"Caedmon's Hymn" is one of the oldest poems known written in Anglo-Saxon, the language which centuries later became English. It's a poem about the creation of the world, written by an illiterate farmhand named Caedmon who worked for the monastery of Whitby in northern England. The story told is that Caedmon was given the gift of song by a mysterious figure who visited him in a dream, however it's very likely that Caedmon was in fact a trained bard who had been hiding his gifts from the Christian monks who would have disapproved of his "pagan" songs. The words of his song were written down, but no melody survives. The version below is a setting of the Anglo-Saxon lyrics to a melody written by Jay Leeming.