On Whitby's wild and windswept cliffs Before the Conqueror came
There lived a dame of royal blood And Hilda was her name
Her zeal inspired the local folk To join her in her labours
To build a house to honour God Despite some noisy neighbours
Snakes!
Wriggling and slithering Their hissing filled the air
Wherever people tried to step They'd find a serpent there
But Hild was not frightened By the snakes' intimidation
She prayed and her prayers led to
An incredible transformation
The writhing reptiles turned to stone
Each one decapitated And cast into the tumbling sea
Quite incapacitated
The folk of Whitby were amazed And all of them waxed lyrical
That Hild before their eyes performed A bona fide miracle
For ridding Whitby of the snakes And being an abbey builder
Our heroine was canonised And so became...
Saint Hilda
The legend of St Hild and the snakes is a way of explaining the existence of special
curvy fossils in the cliffs near Whitby.
I have an ammonite here.
When this was was alive it would have had the head of like an octopus or a squid coming
out of the open end but fossilised it looks very much like a snake with its head missing.
Hild was a seventh century Northumbrian princess who founded one of the great abbeys of medieval
England at Whitby on a peninsular on the coast of Yorkshire.
It was a double monastery one half for women one half for men and Hild ruled the lot and
everyone loved her.
The legend of Hild and the snakes is that they Whitby area got overrun with snakes,
poisonous snakes and Hild prayed to God for help and make a couple of suggestions both
of which the almighty accepted.
First was to deprive the snakes of their heads which stopped them biting but they were still
pretty wriggly and scary so God had them transformed into stone and they still erode out of the
cliffs near Whitby to this day.
That's the story.
The Whitby Abbey we see today is not the abbey of St Hild because the Vikings wiped that
off the face of the Earth and indeed took the area over and gave Whitby its name but
centuries later a new Benedictine monastery was built there at the end of the Saxon period
and a number of monasteries developed out of that to produce the magnificent ruin we
see today.
The story of Hild and the snakes is not found until about 700 years after Hild's time so
it really is part of the late middle ages which is a great period for interest in saints
and their cults.
Instantly it becomes very popular it's repeated in book after book through the 15th and early
16th centuries.
The abbey takes it up big time because it become put on the abbey's seal which is the
official stamp for all its documents showing Hild with an ammonite (or fossilised snake)
curled up underneath her.
Hild really existed because she's recorded in 7th and 8th century Saxon texts.
She's one of the great figures of early Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England.
The legend is a legend but the way it happens is quite important.
It's important that it's God who performs the miracle and not Hild.
All Hild does as a good Christian is ask God's help and he then decides to give it.
If Hild has turned the snakes into stone herself which some modern versions of the legend say
she'd have been a sorceress and not a saint and so right beyond the pale!
The great thing about the Hild and the snakes story is it spans such a vast area of time.
It unites the very beginnings of Christianity in England with the modern interest in fossils
and a past so extensive and primeval that Hild herself would never have known it was
there.