Whitby Abbey
Interesting facts
- Cædmon, the earliest English poet known by name, lived in Hild's community here in the 7th century.
- Before it was called Whitby, the place was known as Streoneshalh; the later name comes from Old Norse for white settlement.
- Besides the date of Easter, the Synod of Whitby also debated the proper style of tonsure for monks and clergy.
- The Danish raids that emptied the monastery came in 867–870 under the Viking leaders Ivar the Boneless and Ubba.
- Reinfrid, who refounded the monastery after the Norman Conquest, had been a soldier of William the Conqueror before becoming a monk.
- The soaring Gothic church whose ruins stand today was rebuilt on a much larger scale from the 1220s.
- In December 1914 the German battlecruisers Von der Tann and Derfflinger shelled the headland, badly damaging the abbey ruins in about ten minutes.
- The abbey's coat of arms bore three coiled snakes, in fact ammonite fossils; according to legend, Hild turned the local snakes to stone.
- In Dracula the Count comes ashore as a great dog and bounds up the 199 steps to St Mary's churchyard beneath the abbey.
- King Oswiu of Northumbria, who granted the land, was buried at the abbey along with Hild and several royal kin.
Why it is worth it
Abbess Hild founded a monastery for both men and women at Whitby in 657, on land granted by King Oswiu of Northumbria, and within seven years the new house had already hosted one of the most consequential meetings in the history of English Christianity. The Synod of Whitby, convened in 664, settled a dispute that sounds narrow today but mattered enormously then — whether the English church should calculate the date of Easter by Roman or Celtic reckoning — and its decision in favor of Rome set the course the English church would follow from then on.
Danish raids in the ninth century emptied the site, and it stayed empty until 1078, when the Benedictine monk Reinfrid re-established monastic life there under Norman rule. That second community lasted until 1539, when Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries shut it down for good, leaving the roofless skeleton of church and priory that still dominates Whitby's headland.
It was that skeleton, silhouetted against the North Sea, that caught Bram Stoker's attention when he came to Whitby on holiday in July 1890, already turning over the idea for a gothic novel. He is known to have used his stay to dig through local antiquarian books, in one of which he found the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler — Vlad Dracula — and it is at Whitby, beneath these ruins, that Stoker chose to stage the vampire's first landfall in England. It's a resonance some readers of the novel have noted: the same headland that once hosted the Synod of Whitby, where the English church fixed the line between Roman order and older tradition, becomes the exact spot where Stoker lets something ancient and foreign cross into English soil.
Getting there
27 km from Scarborough. Teesside International Airport (MME) is about 53 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
Whitby Abbey was a 7th-century Christian monastery that later became a Benedictine abbey. The abbey church was situated overlooking the North Sea on the East Cliff above Whitby in North Yorkshire, England, a centre of the medieval Northumbrian kingdom. The abbey and its possessions were confiscated by the crown under Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1545.
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