Whitby Abbey

Whitby Abbey stands on the East Cliff above the harbour town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire, looking out over the North Sea. The ceremonial county is the largest in England by land area. Its eastern uplands are the North York Moors, and the River Esk runs off those moors and enters the North Sea at Whitby. The headland has been a landmark for sailors since the medieval church fell into ruin.

What remains is the shell of a great Gothic abbey church, beside a seventeenth-century house, over the buried traces of a much older religious settlement.

The earliest occupation so far identified on the headland is a late Bronze Age enclosure containing a round house, found near the cliff edge, together with objects of that period. A Roman presence is attested by finds. The headland may have held a signal station in the third century, midway between known stations at Goldsborough and Ravenscar, in a strategic position at the mouth of the Esk. If that station stood here, it has probably long since fallen into the sea.

About five hundred metres of land have been lost to coastal erosion in the last two thousand years, and a similar length of cliff is estimated to have gone since the Anglian settlement itself.

After Roman rule collapsed, Britain broke into small kingdoms. By the seventh century the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was Northumbria, the land of the people north of the Humber. It had begun as two kingdoms, Bernicia in the north and Deira in the south, divided roughly about the River Tees. The names of both are likely British in origin.

Æthelfrith, king of Bernicia from about 593, became the first Bernician king also to rule Deira, around 604. He was a pagan, and he was remembered for driving Britons from land and planting English in their places. He defeated Áedán mac Gabráin of Dál Riata at Degsastan in 603, and later, probably between 613 and 616, he defeated the army of Powys at the Battle of Chester and killed a large number of the monks of Bangor-Is-Coed who had come to pray for the British side. He was killed around 616 at the Battle of the River Idle by Rædwald of East Anglia, who then placed Edwin, the exiled heir of Deira, on the throne.

Æthelfrith’s sons, including Oswald and Oswiu, fled north into exile among the Gaels and Picts.

Edwin, son of Ælle of Deira, ruled both Deira and Bernicia from about 616 until his death. He is the first king of the two realms known to have converted to Christianity, and he was later venerated as a saint. In exile he had passed through Mercia, where he married Cwenburh, a daughter of king Cearl, and then into East Anglia under Rædwald’s protection. Æthelfrith offered Rædwald money to kill him and then threatened war.

Rædwald’s wife is said to have turned the king from that bargain. After Rædwald’s death, around the middle of the 620s, Edwin became the strongest ruler in Britain. Bede includes him among kings who held imperium over other Anglo-Saxon rulers, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives him the title bretwalda. He expelled Ceretic from the British kingdom of Elmet in 616 or 626.

His household moved from royal vill to royal vill, among them Yeavering, where a timber structure likened to an amphitheatre has been found, and Goodmanham, where the pagan priest Coifi is said to have destroyed the idols.

In 625 the widowed Edwin married Æthelburh of Kent, daughter of Æthelberht of Kent and the Merovingian princess Bertha. The marriage allowed her to keep her Roman Christian worship, and she came north with her chaplain Paulinus, a Roman monk sent in 601 to assist Augustine of Canterbury. On 19 April 626, the evening before Easter, Æthelburh gave birth to a daughter, Eanflæd, at a residence by the River Derwent. Earlier that day an assassin sent by Cwichelm of Wessex had tried to kill Edwin.

Edwin agreed that the child could be baptised, and he promised to become a Christian if he defeated Cwichelm. Eanflæd was baptised on Pentecost, 8 June 626, with eleven others of the household. Edwin campaigned successfully and was baptised on Easter Day, 12 April 627, with his court, in a small wooden church built for the occasion near the site of the present York Minster. Paulinus became the first bishop of York.

Bede’s account of the decision includes the speech of an unnamed counsellor, who compared a human life to a sparrow flying through a lit hall in winter, safe for a moment and then gone into the dark. Coifi, the high priest, rode a stallion to the shrine, cast a spear into it, and set it on fire. Pope Boniface V wrote to Edwin and to Æthelburh. The conversion of the court was real, but it may not have gone deep beyond the household.

Very few Roman clergy were with Paulinus. Only James the Deacon is known to have remained in the north after the disaster that followed.

That disaster was the Battle of Hatfield Chase in 633. Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd and the pagan Penda of Mercia defeated and killed Edwin. Penda had taken the Severn valley after the Battle of Cirencester in 628 and remained pagan while neighbouring kings accepted baptism. Bernicia and Deira split again under pagan kings.

Paulinus fled to Kent with Æthelburh, the young Eanflæd, and Hild, Edwin’s grand-niece. James the Deacon stayed. Oswald, Æthelfrith’s son, had learned Christian practice on Iona during his exile. He defeated and killed Cadwallon, reunited the two kingdoms, and invited Ionan missionaries, above all Bishop Aidan, who settled on Lindisfarne.

Oswald was killed by Penda at the Battle of Maserfield in 642. From then until 655 Penda was probably the most powerful Anglo-Saxon ruler. He campaigned into Bernicia and at one point besieged Bamburgh. Oswiu, Oswald’s brother, held Bernicia but struggled for years to master Deira.

Oswiu, also called Oswy or Oswig, was born about 612. Bede says he was fifty-eight when he died in 670. He was a son of Æthelfrith and, most likely, of Acha of Deira, Edwin’s sister. He went into exile at about four years old and grew up in a Gaelic world.

