Saint Wilfrid (c. 633–709)

The champion of Rome in early England

In the seventh century, Christian England was not one, but twofold. Two missionary streams had brought it the Gospel: in the south, the Roman mission of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Saint Gregory the Great in 597; in the north, the Irish mission of the monks of Iona, settled at Lindisfarne around Saint Aidan. Both traditions were equally holy and equally Catholic in faith; but they differed on sensitive points of discipline, above all on the reckoning of the date of Easter and on the form of monastic tonsure^[8][9].

In this divide, Wilfrid chose Rome — not from contempt for the Celtic holiness that had nourished him, but from the conviction that the unity of the universal Church was worth more than a local custom, however venerable. His whole life was the unfolding of this choice: to attach England to the Roman centre, to common discipline, to the Benedictine Rule, to the architecture and chant of Rome. He was, in the words of tradition, "the great defender of the rights of the Apostolic See" in the island^[10].

A saint of combat

Wilfrid is not a saint of silent gentleness, as Aidan was, or as Bede would be. He is a saint of combat: a great lord turned great bishop, a man of action, a magnificent builder, a tireless traveller, a tenacious pleader, surrounded by a numerous retinue, rich in foundations and in enemies. There is nothing sanitised about his holiness: it passes through prisons, trials, perilous crossings, hostile kings and three journeys to Rome.

That very harshness is his greatness. Where others would have bent, Wilfrid held firm on one principle: a bishop must not be stripped of his right without recourse to Rome. By refusing to submit to an ecclesiastical injustice and carrying his cause before the pope, he unknowingly fixed for England the reflex of appeal to the See of Peter as the final instance. His tenacity, often reproached, is also that by which he served the Church far beyond his diocese.

A young and divided Christendom

To understand Wilfrid, one must picture the Northumbria of his childhood: a vast kingdom in the north of England, Christian for less than a generation, still in contact with paganism, and crossed by the meeting — sometimes the tension — of two spiritual families. King Oswald, then his brother Oswiu, had called the Irish monks from the island of Iona; thus had Aidan founded Lindisfarne and evangelised the North with a legendary gentleness^[11].

But Queen Eanflæd, Oswiu's wife, had been raised in Kent according to the Roman usage. It could happen, therefore, in one and the same court, that the king was already celebrating Easter while the queen was still fasting in Lent: the discrepancy of the reckonings put the feast of the Resurrection out of joint within the royal family itself^[12]. This visible scandal of a Church on two calendars made a decision inevitable sooner or later. Wilfrid grew up in that world.

The Easter controversy and the tonsure

The object of the conflict may seem slender to a modern reader: a few days' difference in the reckoning of Easter, and a way of shaving the crown of the head. But in the seventh century, these differences touched the visible heart of Christian unity. Easter is the feast of feasts; to celebrate it on different dates is to display a divided Church before the pagans one wishes to convert. As for the tonsure, it was the very sign of monastic and clerical belonging.

The Irish followed an ancient 84-year cycle and an "ear-to-ear" tonsure; Rome and almost the whole of Christendom followed a more exact 19-year cycle, inherited from Alexandria and confirmed in the spirit of the Council of Nicaea, and the "crown" tonsure said to be of Saint Peter^[13][14]. For Wilfrid, the question was not merely technical: to follow Rome was to join the universal Church; to stand apart was to shut oneself up, as he would say at Whitby, with "a handful of men in a corner of the remotest of islands"^[15].

The noble child and the queen's page (c. 633–648)

Wilfrid was born about 633 or 634, in Northumbria, into a family of the nobility. His mother died early; he bore a stepmother ill, and at about fourteen left his father's house. Gifted and distinguished, he was presented at the court of King Oswiu and won the favour of Queen Eanflæd, who became his protectress^[16][17]. It was she who directed him towards the religious life and sent him to be formed at Lindisfarne, the great island monastery founded by Aidan.

The young Wilfrid learned the psalter and the monastic life there in the Irish tradition. But very soon a vaster aspiration stirred in him: he wanted to know the Church "as it is kept at Rome and in Gaul", to go back to the sources, to see with his own eyes the tomb of the Apostles. This thirst for Rome, born at Lindisfarne itself, would decide his whole life.

Lindisfarne, then the call of Rome (653–658)

About 653, Wilfrid set out for the south. At Canterbury, he completed his formation in the Roman usage, then embarked for Rome — one of the first Englishmen to undertake this pilgrimage. For part of the way he travelled with Benedict Biscop, another young Northumbrian nobleman enamoured of Rome, the future founder of the monasteries of Bede^[18].

