Cædmon

Common card · No. 296359

Cædmon, OSB (; fl. c. 657–684) was a Benedictine monk and the earliest English poet whose name is known. He was a Northumbrian cowherd who cared for the animals at the double monastery of Streonæshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy of Hilda. He was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream, according to the 8th-century Christian historian Bede. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Catholic Church and Anglicanism, with a feast day on 11 February. Cædmon is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of three of these for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived. His story is related in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English People") by Bede, who wrote, "[t]here was in the Monastery of this Abbess a certain brother particularly remarkable for the Grace of God, who...

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