Bede says he was fluent in the Irish language and Irish in his faith. He became king of Bernicia when Oswald fell in 642. He had already been married to a British princess, Rieinmellt. In or shortly after 642 he sent a priest named Utta to Kent, then ruled by Eanflæd’s cousin Eorcenberht, to ask for Eanflæd’s hand.

The marriage would bring Kentish, and perhaps Frankish, support, and any children would have a claim on both royal lines of Northumbria. The date of the wedding is not recorded. It did not secure Deira. By 644 Oswine, Eanflæd’s paternal second cousin, was ruling there.

In 651 one of Oswiu’s generals killed Oswine. To make amends for the killing of his wife’s kinsman, Oswiu founded Gilling Abbey, where prayers were said for both kings. The same year is given as the end of the last separate king of Deira, after which Bernician kings held a unified Northumbria, though sub-kings still appear.

The decisive fight with Penda was the Battle of the Winwaed, traditionally dated 15 November 655. The river has never been securely identified. Since Oswiu closed the campaign in the district of Loidis, the country of modern Leeds, the Winwaed is often sought near Leeds or as a tributary of the Humber. Andrew Breeze has argued for the River Went, north of Doncaster.

Others have suggested Cock Beck. Philip Dunshea has argued that Bede’s wording allows the battle itself to have been fought some time, even years, before the November day on which Oswiu brought the campaign to a close, and perhaps far from Leeds. Before the fight Oswiu was besieged at a place called Urbs Iudeu, sometimes identified with Stirling and sometimes with Jedburgh. He offered a great treasure for peace.

Bede says Penda refused it and meant to destroy Oswiu’s people from the highest to the lowest. The Historia Brittonum says Penda distributed the treasure among his British allies, which would mean he accepted it. Oswiu’s young son Ecgfrith was a hostage in Mercia, perhaps as part of a bargain. Penda came with allies from East Anglia and Wales and a force led by thirty warlords.

His army was weakened by desertion. Cadafael ap Cynfeddw of Gwynedd left him and was remembered as Cadomedd, the battle-shirker. Æthelwald of Deira withdrew to wait out the result in safety. Oswiu’s force was small.

He prayed and promised that if he won he would give his infant daughter to the religious life and grant twelve estates for monasteries. The battle was fought in heavy rain. Bede says many more drowned in the flight than were killed by the sword, and that Penda’s head was cut off. Penda and his ally Æthelhere of East Anglia died, with thirty royal leaders.

Mercia was divided. Oswiu took the north. The south went to Penda’s Christian son Peada, who had married into the Bernician line and who was murdered in 656. For about three years Oswiu’s power reached over Mercia, and he was recognised as bretwalda.

Bede treats the battle as the effective end of Anglo-Saxon paganism, because the kings who followed Penda, including Peada, Wulfhere, and Æthelred, were Christian. Northumbrian rule over Mercia itself did not last.

It was in the year of that victory, or in its immediate wake, that the monastery on the Whitby headland was founded. One account says that in 657 Oswiu founded the house, then called Streoneshalh, and appointed Hild, abbess of Hartlepool and grand-niece of Edwin, as its first abbess. Another says the house was founded in about 657 by Hild herself, with Oswiu’s support. Both agree on the year, the place, and the partnership of king and abbess.

An excavator’s reading of Bede adds that Hild acquired ten hides of land for the foundation. A hide was a unit of tax assessment, not a measured acreage, so the gift was large without being a figure that can be walked out on the ground. The older name is given as Streoneshalh, Streaneshalch, or Streanæshalch. One explanation is that it meant Streane’s headland.

The double house of monks and nuns was a royal monastery and a burial place of the Northumbrian dynasty.

Hild, or Hilda of Whitby, was born in 614 into the Deiran royal household. Her father Hereric, a nephew of Edwin, was poisoned while in exile at the court of the king of Elmet. Her mother was Breguswīth. Hild was brought up at Edwin’s court and, at thirteen, was baptised with him on 12 April 627.

After Hatfield Chase she went to Kent with the queen. Her elder sister Hereswith, wife of Æthelric, brother of King Anna of East Anglia, later became a nun at Chelles in Gaul. When Hild was about thirty-three and ready to join her sister, she answered Bishop Aidan instead and returned to Northumbria. Aidan had brought the monastic customs of Iona.

Her first community was on the north bank of the River Wear. After a year Aidan made her the second abbess of Hartlepool. No standing trace of that abbey remains, though its cemetery has been found near the present church of St Hilda in Hartlepool. In 657 she became founding abbess at Streoneshalh and stayed until her death.

Bede, who finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about 731 and who was born about eight years before Hild died, is the main narrative source for her life. A second early text is an anonymous Life of Pope Gregory the Great written by a monk of Streoneshalh. Bede describes a house in which property was held in common, peace and charity were practised, and everyone was to study the Bible and do good works. As a landowner she had people in her employ for sheep, cattle, farming, and woodcutting.

Kings and princes asked her advice. He says that all who knew her called her mother because of her devotion and grace. Five men from the monastery later became bishops. Two of them, John of Beverley, bishop of Hexham, and Wilfrid, bishop of York, were later treated as saints.

