The life of St Hilda of Whitby
She spent time leading small communities on the River Wear and at Hartlepool before undertaking the greater task of founding a double monastery, for both women and men, at a place called Streaneshalch, which later ages would know as Whitby.
Under her direction Whitby became a center of learning where the Scriptures were studied with unusual seriousness; five of the men formed there went on to become bishops, and she is remembered for recognizing and encouraging the gift of an unlettered herdsman named Caedmon, whose religious verse in English marked a beginning for poetry in that tongue. In 664 her monastery hosted a gathering that settled, for Northumbria, the long dispute over how to calculate the date of Pascha in favor of the wider Roman practice, a decision Hilda herself had not favored but accepted. She died at Whitby in 680, remembered as a wise governor of souls whom kings and scholars alike sought out for counsel.
