St. Aldhelm was an English saint who, after studying under the Irish monk Máeldub and the North African abbot St. Hadrian (d. 710), who had come to Canterbury with St. Theodore of Tarsus (602-690), became abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Malmesbury. He founded other monasteries and became renowned as a scholar before his consecration as Bishop of Sherborne in 705. He died in 709, while making the rounds of his diocese, and was buried in Malmesbury Abbey. Besides his work as abbot and bishop, Aldhelm is also famous as a scholar and poet, especially for his prose treatise In Praise of Virginity and its poetic counterpart, The Song of Virginity, as well as his Latin riddles. The following Life of Aldhelm comes from the Nova Legenda Angliae of John Capgrave (1393-1464).
Blessed Aldhelm, having arisen from a most splendid family of Angles, descended from his grandfather’s grandfather, a king. Indeed, his father, by the name of Kenten, a man devoted to God, was a brother of Ine of Wessex.[1] Therefore, this Kenten, from his wife, begot a son by the name of Aldhelm. For Aldhlem, in English, is translated as “old helmet” in Latin:[2] since, head protected by the helmet of salvation, he brought home to heaven the best victory over enemies. His boyish years having elapsed, he was handed over to liberal studies: where he, therefore, quickly reflourished, so that the aforesaid was esteemed by the Greek and Latin doctors whom he had. At last, called into the monastery of Meldunesburg, later Malmesbury,[3] he first became a monk, then priest and abbot; abstaining from food and water, he occupied himself with vigils and prayers. For his illustrious fame had already passed through many heralds: it surpassed the Alps; and it penetrated Rome. Incited by this, Pope Sergius, having written, called and received him honorably. For when, on a certain day, he celebrated Mass in the Lateran Church, and took off the chasuble, he stretched it behind himself, to, he thought, give it to one of the ministers. But since the industry of the servants defaulted, divine providence soon approached. For immediately a ray of the sun, bursting through the window, fell upon the chasuble and sustained it by day. For that chasuble, in memory of the miracle, has decorated the church of Malmesbury until today. At that time, it happened at Rome that a boy begotten by an unchaste mother and an unchaste father praised the fame of the Apostolic Successor: since, then, as was wont to occur, vulgar opinion believed him begotten by the pontiff, the anxious Aldhelm, having allied the bishop to himself with much friendship, for the infamy of such an alliance, ordered the boy, nine days after birth, to be exhibited; and he commanded, in the virtue and in the name of Jesus Christ, that he declare if Sergius was a witness to the unchastity. The infant most absolutely responded by word that the Leader was not a partaker in crime: he had no communion with the second sex. Aldhelm, therefore, both removed the infamy from his friend, the pontiff; and he gathered grace for himself. But when, in his coenobium, he built a church for Holy Mary, the last needed beam was found shorter than the rest. Aldhelm, therefore, having fled to prayer to God, found the beam soon lengthened, according to his petition. In that season, having accepted an invitation to a colloquium from Berthwald the Archbishop, by the seashore, passing sailors did not honor him, contemning and deriding him for some dirtiness in his vestments. And, behold, a contrary wind began to blow on the sea: a storm raged, a tempest grew strong. Therefore, the sailors, endangered and expecting the hour of death, confessed their fault with tears: and they clamored for the suffrage of Saint Aldhelm. And he ascended a skiff to bring help, and at once, as the saint pressed the cutter with his body, he rendered the sea ready for all tranquility; and he drew the sailors, with the ship, to land. But here the holy man wrote many books, as he could, being most learned in everything, among which he composed the book of the Praise of Virginity and of the Fight Against the Seven Principal Vices; On the Disciplines of the Philosophers; On the Admonition of Fraternal Charity, and many other books. He also made a coenobium near the river which is called Frome, where there stands, to this day, a church built in honor of Saint John the Baptist; and at Bradford he build a third monastery. But that monastery was later effaced and destroyed by the Danes.[4] For, never departing from the monastery except when pressed by great necessity, he stood out as least avid for money: but everything paid to him he spent for useful causes and for the poor: so that he could thus tame his fragile flesh; in a font which is near the monastery, which is called the font of Saint Aldhelm,[5] he immersed himself to the shoulder. There, not caring for the glacial rigor, he stayed during the night, singing the entire psalter. He did not flee the consort of women: instead, he would detain one, either sitting or lying down: and when he grew warm in flesh’s instability, he departed with a quiet and immobile soul. The devil saw himself derided, discerning a woman and a man close together, each called away in soul, singing the psalter insistently: and the holy one said farewell to the woman, with saved modesty, undamaged chastity. For Saint Aldhelm, at a certain time, took with himself, from Rome, an altar of white marble: being six feet thick, four palms long, three palms wide.