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Life of St Wilfrid

Eddius Stephanus, tr. Colgrave, 1927

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Eddius’s Life of Wilfrid is, with the exception of the Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert, and Bede’s Metrical Life of the same saint, the earliest piece of biography we possess. In fact it is almost the earliest considerable piece of literature written in this country. Its importance is obvious for it gives us a contemporary picture of a man who was a great figure in the political and ecclesiastical life of the seventh century. The Church was definitely moulded into shape during Wilfrid’s lifetime, and Wilfrid himself played a leading part in deciding what that shape should be. He was largely instrumental in converting the whole of Northumbria to the Roman form of Christianity; he brought the north definitely into contact with the Mother Church by his journeys to Rome and by his appeals to the Apostolic See; he built churches which were the wonder of the western world; he exercised a great influence on the art and architecture of the times¹, and, more important even than all these, by his defiance of kings and princes he asserted the authority of the Church in so definite a manner that as a result no less than twenty-six of the forty-six years of his episcopacy were spent in exile. He died worn out by the struggle, but he had triumphantly proved that the Church was no mere appendage to the throne.

This work has always been attributed to Eddius Stephanus, though the actual evidence is far from strong. The preamble to the Fell Ms in the Bodleian Library states that it was written by a certain Stephanus, a priest. On the Cottonian Ms there is written in a sixteenth-century hand, possibly that of Sir Robert Cotton, “per Heddium Stephanum monachum Cantuar. An° 720.” This is all the evidence we have from the Mss themselves². William of Malmesbury also declares that the Life is the work of the priest Stephanus (Gesta Pontif. Anglorum, III, Prol.).

There is a reference in Bede which helps to identify this Eddius Stephanus. He says (H.E. IV. 2), “Except James above mentioned, the first singing master in the churches of the Northumbrians was Aedde surnamed Stephen invited from Kent by the most reverend Wilfrid.” This quotation explains the reference in ch. XIV of the present work where we are told that Wilfrid returned from Kent to Northumbria bringing with him the singers Aedde and Aeona. So it has always been held that this Aedde or Eddius is the author of the work³. This is the only place in which the name is mentioned, and it is possible to gather but little information about Aedde in the work itself. He probably came north in 669. Raine (H.C.Y. p. xxxi, Pref.) declares for no very obvious reason that Eddius was present at Ouestraefelda in 702; but at any rate it is probable, by his use of the first person in his description of the last journey to Rome, that he was with Wilfrid on that occasion (cf. chs. LII–LIII). He returned later to Ripon as is clear from the reference in ch. XVII, where he speaks of the treasures which Wilfrid gave, which “are preserved in our church until these times as a witness to his blessed memory; here too his remains rest.” It was here presumably that he wrote the Life of his master. There are also various other indications that he was a monk at Ripon (cf. chs. XLV, LXII–LXVIII).

It seems probable that the anonymous Life of St Cuthbert which appeared between 698 and 705 inspired the community at Ripon to urge Eddius to produce an account of his own patron. The fact of the existence of a Life of Cuthbert, whom the community must have regarded as in a certain sense a rival of their own great founder, would undoubtedly stir them up to produce a Life of Wilfrid.

We do not know the exact date of the Life but it is clear that it cannot have been written very long after Wilfrid’s death. Eddius came up north with Wilfrid in 669 and must at that time have been at least twenty years old and in all probability was more, seeing that he was even then an accomplished musician. So at the lowest computation Eddius would be sixty years of age when his patron died. It is highly probable therefore that the Life was produced within the next ten years—that is to say, before 720. The tone of the last few chapters and the details about the first anniversary of his death also tend to shew that the Life was produced shortly after Wilfrid died (cf. also chs. XVII, XXII, XXIII, XXVI, XXXVII).

Eddius would have no difficulty in gathering together the materials for his history. He had been intimately associated with Wilfrid over a period of forty years and besides that he was in close touch with Acca and Tatberht. It was Acca for whom Wilfrid asked when he recovered consciousness after his illness at Meaux and to whom he revealed his vision (ch. LVI); Tatberht was his kinsman and he told him the story of his life probably as he rode south to Oundle on his last journey (ch. LXV). All this, and the many reminiscences of the monks who had followed him, were at Eddius’s disposal.

