Cædmon was an Anglo-Saxon herdsman attached to the double monastery of Streonæshalch (657-681). Originally ignorant of the art of song, Cædmon learned to compose one night in the course of a dream. Cædmon's only known surviving work is Cædmon's Hymn, the nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of the Christian god he supposedly learned to sing in his initial dream. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. (Summary from wikipedia)