Wilfrid

Wilfrid was among the most powerful and contentious ecclesiastical figures of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England. He was born into a noble Northumbrian family in the 630s. After his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage he left home in adolescence, was received at the court of King Oswiu, and was sent by Queen Eanflæd to the island monastery of Lindisfarne. Dissatisfied with Irish customs there, he proceeded to Kent and then, with Benedict Biscop, to Rome, where he studied the Roman method of calculating Easter and the apostolic liturgy. He remained for some years at Lyons as a protégé of Archbishop Annemund, refusing a proposed marriage into the Gallic aristocracy. When Annemund was murdered in a political purge, Wilfrid returned to Northumbria determined to implant Roman discipline and the Rule of Saint Benedict.

About 660 Alhfrith, sub-king of Deira, granted him the monastery of Ripon. Wilfrid expelled the Irish community that would not accept the Roman Easter and tonsure, and he established a house under the Benedictine rule. At the Synod of Whitby in 664 he was the chief spokesman for the Roman party against Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne. King Oswiu’s decision in favour of Rome marked a decisive turn of the Northumbrian church toward the papacy and continental practice. Wilfrid was elected bishop of the Northumbrians but travelled to Gaul for consecration, which he received from a large body of Frankish bishops at Compiègne, because he regarded the remaining English bishops as canonically irregular. His delayed return allowed Chad to be installed at York. In 669 the newly arrived Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury restored Wilfrid to the see of York and moved Chad to Lichfield. During the following decade Wilfrid administered a diocese covering all Northumbria, acquired great estates, restored the church of York, and built ambitious stone churches with surviving crypts at Ripon and Hexham, employing masons and glaziers from the Continent.

In 678 King Ecgfrith, whose first wife Æthelthryth had taken the veil with Wilfrid’s encouragement, and Archbishop Theodore divided the York diocese into several sees without Wilfrid’s consent and expelled him. Wilfrid appealed to Rome, the first English bishop to do so. A synod under Pope Agatho in 679 ordered his restoration, but Ecgfrith refused to comply fully, imprisoned him, and then drove him into exile. Wilfrid evangelized the pagan South Saxons, converted King Æthelwealh, and founded a monastery at Selsey; he also participated in the conversion of the Isle of Wight and found patronage in Mercia. After Ecgfrith’s death he was restored by King Aldfrith, yet disputes over monastic privileges and diocesan boundaries produced a second exile around 691. A further appeal to Pope John VI and a council held at Nidd in 705 produced a compromise: Wilfrid received Hexham and Ripon but not York, which remained with John of Beverley.

Wilfrid died at the monastery of Oundle, one of his Mercian foundations, on 24 April in 709 or 710, and was buried in the church he had built at Ripon. His chaplain Stephen of Ripon wrote a Life that portrays him as a tireless champion of Roman orthodoxy, monastic independence, and papal authority. Bede, writing a generation later, treated him more cautiously. Wilfrid’s legacy includes the firm establishment of Roman liturgical and computistical practice in northern England, the spread of Benedictine monasticism, a tradition of appeal to the Holy See, and a distinctive Romanizing architecture. He was honoured as a saint from the eighth century, and his cult remained centred on Ripon, of which he is the patron. His feast is kept on 12 October and also on 24 April.