Abbot Botolph

Saint Botolph, whose name also appears as Botulf, Botwulf, or Botulph, was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monastic founder and abbot. Almost nothing about him can be established from strictly contemporary evidence. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records under the year 654 that Botulf began to build a minster at Icanho. Icanho is most often identified by modern historians with the village of Iken on the River Alde in Suffolk, then in the kingdom of East Anglia; a long-standing alternative tradition links him with the later town of Boston in Lincolnshire, whose name is customarily derived from Botolph's tun. No seventh-century source gives his date or place of birth, the names of his parents, or any detail of his education.

A much fuller story was written in the eleventh century by Folcard, a monk of Saint-Bertin who composed a Life of St Botolph at the request of Bishop Walkelin of Winchester. Folcard stated that earlier written materials had been lost or were fragmentary. In his account Botolph was of noble English stock. Together with a brother named Adulf he went overseas to learn the monastic life, probably in northern Gaul. After his return he obtained from an East Anglian ruler a tract of waste or previously uncultivated land at Icanho, cleared it, and established a monastery of which he became abbot. Later Catholic tradition commonly describes the house as Benedictine, although mid-seventh-century English monasteries observed a variety of rules and East Anglia had already been influenced by Irish monks such as St Fursey. Folcard presents Botolph as an exemplar of humility, strict observance, and kindness to the poor, and attributes miracles to him; these features belong to the conventions of medieval hagiography and cannot be verified independently.

Tradition places Botolph's death on 17 June in or about 680, presumably at Icanho. His monastery is thought to have suffered in the Danish invasions of the ninth century. During the tenth-century Benedictine reform, relics believed to be his were recovered and divided. Thorney Abbey in the Cambridgeshire marshes became the chief repository, which is why medieval writers sometimes call him Botolph of Thorney; other portions were said to have gone to Ely, to Westminster, and to other churches. The cult, however, was already widespread. More than sixty pre-Reformation churches in England bore his dedication, with a marked concentration in East Anglia and Lincolnshire and a striking series of churches at the gates of the City of London—St Botolph Aldgate, St Botolph Bishopsgate, St Botolph Aldersgate, and the vanished St Botolph Billingsgate. That pattern of gate and roadside dedications made him a natural patron of travellers and wayfarers.

Boston in Lincolnshire, dominated by the great medieval church of St Botolph known as the Boston Stump, carried the saint's name to New England when Puritan emigrants named Boston, Massachusetts, after their Lincolnshire borough. Botolph was never the subject of a formal papal canonization, which did not yet exist in his age; he was recognized as a saint through popular veneration and liturgical observance. His feast day is 17 June. Beyond travellers he is associated with the two Bostons and, in a more general way, with the roads and boundaries of eastern England. The historical Botolph remains an obscure seventh-century abbot whose genuine early cult, rather than the later legendary biography, is the surest testimony to his importance.