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Hello, today we'll be discussing the 7th century St. Hilda, or Hilda, as she would have been known then.

She wielded considerable religious and political influence in a volatile era.

The monasteries she led in the north of England were known for their literacy and learning and produced great future leaders including five bishops.

The remains of a later Abbey still stand in Whitby on the site of the powerful double monastery she headed there.

We gain most of our knowledge of Hilda's life from the venerable bead, her wrote that she was 66 years in the world living 33 years in the secular life and 33 dedicated to God.

She was baptised alongside her kinsmen, Edwin, the king of Northumbria, and beadrides, her prudence was so great that not only in different persons but even kings and princes asked and received her advice.

Hilda and her Abbey at Whitby hosted the famous Synod which decided when Easter would be celebrated following a dispute between different traditions.

Her achievements are all the more impressive when we consider that Christianity was still in its infancy in Northumbria.

So how do we weigh the contribution she made to the establishment of Christianity in the north of England?

How unusual was it for a woman to be such an important figure in the church at this time, and how did her double monastery, both men and women, operate on a day to day basis?

And how did she manage to convert a farmhand into England's first vernacular poet?

John immediately discussed the life and works of St Hilda, a John Blair following history at Queen's College Oxford, Rosemary Cramp, Emeritus Professor in Archaeology at Durham University, and Sarah Foot, Professor of Early Medieval History at Sheffield University.

John Blair, can you give us an overview of what was going on politically and generally in the early seventh century in Northumbria?

It's a time when English society was changing very rapidly and very fundamentally, and so was kingship.

We don't know much about English kingship before 600, and it may have been quite complex, but we can say for certain that there were fundamental changes which were causing the emergence of kingship over very large areas and more stable dynasties, and also the accumulation of enormous amounts of wealth in the hands of royal families.

As we can see most spectacularly in the Sutton Who Ship burial in Suffolk.

In the case of Northumbria, we can see the emergence of two kingdoms, essentially what's now Yorkshire, the Kingdom of Dehira, and everything to the north of that, going up well into modern Scotland, into Lothian, the Kingdom of Benicia.

And at the time we're talking about both of those had quite recently been brought under English control from the British kingdoms which they'd evidently been, and the dynasties of Dehira and Benicia were competing for supremacy.

It's a time when there was intense rivalry, often very ruthless rivalry between dynasties, when the members of families that were not in the ascendancy had to go into exile to avoid being killed by the temporarily dominant family.

And that was a context in which princesses and princes of families temporarily out of power necessarily travelled very widely, went to other courts elsewhere in England or even in Francia.

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