Hieu of Tadcaster
Our Venerable Mother Hieu, Abbess of Tadcaster, First Nun of Northumbria
Venerable · d. 657 (traditional)
Commemorated 2 September — Repose, traditionally placed in 657
Hieu (Bede's Heiu, †657 in the received Orthodox calendars) is remembered as the first woman in Northumbria to take the vows and habit of a nun, consecrated by Aidan of Lindisfarne himself. She founded the monastery of Heruteu — Hartlepool — the house in which Hilda of Whitby would afterwards begin her rule, and then withdrew to the city of Calcaria, called Kaelcacaestir by the English, identified since antiquarian times with Tadcaster in Yorkshire, where she fixed her dwelling. That single notice of Bede is the whole of her ancient record; the rest — her Irish origin, the year of her death — belongs to later and modern tradition, and is marked as such below.
Everything the ancient sources transmit about Hieu is contained in one sentence of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (IV.23), given in passing in his account of Hilda of Whitby. Bede relates that Hilda was made abbess in the monastery called Heruteu (Hartlepool, on the Durham coast), and that this monastery had been founded not long before by "the devout handmaid of Christ Heiu, who is said to have been the first woman in the province of the Northumbrians to take the vows and habit of a nun, being consecrated by Bishop Aidan; but she, soon after founding the monastery, retired to the city of Calcaria, which the English call Kaelcacaestir, and there made her dwelling."
Note the reserve of Bede's own wording: fertur — she "is said" to have been the first nun of Northumbria. Even this, the one great fact of her memory, Bede reports as received tradition rather than as his own knowledge. Nothing further is recorded of her: no ancestry, no death notice, no relics, no miracles. The Life of this entry is therefore, deliberately, no longer than its record.
What the notice implies is nonetheless considerable. Aidan came from Iona to Lindisfarne in 635; Hilda took charge of Hartlepool in or about 649. Within that narrow window Hieu received the monastic habit — before any other woman of the Northumbrian kingdom — established at Hartlepool the community that became one of the great double monasteries of the English north, and then laid down its government to withdraw southward. Calcaria was a Roman station in the West Riding; the standard identification, current since the antiquaries and adopted by the calendars, is Tadcaster, though the nearby township of Healaugh has also been proposed, and later local tradition attached her name there.
Veneration and later cultus
No medieval feast or shrine of Hieu is attested. Her veneration is modern and Orthodox: she stands in the calendars of the Latin saints of the British Isles kept by the Orthodox jurisdictions in Britain, on September 2, with the year of repose given as 657. Both the date and the year rest on this modern calendar tradition, not on any ancient source: the St Constantine York calendar (Antiochian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland) lists her on this day as "St. Hieu, abbess of Tadcaster (657)", and the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland keeps her the same day as "Venerable Hieu of Tadcaster (†2 September 657)". The Romanian account adds that she was born in Ireland and sought out Aidan at Lindisfarne after hearing of his holiness; her Irish origin is a common statement of the modern notices (her name is not obviously English) but is found in no ancient source, and Bede says nothing of where she came from. One modern notice gives 12 March as the day of her death at Healaugh; the discrepancy with the September feast is simply recorded here, since neither date can be carried back beyond the modern literature.
Feast and commemoration
September 2 (church date; New Calendar civil September 2, Old Calendar civil September 15), rank primary. The feast belongs to the British Isles and Ireland local layer: the witness is the St Constantine York calendar (Antiochian Archdiocese of the British Isles and Ireland), and the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland keeps her on the same day. She is not carried by the OCA, Greek or Russian calendars for this day. No proper service is known; the common of a venerable woman applies.
Iconography
No ancient image of Hieu exists or is likely ever to have existed; she has no medieval cultus and no attested iconographic type. Modern Orthodox icons of the recent English saints' revival depict her as an abbess in monastic habit with staff, but these are contemporary copyrighted works and none is stored here. She is listed among the wanted icons.
Disputed questions
- Hieu, Begu and Bega. The medieval Life and Miracles of St Bega — the patroness of St Bees in Cumbria — constructed its heroine in part out of Bede's material, identifying Bega both with Begu, the aged nun of Hackness who saw the vision of Hilda's passing (Bede IV.23), and, in the subsequent tradition, with Hieu of Hartlepool. Modern scholarship treats the three as distinct women, and this collection follows that judgement: Hieu of Hartlepool and Tadcaster, Begu of Hackness (†681), and Bega of St Bees each stand alone, and material proper to one is not transferred to another. Neither Begu nor Bega is yet authored in this corpus; when they are, reciprocal notes belong there.
- Where is Kaelcacaestir? Tadcaster is the standard identification of Bede's Calcaria and the one the Orthodox calendars use in styling her "of Tadcaster"; Healaugh, a few miles away, is the principal rival proposal. The question is a place-name question, not a biographical one, and is left open here.