It is easy to criticize Eddius—to point out his partisanship, and his mistakes in historical fact, to call him credulous and to cast doubts on the historical value of his work. All this has been done⁴, and it is impossible to deny the truth of many of the criticisms which have been made. But in spite of all this the Life presents a living picture of St Wilfrid such as we certainly do not get in Bede. It is scarcely fair to expect Eddius to be anything else but partisan; it is extremely difficult for the modern biographer to escape from the snare with the experience of 1200 years of biography-writing behind him. Eddius, on the other hand, had probably only one example to imitate. Besides all this Eddius’s aim was to extol his patron, even if he had to twist the facts in order to do it. So it is not surprising to find that Eddius judges all men by their attitude to his hero. Aldfrith’s death, for instance (ch. LIX), is due to his treatment of Wilfrid; Ecgfrith so long as he lived at peace with Wilfrid was victorious, but when disagreement broke out between them, the king’s power rapidly diminished (ch. XIX; compare also ch. xx, note)⁵. But we must not condemn Eddius as being utterly unscrupulous. Take for instance the gap which occurs in the Life between the times when Wilfrid left the north in 692, after he was driven out by Aldfrith, and the conference at Ouestraefelda in 703. It may well be that Eddius, having no means of finding out the details of his life during that period, preferred to keep silence. He does not hesitate to explain the motives for Wilfrid’s two expulsions, while Bede is content merely to quote the facts. In both cases the reasons given (chs. XXIV and XLV) are likely enough—except for the story of the bribing of Theodore—and they are not altogether creditable to Wilfrid, at any rate from our point of view. But, apart from all questions of the credibility of Eddius as a historian, the value of the biography is to be found in the account given of the building and renovation of the churches of York, Ripon and Hexham, the glimpse we get of the significance of Wilfrid in the history of the times, and an extremely interesting picture of life in England and on the continent in the late seventh century. Concerning the accusation made against Eddius that he was credulous, little need be said. … It was natural to his age, and, like all other religious and orthodox people of his time, he readily believed in stories of supernatural interposition in the everyday affairs of life.

A few words may be said concerning the relation between Bede’s account of Wilfrid and that of Eddius. Bede obviously uses Eddius though he does not acknowledge it. As in his borrowings from other sources⁶ he alters the language while keeping closely to the sense. He has, however, added fresh details. On the subject of Aethilthryth he got his information from Wilfrid himself (H.E. IV. 19). Other details of Wilfrid’s life he may easily have obtained from his friend Acca, such as Wilfrid’s stay with Willibrord on his last journey to Rome (H.E. III. 3), the picturesque account of the way in which Wilfrid relieved the famine in Sussex (H.E. V. 11), or the consecration of Oftfor and Suidberht (H.E. V. 11). It is clear throughout his account that he is not altogether favourable to Wilfrid; one fact alone may be mentioned to illustrate this point; he describes only one miracle connected with Wilfrid—the vision of St Michael; it is noticeable that in this miracle his friend Acca plays an important part. But when he is writing the Life of St Cuthbert, a man especially dear to him, it is noticeable that the miraculous element is more than usually great. But in spite of all this we know from Bede’s other writings that he was a careful and scrupulous historian, and, after a detailed comparison of Eddius’s narrative with that of Bede, one is forced to the conclusion that Bede, especially on points in which they differ, is a more dependable authority⁷ (see e.g. notes on chs. XI, XXIV, XLI, XLIII, etc.).

The style of Eddius’s Latin, though not so good as that of Bede, is nevertheless very much better than that of other (continental) Latin writers of the period. His sentences often hang together badly, his genders and cases are sometimes mixed, he is capable of mistakes in declensions and conjugations, an active form is invented for deponent verbs, and words are used in wrong, or at any rate very unusual, senses. But in spite of all these things the narrative is on the whole clear and straightforward and the number of obscure passages is not very much greater than we find in Bede.