The pattern of the double house, at Hartlepool and here, was that men and women lived apart and worshipped together. Archaeological readings of the buildings have not stayed still. One account, drawing on the stone footings cleared in the 1920s, describes a Celtic layout of small houses for two or three people, and says the exact church of Hild’s monastery is unknown in both place and size. The same footings, north of the later abbey church, were first read as single-cell structures and have since been read as more likely parts of larger ranges.

Timber buildings, domestic hearths, pits, and wells of the Anglian period have been excavated at the cliff edge, with evidence of industry including glass working. Much of an extensive lay settlement has gone into the sea.

The lay brother Cædmon lived in this house during Hild’s abbacy. His name is British in origin, from a form ancestral to Welsh Cadfan, although Bede says English was his own language. He is the earliest English poet whose name is known. Bede gives no exact dates.

Cædmon took vows at an advanced age, and his working life falls between the foundation in 657 and a death somewhere between 679 and 684, the latter limit set by the next datable event in Bede’s history, Ecgfrith’s raid on Ireland. The only early narrative is Bede’s. One evening, while others feasted and passed a harp, Cædmon left to sleep with the animals because he knew no songs. In a dream someone asked him to sing the beginning of created things.

He sang a short poem in praise of God as maker of heaven and earth. In the morning he remembered it, added lines, and was taken to the abbess. She and her counsellors tested him with a passage of sacred history. He returned the next day with a poem, took monastic vows, and was taught by the scholars of the house.

Bede says he turned that teaching, after a night of thought, into verse, and that he composed only religious poetry: creation, the Old and New Testaments, judgment, hell, heaven, and the mercies and judgments of God. The Old English translation of Bede adds that he felt shame at his inability to sing, and that Hild’s scribes took his verse down from his mouth. Those additions match the translator’s usual habits and need not prove a second tradition. Only the first poem, Cædmon’s Hymn, survives, in twenty-one copies and in Northumbrian and West Saxon forms.

It is one of three candidates, with the runic texts of the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket, for the earliest attested Old English poetry. Some scholars treat the surviving lines as close to his words. Others argue that they are a translation back out of Bede’s Latin. The poems of the Junius manuscript were once attributed to him, but they differ in style from the Hymn and cannot be given to him on the surviving evidence.

He died after a premonition, in the monastic hospice, after receiving the Eucharist, just before nocturns. A cross in his honour was set up in 1898 in the churchyard of St Mary in Whitby. His feast is kept on 11 February.

The event that made the headland famous in the history of the church was the Synod of Whitby in 664. Oswiu summoned it to decide whether his kingdom would calculate Easter, and wear the monastic tonsure, by the custom of Iona or by the custom then kept at Rome. The meeting was at Hild’s double monastery. The identification of Bede’s Streanæshalch with later Whitby is generally accepted, but it is not absolutely certain.

Strensall, near York, has been proposed as another candidate. There are two principal narratives. Stephen of Ripon wrote the Life of Wilfrid probably soon after 710. Bede wrote in 731, using that Life and also people who had known participants, among them Acca of Hexham, Wilfrid’s companion.

The two accounts agree in outline. Bede’s is much longer. Both wrote at a distance, and the speeches they give are better read as their own summaries than as transcripts. Bede put the synod at the centre of his history.

Easter arithmetic mattered to him, and he wanted to show the English church as one. Historians have generally followed his basic presentation while recognising that emphasis. Stephen’s life has been criticised for inaccuracies elsewhere, but his account of this meeting has worn better than other passages.

The quarrel was older than 664. Edwin’s Roman mission had brought the newer nineteen-year Easter cycle. Oswald’s Ionan mission kept an eighty-four-year cycle, the Latercus associated with Sulpicius Severus around 410, which Rome and Gaul had once used and had since replaced. The Victorian tables of Victorius of Aquitaine and the Dionysian tables drawn from Alexandria often gave different Sundays.

In the Northumbrian court the split was visible. Queen Eanflæd and her household kept Easter on a different day from King Oswiu. One side could be feasting while the other was still in the Lenten fast. While Aidan lived, the disagreement did not break the peace.

After him, Bishop Finan was challenged by Ronan, an Irishman trained at Rome. The crisis came under Colmán, the third Ionan bishop of Lindisfarne, appointed in 661. Colmán was from the west of Ireland, educated on Iona, and probably a nobleman of the Conmaicne Mara.

An important mover of the meeting was Alchfrith, also called Alhfrith, Oswiu’s son and sub-king in Deira. Henry Mayr-Harting called him the chief cause of the trouble. In the early 660s Alchfrith expelled Ionan monks from Ripon and gave the house to Wilfrid, a Northumbrian who had lately returned from Rome. Wilfrid became the spokesman of the Roman party because Agilbert, a Frankish bishop who also held office in England, could not put the technical argument into Old English.

Eanflæd sent her chaplain Romanus. Colmán spoke for Iona. Hild herself kept the Ionan Easter. Oswiu presided and judged.

He did not, in the narratives, join the clerical debate.

Colmán defended the Ionan date as the practice of Columba, who had followed the apostle John. Wilfrid, in Bede’s telling, answered that the Roman practice was that of the city where Peter and Paul had lived, taught, suffered, and were buried. It was, he said, the practice of the church as far as Egypt. John’s custom had fitted his own community and time, and the Council of Nicaea in 325 had since required Easter on a Sunday rather than on the date of the Jewish Passover.

