According to Bede, Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest surviving English poem was composed miraculously in the seventh century by an illiterate farm servant at Whitby abbey (Bede, The Ecclesiastical history of the English people. In McClure J, Collins R (eds). Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 215–218, 1994); the abbess Hild recognized its value and preserved and disseminated it widely.