Saint Aye

Saint Aye, whose name also appears as Aya, Agia, and Aia, was a Frankish noblewoman of Hainaut, in the Low Countries, remembered as having lived in the later seventh century and died in the early eighth. Almost nothing about her can be established from contemporary documents. What survives comes from later medieval hagiography, from the liturgical tradition of Mons, and from brief martyrological notices. In that tradition she belonged to the aristocracy of Hainaut and was married to Hidulf (also Hydulphe or Hidulphus), a nobleman of the same region who is likewise honored as a saint. The couple is described as childless. After some years of marriage they determined, by mutual consent, to separate and take up the religious life, a decision in keeping with a well-attested Merovingian pattern in which aristocratic spouses divided their property and entered monasteries.

Aye is said to have entered the women’s community founded at Mons by Saint Waltrude (Waldetrudis; in French, Sainte Waudru). Waltrude was the principal saint of medieval Mons; her seventh-century monastery later became the collegiate church and chapter of noble canonesses dedicated to her. Aye passed the rest of her life in that house. Hidulf withdrew from the world as well. Later notices should not be allowed to conflate him with Saint Hidulf of Moyenmoutier, an abbot and bishop of a different region and generation. The year of Aye’s death is not recorded in any early source. Later compilers commonly place it about 709 or 714. She died as a widow and a nun at Mons.

Her body was buried at Mons, and her relics were preserved in the church of Sainte-Waudru. Veneration of Aye remained local rather than universal. The Roman Martyrology records her on 18 April with the notice that at Mons in Hainaut is commemorated Saint Aye, widow. She belongs to the large company of saints recognized by popular and episcopal cult long before the papacy reserved formal canonization to itself; no pope is recorded as having canonized or beatified her in the later canonical sense.

The story that fixed her image for later centuries is a posthumous miracle connected with a lawsuit. According to the medieval account, a dispute arose over estates which Aye had given to the monastery of Mons. When ordinary witnesses could not settle the matter, her tomb opened, she sat upright, and she gave testimony in the community’s favor, after which she lay down again. Because of this legend she has been invoked by people entangled in lawsuits and other legal contests, and she is sometimes named as a patron of litigants. Apart from that specialized patronage and her modest place in the calendar of Hainaut, Saint Aye remains an obscure figure whose historical outlines are faint, but whose memory has been kept by the church of Mons and by the martyrological tradition of 18 April.