Columba, Wilfrid allowed, had done what he could with the knowledge he had, but the monks of the present could not plead ignorance. No one, he said, had authority over Peter. Oswiu asked both sides whether they agreed that Christ had given Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven and had called him the rock. They agreed.

Oswiu then judged for the holder of the keys. Most of those present, including Hild, accepted the ruling. The monks of Lindisfarne who would not accept it withdrew, first toward Iona and then to Ireland. Colmán resigned the bishopric.

He was allowed to take some relics of Aidan. Between 665 and 667 later tradition has him founding churches in Scotland, though no seventh-century record confirms that. In 668 he settled on Inishbofin and founded a monastery. He brought half the relics of Lindisfarne, including bones of Aidan and a piece said to be of the true cross.

A rift opened on the island between Irish and English monks over work in the harvest, and Colmán placed the English on the mainland at Magh Eó, Mayo of the Saxons, where he died in 674. His feasts are 8 August and 13 November. The relics once claimed for Mayo Abbey are said to have vanished in 1537.

The synod was a Northumbrian decision. It bound the church that answered to Lindisfarne, not the whole of Britain by a single decree. Oswiu replaced the departing clergy largely with Irishmen from parts of Ireland that had already accepted the Roman Easter. The episcopal seat of Northumbria moved from Lindisfarne to York.

Wilfrid later became bishop of Northumbria. There is a further awkwardness in the victory as Bede tells it. The Easter he presents as Roman was the Alexandrian reckoning, and Bede himself doubted whether that method was the one then used in Rome. He later published his own tables, in De Temporibus in 703 and more fully in De Temporum Ratione between 716 and 725.

Those Bedan tables spread through Britain and the Carolingian empire in the ninth century and were accepted in Rome in the tenth. Since the Reformation the meeting has often been cast as a Celtic church subdued by a Roman church. Patrick Wormald traced that picture to later confessional argument and called the idea of a Celtic church in a post-Reformation sense remarkably hard to dislodge. Mayr-Harting also set Alchfrith’s zeal in politics: a sub-king in Deira had reason to want Colmán replaced by a bishop closer to himself.

What changed at the time was concrete. The kingdom would keep one Easter and one form of tonsure, and the queen and the king would no longer fast and feast in the same week.

Hild suffered a fever for the last seven years of her life and went on working. In her last year she founded another monastery at Hackness, fourteen miles from Whitby. She died on 17 November 680, at sixty-six, after receiving viaticum. A legend says the bells of Hackness tolled at that moment, and that a nun there named Begu saw Hild’s soul carried to heaven by angels.

She was succeeded as abbess by Eanflæd, Oswiu’s widow, and by their daughter Ælfflæd, at first together, and later by Ælfflæd alone. One list of burials names the widow and abbess as Eahlfrith. The narrative of Eanflæd’s life gives that widow and joint abbess the name Eanflæd. Both names are attached to the woman who ruled the house after Hild and who was buried on the headland.

Eanflæd had grown up in Kent after her father’s death, under her uncle King Eadbald. Her children with Oswiu are identified, with varying confidence, as Ecgfrith, Ælfwine, Osthryth, and Ælfflæd. Aldfrith, Ealhfrith, and Ealhflæd are not reckoned as hers. She was an early patron of Wilfrid and recommended him to King Eorcenberht when he wanted to go to Rome.

She retired to the monastery after Oswiu’s death, perhaps several years later. Oswiu died on 15 February 670 and was buried at Whitby. His feast is kept on that day in both East and West. During Eanflæd’s time as abbess the bones of her father Edwin were brought to Whitby for reburial.

She died in the reign of her stepson Aldfrith, between 685 and 704. A late tradition gives her feast as 24 November. William of Malmesbury believed her remains were later taken to Glastonbury, where a monument to her was said to stand in the twelfth century.

Ælfflæd was born in 654. When she was about a year old, Oswiu, in thanksgiving for the Winwaed, gave her to Hild to be raised at Hartlepool. When Hild moved to the new foundation in 657 or 658, she brought the child. From Hild’s death in 680 Ælfflæd was joint abbess with her mother, then sole abbess until her own death in 714.

She had a reputation for surgery and for personal care of the sick, as Hild did. The Northumbrian church of this generation was wealthy and aristocratic. On at least one occasion Ælfflæd banqueted with Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. In the Life of Cuthbert, she asks him about the succession after Ecgfrith.

He tells her she will find the next king to be a brother no less than the other, on an island beyond the sea. She understands him to mean Aldfrith, then on Iona. Like her mother she was associated with Wilfrid, and she played a large part in the settlement that put her nephew Osred, son of Aldfrith, on the throne in 705. She was a political figure from Ecgfrith’s death in 685 until her own.

One story says she was cured of a crippling illness within three days of putting on a linen girdle sent by Cuthbert. A letter of hers to Adolana, abbess of Pfalzel, survives in the Boniface correspondence. In it she asks help for another abbess who wished to go on pilgrimage to Rome, a rare glimpse of Whitby’s links with religious women on the Continent after Hild. Bede praises her holiness.

Stephen of Ripon calls her the consoler of the whole kingdom and the best counsellor. Her feast is 8 February. She was buried at Whitby. A late life of her was collected in John Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae of 1516.

Excavations in the 1920s found two inscribed memorial stones believed to record her death and that of Cyneburgh, a queen of Oswald.

