Wilfrid - Legacy

Legacy

Wilfrid's feast day is 12 October or 24 April. Both dates were celebrated in early medieval England, but the April date appears first in the liturgical calendars. The April date is usually celebrated as his translation date, or the date when his relics were translated to a new shrine. Immediately after his death his body was venerated as a cult object, and miracles were alleged to have happened at the spot where the water used to wash his body was discarded. A cult grew up at Ripon after his death and remained active until 948, when King Eadred destroyed the church at Ripon; after the destruction, Wilfrid's relics were taken by Archbishop Oda of Canterbury, and held in Canterbury Cathedral. This account appears in a foreword written by Oda for Frithegod's later poem on Wilfrid's life. However, according to Byrhtferth's Vita Sancti Oswaldi, or Life of Saint Oswald, Oda's nephew, Oswald, Archbishop of York, preserved the relics at Ripon and restored the community there to care for them. The two differing accounts are not easily reconciled, but it is possible that Oswald collected secondary relics that had been overlooked by his uncle and installed those at Ripon. The relics that were held at Canterbury were originally placed in the High Altar in 948, but after the fire at Canterbury Cathedral in 1067, Wilfrid's relics were placed in their own shrine.

After the Norman Conquest of England, devotion continued to be paid to Wilfrid, with 48 churches dedicated to him and relics distributed between 11 sites. During the 19th century, the feast of Wilfrid was celebrated on the Sunday following Lammas in the town of Ripon with a parade and horse racing, a tradition which continued until at least 1908. He is venerated in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion. He is usually depiction either as a bishop preaching and baptizing or else as a robed bishop holding an episcopal staff.

Wilfrid was one of the first bishops to bring relics of saints back from Rome. The papacy was trying to prevent the removal of actual body parts from Rome, restricting collectors to things that had come in contact with the bodily remains such as dust and cloth. Wilfrid was known as an advocate of Benedictine monasticism, and regarded it as a tool in his efforts to "root out the poisonous weeds planted by the Scots". He built at Ripon and Hexham, and lived a majestic lifestyle. As a result of his various exiles, he founded monastic communities that were widely scattered over the British Isles, over which he kept control until his death. These monastic foundations, especially Hexham, contributed to the blending of the Gaelic and Roman strains of Christianity in Northumbria, which inspired a great surge of learning and missionary activity; Bede and Alcuin were among the scholars who emerged from Northumbrian monasteries influenced by Wilfrid. Missionaries inspired by his example went from Northumbria to the continent, where they converted pagans in Germany and elsewhere.

One commentator has said that Wilfrid "came into conflict with almost every prominent secular and ecclesiastical figure of the age". Hindley, a historian of the Anglo-Saxons, states that "Wilfrid would not win his sainthood through the Christian virtue of humility". The historian Barbara Yorke said of him that "Wilfrid's character was such that he seems to have been able to attract and infuriate in equal measure". His contemporary, Bede, although a partisan of the Roman dating of Easter, was a monk and always treats Wilfrid a little uneasily, showing some concern about how Wilfrid conducted himself as a clergyman and as a bishop. The historian Eric John feels that it was Wilfrid's devotion to monasticism that led him to believe that the only way for the Church to be improved was through monasticism. John traces Wilfrid's many appeals to Rome to his motivation to hold together his monastic empire, rather than to self-interest. John also challenges the belief that Wilfrid was fond of pomp, pointing out that the comparison between the Irish missionaries who walked and Wilfrid who rode ignores the reality that the quickest method of travel in the Middle Ages was on horseback.

The historian Peter Hunter Blair summarises Wilfrid's life as follows: "Wilfrid left a distinctive mark on the character of the English church in the seventh century. He was not a humble man, nor, so far as we can see, was he a man greatly interested in learning, and perhaps he would have been more at home as a member of the Gallo-Roman episcopate where the wealth which gave him enemies in England would have passed unnoticed and where his interference in matters of state would have been less likely to take him to prison." R. W. Southern, another modern historian, says that Wilfrid was "the greatest papal enthusiast of the century". James Campbell, a historian specialising in the Anglo-Saxon period, said of him "He was certainly one of the greatest ecclesiastics of his day. Ascetic, deemed a saint by some, the founder of several monasteries according to the rule of St Benedict, he established Christianity in Sussex and attempted to do so in Frisia. At the same time, his life and conduct were in some respects like those of a great Anglo-Saxon nobleman."