houses. Bede says that kings and princes came to her for advice, and that five men trained in her monastery became bishops, which places the house at the centre of the Northumbrian church rather than at its edge. The best known story attached to it concerns a cowherd on the estate.

Caedmon left a feast because he could not take his turn at the harp, slept in the byre, and was told in a dream to sing about the creation; he woke with the verses, Hild had him tested by scholars and received him into the community, and the nine lines of Caedmon's Hymn are the earliest English poem whose author is known by name. Danish raids ended the house in the ninth century, and the ruin standing above the harbour today belongs to the Benedictine abbey refounded after the Norman conquest. Hild died in 680 after seven years of illness, and Bede reports that a nun in a daughter house saw her soul carried up in a light at the moment of her death. Her successor Aelfflaed, daughter of the king who had presided at the synod, kept the house in the same position of influence for another generation.

The synod of 664 met to decide which of two methods of calculating Easter the Northumbrian church would keep. The problem was practical before it was theological: King Oswiu had been trained in the Ionan tradition and his queen Eanflaed in the Roman, so in some years the king was celebrating the resurrection while the queen was still fasting through Lent, and the court kept two calendars.

Colman, bishop of Lindisfarne, argued for the Ionan reckoning on the authority of Columba and, behind him, of John the Evangelist. Wilfrid argued for the Roman on the authority of Peter and of the practice of the wider church, and, as Bede tells it, closed by pointing out that Peter holds the keys of heaven. Oswiu asked Colman whether that was so, was told it was, and decided for Rome.

Colman resigned and withdrew to Iona and then to Ireland with those who would not accept the ruling. Everything known about the synod comes from Bede, writing sixty years later and firmly on the winning side, and he presents it as the moment the English church joined the universal one; the form of the tonsure and other Ionan customs were at issue as well as the date. What was not at stake was any point of doctrine, which is worth saying plainly, because the synod is often described as though it had been.