At Rome, he prayed at the tombs of the Apostles and put himself to school with Archdeacon Boniface, who initiated him into the Roman reckoning, canon law and the discipline of the universal Church. On the way back, he stopped at Lyons, where Bishop Annemund (also named Dalfinus in the English sources) kept him three years, loved him as a son and conferred on him the Roman tonsure, that of Saint Peter^[19][20]. Wilfrid nearly perished there: Annemund was massacred in a political riot, and Wilfrid, it is said, offered to die with him, but was spared because he was a foreigner. These Latin years made him, on his return about 658, the man best versed in the usages of Rome in all northern England.

Abbot of Ripon and the Rule of Saint Benedict

Back in Northumbria, Wilfrid attached himself to the young King Alhfrith, Oswiu's son, himself won over to the Roman cause. Alhfrith gave him the monastery of Ripon, whose Irish monks had just been set aside for refusing to conform to Rome^[21][22]. There Wilfrid fully established the Rule of Saint Benedict — a momentous gesture, for it made Ripon one of the first homes of Benedictine monasticism in northern England^[23].

Only after five years as abbot did he receive the priesthood, from the hands of Agilbert, a Frankish bishop passing through. Wilfrid was now a recognised spiritual leader, still young, but already borne by a clear vision: to bring the English Church, in its liturgy, its discipline and its architecture, into the great Roman communion. The opportunity to make this vision triumph would come at Whitby.

The issue at stake

In 664, King Oswiu summoned a synod at the double monastery of Streanæshalch — the future Whitby — governed by the abbess Saint Hilda. Its object: to settle, for Northumbria, the question of the date of Easter and of the tonsure^[24][25]. The issue went beyond liturgy: the orientation of the whole Church of the North — towards Iona or towards Rome — was at stake there.

Two parties faced each other. For the Irish and Ionian tradition, Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne, resting on the authority of Saint Columba and the Apostle Saint John. For the Roman tradition, a young abbot with an assured tongue: Wilfrid, chosen as spokesman because he knew Rome, Gaul and the reckoning better than anyone^[26].

The debate: Colmán and Wilfrid

Colmán spoke first. He defended the Easter of his fathers with noble simplicity: it was the one he had received from his elders, the one Columba and his successors had celebrated, the one that went back, he said, to the Apostle Saint John^[27]. The argument of reverence, of fidelity, of proven holiness.

Wilfrid answered. His plea, as Bede reports it, rested on universality: the Easter he defended was the one observed at Rome, where the Apostles Peter and Paul had taught and suffered, but also in Italy, in Gaul, in Africa, in Asia, in Egypt — everywhere the Church was spread. Only, he said, a few Britons and Irishmen persisted in another reckoning, in a remote corner of the world, against the Council of Nicaea and against the usage of the whole earth^[28]:

"The Easter we observe, we have seen celebrated by all at Rome, where the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul lived, taught, suffered and are buried. We have seen it observed likewise in Italy and in Gaul […]. We know it is so in Africa, in Asia, in Egypt, in Greece, throughout the universe wherever the Church of Christ is spread. The only exceptions are these men here and their accomplices in obstinacy, the Picts and the Britons, with whom, from two islands lost at the edge of the ocean, and from the remotest part of it still, they stupidly strive to fight against the whole world." — Wilfrid at the Synod of Whitby, as reported by Bede, Ecclesiastical History, III, 25^[29]

On the point of Saint John, Wilfrid replied that John's usages held for his own time and Judeo-Christian milieu, but that the Church had since defined and unified them after Nicaea; to cling to the letter of an ancient custom against the present unity of the Church is to mistake fidelity.

"Peter is the doorkeeper": Oswiu's decision

Then came the decisive argument. Wilfrid set against the authority of Columba that of Peter, to whom Christ himself had said: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 16:18–19)^[30]. King Oswiu, seizing the point, questioned both sides: is it true that the Lord spoke these words to Peter? Both camps agreed. Did he ever give such power to Columba? Colmán had to admit he had not.

Then Oswiu decided, with a simplicity that has echoed through the centuries:

"Since Peter is the doorkeeper, I shall not contradict him; on the contrary, I wish to obey his decrees in all things, as far as I am able — lest, when I present myself at the gates of the kingdom of heaven, there be no one to open to me, he who, by your own admission, holds the keys having turned his back on me." — Oswiu, King of Northumbria, concluding the Synod of Whitby, as reported by Bede, III, 25^[31][32]

The Roman cause won. Northumbria adopted the Easter and tonsure of Rome; the episcopal see of the North would pass from Lindisfarne to York. Wilfrid, barely thirty, had just won the battle of his life.

