Wigbert
St. Wigbert, born in Wessex around 670, was an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk from the monastery of Glastonbury and a missionary and disciple of St. Boniface who traveled with the latter in Frisia and northern and central Germany to convert the local tribes to Christianity. When Boniface had felled Thor's Oak near Fritzlar in northern Hesse in 723, he built a wooden chapel from the oak's wood and in 724 established a Benedictine monastery in Fritzlar. Wigbert became the first abbot and led the monastery to eminence as a center of ecclesiastic and worldly learning. From about 737 he was simultaneously abbot of Ohrdruf where he established a school for missionaries operating in Thuringia. In both monasteries he was the teacher of Lullus und Sturmius, two eminent missionaries and future abbots and bishops. Wigbert died in 747, was canonized, and was initially buried in Fritzlar in the stone basilica he had built to replace the original wooden chapel. Lullus later had most of his body (except for a few sacred relics which remained in Fritzlar) interred in the abbey at Hersfeld, where he is the town's patron saint. The monastery was converted into a canonic college in 1005.
|
|
