The Last Years of Wilfrid. — 705-709

Wilfrid's illness assembles all the abbots of his monasteries about him. — He divides his treasures: his farewell to the monks of Ripon. — His last journey to Mercia. — He consecrates the Church of Evesham monastery. Bishop Egwin of Worcester and the smiths. — Vision of the three virgins in the forest. — Simon de Montfort, creator of the House of Commons, buried at Evesham. — Wilfrid narrates all his life to his successor Tatbert. — His death. — His funeral at Ripon. — His worship and his miracles. —He appears with St. Cuthbert to relieve Hexham against the Scots: the Christian Dioscuri. — His banner appears at the battle of the Standard. —Services which he rendered to the monastic order, to the Church of England, to the universal Church, to the English nation. (Note on the Culdees of York.) — He begins that long succession of pontiff- confessors which has no rival out of the Church of England. — His character.

Wilfrid's Wilfrid passed the four last years of his life in "Iness. - - - athers all illness peace at his Monastery of Hexham, which had lis abbots though not by his will, become a cathedral and the seat of a diocese, the last of those of which he had been successively bishop.^^^ As he travelled on one occasion from Hexham to Ripon, he was attacked by a sudden faint, even more serious than that which seized him at Meaux. He was carried into a house on the roadside, and there ensued a scene which proves the love with which he was regarded, and how it was at once a bishop, a king, and a father whom his great and powerful monastic family was about to lose. At the first report of his illness all the abbots of his numerous monasteries, and even the anchorites who had gone out from his foundations, hurried to Hexham. Distance was no obstacle to them; they travelled day and night, questioning every passer-by, and continuing their course with hastened steps or saddened hearts according as the answer they received told them that their father was yet living, or that they would arrive too late. It was the desire of all to see once again their master and beloved father, and to join their prayers and tears to those of the community, that he might be permitted to regain consciousness, and to put his succession in order by dividing his property, and naming the future superiors of all his houses; ^^ for his influence was everywhere so great that the monks had given up their right to elect their own chiefs, which was, however, one of the constitutional principles of the Benedictine order. Their prayers were heard. Wilfrid recovered; but considering himself to have been thus warned that the time fixed by the archangel in his vision at Meaux would soon expire, he occupied himself in putting all his afi*airs in order, in preparation for his death. When he arrived at Ripon, he had the door of his treasury opened by the official who ceeds tothe kept the keys, in presence of the two abbots of his monasteries in Mercia, and of eight of the most devout monks. It is curious to note the inexperience of the persecutors and spoilers of those remote times, which is shown by the fact that, after his two periods of exile, his condemnations, and his long absence, this treasury, left in the keeping of a few monks and often of unfriendly superiors, in the midst of a country whose government had been for ^*9* York in 665, Lindisfame 678, Lichfield 681, and Hexham in 705. 296 II Cum intimo cordis mcerore... indesinenter diu noctuque cancntcs et deprecantes... omnes abbates ejus de suis locis et anacboretic concito cursu pergentes... secundum traditiones hominum de morte ejus hcBsitantes.... Ne nos quasi orbatos sine abbatibus relinqueret... ut et omnem vitam nostram in diversis locis secundum suum desiderium sub praepositis a se electis constitueret." — Eddius, c. 58. thirty years at constant war with Wilfrid, still contained treasure enough to make up four large portions of gold, silver, and precious stones. " My dearest brothers/' said Wilfrid to the ten witnesses of his last wishes, " I have thought for some time of returning yet once more to that see of Peter from which I received justice and freedom, to end my life there. I shall take with me the chief of these four portions for an offering to the basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St. Paul the Apostle. But if, as often happens to the old, I sliould die before accomplishing my wishes, I enjoin you, my faithful friends, to send these gifts to the churches I mention. Of the other three parts, you must divide one among the poor of my people for the salvation of my soul. Another shall be for the use of the two future abbots of Hexham and Ripon, and will enable them to conciliate the king and the bishops by gifts; and the last is for those who shared with me the long fatigues of exile, and to whom I cannot leave lands, that they may still have the means of living after my death." Here he stopped, overcome perhaps by emotion or fatigue; but after a while he resumed: " Remember that I appoint the priest Tatbert, my cousin, who up to this day has never left me, to be prior of the Monastery of Ripon, to take my place while I live, and to succeed me when I die. I do all this that the Archangel Michael may find me ready when my hour arrives; and I do not think it is far off." ²⁹⁷ His fare- When he had finished these arrangements, he caused the bell to be rung to summon his monastic family around him. When all the monks were assembled in the chapter-house, he entered, and sat down in the midst of them. '^ Your prior Celin," he said, " has for a long time labored in all the duties of monastic life; 1 can no longer refuse him permission to return to the life of solitude and contemplation for which he thirsts. I exhort you to preserve scrupulously the regularity of your life until I return and bring you the person I judge worthy to be your superior. But if it please God that I do not return, take him who shall be pointed out to you by these my fellowtravellers: make him your abbot, and pay him the obedience

*^' " Gazophylacium aperire claviculario praecepit.... Alteram partem inter se dividant, ut cum muneribus regis et episcoporum amicitiam impetrare potuerint. Tertiam vero partem iis' qui mecum longa exsilia perpessi laboraverunt.... Haec statuta dico ut me Michael archangelus visitans paratum inveniat." — Eddics, c. 59.