The aftermath

Colmán, unable to bring himself to change, withdrew with his faithful monks towards Iona, then to Ireland^[33]. Far from a bitter triumph, this departure took place in mutual respect: Bede keeps an intact admiration for Colmán and for the Irish saints. Whitby was not the defeat of Celtic holiness — Aidan, Cuthbert, Hilda remain honoured — but the end of a disciplinary anomaly and the entry of northern England into the full visible communion of the West. It is the most lasting historical fruit of Wilfrid's life.

Bishop of York, consecrated in Gaul

Shortly after Whitby, Wilfrid was chosen as bishop for Northumbria, with his see at York. But he refused to be consecrated by the British bishops or by those who, in his eyes, were not in full Roman communion: he insisted on receiving consecration from perfectly legitimate hands. He therefore set out again for Gaul, where he was consecrated at Compiègne by an assembly of Frankish bishops, with a magnificence of which his Life keeps the memory — carried, according to custom, on a throne by the bishops^[34][35].

This exacting standard, so characteristic of him, turned to his disadvantage. Wilfrid lingered in Gaul; his absence dragged on. Meanwhile, in Northumbria, the impatient king had the see filled otherwise.

The intruder Chad and restoration by Theodore

On his return, Wilfrid found Chad (Ceadda) installed in the see of York. He did not dispute it; he humbly withdrew to Ripon, biding his time, exercising his ministry without lustre for several years^[36]. His patience would be rewarded by a providential man: Theodore of Tarsus, the new Archbishop of Canterbury sent by Rome, the great organiser of the English Church.

About 669, Theodore noted the irregularity of Chad's consecration, corrected it, and restored Wilfrid to the see of York^[37][38]. Chad, with admirable humility, submitted at once and himself became a great saintly bishop at Lichfield. For nearly ten years, Wilfrid then governed the vastest diocese in England, built, reformed, and kept an almost princely state. It was the peak of his power — and the prelude to his greatest trial.

The division of the diocese and the first appeal to Rome (679)

The diocese of Northumbria was immense, too vast for one man. Archbishop Theodore, from a pastoral concern for organisation, decided to divide it into several bishoprics — but he did so without Wilfrid's consent, and with the support of King Ecgfrith, now hostile^[39][40]. Wilfrid saw in this partition a spoliation: his diocese was being carved up and other bishops set up in his place.

He then took a decision unheard of for an Englishman of his time: rather than complain to the king or the archbishop, he appealed directly to the pope, at Rome. It was the first appeal by an English churchman to the Apostolic See — a precedent of immense consequence^[41][42]. He reached Rome (not without drifting to Frisia on the way, see below), and Pope Agatho gathered a synod at the Lateran in 679 which ruled for him in principle: Wilfrid must be restored; the division could not stand against him^[43].

Ecgfrith's prison and exile

Armed with the pontifical decision, Wilfrid returned to Northumbria — and met a wall. King Ecgfrith, furious that one of his subjects had sought justice outside the kingdom, refused to obey the pope, accused Wilfrid of having bought the decree, had him thrown into prison (at Dunbar or Bamburgh), then banished him from Northumbria^[44][45]. The Life reports that in prison Wilfrid sang the psalms, and that his cell was, it is said, lit by a supernatural light.

Then began a long wandering: driven from the North, Wilfrid found refuge now in Mercia, now among the South Saxons, now again on the roads to Rome. Far from wasted years, these exiles would be the most fruitful of his apostolic life.

The Frisians (winter 677–678)

On his way to Rome for his first appeal, Wilfrid was driven off course by the winds and landed in Frisia (the present-day Netherlands). King Aldgisl welcomed him kindly and let him preach all winter 677–678^[46]. According to Stephen of Ripon, most of the chiefs and thousands of the common people received baptism from his hands. Wilfrid thus became the first Anglo-Saxon missionary to the Frisians, preceding by several years Saint Willibrord, the future "apostle of Frisia"^[47].

His stay had no lasting effect in the short term, but it opened the way: from Wilfrid and Ripon would spring the Anglo-Saxon missionary impulse towards the continent, which would soon carry Willibrord to Frisia and Boniface to Germany. The fighter of Whitby was also, quietly, one of the fathers of the great Anglo-Saxon missions.

The South Saxons: the Gospel and the nets (681–686)

The most moving episode of his missionary life is the conversion of the South Saxons (Sussex), the last still-pagan kingdom of England. In exile, Wilfrid settled there about 681 and founded the monastery of Selsey, a gift of King Æthelwealh, which would become the first episcopal see of the South Saxons^[48][49]. He arrived in the midst of famine: the people, knowing nothing of fishing, were dying of hunger beside a sea and rivers full of fish.

