The women who ruled from windy Whitby
Atelling object in the new museum beside the ancient ruins of Whitby Abbey is a little piece of Anglo-saxon window glass. They’d have needed it, for the knifewind cut through the spring sunshine on the clifftop site.
I suppose the Angles and Saxons are widely thought of as living in smoky huts, oblivious of Roman comforts. All the evidence is that at their best they put great energy into handing on the learning and skills of the ancient world while adding cultural riches of their own. Think of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the gold-set jewellery of Sutton Hoo, or the international learning of a man like Bede.
Mention Whitby and the probable response is: “Ah, Dracula.” For it was here that Bram Stoker’s vampire came ashore. Among Goths, devotion to the agreeable old fishing town at the mouth of the Esk is so great that the shops and offlicences of Whitby cater for their pale-skinned taste for Monster energy drink as much as for tourists who prefer fish and chips and candyfloss.
The fictional Dracula ran past the ruins of Whitby Abbey as he loped shadowily up and down the 199 stone steps to St Mary’s church, with its improbable fitting of galleries and pews like a theatre set designed by some Georgian Rubik.
But how can any visitor resist the climb to inspect the Abbey remains? Their silhouette hovers above the rooftops of the town in unexpected places. Under cloud, rain and sunbeam, they remain mysterious. No aspect is more beguiling than the empty-lanceted east facade reflected in the wind-ruffled monastic pond that baffles expectations. How can it stay filled on a clifftop headland?
From the ruins now visible it is not easy to tell how a monastery came to be here in the first place. The monastic church is the one begun in the 1220s, taking more than 200 years to complete. I’d very much like to have seen how the Romanesque or Norman church that it replaced. But I learnt at Whitby Abbey’s museum, with the help of English Heritage’s extraordinarily learned
historian Michael Carter, how surprising it was that the 11th-century Norman monastery should have been refounded there.
For Whitby wasn’t called Whitby when it was first built in the 7th century. Whitby is the name brought by the Vikings. The English had probably called the place Streanaeshalch. It’s complicated. But the heroines of its early history were St Hilda (Hild in English) and her successor as abbess St Aelfflaed. In 664 under Hilda was held the most important synod of the pre-conquest era, and from the school of her monastery (of nuns with a separate community of priests) came five notable bishops.
Hilda counselled kings and sent envoys abroad. Clues to the culture of her age are seen in touchingly beautiful miniature crosses of jet and silver (above) found on the Abbey site, and fragments of drinking glasses, no doubt imported. The sea was no barrier but a road.
This nest of civilisation on the windy headland of Streanaeshalch was wiped out by the Vikings – the heathen, as chroniclers called them. That Normans should have refounded an abbey on the same spot after 200 years shows that respect for their holy predecessors overcame any cultural alienation from the people they’d conquered.
English Heritage (now a charity, not a government quango) needs to fund its conservation and educational work from donations and sales of hand-knitted knights’ helmets and Whitby gin in the shop.
But it was in the encouragingly presented museum on the floor above that I learnt respect for those of whose ruins we remain in awe.