A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (23 page)

Willibrord extended his missionary activities to the Frisian islands of Heligoland and Walcheren and even made some conversions in Denmark. His standing in the Frankish kingdom was evident when he was chosen to baptize the infant child of Charles Martel, Pipin of Heristal’s ambitious bastard son. The child, later known as Pippin the Short, was the first king of the Carolingian dynasty and father of Charles the Great. Pippin of Heristal died in December 714. It was the signal for bitter internecine war between his grandsons, their sponsors and Charles Martel, the illegitimate son. In Frisia Radbod seized his chance. He ravaged the Christian enclaves intruded into his territories by the Franks and drove Willibrord from the country. The saint retired, for the time being, to Echternach.

Four years later, in 719, the Merovingian political landscape was transformed. A puppet still wore the crown, but old divisions were to be merged into a single immense domain under the supreme effective power of Charles Martel. On the northern frontier the death of Radbod that same year opened the field to revived Christian initiative. Although in his sixtieth year, Willibrord willingly returned. To help him he had a vigorous new assistant in the person of Wynfrith of Crediton or Exeter, known to history as St Boniface.

St Boniface of Crediton, patron of Germany: his early career

The newcomer was in his forties and the ageing Willibrord had another twenty years of active life ahead of him. Given the general assumption that medieval people had very short lifespans a word about ages may be in order. The indomitable Wilfrid of York lived to be seventy-six; Willibald, the English-born bishop of Eichstätt, eighty-six. His brother Wynnebald, abbot of Heidenheim, died in his sixties and their sister St Walburga, who succeeded him as head of the abbey, was verging on seventy. The sweet-natured and much beloved Lioba, abbess of Tauberbischofsheim, another alumna of Wimborne, died aged about eighty. As to Boniface himself, when he met his death in 754, aged about seventy-eight, it was not from natural causes but as martyr of a pagan raiding party into his encampment at Dokkum during a final missionary campaign in northern Frisia – his only shield a heavily bound Gospel book with which, tradition holds, he tried to parry the sword blows of his attackers.

Wynfrith, said to have been born in Crediton, Devon, about 675, was the son of a notable West Saxon family in the region of Exeter. His biographer and kinsman St Willibald tells us that it was only with reluctance that his father allowed the boy to attend the monastery school of Exeter and then travel to the monastery of
Nursling in Hampshire. Here he was soon attracting students of his own by his academic reputation and the general admiration for his austere and virtuous life.

King Ine of Wessex and his advisers selected Wynfrith to head a delegation to the archbishop of Canterbury. Its success added the skills of a diplomat to his reputation. Inevitably, when the old abbot died the monks of Nursling begged him to take over the job. Instead, with two or three companions, he headed for the port of Lundenwic, bent on a Continental mission. A sea passage usually meant finding the skipper of a merchant ship willing to take passengers. Departure time could depend on how long it took the shipmaster to assemble his cargo. Having negotiated a fare, the monks waited for the shipmaster to set his sail for Dorestad, about twelve miles from Utrecht. It was the year 716 and Boniface found the Frisian opposition to the Franks in spate. He returned to England to reconsider his strategy.

The Continent was still the objective and Bishop Daniel of Winchester appointed another abbot at Nursling. The bishop offered advice on dealing with pagan rulers and their claims to descend from the gods. Don’t argue, just listen to the genealogies with interest. And then point out that beings generated through the intercourse of male and female can hardly be eternal, so they must be not gods but men. And why, if against the odds they do have divine powers, do these gods of the north allow the Christian peoples to occupy the fertile southern regions of the world, rich in oil and wine, while they and their own worshippers are restricted to the cold regions? Above all the heathen are to be constantly reminded of the superiority of the Christian world. This must have been a difficult proposition to advance given the recent victories of Islam around the southern shores of the Mediterranean and its contemporary incursions into Europe; Boniface would later have to write to an abbess friend to delay her plans for a pilgrimage to Rome until the Saracen attacks on the Holy City had abated.