There are two manuscripts of the Life. C, the first, is at the British Museum in the Cottonian collection (Vespasian, D. VI). It is part of a volume which apparently once belonged to the Canterbury library, judging from an inscription on fol. 2. The size of the Ms is 5¼ in. × 7¼ in. The book consists of two parts, the first of which (fols. 2–77) belongs chiefly to the ninth century with a few eleventh-century additions, while the latter part (fols. 78–125) contains the life of Wilfrid in a hand of the eleventh century. On the last page (fol. 125) are a few exercises in penmanship which belong to the twelfth century. From some of these it would appear that the volume was removed from somewhere in Yorkshire to Canterbury⁸. The chapter headings are written in red or purple ink and in a few places there are rather crude attempts at ornate capitals (e.g. chs. XV, XXXVII, XXXIX, XL, XLVIII, LI, LX, LXIV, etc.) some of them with roughly drawn faces or animal designs. Two of the leaves of the Ms are missing and consequently there is a gap extending from the end of ch. XV to the middle of ch. XVIII (see note a.l.).

There is a copy of this made by Thomas Gale, a High Master of St Paul’s School, in the seventeenth century, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, No. 13, 791. It is a somewhat careless piece of work.

On the first folium is the following inscription: “Heddius cognomento Stephanus de vita Wilfridi archiepiscopi Eboracensis (hanc inscriptionem habet codex Cottianus, unde haec descripsimus sed manu recentiori. Jacobus Usserius qui ista codici Cottiano affixit, hanc ipsam vitam Heddii attribuit ex codice ecclesiae Sarensis; v. eius...).” The book, whose title is omitted here, is Ussher’s Discourse of the Religion Anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish, 1631, where he speaks of the Ms at Salisbury and declares that he read on it the name of Stephen and not that of Eddius. So much for Gale’s inaccuracy which is very marked all through this piece of work.

F, the second Ms, is in the Fell Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (vol. III. 34 a-56 b, originally vol. I). It forms part of a volume of Saints’ Lives and is clearly written in a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century hand. The capitals of a number of the chapters are missing. Evidently they had been left to be put in later by another scribe. The Ms is 8¼ in. × 12¾ in.

When Mabillon edited the Life in 1677 he only had a copy of the Cotton Ms, but later on Dr Thomas Gale had obtained a copy of a MS belonging to the Salisbury Cathedral Library from which he supplied the defects of the Cottonian ms and through Professor Bernard, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford at the time, sent them on to Mabillon, together with a list of variant readings which Mabillon published in another part of the same volume published in 1680 (AA.SS.O.S.B. saec. IV. pt II. pp. 550–553). Since then editors have been puzzled to know what has become of this Salisbury MS—Codex Sarensis as Mabillon calls it. Only two Mss are known at present. Raine suggested that the Fell and Salisbury Mss might possibly have been identical, while Levison, the most recent editor, denied this and declared the Codex Sarensis to have been another MS now lost. The question however can easily be solved. In the first place all editors have noticed the close similarity between the variants preserved by Mabillon from the Salisbury Ms and those from the Fell MS. As a matter of fact, by far the greater number of the readings are identical, and those which are not, look more like careless slips of the pen than actual variants. But there is some correspondence among the Salisbury Muniments which explains the whole matter. In 1640 the Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Ussher, borrowed six books from the Church Library at Salisbury. Of these, three can be identified by the descriptions given as MS Fell, I, II, and III. In 1650 Dr Baylie, Dean of Salisbury, demanded their return and four of them were sent to the Bodleian Library. Of the other two volumes, “His Grace of Armagh testified that they were plundered and lost.” The Salisbury authorities allowed the rest of the volumes to remain at the Bodleian until they called for them. In 1679, the late Librarian of the Bodleian, by this time Bishop of Lincoln, acknowledged that these four books, belonging to Salisbury, had been placed in the Library during his time but only three of them could now be found. Later on the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Fell, had them on loan to be “collated and compared.” He died in 1686 and the three volumes were returned to the library in the form of a bequest from the Bishop! Hence it is simply a matter of different names for the same Ms.

In the Bodleian Library there is also a beautifully written copy of the Fell Ms made by a nephew of Dr Fell (MS Jones, II). This was probably made during the period when the books were in the Bishop’s possession before his death. There are various conjectural readings in the margin.