Oswiu’s son Ecgfrith, born about 645, was king of Northumbria from 670 until 20 May 685. At about ten he had been a hostage at the court of Cynewise, Penda’s queen. Oswiu married him to Æthelthryth, a daughter of Anna of East Anglia, to bind other kingdoms. Around 672 Æthelthryth persuaded him to let her become a nun.

She entered the house of Abbess Æbbe, Ecgfrith’s aunt, at Coldingham, and a year later founded Ely. Ecgfrith’s second wife was Eormenburg, also called Iurminburh, who became a bitter enemy of Bishop Wilfrid. In 671 Ecgfrith defeated the Picts at the Battle of Two Rivers, and Northumbrian control in Pictland lasted about fourteen years. In 674 he repelled the Mercian king Wulfhere and took Lindsey.

In 679, at the Battle of the Trent, he fought Wulfhere’s brother Æthelred, who was married to Ecgfrith’s sister Osthryth. Ecgfrith’s brother Ælfwine was killed. Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, mediated, and Lindsey went back to Mercia. In June 684 Ecgfrith sent a raiding party under his general Berht to Brega in Ireland.

The party took many slaves and sacked churches and monasteries. Bede condemned the raid, and Ecgfrith had acted against the warning of Ecgberht of Ripon. In 685, against the advice of Cuthbert, he led an army against the Picts of Fortriu under his cousin Bridei mac Bili. On 20 May he was drawn by a feigned flight into the hills and killed at the age of forty, at the battle called Nechtansmere or Dun Nechtain, placed either at Dunnichen in Angus or at Dunachton in Badenoch.

Most of his army died with him. He was buried on Iona and succeeded by his half-brother Aldfrith. Bede dates the beginning of Northumbrian decline from that death. The kingdom never recovered the dominance in central Britain lost in 679, nor the dominance in the north lost in 685, though it remained powerful into the Viking age.

Ecgfrith also endowed the twin monasteries where Bede himself was formed. In 674 he gave Benedict Biscop seventy hides near the mouth of the Wear for a house dedicated to Peter. About ten years later he gave forty hides on the Tyne at Jarrow for a sister house dedicated to Paul. Bede entered Wearmouth at seven and finished the Ecclesiastical History there in 731.

Ecgfrith appears to have been the earliest Northumbrian king, and perhaps the earliest Anglo-Saxon ruler, to issue the silver penny, the thick sceatta, cast in moulds, which became the basis of later English coinage. The religious world that had argued about Easter at Streoneshalh was, a generation later, the world that taught Bede.

The written history of the first monastery then goes dark. One account says the house was destroyed by Danish invaders in 867. Another says it was laid waste in successive raids between 867 and 870 under Ingwar and Ubba, and that it stayed desolate for more than two hundred years. A third, more cautious, says the Anglian town and monastery were abandoned at some point in the ninth century, probably because of raids by Vikings from Denmark and then a permanent Danish settlement, and that the exact time and manner are not known.

By the Norman Conquest in 1066 the headland seems to have been empty, while a substantial town called Whitby stood down by the harbour. Ingwar is the name traditionally identified with Ivar the Boneless, a leader of the Great Heathen Army that landed in England in 865 and took York in 867, during the campaign against Ælla of Northumbria. Ivar and Ubba are also named as the Danish commanders in East Anglia in 869, when King Edmund was killed after refusing to renounce Christ. Æthelweard dates Ivar’s death to 870.

If Ivar is the same man as Ímar, king of Dublin, the Annals of Ulster place that death in 873. The nickname Boneless is unexplained. Sagas say he was born unable to walk, or that the word has been misunderstood. The saga account of his burial, and of William the Conqueror later burning an undecayed body, is legend rather than a record of this headland.

What the headland sources agree on is a violent end in the later ninth century and a long emptiness afterward. The North Sea, which the Northumbrians had looked across and which was the centre of the Viking age in northern Europe, had brought the raiders to the cliff.

A sign of some religious continuity is argued from the Domesday Book of 1086, which records a place called Prestebi, from Old Norse, a habitation of priests, and also Witebi, Whitby. Prestebi or Hwitebi, the white settlement, was the name of the site when a new community arrived. The ruined monastery given to the refounders comprised about forty ruined monasteria vel oratoria, a scatter of chapels and cells compared with Irish monastic ruins. Around 1078 a monk called Reinfrid founded a new community at Whitby.

He had been a soldier of William the Conqueror before he became a monk. He asked William de Percy for land. Percy gave him the ruined monastery of St Peter with two carucates, to found a new house. Serlo de Percy, the founder’s brother, joined him.

The new monastery followed the Rule of Saint Benedict. Very early, the community split. One part remained on the headland and became the Benedictine abbey of Whitby. The other developed into St Mary’s Abbey at York.

Another account says that monks from Evesham refounded the house as a Benedictine monastery for men. Little archaeological trace of this Norman restart has been found. The first buildings were probably of timber, or they reused the Anglian ruins. About 1100 a stone church and conventual buildings were put up in the Romanesque style, and a large parish church, St Mary, was built close by.

It belonged to the abbey and is thought to date from the early twelfth century.

The Rule that this second monastery adopted was written in Latin around 530 by Benedict of Nursia for monks living under an abbot. Benedict had left Rome as a young man, lived as a hermit near Subiaco, and founded Monte Cassino in 529, where he wrote the Rule near the end of his life. It describes a school for the service of God, moderate by the standards of the desert, summed up later in the words peace, and pray and work. It distinguishes cenobites, who live in a monastery under a rule and an abbot, from hermits, and from monks who wander or who live without a superior.

