Caedmon's Call

The Great Rood Screen · Jul 2, 2026

Imagine a hall in Northumbria, thirteen hundred years ago, and the harp going round the benches after supper — and one man rising in dread and slipping out into the dark, because in his whole long life he has never been able to sing. His name is Caedmon, and tonight, in a cattle-shed, God will give him the gift he has run from his entire life. In a deliberately quieter and more intimate episode, Dcn. Seraphim reads and talks through Bede's account of the first Christian poet of the English language, movement by movement — the herdsman who became a monk of Hilda's Whitby, and whose first…