What is the relation between the two Mss? It is clear that neither one is a copy of the other because in several places one MS omits words and phrases which the other one inserts (cf. chs. I, VI, XIII, XVIII, XXX, LIII, LV, LVII), while certain proper names are spelt with consistent differences in each. On the whole it looks as though they were both copies of another Ms which was not the archetype. This seems apparent owing to the fact that in both there are obvious mistakes which appear to be due to the copy that the scribes were using, as e.g. in the chapter-heading of Chap. XXV. On the whole the scribe of F seems to have done his work more carelessly, and, if there is anything to choose between them, preference should be given, not, as Raine says, to F, but to C⁹.

In the text I have not attempted to reproduce slight orthographical differences, which, so far as one could tell, were due largely to the idiosyncrasies of the scribes. Thus -ae is written sometimes -ae, sometimes -e, and sometimes -ę. I have adopted the usual spelling. In the same way I have rejected spellings such as michi, nichil, ancxiatum, and have also adopted the assimilated forms of prefixes in verbs such as affirmare for adfirmare, illucescente for inlucescente. Both types are found indifferently in the Mss. I have preserved all variants which have the slightest value, but I have only in specially interesting cases noted those which are merely differences in spelling, such as I have just described, or are undoubtedly nothing more than a slip of the pen on the part of the scribe.

The Life has been edited, either in part or entirely, by the following:

1. JOHN LELAND. De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea. Tom. III, pp. 169–170. (Edited Thomas Hearn, Oxon. 1715, vol. IV. pp. 109 ff.) He quotes about ten chapters, making use of a Ms which is now apparently lost.

2. JAMES USSHER, Archbishop of Armagh, quotes various passages from C, in all about four chapters, in his book, A Discourse of the Religion Anciently professed by the Irish and Brittish, London 1631, pp. 102, 104–106, and also two chapters in his work called Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates, Dublin, 1639, pp. 78, 922, 931.

3. JEAN MABILLON. Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, saec. IV. pt I. Paris, 1677, pp. 676–722. He was the first to publish the whole Life. It was produced from the copy of C made by Thomas Gale and now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (see above). Later on the parts missing in C were supplied from the Codex Sarensis (really F, see above) and some variant readings were added, saec. IV. pt 2, pp. 550–553, a. 1680.

4. THOMAS GALE. Historiae Britannicae, Saxonicae, Anglo-Danicae Scriptores XV. Oxon. 1691. Pp. 51–90. This was from C but he declared in the preface that it was “ad codicem MS Sarisburiensem emaculatam et auctam.” Actually it scarcely differs from the text published by Mabillon.

5. J. A. GILES. Original Lives of Anglo-Saxons. Published for the Caxton Society, London, 1854. Pp. 198–277. A reprint of Gale’s text.

6. JAMES RAINE. The Priory of Hexham. Vol. I. (Surt. Soc. vol. XLIV.) Durham, 1864. Appendix, pp. iv, v. The chapters referring to the building of Hexham. From C.

7. N. E. S. A. HAMILTON. Willelmi Malmesbiriensis. De Gestis pontificum Anglorum libri quinque (Rolls Series, vol. LII.) London, 1870. Pp. 222–226. Four chapters from C.

8. A. W. HADDAN and W. STUBBS. Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. III. Oxon. 1871. Edits those parts concerned with ecclesiastical law. C and F collated.

9. JAMES RAINE. Historians of the Church of York. Vol. I. (Rolls Series, vol. LXXI.) London, 1879. Pp. 1–103. The full text of the Life. Based on F but collated with C; a very inaccurate piece of work. The critical notes on the text are amazingly inadequate.

10. J. T. FOWLER. Memorials of the Church of St. Peter and St. Wilfrid, Ripon. Vol. I. (Surt. Soc. vol. LXXIV.) Durham, 1882. Pp. 4–5, 7–11, 14–19, 21–26. Edits the parts dealing with the church at Ripon, based on Raine’s text.

11. WALTER DE GRAY BIRCH. Cartularium Saxonicum. Vol. I. London, 1885. Pp. 72–73, 103, 159–161. Wilfrid’s petition and the decrees of Pope John and Archbishop Theodore. From C.

12. W. LEVISON. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum. Vol. VI. Hanover and Leipzig, 1913. Pp. 163–263. Contains the whole Life with an accurate text based on a careful collation of C and F. It also has a valuable critical apparatus, notes, and introduction.

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