The abbot is warned that he will answer for the souls in his care, and the brothers are to be called to council on important affairs. Benedict did not found an order in the later sense. Each house remained, in principle, self-governing. At Whitby the rule meant a community of men, no longer the double house of Hild, on a headland that was again a centre of learning and a great landowner.

The same generation of Norman Benedictine foundation produced other houses that were not daughters of Whitby and that lived very different lives. Battle Abbey, in East Sussex, was built by William the Conqueror on the site of the Battle of Hastings and dedicated to Martin of Tours. In 1070 Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for the killing done in the conquest. William had vowed a monastery if he won, with the high altar on the spot where King Harold fell on Saturday 14 October 1066.

He began the work and died before it was finished. The church was completed about 1094 and consecrated under his son William II, who presented his father’s sword and coronation robes. The first monks came from the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutier. The house was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, Mary, and Martin.

It was planned for one hundred and forty monks and never held more than sixty. William I exempted the church of St Martin of Battle from episcopal jurisdiction, on a level with Canterbury. The abbot was mitred, later sat in parliament, and had the privilege of pardoning a criminal he met on the way to execution. The abbey kept a roll of those said to have come with William from Normandy, later swollen by names added for the sake of pedigree.

The church was remodelled in the late thirteenth century. At the suppression in May 1538, seventeen monks remained. They received pensions, among them Abbot John Hamond and Prior Richard Salesherst. Henry gave the abbey and much of its land to Sir Anthony Browne, who demolished the church and parts of the cloister and turned the abbot’s quarters into a country house.

Edith Weston Priory was a much smaller affair, a cell of Benedictine monks in Edith Weston in Rutland, an alien house of the French abbey of Saint-Georges at Boscherville. That parent house was founded about 1050 by Ralf de Tanquerville, chamberlain to William the Conqueror. By 1114 his son William gave the church and manor of Edith Weston, and a few monks were placed there to collect the rents and to pray for the founder. William founded a second English cell, Avebury Priory, around the same time.

Like other alien houses, Edith Weston Priory passed under the crown in time of war with France. The last known prior is recorded in 1361, and by 1394 the church and manor had been sold to St Anne’s Priory at Coventry, which ended the cell. Nikolaus Pevsner was dismissive, writing that Brooke Priory was the only monastery in Rutland because Edith Weston hardly counted. The earthworks are thought now to lie under Rutland Water.

Set beside that cell, and beside the penitential abbey on the Hastings ridge, the refounded house at Whitby was a major royal and baronial monastery, not a rent-collecting dependency of a Norman abbey.

William de Percy’s original gift, as the memorial in the abbot’s book enumerated it, included the monastery of St Peter at Streoneshalh, the town and port of Whitby, the parish church of St Mary, and six dependent chapels at Fyling, Hawsker, Sneaton, Ugglebarnby, Dunsley, and Aislaby. It included five mills, one of them at Ruswarp, the village of Hackness with two mills and the parish church of St Mary, and the church of St Peter at Hackness, where the monks served, died, and were buried. Reinfrid, the first prior, ruled for many years and was killed in an accident. He was buried at St Peter’s, Hackness.

Serlo de Percy succeeded him. The greater part of the building associated with Percy was later pulled down, and the monastery was rebuilt on a larger scale in the 1220s.

The thirteenth-century rebuilding is the church whose shell still dominates the headland. There is no documentary account of the decision to rebuild, but the work included major landscaping of the site. On stylistic grounds the first campaign is dated about 1225 to 1250. The eastern arm, the crossing and transepts, a central tower, and part of the nave were built before the money seems to have run out.

Work on the nave appears to have resumed in the fourteenth century and to have finished only in the fifteenth. The one documentary clue is a permission, recorded in the Whitby Cartulary, for a monk of Whitby to go out and raise funds in 1338. The west front is of that later medieval Gothic, with lancet windows. South of the church there were extensive monastic buildings.

They were almost completely demolished after the suppression. A thirteenth-century monastic precinct boundary has been identified. The main ranges themselves have not been excavated, though geophysical survey shows substantial buried remains.

The abbey’s coat of arms was three coiled snakes, or snakestones, ammonite fossils given serpents’ heads, red on a blue field. The crest was a mitre and the head of a crosier, both in gold. The same fossils fed a local legend that Hild turned a plague of snakes to stone and threw them from the cliff, which was the medieval explanation of the ammonites in the shore rocks. Craftsmen carved heads on the fossils and sold them as signs of the miracle.

The genus Hildoceras takes its scientific name from her. Another legend says seabirds dip their wings when they fly over the abbey, in her honour. Her name was already in the calendar of St Willibrord at the start of the eighth century. One tradition says King Edmund translated her relics to Glastonbury, another that St Edmund took them to Gloucester.

Her feast is 17 November in the Roman calendar and in some Anglican churches, 18 November in parts of the Anglican communion, 19 November in the Church of England, and 17 November in the Eastern Orthodox church. A joint feast with Æthelthryth and Mildred is kept on 23 June in certain former Anglican Catholic parishes. She is shown with a pastoral staff and a church, and often with ammonites at her feet.

