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.