Wandregisel

Wandregisel (Latin Wandregisilus; in French, Wandrille) was a Frankish monastic founder of the seventh century and first abbot of Fontenelle in the lower Seine valley, the house later known as the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille. An early Life written at Fontenelle in the eighth century places his birth about the beginning of the seventh century in the diocese of Verdun, in Austrasia, among the Frankish aristocracy. He was prepared for public life and served at the court of the Merovingian king Dagobert I, a setting in which several other future abbots and bishops of Neustria and Austrasia were formed. In accordance with his rank he married. The same early narrative states that he and his wife, whose name is not securely preserved in reliable sources, agreed to continence and then to separation so that each might enter religion, she as a nun and he as a monk. Surviving accounts do not record children.

After leaving the court, Wandregisel received the clerical tonsure from Balderic, abbot of Montfaucon in the Argonne. He did not remain there permanently. Seeking a stricter observance, he went to Bobbio in northern Italy, the monastery founded by Columbanus, and afterwards lived at Romainmôtier in the Jura. Those sojourns placed him within the Columbanian network that linked Ireland, Gaul, and Lombard Italy, and they help explain the mixed monastic customs later associated with Fontenelle. Returning to Frankish Gaul, he attached himself to the church of Rouen. Archbishop Audoin (Saint Ouen), himself a former courtier and a principal organizer of Neustrian monasticism, ordained him priest. Wandregisel then looked for a place of withdrawal in the wooded country along the Seine.

In the middle of the seventh century he founded a monastery at Fontenelle, in what is now Normandy, not far from the contemporary foundation of Jumièges. The date usually given for the foundation is 649. The site lay on land connected with the Neustrian elite; later tradition names a royal official among the donors. As first abbot, Wandregisel gathered a community and established the liturgical and manual round that characterized the great Seine abbeys. Fontenelle quickly became a centre of recruitment for the episcopate and for other monasteries. Among those formed there were men later venerated as saints, including successors in the abbacy such as Ansbert, who would also occupy the see of Rouen. The house used, as was common in seventh-century Gaul, a rule drawing on both Benedictine and Columbanian practice; in later centuries it was fully identified with the Benedictine order.

Wandregisel died at Fontenelle on 22 July, in the year traditionally given as 668, and was buried in the abbey he had founded. His tomb became a focus of local veneration, and his feast was kept on the anniversary of his death. In the ninth century, during the Viking assaults on the Seine monasteries, the community of Fontenelle was dispersed and the relics of Wandregisel were carried to various refuges in Francia; they were later in part restored. He was never the object of a medieval papal canonization in the later formal sense; his cult is of the early episcopal and monastic kind afterward classed as pre-congregation. He is not widely invoked as patron of particular trades, places, or illnesses. His historical importance lies in the foundation of Fontenelle and in the wider movement of court aristocrats who, in the seventh century, turned from Merovingian palaces to the monastic conversion of northern Gaul.