Boniface (born Wynfreth; 675 – 5 June 754) was an English Benedictine monk and leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic parts of Francia during the eighth century. He organised significant foundations of the church in Germany and was made Archbishop of Mainz by Pope Gregory III. He was martyred in Frisia in 754, along with 52 others, and his remains were returned to Fulda, where they rest in a sarcophagus which remains a site of Christian pilgrimage.
Boniface's life and death as well as his work became widely known, there being a wealth of material available – a number of , especially the near-contemporary , legal documents, possibly some sermons, and above all his correspondence. He is venerated as a saint in the Christian church and became the patron saint of Germania, known as the "Apostle to the Germans".
Norman Cantor notes the three roles Boniface played that made him "one of the truly outstanding creators of the first Europe, as the apostle of Germania, the reformer of the Frankish Church, and the chief fomentor of the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian family."Cantor 167-68. Through his efforts to reorganize and regulate the church of the Franks, he helped shape the Latin Church in Europe, and many of the dioceses he proposed remain today. After his martyrdom, he was quickly hailed as a saint in Fulda and other areas in Germania and in England. He is still venerated strongly today by Catholics in Germany and throughout the German diaspora. Boniface is celebrated as a missionary; he is regarded as a unifier of Europe, and he is regarded by German Roman Catholics as a national figure.
In 2019 Devon County Council, with the support of the Anglican Diocese of Exeter, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Plymouth, and local Devon leaders of the Orthodox, Methodist, and Congregational churches, officially recognised St Boniface as the Patron Saint of Devon.
Early life
The earliest Bonifacian vita does not indicate his place of birth but says that at an early age he attended a monastery ruled by Abbot Wulfhard in ,Levison 6. or Examchester,Talbot 28. which seems to denote Exeter, and may have been one of many built by local landowners and churchmen; nothing else is known of it outside the Bonifacian .Schieffer 76–77; 103–105. This monastery is believed to have occupied the site of the Church of St Mary Major in the City of Exeter, demolished in 1971, next to Exeter Cathedral. Later tradition places his birth at Crediton, but the earliest mention of Crediton in connection to Boniface is from the early fourteenth century,Orme 97; Hockey 106. in John Grandisson's Legenda Sanctorum: The Proper Lessons for Saints' Days according to the use of Exeter.Levison xxix. In one of his letters Boniface mentions he was "born and reared...[in] the synod of London",Emerton 81. but he may have been speaking metaphorically.Flechner 47. His English name is recorded as being Winfrid or Winfred.
According to the , Winfrid was of a respected and prosperous family. Against his father's wishes he devoted himself at an early age to the monastic life. He received further theological training in the Benedictine monastery and minster of Nhutscelle (Nursling),Levison 9. not far from Winchester, which under the direction of abbot Winbert had grown into an industrious centre of learning in the tradition of Aldhelm.Schieffer 105–106. Winfrid taught in the abbey school and at the age of 30 became a priest; in this time, he wrote a Latin grammar, the , besides a treatise on verse and some Aldhelm-inspired riddles.Gneuss 38. While little is known about Nursling outside Boniface's , it seems clear that the library there was significant. To supply Boniface with the materials he needed, it would have contained works by Donatus, Priscian, Isidore, and many others.Gneuss 37–40. Around 716, when his abbot Wynberth of Nursling died, he was invited (or expected) to assume his position—it is possible that they were related, and the practice of hereditary right among the early Anglo-Saxons would affirm this.Yorke. Winfrid, however, declined the position and in 716 set out on a missionary expedition to Frisia.
Early missionary work in Frisia and Germania
Boniface first left for the continent in 716. He traveled to Utrecht, where Willibrord, the "Apostle to the Frisians", had been working since the 690s. He spent a year with Willibrord, preaching in the countryside, but their efforts were frustrated by the war then being carried on between Charles Martel and Radbod, King of the Frisians. Willibrord fled to the abbey he had founded in Echternach (in modern-day Luxembourg) while Boniface returned to Nursling.
Boniface returned to the continent the next year and went straight to Rome, where Pope Gregory II renamed him "Boniface", after the (legendary) fourth-century martyr Boniface of Tarsus, and appointed him missionary bishop for Germania—he became a bishop without a diocese for an area that lacked any church organization. He would never return to England, though he remained in correspondence with his countrymen and kinfolk throughout his life.
According to the vitae Boniface felled the Donar Oak, Latinized by Willibald as "Jupiter's oak", near the present-day town of Fritzlar in northern Hesse. According to his early biographer Willibald, Boniface started to chop the oak down, when suddenly a great wind, by miracle, blew the ancient oak over. When the gods did not strike him down, the people were amazed and converted to Christianity. He built a church from its wood at the siteLevison 31–32.—the church was the beginning of the monastery in Fritzlar. This account from the vita is stylised to portray Boniface as a singular character who alone acts to root out paganism. Lutz von Padberg and others claim that what the vitae leave out is that the action was most likely well-prepared and widely publicized in advance for maximum effect, and that Boniface had little reason to fear for his personal safety since the Frankish fortified settlement of Büraburg was nearby.von Padberg 40–41. According to Willibald, Boniface later had a church with an attached monastery built in Fritzlar,Levison 35. on the site of the previously built chapel, according to tradition.Rau 494 n.10.