AND THE BENEDICTINE OEDER. 437

you have promised to God and to me." At these words, in which they foreboded a last farewell, all the monks fell on their knees weeping, and, bending their heads to the earth, promised to obey him. While they thus remained prostrate, Wilfrid blessed them, recommended them from the bottom of his tender heart to God, and departed, to see them no more.^^

The new King of Mercia, Ceonred, nephew of his old friend Ethelred, had invited him to visit and confer with him at once as to the state of the Mercian monasteries and of his own soul; for, drawn by the example of his uncle towards monastic life, he wished to consult Wilfrid before joining that uncle in the cloister. The aged saint obeyed this call, and, crossing the Humber for the last time, entered Mercia, where he visited one after another all the monasteries he had founded or adopted in that great kingdom, making everywhere arrangements similar to those he had made at Ripon to further the well-being and security of his different communities.^^^ He even went in this last effort of his old age to a district in which he had founded no monastic houses, into the country of the Wicciens, on the borders of the Welsh Celts and Western Saxons, to consecrate a Benedictine church just built at Evesham by the young King of the Mercians and Bishop E?win. }f-.,^,i,y The name of Egwin is worthy of a moment's

'^,- rr • f ,1 pause in our narrative. He was a scion of the reigning dynasty of Mercia, and had been, in his youth, made bishop of one of the new bishoprics created by Theodore, at Worcester; but the post was a difficult one, and, notwithstanding his unwearied self-devotion, he did not succeed in purifying or regulating the morals of his flock. They would neither obey nor even listen to him. One day

²⁹⁸ u Puisato signo tota familia Hryporum simul in unum congrcgata est... geniculantes lacrymantesque, inclinato capite in terram... proniqae orantes... et ab eo die ultra faoiem ejus simul non viderunt." — Eddius, c. 50.

a99 u Abbates suos omnes in adventu suo gaudentes invenit... et unicuique eorum secundum suani mensuram, aut num terris vitam monachorum suorum augmentavit, aut cum pecunia corda eorum lajtificavit." — Eddius, c. 61. To the various monasteries, the foundation of which by Wilfrid we have described, and the names of which are known, such as Hexham, Ripon, Peterborough, Ely, and Selsey, we ought to add Stamford, in the part of Mercia conquered by the Northumbrians, which was given to him on his first return from Rome to England, by his friend the young King Alchfrid. when he had preached against the habitual vices of the population, in a great forge situated in the depths of a wood, the smiths, far from ceasing their work, struck as hard as possible with their hammers on the anvils, so as to deafen him and drive him away.^oo His zeal for the strict observance of the marriage vow among these new Christians had above all irritated them against him.

To put an end to the persecutions and calumnies with which he was loaded, he determined to go, following Wilfrid's example, to justify himself before the Holy See. Though he did not admit the truth of any of the accusations brought against him, he yet remembered with confusion certain sins of his youth, and to expiate them determined to undertake this long journey with his feet loaded with iron chains, and, thus voluntarily fettered, entered Rome, where Pope Constantino did him entire justice^^^ Two years after his first pilgrimage he went again to Rome, from whence he brought back the Papal charter for the monasteries which a singular circumstance had determined him to build in a

forest given him by King Ethelred. A swineherd,

pushiug his Way through the tufted thickets of this "svood, ouco camo to a clearing where he saw three lovely girls seated, whose beauty appeared to him more brilliant than the sun; the one in the middle held a book, and all three were singing celestial harmonies. Modern learning

300 (( Qum conflandi ferrum locus esset aptissimus, et fabris et ferri excussoribus maxime repleretur, gens incredula incudes malleis ferreis tanto strepitu continuo percutiebat, ut bead viri serrao non audiretur.... Prae concussione, immo confusione malleorum et incuduni adhuc tinniebant ambae aures ejus, ac si percutientes incudes eum suquerentur." — Act. SS. 0. S. B., t. iii. p. 322, and Chronic. AhbatitB de Evesham, London, 1863, p. 2C. The legend written in the eleventh century by a Prior of Evesham adds that the forge and its inhabitants were swallowed up by an earthquake, and that since then no one has been able to exercise the trade of a smith on the site of the castrum thus punished, a story which suggests the following verse of Ovid — " Poena potest demi, culpa perennis erit; "

changing it thus: —

Culpa potest demi, poena perennis erit.

Epist. ex Ponto, i. 64. ³⁰¹ u Peccatorum juvenilium quondam conscium." — Gdill. Malmesb., De Pontif. AncjL, lib. iv. p. 284. "Pedes suos vinculis ferreis astrinxit quae clave poteraut firmari ac reserari." — Ohron. Evesh., p. 6. The legend adds that the key of these fetters, which he had dropped into the Avon, a river of his own country, was found at Rome, in a salmon which had come up the Tiber. This miracle greatly contributed to the popular renown of St. Egwin among the English of the middle ages, who, like their descendants, were great salmon-fishers. has supposed the locality of this vision to have been a place consecrated by Saxon superstition to the worship of the three Goddess Mothers, a worship which had struck deep root among the rural population of all the northern provinces of the Roman Empire, and which resisted the anathemas of the Councils longer than most other vestiges of idolatry .302 Egwin, when he was informed by the herdsman, went to pray humbly on the place of the vision. When his prayer was ended, he in turn saw the three virgins, one of whom, taller and infinitely more beautiful than the others, held, besides her book, a cross, with which she blessed him before she disappeared.303 jje recognized the Mother of the Saviour, and immediately resolved to build a monastery in her honor in that hitherto inaccessible spot. The new king of the country, godson and pupil of Egwin, seconded his master in this design, and gave him eighty-four manses or pieces of ground in the neighborhood of the forest.

