class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[18]"/> literary interest attaching to the story, his life shows some of the details in outward organisation of these great double monasteries. Before his entry into the monastery, says Bede, he was advanced in years, and yet had so little skill in music that he was unable to take his turn at feasts in singing and playing on the harp, an accomplishment common to high and low among the Anglo-Saxons and kindred nations.

The story is familiar: on one occasion when the feast was over, he left the hall as soon as he saw the harp being passed, according to custom, from hand to hand. He went out to the cattle-sheds, tended the beasts and lay down to sleep. In a dream he heard a voice, "Caedmon, sing me something." He answered, "I know not how to sing; and for this cause I came out from the feast and came hither because I knew not how." Again he who spoke with him said, "Nevertheless, thou canst sing me something." Caedmon said, "What shall I sing?" He answered, "Sing me the Creation." Then Bede relates how the cow-herd sang songs before unknown to him, in praise of "the Creator, the Glorious Father of men, who first created for the sons of earth, the heaven for a roof, and then the middle world as a floor for men, the Guardian of the Heavenly Kingdom." When the abbess Hild heard of the miracle, she instructed him in the presence of many learned men to turn into verse a portion of the Scriptures. He took away his task and brought it to them again "composed in the choicest verse." Thereupon the abbess, says Bede, "embracing and loving the gift of God in the man, entreated him to leave the secular, and take upon him the monastic life, and ordered him to be instructed in sacred history." So he was received into Whitby monastery with all his family "and," continues the story, "all that he could learn he kept in memory, and like a clean beast chewing the cud, he turned it all into the sweetest verse, so pleasant to hear, that even his teachers wrote and learned at his lips."

The story throws a good deal of light on the way in which a large double monastery was organised. One gathers from it that not only isolated monks and nuns were received into the community but sometimes whole families. Caedmon entered "cum omnibus suis," which is generally taken to mean that his whole family were received with him. We see from it, too, how earnest was the desire of the superiors of the monasteries to instruct the ignorant; how rich and poor alike in the C7 might aspire to the monastic life, the only passport being the honest desire to serve God in the best possible way.

Again in the latter part of the story, dealing with Caedmon's sickness and death, there is evidence of how the aged, the sick and the dying were tended with special care.

Whitby was not only an important religious but also political centre and the abbesses took by no means a small part in controversy. At the Synod of Whitby[23] held here in 664, when the respective claims of Irish and Roman ecclesiastical discipline were discussed, Hild took the side of the Irish Church; while her successor, Aelflæd, interested herself in the doings of her brother, King Egfrith. Hild reigned thirty years at Whitby and died after many years of suffering, during which she never failed to teach her flock, both in public and in private. All that we know of her character, indicates a strong and vivid personality, a mind keenly alive to the necessities of the age, and a will vigorous enough to be successful in providing for them where opportunity occurred. She had a worthy successor in Aelflæd, a friend of the holy S. Cuthbert. Bede says of her that "she added to the lustre of her princely birth the brighter glory of exalted virtue," and that she was "inspired with much love toward Cuthbert, the holy man of God."[24]

On one occasion she had fallen seriously ill, and expressed a wish that something belonging to S. Cuthbert could be sent to her. "For then," she said, "I know I should soon be well." A linen girdle was sent from the Saint, and the abbess joyfully put it on. The next morning she could stand on her feet and the third day she was restored to perfect health. Later, a nun was cured of a headache by the same girdle, but when next it was wanted, it could nowhere be found. Bede argues quaintly that its disappearance was also an act of Divine Providence, since some of the sick who flocked to it might be unworthy, and, not being cured, might doubt its efficacy, while in reality, their own unworthiness was to blame. "Thus," he concludes, "was all matter for detraction removed from the malice of the unrighteous."

A contemporary of Hild's was Aebbe, a princess of the rival dynasty of Bernicia, and sister of the royal saint, King Oswald, and of Oswy, the reigning king. Her brother intended to give her in marriage to the king of the Scots, but she herself was opposed to the alliance. Her family had embraced the Christian religion in exile, and she determined to follow the monastic life.

Accordingly, she built a double monastery, apparently in imitation of Whitby, at Coldingham on the promontory still called S. Abb's Head. She does not seem, however, to have maintained, like Hild, the discipline and fervour of which she herself gave an example; for Bede notes here a rare example of those disorders of which there were certainly far fewer in England at this time than anywhere else.[25] Aebbe was apparently in ignorance of the relaxation of discipline in her monastery until she was warned of it by an Irish monk of her community, named Adamnan.

As he was walking with the abbess through the great and beautiful house which she had built, he lamented with tears, "All that you see here so beautiful and so grand will soon be laid in ashes!" The astonished abbess begged an explanation. "I have seen in a dream," said the monk, "an unknown one who has revealed to me all the evil done in this house and the punishment prepared for it."

And what, one naturally asks, are these crimes for which nothing short of total destruction of the splendid house is a severe enough visitation from Heaven? Adamnan continues "The unknown one has told me that he visited each cell and each bed, and found the monks, either wrapt in slothful sleep, or awake, eating irregular meals and engaged in senseless gossip; while the nuns employ their leisure in wearing garments of excessive fineness, either to attire themselves, as if they were the brides of men, or to bestow them on people outside." One must admit that here and there in the writings of the period, there are references to this worldliness in some monasteries; but whatever may have been the state of things at a later date, there does not seem to be evidence of graver misdeeds in these early years of monasticism in England. Bede uses perhaps unnecessary severity in speaking of renegade monks and nuns so-called, since he is admittedly speaking from hearsay and not about disorders which came under his own observation. Whatever the sins of Coldingham may have been, the community at a later date atoned for them, for in the C9, when the Danes invaded Northumbria, and killed the men of this monastery, among others, the nuns are said to have mutilated their faces in