Arnold of Soissons

Arnold of Soissons, also known as Arnulf of Soissons and Arnold of Oudenburg, was an eleventh-century Benedictine monk, abbot, and bishop later venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Traditional accounts place his birth around the middle of the eleventh century at Tiegem in the County of Flanders, in the Low Countries (now in Belgium). He is described as coming from a noble family; some medieval notices name his father as a certain Fulbertus. In early adulthood he followed the career of a knight and soldier, a path consistent with his social rank in a frontier region of Flanders. At some point he abandoned arms and the secular life and entered the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Médard at Soissons, in the kingdom of France, one of the great royal monasteries of the old Frankish heartland.

At Saint-Médard he is said to have spent his first years in religion as a hermit before being drawn into the government of the community. He later became abbot of the monastery. Hagiographical sources present him as a reluctant superior, even attempting to flee the honor, which is a conventional motif in lives of reforming monks of this period but may also reflect genuine unwillingness. His reputation for austerity and leadership, formed in a house closely tied to the French crown and to the episcopal city of Soissons, led to his subsequent elevation to the episcopate during the decades of the Gregorian Reform, when monastic men were frequently chosen as bishops in northern France.

In or about 1080 he was elected bishop of Soissons. Medieval accounts emphasize that he accepted the office only with reluctance. His tenure coincided with political and ecclesiastical turbulence in the French kingdom, including strained relations between reforming churchmen and secular princes. Opposition from local factions made it impossible for him to govern the diocese in peace, and after a relatively short and troubled episcopate he withdrew from the see. The precise legal character of his departure—whether a formal resignation, expulsion, or simple retirement—is not recoverable in detail from the surviving notices, but he did not remain an active residential bishop of Soissons.

Returning to Flanders, Arnold founded, or restored, the Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter at Oudenburg, near the Flemish coast. He governed that community as abbot until his death there in 1087, and he was buried at the abbey, which became the center of his cult. In later popular tradition he was closely associated with brewing. Legend holds that during an epidemic he urged people to drink beer rather than water, because beer was boiled in the making and therefore safer, and that he once miraculously supplied or multiplied beer when a brew-vat failed. On the strength of these stories, which should be treated as pious legend rather than as documented biography, he became a patron saint of brewers and of hop-pickers, especially in the Low Countries. His feast is kept on 14 August. He is distinct from Saint Arnulf of Metz, a seventh-century bishop who is also invoked by brewers.