On the very site of the great forge where the consecraworkmen had deafened Egwin with the noise of ^^'^0",°^^"^,!. their hammers, and quite near the new monastery of evcsat Alcester, the Mercian parliament was convoked *™* to give validity to the donations and privileges conferred on Egwin; and Wilfrid, as the great champion of the Benedictine rule in England, was appointed to preside at this solemnity, and to place on the altar he was about to consecrate the charter of endowment and freedom which had just been voted.^*^* At the moment when he was about to accomplish,

'•^°^ Roach Smith, Illustrations of Roman London. The same author relates that Wolstan, a monk of Winchester, at the end of the tenth century, in his poem on the Miracles of St. Swithin, has left a singular story of three nymphs or fairies who exercised their power in the forests of his neighborhood.

³⁰³ u Surgenti ab oratione tres virgines... apparuere, quarum quae media eminebat praecelsior omniquc nitore splendentior, aliis prasfulgebat, liiiis candentior, rosis vernantior, odore inajstimabili fragrantior.... Quum cogitaret banc Domini Genitricem esse." — Chroii. Evesh., p. 9.

3J4 u j^x mandate apostolico fuit sapientium conventus in loco qui Alneceastra vocatur... ct Brythwaldus archiepiscopus ex ore omnium et terram loci et libertatem in carta descripsit. Tunc elegerunt sapientes ut dominus Wilfridus episcopus et ego privilegium idem ad locum eumdem affercmus. Eadem autem die... Wilfridus episcopus et ego... cartam et loci libertatem... super altare posuimus, ct sic coram omnibus locuti fuimus." — Chronicon Abbatia; de Evesham, edid. W. D. Mackay, 1863, p. 20. Cf. Pref. p. xviii. in the new collection of Rerum Britannicarum Medii JEvi Scriptores. It is needless to say that I do not quote the authority of the Rule of Pope Constantino in favor of Evesham, so cruelly turned into ridicule, together with so many other pretended Pontifical charters, by the formidable irony of P6re Papcbroch. (Holland., vol. ii. April, pp. 30, with his colleague Egwin, this solemn mission, in presence of all the people, he made the following prayer, which was immediately enrolled in the acts of the foundation: —

^** Lord God, who dwellest in heaven, and who hast created all things, save him who shall give peace and security to this place, and shall confirm the inheritance of God in that liberty in which we offer it to Him. For this reason, in the name of Almighty God and of all heavenly virtue, we enjoin that neither king, nor prince, nor minister, nor any man of what rank soever, shall have the audacity to rob this holy place, or to appropriate any part of it whatever to his own profit that this place may always remain as we will it, consecrated to the use of the flocks and shepherds of God, and under the sway of its own abbot, according to the rule of God and St. Benedict, But if— which God forbid! — any man, led astray by avarice, should contravene this institution, may he be judged before the tribunal of God, may he be forgotten by Christ, may his name be struck out of the bookof life, and himself chained in the eternal pains of hell, unless at least in this life he does penance. As to him who shall respect and preserve this foundation, may God and all the saints have him in their holy keeping, and give joy to his soul in this life and happiness in the next.''-^^^

Egwin was buried in the monastery he had founded, the later annals of which are not without interest. Five hundred years afterwards it became one of the most venerated sanctuaries and most frequented places of pilgrimage in England,

31.) We may remark that the chronicler of Evesham has not dared to cite this bull at its proper date, that of the foundation, and only transcribes it in speaking of the suit decided by Pope Innocent III., Dec. 2i, 1205, between the Bishop of Worcester and the Abbot of Evesham; the Pope, deceived by false documents, of which many were then fabricated, pronounced for the monastery. The monk Thomas of Marleberge, charged to plead the cause at Rome, and who has left us a very honest and animated narrative of the whole procedure, tells us that he fainted at the feet of the Pope when he heard the sentence read, partly from fatigue on account of the fast of the vigil of Christmas, partly for joy to feel that they were delivered from a quasi- Egyptian servitude.

³⁰⁵ u Domine Deus... conserva ilium qui locum istum pacificabit et conservabit ct hanc Dei hereditatem et banc libertateni confirmabit quam Deo obtulimus. Nos etiam praecipimus... ut neque rex, neque princeps, neque minister, nee ullius ordinis homo, id prassumat ut locum istum sanctum diminuat aut sibi in privatam potestatem aliquid vindicet, sed sit locus hie, ut nos optamus, gregibus et Dei pastoribus ejusdem loci in usum, et bene dispositus in potestate proprii abbatis secundum regulam Dei et beati Benedict!. Si autem aliquis (quod absil) avariticc spiritu arreptus vertere velit, judicetur ante tribunal Dei et nunquam in Christi veneat memoriam." — Chron. Evesh. the bleeding remains of Simon de Montfort, the great Earl of Leicester, slain in the great battle fought under its walls, having been carried thither. This proud aristocrat retains a just eminence in history as having completed the establishment of the most famous political assembly" of modern times— the British House of Commons — by calling together the representatives of the cities and boroughs, and seating them beside the knights of the shires. Although a victorious enemy of the throne, and condemned by the Pope, he won to his side the popular and religious sentiment of the nation. During his life, and long after his death, he was the idol of the English people, who gave expression to their passionate attachment for the champion of their rights in a mode adapted to the spirit of the time, by going to pray at his tomb, attributing to him numerous miracles, and by comparing this new St. Simon to Simon Peter and Simon Maccabeus.^^