Boniface and the Carolingians
The support of the Frankish mayors of the palace, and later the early Pippinids and the Carolingian dynasty, was essential for Boniface's work. Boniface had been under the protection of Charles Martel from 723 onwards.Greenaway 25. The Christian Frankish leaders desired to defeat their rival power, the pagan Saxons, and to incorporate the Saxon lands into their own growing empire. Boniface's campaign of destruction of indigenous Germanic pagan sites may have benefited the Franks in their campaign against the Saxons.
In 732, Boniface traveled again to Rome to report, and Pope Gregory III conferred upon him the pallium as archbishop with jurisdiction over what is now Germany. Boniface again set out for the German lands and continued his mission, but also used his authority to work on the relations between the papacy and the Frankish church. Rome wanted more control over that church, which it felt was much too independent and which, in the eyes of Boniface, was subject to worldly corruption. Charles Martel, after having defeated the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate during the Battle of Tours (732), had rewarded many churches and monasteries with lands, but typically his supporters who held church offices were allowed to benefit from those possessions. Boniface would have to wait until the 740s before he could try to address this situation, in which Frankish church officials were essentially sinecures, and the church itself paid little heed to Rome. During his third visit to Rome in 737–38, he was made papal legate for Germany.Moore.
After Boniface's third trip to Rome, Charles Martel established four dioceses in Bavaria (Salzburg, Regensburg, Freising, and Passau) and gave them to Boniface as archbishop and metropolitan over all Germany east of the Rhine. In 745, he was granted Mainz as metropolitan see.Good. In 742, one of his disciples, Sturm (also known as Sturmi, or Sturmius), founded the abbey of Fulda not far from Boniface's earlier missionary outpost at Fritzlar. Although Sturm was the founding abbot of Fulda, Boniface was very involved in the foundation. The initial grant for the abbey was signed by Carloman, the son of Charles Martel, and a supporter of Boniface's reform efforts in the Frankish church. Boniface himself explained to his old friend, Daniel of Winchester, that without the protection of Charles Martel he could "neither administer his church, defend his clergy, nor prevent idolatry".
According to German historian Gunther Wolf, the high point of Boniface's career was the Concilium Germanicum, organized by Carloman in an unknown location in April 743. Although Boniface was not able to safeguard the church from property seizures by the local nobility, he did achieve one goal, the adoption of stricter guidelines for the Frankish clergy,Wolf 2–5. who often hailed directly from the nobility. After Carloman's resignation in 747 he maintained a sometimes turbulent relationship with the king of the Franks, Pepin the Short; the claim that he would have crowned Pepin at Soissons in 751 is now generally discredited.Wolf 5.
Boniface balanced this support and attempted to maintain some independence, however, by attaining the support of the papacy and of the Agilolfings of Bavaria. In Frankish, Hessian, and Thuringian territory, he established the diocese of Würzburg (741).Kirsch, Johann Peter. "St. Burchard of Würzurg." The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 3. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908. 27 December 2022 By appointing his own followers as bishops, he was able to retain some independence from the Carolingians, who most likely were content to give him leeway as long as Christianity was imposed on the Saxons and other Germanic tribes.
Last mission to Frisia
According to the , Boniface had never relinquished his hope of converting the Frisians, and in 754 he set out with a retinue for Frisia. He baptized a great number and summoned a general meeting for confirmation at a place not far from Dokkum, between Franeker and Groningen. However, instead of his converts, a group of armed robbers appeared and slew the aged archbishop. The mention that Boniface persuaded his (armed) comrades to lay down their arms: "Cease fighting. Lay down your arms, for we are told in Scripture not to render evil for evil but to overcome evil by good."Talbot 56.
Having killed Boniface and his company, the Frisian bandits ransacked their possessions but found that the company's luggage did not contain the riches they had hoped for: "they broke open the chests containing the books and found, to their dismay, that they held manuscripts instead of gold vessels, pages of sacred texts instead of silver plates."Talbot 57. They attempted to destroy these books, the earliest already says, and this account underlies the status of the Ragyndrudis Codex, now held as a Bonifacian relic in Fulda, and supposedly one of three books found on the field by the Christians who inspected it afterward. Of those three books, the Ragyndrudis Codex shows incisions that could have been made by sword or axe; its story appears confirmed in the Utrecht hagiography, the , which reports that an eye-witness saw that the saint at the moment of death held up a gospel as spiritual protection.Schieffer 272-73. The story was later repeated by Otloh's ; at that time, the Ragyndrudis Codex seems to have been firmly connected to the martyrdom.