Bede recounts how Wilfrid, before ever baptising, saved this people from death. The scene has remained famous:

"The bishop, arriving in the province, found there so great a misery from famine that he taught them to feed themselves by fishing; for the sea and the rivers abounded in fish, but the people had no art of taking them, save eels alone. The bishop's men, having gathered eel-nets from all sides, cast them into the sea, and by God's blessing took three hundred fishes of divers kinds." — Bede, Ecclesiastical History, IV, 13^[50]

These three hundred fishes were shared in three: a hundred for the poor, a hundred for those who had lent the nets, a hundred for the fishermen themselves^[51]. Fed first in the body, the people opened to the Word; and Bede notes that, as Wilfrid baptised, a gracious rain ended the drought — a sign, in the converts' eyes, that the God of baptism also gave the life of the earth. The charm of this episode says all there is to say about mission rightly understood: love of neighbour opens the door to the proclamation of the Gospel.

The churches of Ripon and Hexham

Wilfrid was also one of the greatest builders of seventh-century England. Against the modesty of the wooden buildings of the Celtic tradition, he wanted for God stone churches in the manner of Rome and Gaul. At Ripon, he raised a church dedicated to Saint Peter; at Hexham, on lands given by Queen Æthelthryth (Etheldreda), he built a basilica dedicated to Saint Andrew, adorned with columns, spiral staircases and many side chapels^[52][53].

His biographer Stephen, dazzled, writes that the church of Hexham had no equal on this side of the Alps:

"From the depth of the earth to the very top, with its crypts of wonderfully cut stone, its building carried by divers columns and its many side aisles, its walls of remarkable length and height, surrounded by winding galleries and spiral staircases… we have heard of no other house like it on this side of the Alps." — Stephen of Ripon, Life of Saint Wilfrid, on the church of Hexham^[54]

These crypts of stone, at Hexham as at Ripon, still stand today: they are the oldest built remains preserved of an English cathedral, reusing the dressed stones of the neighbouring Roman ruins. The Ripon crypt, known as "Wilfrid's Needle" (Wilfrid's Needle), remains a place of pilgrimage^[55].

The Benedictine Rule and Roman chant

Wilfrid brought back from Rome not only church plans, but a Christian way of life. He widely spread the Rule of Saint Benedict in the monasteries he founded or reformed, contributing more than any other to making English monasticism a Benedictine monasticism^[56][57]. He also introduced Roman chant into the worship of the North: according to Bede, he was among the first to bring chant masters from Canterbury — including a certain Æddi (Eddi) — to teach the English the Roman manner of singing the office^[58].

Through this, Wilfrid lastingly shaped the liturgical face of the English Church: Roman stone, the Benedictine Rule, Roman chant, the Roman Easter. Where other saints shone through gentleness or learning, he marked his Church with a visible architecture of Catholic unity.

Austerfield and the appeal to John VI

Recalled to Northumbria after Ecgfrith's death (685) and restored for a time, Wilfrid clashed anew, under King Aldfrith and Archbishop Berhtwald, with the old question of his diocese. A council gathered at Austerfield about 702–703 asked him to renounce his claims and nearly stripped him of everything^[59][60]. True to himself, the old bishop — he was nearly seventy — refused to yield on principle and set out for Rome a second time.

Pope John VI gathered a synod in 704 which again largely ruled in his favour and ordered that justice be done to him^[61]. Armed with this decision, Wilfrid returned to England.

The final settlement

This time, a lasting compromise was found. Wilfrid renounced the great see of York, but he was restored in his monasteries of Ripon and Hexham and confirmed as Bishop of Hexham by King Osred, about 705–706^[62][63]. After a lifetime of combats, the old man at last obtained peace: neither total triumph nor defeat, but the recognition of his essential right. His last years flowed between his beloved foundations, in prayer and the government of his monks.

Fidelity to the See of Peter

The heart of Wilfrid's holiness is an absolute fidelity to Rome, to the See of Peter as the visible centre of unity. In him this is no matter of politics, but of faith: he firmly believes that Christ built his Church on Peter and gave him the keys, and he draws all the practical consequences, even to crossing Europe twice to appeal to the pope. His life is the lived demonstration of the very argument he urged at Whitby: it is to Peter, and to his successors, that the Lord entrusted the keys.

Magnificence for God

Wilfrid has a royal conception of God's service. A great lord, he puts his wealth, his taste, his energy at the service of worship: sumptuous stone churches, precious ornaments — including, says his Life, a gospel book written in letters of gold on purple — a careful liturgy, a numerous retinue. Some reproached him for it as worldly pomp. But in him, this magnificence is a theology in acts: nothing is too beautiful for God, and the beauty of worship is already an evangelisation. In this he joins the intuition that would later build the cathedrals.