The consecration of this Church of Evesham, which was reserved for such memorable destinies, was the last episcopal function exercised by Wilfrid, the last act of that long life so entirely devoted to the extension of monastic life and the defence of the Roman Church. From the banks of the Avon he returned slowly to the neighborhood of Ely and Peterborough, which had long been dear and familiar to him. During this last iourney it occurred to him,

, ,1, -11. • If n

as to the most illustrious monk ot our own day shortly before his death, to tell the story of his life to a younger friend and faithful companion, who might be his witness to posterity. It was to his inseparable follower Tatbert, as he rode by his side, that Wilfrid thus gave, not a general confession, but a detailed narrative of his long life, with the certainty of having reached the eve of its last day .307 Death, indeed, arrested him on his journey, at Oundle, in one of his monastic foundations near Northampton, which he had dedicated to St. Andrew the Apostle, patron of that church at Rome, from whence the first English apostles had proceeded, and where he himself, the first of Anglo-Saxon ³⁰⁶ There are seven pages of these pretended miracles in the Chronicles of the Monks of Melrose. — Cf. Lingard, Hist. Eng., vol. ii. p. 166 of the Paris edition; and Fueeman, Gentleman's Magazine, Sept., 1862. Evesham has preserved nothing of the splendor of its ancient abbey, except one beautiful tower of the fourteenth century.

³⁰⁷ K Omnem vitae sua conversationem memorialiter prius enarravit Tatberto,... quadam die equitantibus per viam, quasi praesciens obitum 6uuai." pilgrims, had prayed on his first arrival^^^ His last illness was short, and his death gentle and without pain. He had only time to remind his companions of his former instructions, and to designate as his successor at Hexham that Acca who stood by him in his trial at Rome and during his mortal illness at Meaux.

Death of When he had given them a last blessing, his 23d jJ^e, head fell back upon the pillow, and rested there in "^^ calm repose, without a single groan or sigh. The whole weeping community chanted prayers around his bed. As they reached Psalm Cin, and the verse Emitte spiritum tuum et creahuntur, his breathing ceased, and he yielded up his soul to his Creator.^o^ The aged soldier of God died more gently than an infant in the cradle. He was seventysix years of age, forty-four of which he had been a bishop.

His funeral was celebrated with a mingled pomp and grief which can readily be imagined. Tatbert, his disciple, confidant, and successor, was also his chief mourner. Before the burial, and in obedience to the last affectionate injunction of the dying, he sent the shirt of the saint, still moist with his last sweat, to an abbess named Cyndreda, who had been converted by Wilfrid, who now governed one of the monasteries of his congregation,^!*^ and who had, doubtless, like the Abbess of Coldingham and Whitby, distinguished herself by her fidelity to the exiled and persecuted pontiff. The body was carried to Ripon, and buried in the church which he had built and dedicated to St. Peter, the apostle whom, along with St. Andrew, he had most venerated.^n Tatbert ordained that a special mass should be said for him; and that every year, on the day of his anniversary, the tithe of his flocks should be distributed to the poor, besides the daily

=*»** See above, p. 309.

309 u Cxim quiete, non cum gemitu et murmure, caput ad cervical lectuli inclinavit et requievit."

^"' " Ad abbatissam sancti pontificis nostri, nomine Cynedryd."— Eddius, c. 62.

" Interulamque puer sancti sudore madentem
Corripuit, normatrici tulit atque beatse
Quani sibi flaniineo sociaverat apte verendo
Egregius heros, redimitim castificando."

Fridegodus, Carmen de Sancto Wilfrido, c. 55. The holy Bishop Cuthbert, who died in 687, also sent his last garment to an abbess who had touched him by her pious devotion.

2" EcDics, 0. 61 and 64. alms which were given also by Tatbert's orders, for the soul of his dear master and for his own.^^^

As soon as he was dead, Wilfrid appeared to the ^.^ ^^^ eyes of all in his true light, as a great saint and a ship and great man. The popular veneration, restrained or ™"'*'='^^- disturbed during his life by the struggles of race, party, and opinion in which he had been engaged, found expression beside his tomb. Miraculous cures on earth, luminous apparitions in the sky; a supernatural power which protected the cell where he died from profanation and from the ravages of fire — such were the first wonders which awoke the enthusiastic confidence of the Anglo-Saxons in this saint of their own race,^^^ a confidence which, having once taken root, went on increasing, and shone out with redoubled intensity four centuries later under the first Norman Kings. It was not only the blind, the infirm, the dying, and the shipwrecked who found occasion to rejoice that they had invoked the powerful intercession of the sainted Abbot of Hexham with God, but also many innocent victims of persecution, many outraged virgins, and whole populations desolated by the ravages of war or by the oppression of foreign conquerors.-^i^ At Hexham, in honor of the sanctuary which he had created,

^'^ The beautiful epitaph which Bede has preserved to us, and of which he was probably the author, deserves to be quoted, at least in part: —

" Wilfridus hie magnus requiescit corpore praesul,
Hanc Domino qui aulam ductus pietatis amore
Fecit, et eximio sacravit nomine Petri,
Cui claves cceli Cliristus dedit arbiter orbis. . . .
Paschalis qui etiam sollemnia tempora cursus
Catholici ad justum correxit dogma canonis,
Quera statuere patres, dubioque errore remote
Certa suae genti ostendit moderamina ritus :
Inque locis istis monachorum examina crebra
Colligit, ac monitis cavit quaj regula patrum
Sedulus instituit : multisque domique, forisque
Jactatus nimium per tempora longa periclis,
Quindccies ternos postquam egit episcopus annos
Transiit, et gaudens celestia regna petivit.
Dona, Jesu, ut grex pastoris calle sequatur."

