HILDA, or Hild (614-680), usually called St Hilda, a Saxon lady whose name is intimately associated with the history of the early English church and of early English literature. She was a member of the royal family of Northumbria, her father Hereric being a nephew of King Edwin; and it was along with her royal kinsman that, as a girl of fourteen, she received baptism at the hands of Paulinus. During the pagan reaction which followed Edwin’s defeat and death, Hilda was tempted to settle with her widowed sister Hereswith at the monastery of Chelles, 12 miles from Paris; but she was recalled to England by Bishop Aidan, the missionary from Iona, and in 649, two years after her consecration as a nun, she was appointed to succeed Hern the abbess of Heortea or Hartlepool. When, in fulfilment of the vow which he had made before the decisive battle with Penda, Oswy came to dedicate his daughter to God, it was to the care of Hilda that he entrusted her. In 658 the abbess founded the famous monastery on the cliffs at Streoneshalh or Whitby, and for the next twenty-two years she ruled with rare ability and virtue over the double community of monks and nuns which gathered round her. Among those who shed the most abiding lustre on the establishment were St John of Beverley and the Saxon poet Caedmon. Hilda died, full of years, in 680, mourned by her nuns as their common mother. There is a St Hilda’s church both at South Shields and at Hartlepool, and the latter preserves her effigy on its ancient seal. At Whitby the tradition long lingered that on a summer forenoon, when the sun shone in the highest windows of the north part of the abbey, a figure of Lady Hilda could be discerned; and the fossil ammonites of the neighbourhood are popularly known as St Hilda’s snakes. See Bede, ...