Caedmon used to sneak out before it was his turn because he couldn’t sing. Like others in Anglo-Saxon society, the monks followed the custom of passing around a harp after the evening meal in the great hall for everyone to take a turn singing/chanting a story. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede records the story of Caedmon, a simple, uneducated cow herder at the Abbey of Whitby who was given the gift of song in a dream/vision. But, in this story, for the first time, one of those traditional songs has a religious theme, illustrating the influence of Christianity on the pagan culture. The poem pictures an Anglo-Saxon society in which the tribe gathers in the mead hall to eat and to entertain each other with songs about heroes and their adventures. Part of this work’s importance is what it reveals about Anglo-Saxon society nearly one hundred years after the arrival of St.
It was probably composed during the latter half of the 7th century. Recorded by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, “Caedmon’s Hymn” is the oldest extant work in the Old English language. Also like other abbeys in England, it was closed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1536.īut long before Henry VIII, Whitby Abbey was home to Caedmon. Like the Abbey at Lindisfarne, the Abbey at Whitby was sacked by Viking raiders and rebuilt. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged.
Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
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