Once more Boniface left Nursling and set out along the road for Lundenwic. It was the turning point of his life. He never lost touch with England and would maintain a stream of correspondence with friends and personalities in most of the English kingdoms, but he never returned. Sailing from Lundenwic as before, though this time on a ‘small swift ship’, Boniface and his party took a crossing to Quentovic. Being a Wessex man he might have considered taking ship at Hamwic, as St Willehad was to, and then up the Seine to Rouen. But Quentovic was the principal Channel port and arrangements for the onward journey to Rome were probably easier. Even so, lodging was a problem and the party had to pitch tents for shelter.

Warrior for Christ, ealdorman for Rome

King Alfred was to describe St Peter as having received the ealdordom of Rome from God. The image well suits the role that Wynfrith of Crediton would discharge for Rome in eighth-century Germany, as the West Saxon ealdorman was the king’s local deputy. Wynfrith made his way to Rome and there, on 15 May 719, Pope Gregory II ‘commissioned him to preach to the unbelieving gentiles’. It is the earliest such mandate to have been preserved.
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It specifies that any baptisms are to be conducted according to the Roman rite and that Wynfrith, now named Boniface by the pope, is to report back to Rome. There had been some papal contacts with the peoples of northern Germany and bishops in the Rhineland had been sending missionary expeditions eastwards. While the English were not always first in the field, however, they pioneered unquestioning authority to Rome. Boniface would later boast of having made more than 100,000 converts.

It has been observed that:

What gave Boniface’s work lasting success, compared with that of some of the Irish monks who had preceded him, was his care for organization and his realization that it was necessary to enlist the support of the state as well as the Church.
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He prepared the ground with a ‘journey of inspection . . . to discover whether [the people] . . . were ready to receive the word of God.’
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In Bavaria and Thuringia he consolidated and extended the existing Christian presence, whether in pockets centred upon baptismal churches established by lay lords or resulting from earlier sporadic Irish missionary work; there were some German initiatives, particularly to the west of Bavaria where Christianity already had some devotees among the aristocracy. His travels also took him into Lombardy where he was received by King Liutprand, though Boniface’s biographer does not tell us whether he visited the monastery at Bobbio, near Pavia, founded by the Irish missionary St Columbanus a century before.

With the death of Radbod in 719 Boniface returned to Frisia where for three years he worked with Willibrord, re-establishing gospel teaching and destroying pagan temples and shrines and building churches. Now getting on in years, the ‘Apostle of Frisia’ wanted to make his dynamic compatriot a bishop and his second in command. Boniface pointed out that he had come to Germany under the aegis of the Apostolic See and had not formally sought Rome’s permission to divert his energies to Frisia. Reluctantly, Willibrord let him return to the German mission field. At Amöneburg in Hesse, Boniface found the ‘rulers’, two brothers, ‘practising . . . the sacrilegious worship of idols under the cloak of Christianity’, though Willibald does not explain further. Boniface won enough converts to establish a chapel. He now commissioned ‘an experienced and trustworthy messenger’ to report his progress to Rome. By return he was commanded to come to the Holy City in person. Pope Gregory II questioned him on his creed and teaching, but it was immediately clear there was a ‘communication problem’, since it seems the Englishman could not easily understand
the Italianized Latin that was evolving at the papal court. Saying, diplomatically, that he ‘lacked the skill in the use of the tongue with which you are familiar’ (a comment incomprehensible if it meant this renowned scholar could not understand Latin), Boniface asked permission to make a written confession of faith. This granted, he produced a piece ‘expressed in polished, eloquent and learned phrases’. Gregory consecrated him bishop without a diocese on 30 November 722.