Tenacity, suffering and forgiveness

Lastly, Wilfrid's holiness is made of tenacity in trial. Imprisoned, banished, slandered, dispossessed, he never denied his right nor yielded to bitterness to the point of breaking communion. He suffered much at the hands of kings and sometimes of fellow bishops; and yet, at the end, he made peace, forgave, settled his succession and distributed his goods as a reconciled man. His perseverance is not stubbornness: it is the firmness of a soul convinced of serving, through his own contested interests, a cause greater than itself — the order of the Church and the rights of the Apostolic See.

Feeling his end near, Wilfrid undertook a last journey to his monasteries. It was at Oundle (In-Undalum, in present-day Northamptonshire), one of his foundations, that he fell ill and gave up his soul, in 709 (some say 710), aged about seventy-six, after some forty-five years as bishop^[64][65]. Before dying, a man of order to the last, he settled the sharing of his goods between the poor, his monasteries and his faithful, and provided for his succession.

His body was carried to his beloved monastery of Ripon and buried in the church of the Apostle Saint Peter which he had built^[66]. Thus did the fighter of Whitby rest under the patronage of that Peter whose keys he had defended all his life. Bede, still only a young monk at Wilfrid's death, soberly sums up an extraordinary life: a man who governed the episcopate for forty-five years amid storms, and did so much for the Church of the English^[67].

The relics and "Wilfrid's Needle"

Venerated as a saint soon after his death, Wilfrid first rested at Ripon. In the tenth century, in troubled times of Viking invasions, Archbishop Saint Oda of Canterbury had part of his relics transferred to Canterbury; other traditions attach a translation to Worcester under Saint Oswald^[82]. The crypt he had built at Ripon, "Wilfrid's Needle", remains to this day a place of pilgrimage, and one of the oldest standing Christian structures in England^[83].

His cult spread widely: many English churches were dedicated to him, and his memory stayed particularly vivid in the North, at Ripon and Hexham, whose cathedrals keep his name and his mark in stone. The Church celebrates him on 12 October, the day of his death; a second memorial, on 24 April, recalls the translation of his relics^[84].

A debated figure, a lasting work

Wilfrid is, among the Anglo-Saxon saints, one of the most debated. Historians note his uncompromising character, his taste for splendour, his intransigence, his repeated conflicts with almost all the kings and several bishops of his time. His Life by Stephen of Ripon, written by a loyal follower, paints him as a persecuted hero; the decisions of Theodore and of the councils show that he also had serious contradictors in good faith, concerned with organising the Church.

But beyond these debates, his work endures: it is in large part thanks to him that England entered the paschal and disciplinary unity of Rome; that it widely received the Benedictine Rule and Roman chant; that the reflex of appeal to the Apostolic See was born; and that the great Anglo-Saxon missionary impulse towards the continent began. Few saints have left so structuring an imprint on the Church of a country.

Thirteen centuries on, Wilfrid still speaks. He reminds us first that the unity of the Church is a precious good, worth sacrificing legitimate attachments for. At Whitby, holy men on both sides had to decide: Wilfrid showed that preferring universal communion to a local custom, however venerable, is not betraying one's fathers, but serving the whole Body of Christ.

He reminds us then that fidelity to the See of Peter can cost dear, and yet deserves holding firm. Imprisoned, exiled, slandered, Wilfrid never gave up recourse to Rome; his tenacity, often misunderstood, founded a right from which the whole English Church benefited.

"Since Peter is the doorkeeper, I shall not contradict him." — This saying of King Oswiu, wrung from him by Wilfrid's pleading, sums up a whole life. A child of Lindisfarne, dazzled by Rome, who made the defence of Peter's keys the combat of his existence, and rests today under the patronage of him whose authority he had defended.

• Saint Bede the Venerable — the great historian who, a generation later, fixed the memory of Wilfrid and of the Synod of Whitby in his Ecclesiastical History.
• Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne — the Irish apostle of the North, from whom Wilfrid received his formation before choosing Rome.
• Saint Hilda of Whitby — the abbess who welcomed the decisive synod of 664 into her monastery.
• Saint Columba of Iona — the father of the Celtic monastic tradition against which Wilfrid set the Roman usage.
• Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Augustine of Canterbury — the pope and the apostle who carried Rome to England.
• Saint Benedict of Nursia — the father of Western monasticism, whose Rule Wilfrid spread in Northumbria.
• Saint Willibrord and Saint Boniface — the great Anglo-Saxon missionaries of the continent, heirs of the impulse Wilfrid opened in Frisia.