The headland was a burial place across both monasteries. Besides Hild, the recorded burials include Bosa of York, Edwin of Deira, Oswiu, Eanflæd, Ælfflæd, Joscelin of Louvain, William de Percy, who died about 1096, a Norman baron and a crusader, and Richard de Percy, born in 1166 and died in 1243, a signatory of Magna Carta.

The second monastery ended in the suppression of the religious houses under Henry VIII of England. He was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich, the son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and he reigned from 22 April 1509 until his death on 28 January 1547. He was not expected to be king until his brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, died in 1502. He married Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, under a papal dispensation.

When he wanted that marriage annulled so that he could remarry in hope of a male heir, Pope Clement VII refused. In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage void in the eyes of the church in England. Clement excommunicated Henry. The Acts of Supremacy made Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England and cut his realms from obedience to the pope.

He dissolved the monasteries and took their wealth. He was buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor and was succeeded by his son Edward VI.

The dissolution was a set of legal and administrative acts, dated in one account from 1536 to 1541 and, for the confiscation of this abbey and its possessions, placed by another account between 1536 and 1545. Two statutes carried it through, a first Suppression Act in 1535 and a second in 1539, under the Act of Supremacy of 1534. The policy was framed as a way to increase the crown’s regular income. Much of the property was in fact sold to pay for military campaigns in the 1540s.

Nearly nine hundred religious houses in England were closed, about two hundred and sixty of monks, three hundred of regular canons, one hundred and forty-two nunneries, and one hundred and eighty-three friaries, some twelve thousand people in all. If the adult male population was about five hundred thousand, one adult man in fifty was in religious orders. Most of those houses were not Anglo-Saxon survivals. They belonged to the monastic foundations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

By the sixteenth century they controlled appointment to about two-fifths of parish benefices, received about half of ecclesiastical income, and owned about a quarter of the landed wealth of the kingdom. Criticism of monastic wealth and of relic cults was already common. Erasmus had mocked houses as lax, worldly, and wasteful, and had wished monks under their bishops. Pilgrimage to monastic shrines was forcibly stopped in 1538.

The change was directed from the king and the court, not from a popular rising, and it met suspicion and, in places, resistance.

For Whitby the year of the end is not a single figure. The community is said to have been disestablished in 1538. The suppression of the abbey is placed in 1539, which is also the year when the buildings south of the church are said to have been demolished. Another account says Henry VIII destroyed the monastery in 1540.

Battle Abbey, as already noted, was suppressed in May 1538. After the suppression at Whitby, Sir Richard Cholmley, who died in 1578, bought the buildings and the core of the estates. The family, originally from Cheshire, were already major landowners in Yorkshire. They turned part of the abbot’s lodging into a house.

A legend says the abbey bells sank with the ship that was taking them to London after the dismantling, and that they can still be heard under the water. There is also said to be a wraith of Hild in the ruins, wrapped in a shroud.

The Cholmley house was only one of the family’s seats. Sir Hugh Cholmley, born in 1600 and died in 1657, took a notable part in the Civil War of 1642 to 1651. He defended Scarborough Castle for the king and surrendered it in 1645. Parliamentarian troops then captured and looted Abbey House at Whitby.

His son, Sir Hugh Cholmley, born in 1632 and died in 1689, restored the estates after the war and about 1672 added a grand wing, known locally as the Banqueting House, with a new entrance courtyard for a formal approach. In the eighteenth century the family moved away and abandoned Abbey House. The roof of the 1670s wing is said to have been removed after storm damage late in that century. A cobbled surface in the inner courtyard of the north wing, with lines of larger stones, seems to belong to the laying out of that seventeenth-century court.

It may have been meant to show through a layer of gravel or lime concrete. Around 1880 Charles Strickland, later Sir Charles Strickland, a descendant of the Cholmleys, added a wing to what survived of Abbey House so that it could be used now and then as a holiday house.

The church shell was substantially complete until the eighteenth century, but wind and rain weakened it. The south transept collapsed in 1736, much of the nave in 1763, the central tower in 1830, and the south side of the presbytery in 1839. An engraving by Francis Grose of about 1790 shows the church from the west before the central tower and the west front had fallen. From the early nineteenth century Whitby grew as a seaside resort, with new terraces on the West Cliff.

The ruin became a destination for visitors, drawn and painted many times. Ownership passed to the Strickland family. In 1920 they handed the abbey to the ministry responsible for ancient monuments.

Before that transfer, the ruin acquired a literary fame that still brings people up the cliff. Bram Stoker, born Abraham Stoker in Dublin on 8 November 1847 and died on 20 April 1912, published the novel Dracula in 1897. He was a barrister, a critic, and the business manager of Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre. He also spent holidays at Cruden Bay in Scotland, which was the setting of two of his other novels and which is named among the places that fed the writing of Dracula.

In the novel itself, the count comes ashore at this headland as a creature like a large dog and runs up the one hundred and ninety-nine steps to the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, in the shadow of the abbey. A diary entry in the book describes the ruin as sacked by the Danes, as the scene of part of the poem Marmion in which a girl was built into a wall, as a noble ruin of immense size, and as a place where a white lady is said to be seen in one of the windows. A real shipwreck is part of the local story of how the novel took shape. The book fixed the ruin in a Gothic imagination that the medieval builders had not intended.

