WHITBY ABBEY.
Whitby, fifty or a hundred years ago, before the raucous cries of steam merry-go-rounds disturbed the ghost of Cædmon or grinning Aunt Sallies stood beside the Abbey Cross, must have been the loveliest town in England. Even now it is bewitching. The old town and the new are separated by the long harbour, with its crowd of gaily painted cobles, its quays, its rows of nets hung out to dry; and so, from the windows of the Royal Hotel on the one cliff, one can look across the water at the other cliff, and the old houses closely packed upon the slope, the red-tiled roofs, the high-pitched gables, the queer passages; and raised high above these the grassy hilltop, the long, low church, the sloping graveyard where Mary Linskill lies, the tall grey cross of Cædmon. Crowning all stands the ruined abbey on its height. A long flight of steps winds up the steep hillside from the harbour to the abbey, skirting the churchyard; and from this distance, in the dusk of evening, the stream of dark figures climbing endlessly might well be blackrobed pilgrims.
WHITBY HARBOUR.
The tall gables of Whitby Abbey on its bare and desolate cliff are known to us in countless pictures. We are prepared for the general effect of wild stateliness, the turrets against the sky, the wind-swept height, the whirling seabirds; but the beauty of the architecture is a surprise to some of us—the slender lancets, the rich triforium and trefoiled arches, the rose window, and all the wealth of ornament. The ruins of the tower lie where they fell, a mass of débris overgrown with grass and weeds. Here under the grey-brown walls, which are crumbled and bitten by the salt wind like a cliff against which the spray has dashed for centuries, we may sit and remember the saints and kings who came to this place when our history was young. It is not of the actual builders of these arches that we chiefly think. Hundreds of years before their day a monastery stood here, whose fame has always overshadowed this later one. This is the story of it:—
In the seventh century King Oswy of Northumbria and King Penda of the Mercians were at war. In vain Oswy offered conciliatory gifts: Penda would have none of them. "If that pagan," cried the exasperated Oswy, "refuses to receive our gifts we will offer them to the Lord, who knows how to accept them!" So he vowed, if he defeated the "wicked king," to dedicate his baby daughter to the cloister and give sites for twelve monasteries. This bleak cliff, then called Streaneshalch, the Bay of the Lighthouse, was one of the sites he gave when he had killed Penda, "that destroyer of his neighbours and fomenter of hostility," as William of Malmesbury calls him; and on it a monastery was built by the royal and saintly Abbess Hilda, "whom all that knew her called Mother, for her singular piety and grace." Here she ruled for many years, teaching peace and charity, training holy men—St. Wilfrid of Ripon, St. John of Beverley—and even conquering snakes and birds, it was said. Important things took place here during her rule. It was here that the great synod was held concerning the keeping of Easter, when St. Wilfrid quoted St. Peter and Colman quoted Columba till King Oswy closed the discussion by saying, "Peter is an officer whom I am not disposed to contradict ... lest when I come to the doors of the kingdom of heaven there may be no one to open them to me." And it was here, somewhere within a stone's throw of this actual spot, that Cædmon, the lay-brother, the herdsman "who did not learn the art of poetry from man but from God," stood before St. Hilda in the presence of learned men, and told his vision and recited the verses that were the first English poem. "And his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth." It was somewhere close at hand, too, that this earliest of our poets lay down to die in the infirmary, "conversing pleasantly in a joyful manner." "I am in charity, my children," he said, "with all the servants of God." Then he crossed himself, "laid his head on the pillow, and falling into a slumber, ended his life so in silence." St. Hilda herself, "whose life was a bright example to all who desired to live well," died and was buried here, but her bones were afterwards taken to Glastonbury. The dust of her successor, however—that Princess Elfleda whom Oswy dedicated to the religious life when he defeated Penda—lies somewhere very near this spot, within the abbey church itself, with that of the king her father, and her mother, Queen Eanfled. And down there on the slope, where the old cross stands, was the graveyard of the monks and in it the grave of Cædmon.