Like any liegeman he was required to take an oath, but where his fellow noblemen pledged loyalty to king or war leader, Boniface swore his allegiance in the first instance to St Peter ‘and to his vicar on earth the pope’. From the outset his mission was pledged to Rome. Bishops of the sees adjacent to Rome (the so-called
suburbicarian
sees) made allegiance to the Byzantine emperor, that is the Byzantine emperor at Constantinople. Boniface pledged to uphold Catholic teaching and to report any bishop deviating from it to the Holy See. A few days later Boniface received letters of commendation from the Pope to the Thuringians, the Old Saxons and to ‘Duke Charles’, that is Charles Martel, mayor of the palace to the Merovingian Theodoric IV, informing him that the new bishop was charged with ‘preaching the faith to the peoples of Germany who dwell on the eastern bank of the Rhine, some of whom are still steeped in the errors of paganism’.
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Armed with a letter of protection from Charles, the new bishop returned to the land of the Hessians, where there was a superficial adherence to Christianity although many practised pagan rites and incantations to springs and trees.

Boniface led his war band of Christian warriors into the heart of enemy territory. The objective was an ancient and massive oak at a place called Geismar (probably the one near Fritzlar). The ancient tree, possibly with four trunks rising from the same bole, was sacred to Thor, the Germanic god of thunder and storm (known to the Anglo-Saxons as Thunor, and was the focus of a vigorous cult. Such
tree cults were at the heart of north European paganism and lingered well into the Christian era. Instances are cited from sixteenth-century Prussia, while as late as the 1640s the priest of the little Normandy parish of Allouville-Bellefosse was battling with superstitious villagers over a great cleft oak tree at the heart of the community. Rather than risk the fury of the locals by chopping it down, the priest constructed a miniature wooden chapel-cell in the cleft, which is still on the tourist itinerary of the
département
of Seine Maritime.

St Boniface confronted problems similar to those facing that Normandy curé. In the Germanic pantheon, Thor was the special deity of warriors; the fact that the cloven trunk, no doubt the result of a lightning strike, continued in vigour suggested the indwelling presence of the god whose weapon was the thunderbolt, Thor’s magic hammer. Undaunted by a largely hostile crowd, Boniface laid an axe to the main trunk. According to Willibald he had not completed the first notch on the fore side of the tree when it ‘was smitten by a divine blast from heaven and crashed to the ground, shattering its crown of branches as it fell’. As if to confirm the miracle, the tree split into four parts, now found to be of equal length, without any further human intervention. Boniface ordered that the wood be used to build an oratory chapel, which he then dedicated to St Peter, patron of himself and of Rome.

Fulda, frontiersmen, English and German

Boniface now pressed on into Thuringia. He and his Christian pioneers, together with the scattered outposts of earlier missionary activity (perhaps from German sees) were harassed constantly. But little by little converts increased in number, ruined church buildings were reactivated as evangelizing centres and land cleared for a new monastery at Ohrdruf, near Gotha. Here the founding group ‘grew their own crops and made their own clothes’. In due course the
monastery was put in the care of Wigbert, a Dorset man with a reputation for discipline who had come out to be abbot of Fritzlar, on the Eder river, which together with the Fulda river was later an important trade navigation.

News of the work attracted recruits from Britain, where ‘readers, writers and skilled men trained in other arts’
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flocked to the villages and forest settlements of Hessen, Thuringia and other German lands. It has been argued that this exodus seriously depleted English resources of educated men and women. Newly converted locals, too, were inspired by the Englishman’s example. When Boniface decided on the foundation of the monastery at Fulda, where his body still lies in its magnificent Baroque sarcophagus, he entrusted the job to his Bavarian follower Sturmi (St Sturm).

Sturm’s parents, noble Christian converts, entrusted the boy’s upbringing to Wigbert at Fritzlar. Ordained as priest, he retreated with two friends to a wild, uninhabited spot to lead the life of a hermit in huts they built themselves and roofed with tree bark. Obviously self-sufficient, practical and determined, he was, Boniface decided, just the man to find the site for his new venture. It was the kind of prospecting expedition that would be a key factor in the medieval clearance of Europe’s forests. The final objective was a self-sufficient community pursuing the contemplative life under a disciplined monastic rule. The chosen site was a deserted spot in well-watered, virgin terrain, capable of self-sustaining productive exploitation. The outcome was an economic growth point and centre for culture and learning.