On 16 December 1914, during the Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, the German battlecruisers Derfflinger and Von der Tann shelled Whitby. The attack lasted about ten minutes. The ships were aiming at the coastguard station on the end of the headland, and they hit the abbey and other buildings in the town. The west front was badly damaged.

A photograph of 1914 records the final collapse of that front after the bombardment. The damage was later repaired. The same morning those two ships had bombarded Scarborough from about eight o’clock until half past nine, striking the castle, the Grand Hotel, three churches, and other buildings, and had then come on to Whitby. Scarborough, Hartlepool, and West Hartlepool were all attacked.

The raid was led by Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper, with Seydlitz, Moltke, and Blücher sent against Hartlepool while Derfflinger and Von der Tann went to Scarborough and Whitby. Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl had the High Seas Fleet waiting east of the Dogger Bank and turned for home when he believed he had met the advance of the British Grand Fleet, missing a chance to catch a smaller British force. The bombardments killed and wounded hundreds of civilians and caused public outrage in Britain, both at the German navy for firing on the coast and at the Royal Navy for failing to stop the ships. At Hartlepool the German ships fired 1,150 shells.

One count gives 86 civilians killed and 424 injured there, another 122 killed and 443 wounded. The abbey was not the object of the raid. It stood on the skyline of a coastguard headland, and the shells found it.

In the decade after 1920, Charles Peers, principal inspector of ancient monuments, directed a major clearance and excavation. Large quantities of rubble were removed. The Anglian footings north of the church were uncovered, and the inscribed stones associated with Ælfflæd and Cyneburgh were found. Between 1993 and 2008 further excavation and survey were carried out, first for a new visitor centre and then to record remains on the cliff before erosion took them.

Evaluations around Abbey Lands Farm showed significant archaeology. In 1999 and 2000 a research excavation on the farm revealed part of a large Anglian Christian cemetery south of the church, also encountered when a visitor car park and entrance were made. The new centre, in the shell of the seventeenth-century Banqueting House, opened in 2002. The design work that turned the hall into a museum was by Stanton Williams.

The displays include Anglian sculpture, among it a fragment of an eighth-century cross inscribed with the words orate pro, pray for. Listening points in the museum tell the stories of Hild and the snakes, of Cædmon, of the bells under the sea, and of the novel.

The most recent excavation of the Anglian cemetery, in 2014, was the end of more than twenty years of intermittent digging. Sarah Jennings, working through the plans, saw a rectangular area in the middle of the cemetery, surrounded by closely packed burials and defined by trenches and stone walls. She had spotted a probable chapel. Only three wall lines were known.

A small excavation over three weeks, finishing on 4 April 2014, and directed by Tony Wilmott, showed a stone building. One account measures it at 4.8 metres square, another at about five metres square. Very large stones were used in the foundation. Parts of the north and south foundations survived.

The east and west walls had been robbed, leaving trenches. The wall trenches cut no burials, and there were no burials inside the building, so the chapel seems to have been there from the start of the cemetery. It was probably used for committal rites. Acid soil had destroyed most of the bone, which limited dating.

A primary cremation, unusual in a Christian cemetery of this period, gave a radiocarbon range of AD 620 to 680 in one account and about AD 610 to 680 in another. Both ranges include 664. The chapel may have been standing when the synod met. One account puts more than two hundred graves around it.

The same season examined a ditch that had been found in earlier years and had been taken for the cemetery boundary, because no burials lay beyond it. It proved far too large for that. One account describes it as almost three metres wide, 1.8 metres deep, and V-shaped. In the southern trench it turned east, toward the cliff, rather than continuing as a neat enclosure of the graves.

A similar ditch had been seen in 1995, and another stretch of the same form 180 metres to the west. In 2007 a further stretch was found on the cliff edge 350 metres east of the cemetery. If these are one ditch, it cuts off the whole headland, from the steep slope down to the Esk on the west to the cliffs of the North Sea on the east, kinking around the cemetery and partly overlain by the thirteenth-century monastic boundary. Eight clay loom-weights of Middle Saxon type, with animal bone and metalworking debris, were found in the fill.

The excavator’s conclusion is that this is the boundary of Hild’s monastery, perhaps the edge of her ten hides, enclosing a large area that includes a further three hundred metres of headland lost to the sea over about thirteen hundred years. Another telling of the same discovery is more guarded, and calls the ditch and bank only a possible edge of the monastic settlement, with more research still to do. Either way, the Anglian settlement was much larger than the group of stone cells once imagined, and it was a fitting scale for a royal abbey. The analysis of twenty-one years of excavation and survey was still in progress when that work was described, and a monograph was being prepared.

The place was used, in succession, as a Bronze Age homestead, perhaps as a Roman lookout, as a royal double monastery and the meeting place of a kingdom’s church, as a Benedictine abbey and a baronial burial ground, as a gentry house, as a romantic ruin and a literary landmark, and as a bombarded and then conserved monument. What was at stake in 664 was whether one royal household, and then the church of Northumbria, would keep a single calendar and a single loyalty in a conflict that already divided a queen from a king. What the decision changed was the public practice of that church, the departure of Colmán, and the prestige of the Roman party Wilfrid led, even though the Easter table Bede defended was not simply the table of the Rome of his own doubts. What the digging has found is the scale of Hild’s settlement, the industry on the cliff, the cemetery and its chapel, and the likelihood of a great boundary ditch, while the Norman church and the Cholmley house still stand above them in ruin and in repair.