St. Wigbert, Abbot and Confessor


HE was an Englishman of noble birth, who, despising the world in his youth, embraced a monastic state. St. Boniface invited him to join in the labours of the conversion of the Germans, and made him abbot of two monasteries which he built, that of Fritzlar, three miles from Cassel, and afterwards also of Ortdorf, in the same province of Hesse. When called out to hear any one’s confession he spoke to no one in his road, and made haste back to his monastery. Broken by sickness he resigned the government of his monasteries to St. Boniface, the better to prepare himself for his last passage. No state of his last sickness could make him mitigate the severity of his monastic abstinence and fasts, though he condemned not such indulgence in others. He died about the year 747, before St. Boniface, and was famous for miracles. His body was soon after translated to the monastery of Herfeld, and his shrine there adorned by St. Lullus with gold and silver. He is named on the 13th of August in the Martyrology of Rabanus Maurus; in that of Usuard, and in the Roman. See his life written by Lupus, then a priest under Rabanus Maurus at Mentz, afterwards abbot of Ferrieres, three leagues from Montargis, in Gatinois, in the diocess of Sens, published by Baluze, inter op. Servati Lupi Ferrar. p. 292. Mabillon, act. Ben. sæc. 3, p. 671, and Solier the Bollandist, ad 13 Aug. p. 132.	1