Which Old English poem is attributed by Bede to an illiterate cow-herder at Whitby?

The Old English poem attributed by Bede to an illiterate cow-herder at Whitby is Cædmon’s Hymn. It is a short Christian poem praising God as creator and is associated with Cædmon, a Northumbrian herdsman who became a poet and monk.

In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Cædmon is described as working at the monastery of Whitby under Abbess Hilda. After leaving a feast because he could not sing, he reportedly dreamed that someone commanded him to sing about the beginning of creation. He awoke able to compose verses and was then tested and encouraged by Hilda and the monastery’s scholars.

Bede wrote the story in Latin and supplied a Latin prose version of the poem’s meaning; he did not preserve the Old English text directly in his account. The surviving Old English versions appear in manuscripts of Bede’s history and show substantial scribal variation.

Cædmon’s Hymn is often called the oldest surviving English poem, though that claim depends on how survival and dating are defined. It is securely associated with early Old English verse and remains a key example of Christian themes expressed through Germanic alliterative tradition.