Monk and Scholar at Nursling

Before he was Boniface the missionary, Wynfrith was a monk, a teacher, and a grammarian of standing in the Anglo-Saxon church. This file traces his formation at the monasteries of Exeter and Nursling, the Latin grammar and the treatise on metre he composed — among the earliest such works by an Englishman — and the teaching career and rising reputation he deliberately set aside in middle age to cross the sea as a missionary. The renunciation is the point: he gave up an assured and honorable life for a precarious one.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

Formation: Exeter and Nursling

Willibald’s Vita reports that the young Wynfrith was first placed in a monastery at Adescancastre — generally identified with Exeter — under an abbot named Wulfhard, and that there, and afterward at the monastery of Nursling (Nhutscelle) near Southampton in Hampshire, under the abbot Winberht, he received his monastic and scholarly formation (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 1–2; trans. Talbot 1954). At Nursling he advanced in the disciplines the Theodoran school-culture of the English church prized: Scripture and its exposition, grammar, rhetoric, metrics, and the computus — the science of reckoning the calendar and the date of Easter (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 2; Talbot 1954; on the school-culture, Levison 1946).

The Vita presents him as an exceptional student who became an exceptional teacher. He was ordained to the priesthood around the age of thirty — that is, around 705, on the conventional chronology — and by then had charge of the monastic school at Nursling, drawing pupils and acquiring a reputation that extended beyond his own house (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 2; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). Willibald, writing for an audience that valued learning, lingers on this: Wynfrith was a man whose gifts in exposition and teaching marked him for high office in the English church.

The Grammarian

That Wynfrith was a scholar of substance is not merely the Vita’s claim; it is confirmed by his own surviving works. He composed an Ars grammatica (also circulating as the Ars Bonifacii), a Latin grammar in the late-antique tradition of Donatus, and a companion treatise on metre, the Caesurae versuum or De metris — among the earliest grammatical works composed by an Anglo-Saxon (Law 1997; Wood 2001). These are not original masterpieces but competent school-texts, compiled from the standard grammarians for the use of students for whom Latin was a learned second language; their interest lies precisely in that — they show an English monk of c. 700 mastering and transmitting the Latin grammatical tradition at a high level, and they place Boniface in the same scholarly current as Aldhelm and Bede (Law, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages, 1997; on the Anglo-Saxon grammatical tradition, Levison 1946).

He was also a poet of the riddling, acrostic kind fashionable in the school of Aldhelm: a set of Latin aenigmata (riddles) on the virtues and vices, composed in elaborate acrostic verse, is attributed to him and survives (Wood 2001). The portrait that emerges is consistent: Wynfrith was a man thoroughly formed by the most learned church of the Latin West, equipped to teach grammar, metre, and Scripture, and embedded in the literary culture of the Aldhelmian and Theodoran schools.

A Career Renounced

The significance of this learning, for Boniface’s story, is what he did with it: he left it. Willibald reports that Wynfrith’s reputation was such that on the death of his abbot the brethren wished to make him abbot of Nursling, and that he was already entrusted with affairs of the West Saxon church — sent, on one occasion, as part of a delegation to the archbishop of Canterbury on behalf of King Ine of Wessex in a matter of ecclesiastical synod (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 2–3; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). He was, in other words, on the ordinary track toward high office in his own church: abbacy, perhaps a bishopric, an honored life of teaching and governance at home.

He set it aside. The Vita is clear that the decision to go to the Continent as a missionary was Wynfrith’s own, taken against the resistance of his community, who did not wish to lose him, and requiring the eventual consent of his abbot and the West Saxon synod (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 3–4; Talbot 1954). He was by now a man of middle age — around forty when he first crossed in 716 — leaving security, status, and a settled scholarly life for the dangerous and uncertain work of the mission field. This renunciation is the hinge of his biography and the point Willibald most wants his readers to feel: not a young enthusiast with nothing to lose, but an established churchman who gave up much.

The Missionary as Scholar

It is worth holding the two together — the grammarian and the missionary — because they did not separate. Boniface carried his learning into the field and never set it down. His letters are full of requests for books: he asks the abbess Eadburga to copy out the Epistle of Saint Peter “in letters of gold” so that the Scriptures might be honored before the eyes of the heathen (Tangl 35 / Emerton, Letter 30; trans. Emerton 1940); he begs correspondents in England for commentaries, for the works of Bede, for treatises he cannot obtain on the Continent (e.g., Tangl 75–76, 91; Emerton, Letters 62, 75–76). The famous book he is said to have raised over his head at Dokkum is of a piece with this lifelong bibliophily (see Dokkum 754). The scholar of Nursling became the organizer of schools, scriptoria, and a learned monastic culture in Germany; the man who taught grammar to English boys spent his last forty years teaching the rudiments of the faith to the Hessians and Thuringians and building the institutions by which that teaching would continue. The renunciation of the scholar’s career was not a repudiation of learning but its redirection into mission.

See Also

• Wessex and the Anglo-Saxon Church — the learned church that formed him
• The First Frisian Attempt — the first act of the renounced career
• The Correspondence — the letters in which the scholar’s hunger for books persists
• Fulda and the Monastic Network — the learned monastic culture he built in Germany
• Monasticism — the monastic tradition that formed him

References

• Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (Exeter and Wulfhard, Nursling and Winberht, at ch. 1–2; ordination and the school at ch. 2; the offered abbacy and the Canterbury embassy at ch. 2–3; the decision to go to the Continent at ch. 3–4.)
• The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (The request to Eadburga for the Epistle of Peter in gold, Letter 30; requests for books, Letters 62, 75–76.)
• Law, Vivien. Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages. London: Longman, 1997. (Boniface’s Ars grammatica and treatise on metre in the Anglo-Saxon grammatical tradition.)
• Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The school-culture and grammatical tradition of the English church.)
• Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (Boniface’s scholarly formation, grammatical works, and riddles; the renounced career.)