etraction removed from
the malice of the unrighteous."

A contemporary of Hild's was Aebbe, a princess of the rival dynasty of
Bernicia, and sister of the royal saint, King Oswald, and of Oswy, the
reigning king. Her brother intended to give her in marriage to the king
of the Scots, but she herself was opposed to the alliance. Her family
had embraced the Christian religion in exile, and she determined to
follow the monastic life.

Accordingly, she built a double monastery, apparently in imitation of
Whitby, at Coldingham on the promontory still called S. Abb's Head. She
does not seem, however, to have maintained, like Hild, the discipline
and fervour of which she herself gave an example; for Bede notes here a
rare example of those disorders of which there were certainly far fewer
in England at this time than anywhere else.[25] Aebbe was apparently in
ignorance of the relaxation of discipline in her monastery until she
was warned of it by an Irish monk of her community, named Adamnan.

As he was walking with the abbess through the great and beautiful house
which she had built, he lamented with tears, "All that you see here so
beautiful and so grand will soon be laid in ashes!" The astonished
abbess begged an explanation. "I have seen in a dream," said the monk,
"an unknown one who has revealed to me all the evil done in this house
and the punishment prepared for it."

And what, one naturally asks, are these crimes for which nothing short
of total destruction of the splendid house is a severe enough visitation
from Heaven? Adamnan continues "The unknown one has told me that he
visited each cell and each bed, and found the monks, either wrapt in
slothful sleep, or awake, eating irregular meals and engaged in
senseless gossip; while the nuns employ their leisure in wearing
garments of excessive fineness, either to attire themselves, as if they
were the brides of men, or to bestow them on people outside." One must
admit that here and there in the writings of the period, there are
references to this worldliness in some monasteries; but whatever may
have been the state of things at a later date, there does not seem to be
evidence of graver misdeeds in these early years of monasticism in
England. Bede uses perhaps unnecessary severity in speaking of renegade
monks and nuns so-called, since he is admittedly speaking from hearsay
and not about disorders which came under his own observation. Whatever
the sins of Coldingham may