“Kings and princes used to come and ask her advice in their difficulties and take it.”[i] This 7th century abbess was patron for the first known poet in the English language, an advisor to kings, and host of the Synod of Whitby, a key gathering in church history. “Kings and princes used to come and ask her advice in their difficulties and take it.”
[i] Leo Sherley-Price, trans. Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Revised R. E. Latham. Introduction D. H. Farmer (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 244.
Read more about her in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
Nicola Griffith’s novel Hild (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013) traces Hild’s life from her girlhood and explores her impact on the Anglo-Saxon world.
A Medieval Woman's Companion 
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