3" Eddius, c. 62, C3.

^" See the curious narrative of Abbot ^Ired of Rievaulx, entitled De Sanctis Ecdesice Ilagidstadensis et eorum Miraculis, ap. Mabillon, Acta SS. 0. S. B., vol. iii. pp. 204, 220, and Raine's Priory of Hexham. We may remark especially the incident of the young man unjustly condemned, who, at the moment of his execution, turned to the church of the saint, crying, " Adjuva nunc, Wilfride, quia si uiodo nolueris, paulo post non poteris." On which there arrived in hot haste two fidejussores, who gave security for him 'more patrio, and saved him. This story is cited by Palgravo as a proof of the utility of invoking saints and miracles against the iniquity of the law. and for so long a time inhabited, the right of sanctuary was allowed to extend to a great circle round the monastery, the great enclosure— a sanctuary not only for ordinary criminals, but, especially in time of war, for the neighboring population, who took refuge there with their cattle, and whom the sword of the most cruel invaders dared not follow thither. The limits of this sanctuary were marked only by crosses erected at certain distances. The town which was soon after built close to the great monastery had no walls; the universal veneration for the memory of Wilfrid served it instead of ramparts. Nearly four centuries after his death, this veneration, and the confidence it inspired in the surrounding people, were expressed in a touching and truly poetic legend. King Malcolm of Scotland, in one of his numerous and cruel incursions into England, irritated by the murder of his messengers near Hexham, ordered the sack of the town and a general massacre of its inhabitants. The Galloway Picts, the most ferocious of all the Scotch, were charged with the execution of this atrocious order, which was but too much in accordance with the spirit of the time. The tears and supplications of the intended victims had been as vain as the entreaties of the clergy to move the king from his purpose. On the eve of the day fixed for the massacre, the whole population, disarmed and desperate, fled to the church of Wilfrid, which resounded with their cries. At this crisis one of the principal priests of the town fell asleep from fatigue, and had a dream, in which he saw two bishops arriving on horseback from the south. These Christian Dioscuri ^is came at a gallop to announce to the unfortunate inhabitants of ^^xham that they were saved. " I am Wilfrid," said one, " and this is Cuthbert, whom I brought theaid oV" with me as I passed by Durham. We are come to nlxhrm"^ deliver you. I have heard the weeping and cries of those who pray in my church. Fear nothing. At the dawn of day I will spread my net over the whole course of the Tyne, and no one shall be able to cross it to hurt you." Accordingly, in the morning a thick fog covered the whole valley. The messengers of the king lost their way, and when the fog dispersed the Tyne had risen so high that, there being no bridge, the Scots could not pass over. The husband of St. Margaret saw in this the finger

^•^ This recalls the apparition of Castor and Pollux at the battle of Lake Eegillus. of God, and gave up his cruel design, and the inhabitants of Hexham were more and more convinced that the arm of Wilfrid was ever ready to defend them.^^^

But it is specially at Ripon, where his relics reposed, that the universal faith manifested itself. Crowds came thither from all quarters, as if they expected still to find in bodily presence the aged saint who had feared neither man nor obstacles, and whose protection they invoked and even exacted with blind trust and tender familiarity, against the iniquities of conquest, the abuse of power, and the unjust severity of the law.^i"

Fifty years after the deliverance of Hexham, the njg banner Scotch, under their sainted King David, reappeared appears at in Northumbria, and committed horrors rarely onhe equalled even in the barbarous wars of the peri- fil^'^''*'"'^* Q(j_3i8 'pj^Q alarmed population took arms under the leadership of the Archbishop of York, and of those Anglo- Norman barons who were most celebrated for the munificence they displayed in the monastic restorations of the twelfth century — the Bruces, Mowbrays, Percies, and Estoutevilles. They marched against the cruel invaders, and met them at some distance to the north of Ripon. The English were drawn up round a cart similar to that famous carroccio which the Lombards of the same period led into battle against the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa: on this humble pedestal, above a pyx containing the host, they had planted the banner of Wilfrid — WUfrldi Bijyensis vexillum— between those of St. Peter and St. John. This cart, which they called the

³¹⁶ "Rexvocat Gallowenses homines cffiteris crudeliores.... ' Mox ut dies illuxerit, transeuntes flumen, irruite in eos. Non parcat oculus vester non ordini, non sexui, non aetati.'... Clamor ingens, ploratus et ululatus.... Et ecce apparuerunt duo viri... sedentes in equis.... Wilfridus vocor, et ecce liic mecuni est sanctus Cuthbertus, quem transiens per Dunelmum adduxi.... Ecce, albescento aurora, extendamrete meiira." — Mlubd RiEVALLKNSis, Be SS. Ecclesie Ilagulstad., c. 2, ed. Surtees. Cf. Pref., p. Ix. Wilfrid is said to have come from Ripon, where his tomb was, and to have gone towards the north, passing by Durham, which is south of Hexham.

^'^ "Ita ad eum in hac ecclesia quasi ad viventem confugerent, in omnibus nccossitatibus quasi praesentera consulerent, in tribulationibus et angustiis ejus auxilium non tani peterent quani exigerent."

^"* See the contemporary historians quoted by Lingard, and above all the discourse of a bishop before the battle, omitted in the edition given by Twysden of the special account by ^Clred, Abbot of Rievaulx, De Bella Standardi, but restored, after the manuscripts, by Raine, in Priory of Hexham, vol. i. p. 89.

