Hild was born a princess of the royal house of Deira. She was born an exile in 614 during the time when the Bernician warrior-king Æthelfrith ruled in both the kingdoms. But in 616 Æthelfrith was killed in battle and the Deirans gained the ascendancy under her great-uncle Edwin. So for much of her childhood she enjoyed the security of a life at the court of a powerful king. She was received into the Christian church at the age of 13 years when the king and his court, pagan up to that time, were baptised by Paulinus, chaplain to Queen Æthelburh who was a Christian from Kent.
The invasion of the kingdom and the death of Edwin in 633 disrupted this life and Hild, then about 18 years old, fled Northumbria along with Edwin's widow, possibly taking refuge with her sister Hereswith, Queen of East Anglia. We know nothing of her early adult days. Bede says that her life fell into two halves, secular and religious. This means that she entered the religious life at the age of 33 in about 647. It is at this point that we again pick up the thread, with Hild in East Anglia and preparing to join her now-widowed sister in the monastery of Chelles, near Paris. But just before she set out she was recalled to Northumbria by Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who provided a small endowment of land for her to set up a religious house on the north bank of the River Wear, in modern County Durham.
How and in what circumstances Hild came to the attention of Aidan is not clear. He did not come to England from Iona until 635 and the Northumbria of his patron King Oswald, Æthelfrith's son, hardly seems a sympathetic environment for the Deiran princess. If she had already returned to Northumbria, then some time after Oswiu's succession in 642 and his marriage to the Edwin's daughter Eanflæd, a kinswoman of Hild, seems more likely.
After a year in this first religious community, Hild was appointed Abbess at the recently founded double monastery (for men and women) in Hartlepool, on the County Durham coast. Here we can begin to appreciate some of the qualities which Bishop Aidan found so valuable in Hild. For at Hartlepool she took on the intellectual challenge of writing the governing constitution for the monastery and the challenge to leadership of implementing it. She developed a reputation for wisdom and spirituality that drew many to visit her.
After Hartlepool there was an even greater challenge at Whitby, on the coast of North Yorkshire, where she established or set in order (Bede is uncertain on this point) a monastery which had a particularly important place in both the religious and secular life of the kingdom. This is probably one of the 12 monasteries which King Oswiu endowed in thanks for his victory in AD 655 over King Penda of Mercia. Here she established the Hartlepool Rule and she developed Whitby as a centre of learning and scriptural studies and a training ground for future priests. Bede records that five bishops had been pupils of hers. Her influence was felt far outside the monastery as a counsellor to ordinary people and also to kings and princes.
Hild enjoyed the trust of King Oswiu and Queen Eanflæd. The king dedicated their infant daughter Ælfflæd to the religious life as another part of his AD 655 victory thanksgivings and entrusted her to Hild. Later, as a widow, Eanflæd joined her daughter at Whitby and the two jointly succeeded Hild as Abbess. At a time when there could still be violent conflict between the two Northumbrian royal houses, Whitby was something of a Deiran house monastery. So the politics of the place were sensitive. As a Deiran princess but with religious allegiance to Bishop Aidan's Bernician-centred Irish tradition, Hild had the pedigree and, no doubt, the discretion to command confidence in all quarters.
That she had a safe pair of hands is evident from the synod of Whitby in 664. King Oswiu faced the most important politico-religious decision of his reign when he had to decide whether to support the Irish or the Roman strands of Christianity which were active in Northumbria. Although Bede describes the great set-piece debate and its protagonists without mentioning Hild, hers was a key role. For it was Hild whom the king entrusted with the task of organising and managing the event. Its outcome, with Oswiu's decision in favour of the Roman church, must have been a personal disappointment to Hild; though one suspects she then tackled the business of instituting reforms rigorously and effectively.
Hild was abbess at Whitby for the rest of her life. She suffered illness during her last six years and died aged 66 in 680. Though Bede gives accounts of miraculous visions at the moment of her death, there was apparently no posthumous cult. This is not surprising, as her own monastery of Whitby promoted a cult of King Edwin. Nor did anyone write a life. We depend on Bede for our knowledge of Hild and he is generous in his assessment, recognising her outstanding qualities. She lived in a world very different from our own and so it can be difficult to appreciate the part she played. If we were to translate her to present day Britain, then perhaps we would be looking at a vice-chancellor of one of the more prestigious universities, with a seat in the House of Lords, whom the government can rely upon to chair a Royal Commission on a difficult topic.
