01 — Foundations
The ground on which Boniface’s mission stands: the mature Anglo-Saxon church of the late seventh century — itself only two or three generations converted, yet already so confident that it sent its own monks back across the sea to evangelize the still-pagan Continent — and within it the Wessex boy Wynfrith, his monastic formation and scholarly career at Nursling, and the teaching life he deliberately abandoned for the mission field. These files establish who he was and what kind of church produced him before he ever set foot in Frisia.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)
Boniface was not a lone visionary but the product of a particular ecclesial culture: the Anglo-Saxon church of Wessex, Kent, and Northumbria in the decades after the Synod of Whitby (664), a church that had received the faith from both the Roman mission of Augustine and the Irish mission of Lindisfarne, had reconciled the two at Whitby in favor of Roman usage, and had under Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus become one of the most learned in the West. That church’s distinctive achievement was to turn its own recent conversion outward — to conceive of the still-pagan Germanic peoples of the Continent, ethnic kin to the Anglo-Saxons, as a field for which the English bore a special responsibility. This section sets that background and then narrows to the man: Wynfrith of Wessex, monk and grammarian of Nursling, before the name “Boniface” was ever given him.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Wessex and the Anglo-Saxon Church | The mature English church that sent missionaries back to the Continent; Wynfrith’s birth in Wessex c. 675; the Roman–Irish synthesis after Whitby; the missionary impulse that preceded Boniface (Willibrord) and the sense of kinship with the continental Saxons. |
| Monk and Scholar at Nursling | His monastic formation at Exeter and Nursling; the Latin grammar (Ars grammatica) and treatise on metre he composed; his teaching career and the reputation that could have made him an abbot — and which he renounced for the mission. |
See Also
- The First Frisian Attempt — what Wynfrith did with the vocation formed here
- The Commission from Rome — the Roman authorization that turned the English impulse into an ordered mission
- St. Bede the Venerable — the historian of this same Anglo-Saxon church
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Western Church of Boniface’s world
References
- Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface. Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954.
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Latham. London: Penguin, 1990.
- Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946.
- Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001.