Standard,-^^^ gave its name to the battle, in which the King of Scotland and his ferocious array were completely routed. After the victory, they brought back to Ripon in triumph the banner of the saint, who had thus protected and saved his former diocese. The banner often reappeared at the head of battalions armed for the defence of the country.^^*'

Of this enduring and touching popularity there now remains nothing but a shadow, a name, a meaningless word. In the modern town of Ripon, which has grown out of the great monastery founded by Wilfrid, the people have retained the habit of calling a certain Sunday in the year Wilfrid's Sunday; -^^^ but when they are asked why, it becomes plain that they know nothing either of the saint to whom they owe their municipal existence, nor of the Church whose apostle and champion he was.

What the Happily for us, his work and his glory are inibed in ineffaceable characters in the history of sen that Church, as well as of his country. His work was as varied as it was successful and lasting. Let us first remark its importance in respect to the monastic order. No ^^^ ^^^^ douo more for the extension and consolidation of that Order in England, in the first place, by the introduction of the Benedictine rule, then estab- Hshcd Only at Canterbury; and afterwards by charters and exemptions obtained from Rome, and from the Saxon kings and parliaments, in behalf of the great foundations of his time, such as Hexham and Peterborough; but above all, by the strongly woven links of intimate and active association between the numerous monasteries who regarded him as their head — a connection which gave them mutual security against the violence and usurpation of the princes and powers around them.822

In the year which followed his death, the first anniversary

³¹⁹ u Dicitur a stando Standardum, quod stetit illic militiae probitas vincere sive mori."

^^^ RicARDi Hagulstadensis, Be Gestis Regis Stephani ei de Bella Standardi, ed. Surtees, pp. 91, 93.

^^' Faber, p. 204. There are no remains of Wilfrid's church, unless it be the crypt of the present cathedral, which is attributed to that period. In the time of Leland, a little before the Reformation, there were only three crosses, antiquissimi oxieris, on the site of the ancient monastery. One of the three spires of the church, rebuilt in the fourteenth century, bore the name of St. Wilfrid. It was blown down by the wind in 1660.

^^^ " In ipsis exiliis non otio deditus, sed coenobiis et episcopatibus fundandis industrius.... Reliquit coenobia quot nullus, quae solus aggregaverat, multis dividens haeredibus." — Will. MALMESB.,f. 153. of his funeral brought together at Ripon all the abbots of the numberless monasteries which he had either founded, adopted, or received among his own communities. They came from the four corners of England, disturbed and anxious as to the situation in which the death of their venerable chief had placed them. " While he lived,"' they said, " we often had to suffer the violence of kings and nobles; but by his holiness, his wisdom, and the great number of his friends, he was always able to deliver us. We must now believe that he will be our protector in heaven, as are St. Peter and St. Andrew, whom he loved so much, and to whom he dedicated all his possessions, and all his followers." On the evening of this anniversary, after supper, during the twilight of the long summer day, all the abbots, followed by the whole community of Ripon, went out to sing complines in the open air. There they saw the whole heaven lighted up by a great rainbow, the pale radiance of which proceeded from the tomb of the saint, and wrapt the whole enclosure of the monastery in light. Eddi, the faithful biographer of Wilfrid, was there, and saw with wonder this luminous circle. " We all understood," he says, " that the intercession of the saint was to be, by the goodness of God, an impregnable rampart round the vine of the Lord and His family; and the event has proved it, for since that time we have lived in safety, under abbots freely chosen by ourselves, and when some have been threatened, others have come to their help, and that throughout all England, north as well as south of the Humber." '^"^^

Our musician thus indicates, as it seems, that Wilfrid had succeeded in making, at least for a time, a first attempt at that association of different monasteries among themselves which many great monastic saints had dreamed of as the completion of the rule of St. Benedict, and which is realized on so vast a scale in the orders of Cluny and Citeaux.

To the Church of England Wilfrid did the im- services mense service of securing the permanence of the [heF^ngUsu episcopate. Proceeding in opposition to him, and church; by uncanonical methods, to partition the primitive bishoprics, Archbishop Theodore, his rival and enemy, established ³²³ "XJndique abbatcs ejus cum subjectis suis... ab oriente et occidente, ab aquilone et austro.... Quamdiu vixit optimum caput vitae nostra;, frequenter a regibus et principibus tentationes sustinuiraus, quibus... finera venerabilem semper imponere consuevit. ... In crepusculo vcspertino... candidum circulum totum coenobium circumdans quasi per diem arcus coeli absque variis caloribus.... Nos vero adorantes laudavimus Dominum." Eddius, c. G4. a new diocesan division, better adapted to the wants of the country. In addition to this, the same pontiff appointed the election of bishops to be conducted by popular assemblies presided over by the primate, at which deputies from the vacant church might be heard, and where the nominations of the king were discussed and controlled by the bishops and so that it might be truly said that, in principle, the choice of the bishops, as well as of the abbots, depended on the clergy .324 g^^ the power of the episcopate became rapidly so great, and its dignity so much sought after, that the elections were soon interfered with in an injurious and oppressive manner by the throne. Wilfrid opposed a far more efficacious barrier to this lay influence by resisting to the utmost the claim made by the kings to nominate, depose, or remove bishops at their pleasure, and by consecrating the principle of permanence and immovability in the episcopate as much by the support of the Holy See as by the national synods. Thanks to him, until the Norman Conquest, four centuries later, no English king dared arbitrarily depose a bishop from his see.

