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Biography

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Saint Agilus, also known as Agil, Agile, Aile, or Saint Aile, was a Frankish nobleman, monk, missionary, and abbot of the late sixth and early seventh centuries. He was born about 580 into a family of high rank in Burgundy. His father, Agnoald, served as a courtier of the Merovingian king Childebert II, and his mother was named Corbena. In a manner typical of Frankish aristocratic piety in that period, his parents dedicated him as a child to the monastic life and placed him at Luxeuil in the Vosges, the monastery recently founded by the Irish abbot Saint Columbanus. There Agilus received his education and was professed under the austere mixed rule that Columbanus had established, combining Irish penitential custom with communal monastic discipline.

After Columbanus was expelled from Burgundy around 610, Saint Eustace (Eustasius) succeeded him as abbot of Luxeuil. Agilus remained a member of that community and, according to later hagiographical tradition, accompanied Eustace on a missionary journey into Bavaria, where they preached among peoples on the eastern margins of the Frankish world. The mission is generally placed in the second decade of the seventh century. Agilus then returned to Luxeuil and continued in the Columbanian observance of that house.

In the 630s the Neustrian magnate Audoin (later Saint Ouen, bishop of Rouen), with the support of King Dagobert I, founded a new monastery at Rebais (Resbacum) in the Brie, in the diocese of Meaux. Agilus was chosen as its first abbot, an appointment that later writers date to about 636. He governed the community according to the Columbanian rule inherited from Luxeuil and remained at Rebais for the rest of his life. Tradition records that he died there on 30 August, about the year 650, and that he was buried at the abbey.

Agilus was venerated as a saint in medieval martyrologies and in the local cult of Rebais; his feast is kept on 30 August. No contemporary charter or letter survives to document his career in detail. The accepted outline of his life—Burgundian noble birth, formation at Luxeuil, the Bavarian mission with Eustace, and the founding abbacy of Rebais—rests on later lives and on the institutional memory of the Luxeuil filiation. He is historically significant as a representative of the second generation of Columbanian monasticism, which carried the observance of Luxeuil into Neustria and helped shape the monastic landscape of seventh-century Francia.

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