[6] A camel brought this stone with him as far as the Alps: and there, because of the steep path, it fell and bruised the beast by the fall: and the marble broke into two parts. Seeing which, Aldhelm, having fled to God and given blessing, returned saving vigor to the animal, and the pieces of the stone, which broke not in a straight line, but by splitting in some curve, he immediately joined into a solid piece: yet, in memory of the miracle, a scar of the splitting is displayed to this day; indeed cured by miracle, and yet visible to the curious eye. That stone is said to be now in some priory of canons by the name of the Britons in the Province of Somerset. Then, by the passage of time, the West-Saxon region stood divided into two episcopates: and Daniel presided in Winchester: and Aldhelm was substitute in Sherborne, after Bishop Hædde:[7] who presided over both provinces. Then Aldhelm, in good old age, full of virtues and sanctity, migrated to the Lord on the eighth Kalends of June,[8] and, in his monastery of Meldunesburg, that is, Malmesbury, he was buried with great honor. Saint Egwin the divine, foreknowing his death, in one of his works says thus: “After two years, Aldhelm, a religious bishop, migrated to the Lord: knowing which through revelation, I, with the brothers called together, revealed the death of the venerated father to them; and, with hastened step, to the place where the sacred body lay, nearly fifty miles beyond the monastery of Malmesbury, I arrived and I approached the sepulchre and I buried him honorably: commanding that, in whatsoever place the sacred body paused in its carrying-away, a signaculum of the sacred cross would be erected.” All the crosses remain until today, without any of them feeling the injuries of old age, one of which can even today be seen in the cloister of the monks. For when, in that valley, while he lived, he went to preach and gave a sermon to the people: he fixed a strong ashen staff, which he used, into the ground: and, meanwhile, through God’s virtue, miraculous in magnitude, quickened juice departed from it; it put on a shell; it was said to emit a beauty of foliage and fronds. But he died in the year of the Lord 709: the thirty-fourth from the year when he was made Abbot, and the fifth year from his episcopacy. Two hundred forty years after his death, namely, in the year of the Lord 949, his sacred body was raised from the earth and gathered in a chest with great honor. For Bede narrates, in the fifth book, eighteenth chapter, that Aldhelm, nobly instructed in ecclesiastical things and in the science of the Scriptures, “wrote, at the command of his people’s synod, an egregious book against the error of the Britons, by which they either did not celebrate Pascha at its time, or another majority of ecclesiastics, in chastity and peace, held the contrary: and he led many of them to the Catholic celebration of the Lord’s Pascha by the reading of this book. He also wrote an excellent book on Virginity which, in the example of Sedulus, germinated by work, he composed in both hexameter verses and prose. He also wrote some others, as much as he could, a man most learned in everything, for he was, as I said, brilliant in word and miraculous in erudition of writings, as much liberal as Ecclesiastical.”[9] Thus Bede.
Footnotes: [1] Ine was King of Wessex from 688 to 726; modern scholars reject this familial connection to Aldhelm.
[2] The Old English form can be broken down into Eald (root of modern words old and elder) and helm.
[3] Other accounts of Aldhelm’s life say that his school-teacher was Máeldub (or Meldun), who founded the monastery at Malmesbury, which town was named after him.
[4] The Church of St. John the Baptist in Frome still stands, though he underwent heavy renovations in the 12th-14th centuries, so little of the original church remains. The church in Bradford seems to be St. Laurence’s Church in Bradford on Avon; there is an Anglo-Saxon church there, although its dates are debated. Original sources say it was built by St. Aldhelm around 700, while the current church’s style suggests the 10th or 11th century. Possibly, if this life is correct, St. Aldhelm built the original church, which was later destroyed by the Danes and rebuilt around the year 1000.
[5] The current well called St. Aldhelm’s Well is actually a little ways away from Bradford on Avon, in Doulting, the place of St. Aldhelm’s death; it is the source of the River Sheppey.
[6] A Roman foot is about 11.6 in. or 0.29 m; a palm is about 2.9 in. or 0.07 m. Thus the altar was about 69.6 in (1.74 m) thick, 11.6 in. (0.29 m) long, and 8.7 in. (0.21 m) wide, if the author is using the units the Roman way.
[7] Hædde became Bishop of Winchester in 676 and died around July 7, 705, and he was revered as a saint in the area, was a feast day of July 7. His successor, Daniel, was a friend of Sts. Aldhelm, Bede, and Boniface, and provided information to Bede for his Ecclesiastical History; he studied with Aldhelm under Máeldub and resigned his see in 744.
[8] That is, May 25, 709; he died in the village of Doulting, while making the rounds of his diocese.
[9] St. Bede the Venerable, Ecclesiastical History of the English People V.XVIII (PL 95:260A-261A).
Source: John Allen Giles, ed., Vita Quorundun Anglo-Saxonum: Original Lives of Anglo-Saxons and Others, Who Lived Before the Conquest (London: J. Russell Smith, 1854), 152-156.