^^ ^'"® whole Catholic Church he rendered the important service of fighting, overcoming, and deg^j.Qy|jjg h^q exclusive Spirit of Celtic Christianity. Without being in any way a revolt or protest against Catholic unity, without deserving at all that imputation of heresy or schism of which Wilfrid and his followers were too prodspirit might readily have degenerated into a sort of narrow and jealous provincialism. After having long repulsed the idea of communicating the benefits of the faith to the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain, the Celtic Church reconsidered the matter, and the ice having been once broken by Roman missionaries, she took measures to supplant and eclipse them everywhere. But the Celtic apostles of England, no doubt without knowing it, by a series of pedantic details, isolated their new converts from the Church of Rome, the centre of Christian action, precisely at the moment when that Church, called by Providence to evangelize the immense family of Teutonic tribes beyond the Rhine and Danube, had the most imperative need of help from that Teutonic race whose mission St. Gregory the Great had prophetically pointed out, and whom God had made the most '^^ "Electio olira prsesulum et abbatum tempore Anglorum pene clericos et raonachos erat." — Guill. Malmesb., De Gestis Fontif., c. 3, f. 157. Cf. LiKGARD, Antiquities, pp. 91-96, 145.

A^D THE BENEDICTINE ORDER. 449

active, the hardiest, and the most persevering of all barbarous races. England was about to become a mere ecclesiastical branch of Ireland, and her character in that case would have become doubly insular, to the detriment of Catholic unity and the common interest of the Christian world. Wilfrid appeared: by a fifty years' struggle, and at the cost of his peace, his safety, and even his personal freedom, he first neutralized, and finally annihilated, the Celtic spirit, without at any time being guilty of persecution, coercion, or violence towards the vanquished. He did more than check the Celtic movement; he sent it back into chaos; he extirpated all the ritual and liturgic differences which served as a veil and pretext for the prejudices of race and opinion; he extirpated them, not only in his immense diocese, the vast region of Northumbria,-^25 i^^^ throughout all England; and not in England only, but, by the contagion of his example and his influence, in Ireland, in Scotland, and finally in the very sanctuary of Celtic Christianity, at lona.-^^^

Last of all, by himself converting the last of the conquering tribes which still remained pagan, that of the South Saxons, Wilfrid gloriously ended the conversion of England, which had been begun nearly a century before by missionaries from Rome. He did yet more. By his own pilgrimage, the first of his race to knock at the door of the Vatican, and to pray at the tomb of the Apostles— by thus ^^ A few faint vestiges of Celtic traditions and institutions are all that can be found in Nortlnimbria at a later period. For instance, in 936, King Athelstane, as he marched against the Scots, solicited the prayers of the Culdees, Colidei, who served the Cathedral of St. Peter: " Videns in dicta ecclesia viros sanctaj vitae et conversationis honestae dictos ad tunc Colideos, qui multos sustentabant pauperes, et modicum habebant unde viverent, concessit... ut melius possent sustinere pauperes confluentes, hospitalitatem tenere." Tliis evidently refers to the Celtic Celi-De; and tlieir existence at York in the tenth century must have dated back from the institutions of the Irish missionaries anterior to Wilfrid. It is apparent also, that according to tlie universal custom of Celtic as well as Benedictine monks, they combined the celebration of divine service with the care of the poor. Athelstane granted them, after his victory, " unam travam bladi de qualibet caruca arante in episcopatu York, qua? usque in prajsentera diem dicitur Petercorn." These travce had been given up to the king on the condition of his exterminating the wolves which destroyed " fere omnes villanorum bestias." The wolves killed, the rents remained available, and the king bestowed them on the Colidei. This gift, largitione fidelium, was confirmed by "William the Conqueror and William Rufus, who transferred them and their rents to a hospital founded by the same Colidei at York under the name of St. Leonard. — DuGDALE, Monasticon, quoted by Reeves, The Culdees of the British Isles, pp. 59-144.

^^^ It will be seen further on how Adhelm, Egbert, and Adamnan finished Wilfrid's work. instituting pilgrimages and appeals to Home — bj obliging Saxon kings and bishops to acknowledge, in law and in fact, the intervention and supremacy of the Papacy, — he brought England into the orbit of that great movement of European civilization of which the Holy See became gradually the pivot and the centre. It was he who completed and crowned the work of Gregory and Augustin. He placed th« seal on the conquest of England by popes and monks. England owed it to him that she was not only Christian, but Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. No other Anglo-Saxon exercised a more decisive and more sovereign influence on the destinies of his race.

Character lu modern England, all that Wilfrid did is deof Wilfrid, gtroyed, all that he loved has perished. He no longer lives except in history, where he has left, for every attentive observer, an ineffaceable trace. By placing him upon her altars, the Church teaches us that by his devotion to justice, truth, and the good of souls, he has gained an eminent position among the saints. But in a purely historical point of view, his character and his career offer a study equally curious and interesting. We find in him no analogy with the great monks of the primitive Church, the solitaries of the Thebaid, nor even with the solemn and mystic ascetics of Celtic Christianity. Though he was not insensible to the consolations and aspirations of spiritual life, the predominating features in his character are not those of an exclusively spiritual being, of a man of prayer and solitude; they are rather those of the man of action and movement, the soldier of religious life.

In Wilfrid begins that great line of prelates, by turns apostolic and political, eloquent and warlike, brave champions of Roman unity and ecclesiastical independence, magnanimous representatives of the rights of conscience, the liberties of the soul, the spiritual powers of man and the laws of God; a line to which history presents no equal out of the Catholic Church of England; a lineage of saints, heroes, confessors, and martyrs, which produced St. Dunstan, St. Lanfranc, St. Ansehn, St. Thomas a Becket, Stephen Langton, St. Edmund, the exile of Pontigny, and which ended in Reginald Pole. By a strange and touching coincidence, it is beside the tomb of this last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, in the cathedral, sprinkled with the blood of St. Thomas the Martyr, that the relics of Wilfrid now rest, having been transferred to the church of the primacy in 959 to save them from the sacrilegious rapacity of the Danes.^^?

