St. Hilda and the Ammonites

St. Hilda of Whitby or Hild of Whitby (c. 614-680 A.D.) was a Saxon abbess and a member of the ancient Northumbrian nobility. She is frequently depicted with a pastoral staff and carrying an abbey church.  There are often ammonites at her feet. 

The historian, St. Bede (who was about eight years old when she died), records she hosted the Synod of Whitby, at which Celtic and Roman Catholicism met to decide on liturgical matters in 664 A.D. She is an important person, and personality, in the history of the early development of Christianity in Britain.  St. Hilda, or “Mother” as she was affectionately known, was a source of encouragement and counsel for people from all walks of life.

Hilda was baptized at age 13 by St. Paulinus of York, who converted her great-uncle, St. Edwin, King of Northumbria and all of his court to the Christian faith. She lived the first half of her life as a noblewoman, but at the age of 33 she became a nun. Whitby Abbey was a double monastery housing both monks and nuns, and Hilda presided over both communities. Whitby Abbey became well-known as a place of learning.  For more on her life, especially her importance to women in the Church, read here.

St. Hilda is associated with several legends, especially turning snakes into stone.

Ammonites were frequently interpreted as being coiled snakes that had turned to stone and somehow lost their heads. They were often called snakestones. Most of the legends surrounding snakestones centered around Whitby. Sir Walter Scott recounts in his 1808 poem, Marmion, how snakestones came to be:

They told, how in their convent cell – A Saxon Princess once did dwell, The lovely Edelfled. And how, of thousand snakes, each one – Was changed into a coil of stone. When holy Hilda pray’d: Themselves, within their holy bound, Their stony folds had often found. They told, how sea-fowls’ pinions fail, as over Whitby’s towers they sail. And, sinking down, with flutterings faint, They do their homage to the saint.

The legend goes that she turned all the snakes to stone in Whitby in order to clear the ground for a new convent.  In response to her devout praying, the snakes coiled up, turned to stone, and fell off the edge of the cliffs after she cut off their heads with a whip. The absence of heads is also attributed to a curse by St. Cuthbert. 

It has become a tradition in Whitby to carve snakeheads onto ammonites.  These snakestones, usually specimens of Hildoceras (named in honor of St. Hilda) and Dactylioceras are used for this purpose.  Some of the carved and polished specimens from Whitby were found in Norway, clearly traded or transported by Norse settlers.  In Elizabethan England snakestone brooches of jet were highly prized.

Hilda was succeeded as abbess by Eanflaed, widow of King Oswiu of Northumbria, and their daughter, Aelfflaed. St. Hilda and Eanflaed were cousins. All three were buried at Whitby Abbey with St. Hilda.

After the rule of Aelfflaed as abbess, nothing more is known of Whitby until it was destroyed by Vikings in 867.  After the Norman invasion of England in 1066 AD, monks from Evesham refounded the abbey as a Benedictine house for men.  It continued until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII in 1539.

According to local folklore, the the wraith of St. Hilda appears in the abbey ruins in a shroud; and the bells of the abbey can be heard ringing under the sea, where they sank with the ship taking them to London after the abbey was dismantled.

The 2013 novel Hild by Nicola Griffith is based on the life of St. Hilda.  She also appears as a main character in Absolution for Murder, the first book in Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma mysteries.