The First Frisian Attempt

In 716 Wynfrith crossed from Wessex to Frisia to join the missionary work begun there by Willibrord — and failed. He had arrived at the worst possible moment: the death of the Frankish ruler Pippin II had emboldened the pagan Frisian duke Radbod, who had driven out the missionaries, destroyed churches, and restored the old worship. This file traces that first, abortive mission, the political collapse of the field, Wynfrith’s return to England, and the lesson he drew — that mission required an authorization and a stability his lone enthusiasm could not supply.

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

The Crossing of 716

Having obtained at last the consent of his abbot and his community, Wynfrith crossed the sea to Frisia in 716, in the company of a few companions, intending to join and assist the mission that Willibrord had been conducting there for a quarter of a century (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; trans. Talbot 1954). Frisia was the natural first field for an English missionary: it lay just across the North Sea, its people were close kin in language and custom to the Anglo-Saxons, and Willibrord’s Utrecht mission had established a precedent and a base (see Wessex and the Anglo-Saxon Church). Wynfrith went, on the Vita’s telling, with high hopes and careful preparation, having considered where the harvest was readiest (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; Talbot 1954).

A Field at War

He had, however, walked into a catastrophe. The Frankish mayor of the palace Pippin II, under whose protection Willibrord’s mission had advanced into Frisian territory, had died in 714, and his death had thrown the Frankish realm into a succession crisis from which Charles Martel would only gradually emerge (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009). The pagan Frisian duke Radbod, long the antagonist of Frankish expansion and Christian mission alike, seized the opportunity. He recovered the territories Pippin had taken, expelled the Frankish-backed clergy, burned churches, and restored the temples and the old worship across the lands he regained (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). The mission field Wynfrith had come to assist had, in effect, ceased to exist; Willibrord himself had been forced to withdraw.

Willibald reports that Wynfrith, undeterred at first, sought out Radbod himself and even, on some readings, attempted to gain a hearing — but found the country closed, the churches in ruins, and preaching impossible under a hostile pagan power then in the ascendant (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; Talbot 1954). The Vita frames the failure not as a defeat of the missionary but as the simple, unalterable fact of the political situation: “because of the persecution which Duke Radbod was then waging,” the time was not ripe (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; Talbot 1954). Radbod’s restoration of paganism made the field unworkable; there was nothing to do but wait or withdraw.

Return to Wessex

Wynfrith withdrew. He returned to England the same year, 716, having accomplished nothing of what he had crossed to do (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; Talbot 1954). The Vita records that on his return the monks of Nursling again wished to make him their abbot — their old abbot Winberht having died — and that he was again pressed to settle into the honorable life he had left (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 4; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). The episode underlines the genuineness of his missionary resolve: he had a failed mission behind him and an abbacy in front of him, and he chose to try again.

The Lesson of Failure

The first Frisian attempt is easy to pass over as a false start, but it was formative. Three things followed from it. First, Wynfrith learned in the hardest way that mission was inseparable from political conditions: where Frankish power did not reach, or had collapsed, the missionary could do nothing, and a field could be opened or shut by the death of a ruler far away (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009). The frank dependence on the Frankish prince that runs through his later letters — his admission to Daniel of Winchester that he could not govern the church or restrain the heathen “without the patronage of the Frankish prince” (Tangl 63 / Emerton, Letter 63; trans. Emerton 1940) — was a conclusion drawn first at the wreck of the 716 mission.

Second, he learned that personal zeal and even episcopal precedent were not enough; what was needed was an authorization of the highest order, one that did not depend on the fortunes of a single local patron. This is the lesson that sent him not back to Frisia but south to Rome (see The Commission from Rome). Rather than attach himself again to Willibrord’s enterprise as a junior helper, he resolved to seek his commission from the pope himself.

Third, the failure clarified the field. Frisia under Radbod was closed; but the death of Radbod in 719 would reopen it, and the lands east of the Rhine — Hesse, Thuringia, the territories of the still-pagan and half-Christianized Germanic peoples — beckoned. When Boniface returned to the Continent after his Roman commission, he did pass briefly through Frisia again, working under the aged Willibrord for a time around 719–721 after Radbod’s death, before turning decisively eastward to the Hessian and Thuringian mission that would become his life’s work (Willibald, Vita Bonifatii 5; Talbot 1954; Wood 2001). The first Frisian attempt failed; but it taught Wynfrith how a mission must be grounded, and it is no accident that his next move was to Rome.

References

Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface (Vita Bonifatii). Trans. C. H. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The crossing of 716, Radbod’s persecution, and the return to England at ch. 4; the brief work under Willibrord after Radbod’s death at ch. 5.)
The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (Boniface on the necessity of Frankish protection, Letter 63.)
Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The death of Pippin II, Radbod’s reaction, and the political collapse of the Frisian field.)
Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The Frankish succession crisis and the Frisian frontier.)