In addition to all this, Wilfrid was the precursor of the great prelates, the great monks, the princely abbots of the middle ages, the heads and oracles of national councils, the ministers and lieutenants, and often the equals and rivals of kings. When duty called, no suffering alarmed, no privation deterred, and no danger stopped his course; four times in his life he made the journey to Rome, then ten times more laborious and a hundred times more dangerous than the voyage to Australia is now. But, left to himself, he loved pomp, luxury, magnificence, and power. He could be humble and mild when it was necessary; but it was more congenial to him to confront kings, princes, nobles, bishops, councils, and lay assemblies, in harsh and inflexible defence of his patrimony, his power, his authority, and his cause.

He was never without adversaries, and as it has been justly remarked, he seems to have foreseen and practised that axiom of Ranc^, which says, " A Christian should spend his money in buying enemies." But many of his enemies were saints; and of all the holy bishops and abbots of his time, so numerous in the Anglo-Saxon Church, not one Avas his ally, not one held out to him a friendly hand in his trials and combats. Many even showed a sort of inexplicable animosity against him. It must be concluded that he did not sufficiently consider the susceptibility of national sentiment, which was always so powerful among his countrymen, and which finally detached them from Catholicism. And in addition, while making the greatest possible allowance for provincial rancor and personal jealousy, it must be admitted that there was in him an unjust contempt for former generous services, a certain sickly irritability, a tiresome pertinacity in dispute, and a haughty and injurious violence of language; ^^ but of language alone, for in his acts he was always tolerant and generous.

On the other hand, he had many friends. The monks who came spontaneously to range themselves under his crosier were counted by thousands; among them he found bold and faithful companions in all his travels, shipwrecks, dangers, and exiles: and these life-long followers were the same who prayed by his bedside with so many tears that his life might 32'' Faber, p. 202.

^"^ This is admitted by the most enthusiastic of his modern biographers, Father Faber, p. 203. Compare Hook, p. 138. be spared. He inspired the most illustrious and most holy women of his race, Queen Etheldreda, the Abbess Ebba, and Elfleda, his last protectress, with an affection which vanquished all obstacles. He exercised over them, and over the most delicate and generous souls of his time, as well as over the savage Frisians and the dauntless Lombards, an irresistible influence; and this power lasted all his life from the time when, arriving at the Northumbrian court in the light armor of a boy, he gained the heart of Queen Eanfleda, until the last crisis, when the heroic Bertfrid, saviour of the Bernician dynasty, declared himself in favor of the aged exile.

This influence is explained by the rare qualities which more than redeemed all his faults. His was, before all else, a great soul, manly and resolute, ardent and enthusiastic, full of unconquerable energy, able to wait or to act, but incapable of discouragement or fear, born to live upon those heights which attract at once the thunderbolt and the eyes of the crowd. His eloquence, superior to anything yet known in England, his keen and penetrating intelligence, his eager zeal for literary studies and public education, his knowledge and love of those wonders of architecture which dazzled the Christian nation, and to which his voice attracted such crowds; his constancy in trial, his ardent love of justice,— all contributed to make of him one of those personages who sway and move the spirits of their contemporaries, and who m.aster the attention and imagination even of those whom they cannot convince.^-^ Something generous, ardent, and magnanimous in his nature commended him always to the sympathy of lofty hearts; and when adverse fortune and triumphant violence and ingratitude came in, to put upon his life the seal of adversity nobly and piously borne, the rising tide of emotion and sympathy carried aU before it, sweeping away all traces of those errors of conduct which might have seemed to us less attractive or comprehensible.

He was the first Anglo-Saxon who secured the attention of other nations, and the first of whom a special biography

329 ('Virpro justitise merito multis jactatus periculis... egregie factus ad promerendam gratiam principurn apud quos exularet, idemque pro rigore justitiae compatriotis regibus odiosus." — Will. Malmesb., f. 153. Eddi, who, like all the learned monks of his time, knew his Horace by heart, does not fail, like a parliamentary' orator of the nineteenth century, to apply to his hero, in the preface of his biography, the well-known lines —

" Feriuntque summos

Fulgura moutes."

Odes, ii. 2.

AND THE BENEDICTINE OEDER. 453

has been preserved. In each detail, as well as in the general impression made by this biograph}^, he appears to us a type of the qualities and singularities of his nation; of their obstinacy, courage, laborious and untiring energy, their dogged love of work and of conflict, their resolution to strive till death for their patrimony, honor, and rights. Dieu et mon droit! This proud English motto is written on every page of the life of Wilfrid. In the service of a cause which now, by the misfortune of the ages and the blindness of men, has become the most unpopular of all causes in the eyes of the English nation, Wilfrid displayed all the virtues which are most characteristic of his countrymen, and most fitted to attract them. All the passions and all the noble instincts of his people palpitated in him. That mind must indeed be besotted by hatred, a thousand times blinder than ignorance itself, which does not recognize in him the eldest son of an invincible race, the first of the English nation.

BOOK XIII.

CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS OF ST. WILFRID, 650-735.

" Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day." — ¹ ThessAL., v. 5. " For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a nd."— 2T11I. 1,7.