Synod of Whitby

In 664 King Oswiu of Northumbria presided over a meeting of churchmen at Streanæshalch, the double monastery of the abbess Hilda later known as Whitby, in what is now Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. He ruled that his kingdom would date Easter and shape the monastic tonsure according to Roman custom rather than the practice of the Irish monks of Iona. A local decision about the calendar, the synod later became a symbol of the English church's alignment with Rome.

Two early accounts survive. The Life of Wilfrid by Stephen of Ripon was probably written soon after 710, and Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People was completed in 731. Bede used Stephen's work but also knew people connected with the participants. The two broadly agree, though Bede's version of the debate is much fuller. Both wrote decades later, and the speeches they give are best read as summaries of how they understood the arguments. Bede, who cared deeply about calculating Easter and about the unity of the English church, may have exaggerated the synod's importance.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 had ruled that Easter should be kept on a Sunday, but working out which Sunday required complex calculation, and different tables produced different dates. Iona and its many daughter houses kept an 84-year cycle, while Rome by now followed a 19-year cycle derived from the church of Alexandria. Both traditions existed in Northumbria. King Edwin had been converted by missionaries sent from Rome, but Oswald, who took the throne after Edwin's death and had lived in exile on Iona, invited Ionan monks such as Aidan to evangelise the kingdom. The difference reached the royal household itself: Oswiu's queen, Eanfled, kept Easter on a different day from her husband, so that one part of the court could be celebrating while the other was still fasting for Lent.

Oswiu's son Alchfrith, sub-king of Deira, had given the monastery of Ripon to Wilfrid, a Northumbrian churchman recently back from Rome, and is often thought to have pushed for the meeting. Bishop Colmán spoke for the Ionan side, appealing to the example of Columba, Iona's founder, and through him to the apostle John. The Roman party included the queen's chaplain Romanus and Agilbert, a bishop from the Frankish kingdom, but since Agilbert struggled with the English language, Wilfrid made the case. According to Bede, he argued that the Roman date was observed where Peter and Paul had taught and were buried, and throughout the wider church. Oswiu asked both sides whether Christ had given Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven. When they agreed, he decided in favour of the keeper of the keys.

In fact, the method Wilfrid defended was really the Alexandrian one, and Bede himself doubted that it was used in Rome. Bede later produced his own tables, which were eventually adopted across the British Isles and beyond.

Northumbria adopted the Roman practice, and its bishop's seat moved from Lindisfarne to York. Colmán and those monks who would not change went back to Iona, taking some relics of Aidan with them, and Wilfrid later became bishop. Oswiu replaced the departing clergy mostly with Irishmen from parts of Ireland that already kept the Roman Easter.

Whitby was only one of many councils on the Easter question in early medieval Christianity, and most of Ireland had already accepted the Roman reckoning; one historian has called Wilfrid's victory a push against an open door. Since the Reformation, however, the synod has often been portrayed as the defeat of an independent "Celtic Church" by Rome, although historians debate whether such a distinct church ever really existed.

Our 700 map is the nearest to 664. It does not draw Northumbria as a separate kingdom, but it shows the Frankish realm across the Channel, from which Agilbert came.