The new museum at Whitby Abbey

Are we siding with Europe, or do we want to go our own way? That’s the question at the heart of a protracted debate. Opinion is fiercely divided, and the woman at the helm has an almost insurmountable task on her hands. The speeches become more and more reckless, and fierce, with insults spat across the chamber and no holds barred. The British, says one orator, are “the only people stupid enough to disagree with the whole world”; they should realise that they “inhabit only a portion of [these] two islands in a remote ocean”.

It could be this week in Westminster, but the location is a windswept headland in North Yorkshire and the year is 664. More than a thousand years on, I am standing in the precise place where it all happened, and those words – uttered by a monk called Wilfrid, later Bishop of York – seem to be swirling around us on the breeze. We can imagine the scene, Michael Carter, a senior historian at English Heritage, and I: the hall would have been somewhere over there, where the grass has just been mown. The speech he has just quoted from is recorded in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Listening intently would have been Colman, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, leading the other side of the debate. And presiding over it all, the legendary Abbess Hilda, one of the most prominent women in Christianity.