Saint Aldhelm

His name is written in at least half a dozen ways, Ealdhelm, Ældhelm, Adelelmus, Althelmus and Adelme among them. ¹ Herbert Thurston, who wrote the Catholic Encyclopedia's article in 1907, puts his birth about 639 and says he was a kinsman of Ine, King of Wessex. ¹

He seems to have had his first schooling at Malmesbury in Wiltshire, under an Irish Christian teacher named Maildubh. ¹ Thurston notes a curiosity: early documents call the place both Maildulfsburgh and Ealdhelmsbyrig, so that it is disputed whether the modern name remembers the teacher, the pupil, or, by a blending of the two, both. ¹

Aldhelm himself credited his progress in letters to Adrian, the abbot from Roman Africa who had come to England with Archbishop Theodore and been made Abbot of Saint Augustine's at Canterbury. ¹ Thurston adds a caution of his own. Theodore reached England only in 671, so Aldhelm must by then have been thirty or forty years old. ¹

Whatever his age, the school left its mark. Thurston thinks his partiality for Greek and for extravagant words can be traced, with some probability, to Adrian's influence. ¹ He is blunt about the result: Aldhelm's vocabulary is "very extravagant, and his style artificial and involved". ¹ Bede judged otherwise, and says "he had a clean style". ²

Back at Malmesbury, probably already a monk, he seems to have succeeded Maildubh as head of both the school and the monastery. ¹ Thurston warns that the exact dates his biographers give cannot be trusted, since they depend on charters of very doubtful authenticity. ¹

As abbot, Thurston says, he lived most austerely, and "it is particularly recorded of him that he was wont to recite the entire Psalter standing up to his neck in ice-cold water." ¹ Under him the abbey prospered, other monasteries were founded from it, and a small church of Saint Lawrence that he built at Bradford-on-Avon was still standing when Thurston wrote. ¹

He went to Rome during the pontificate of Pope Sergius, between 687 and 701, and is said to have brought back a privilege exempting his monastery. ¹ Thurston adds that the document which passed for that bull in the twelfth century is undoubtedly spurious. ¹

The Britons of Devon and Cornwall still kept Easter on their own reckoning. ¹² At the request of a West Saxon synod Aldhelm wrote to them, and Bede, who calls the letter "a notable book against the error of the Britons", says that by reading it many of those subject to the West Saxons were persuaded to adopt the Catholic date. ¹² Thurston says that many of them are said to have been brought back to unity by it. ¹

In 705 Hedda, Bishop of the West Saxons, died, and his diocese was divided in two. ¹² One part went to Daniel; the western part went to Aldhelm, who became, reluctantly, Thurston says, the first Bishop of Sherborne. ¹² The Roman Martyrology remembers him in just those terms: renowned for his learning and writings, formerly abbot of Malmesbury, then ordained the first bishop of Sherborne among the West Saxons. ³

His episcopate was short. Bede says he "most worthily presided four years". ² Some of the stonework of a church he built at Sherborne survives, and Bede mentions that Pechthelm, later a bishop himself, had long been his deacon or his monk. ¹²

He died at Doulting in Somerset in 709. ¹ His body was carried fifty miles to Malmesbury, and at every place where it rested for the night a cross was set up. ¹ Many miracles, Thurston says, were attributed to him both before and after his death, and in 857 King Ethelwulf gave a magnificent silver shrine for him at Malmesbury. ¹ Bede records that Forthere succeeded him. ²

His chief prose work is a treatise in praise of virginity, De laude virginitatis, dedicated to the abbess and nuns of Barking, a community that seems to have included some of his own relatives. ¹ Bede says that "in imitation of Sedulius, he composed double, that is, in hexameter verse and prose", and Thurston confirms that the verse version survives. ¹² Thurston adds a correction that had still not reached the printed editions in his day: two lines that refer to the Virgin Mary had been misread as a dedication to "a certain Abbess Maxima". ¹

A long letter to Acircius, who is Ealdfrith, King of Northumbria, is a treatise on the laws of Latin meter, and to illustrate them Aldhelm included a large collection of verse riddles. ¹ He also wrote poetry in his own English tongue, of which nothing survives. ¹

Thurston reads the poems for what they show of the faith of England at the end of the seventh century: an earnest devotion to the Mother of God, veneration for the saints and above all for Saint Peter, "the key-bearer", the importance given to the Mass and to prayer for the dead, and a high esteem for the monastic life. ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Aldhelm, so none is given here. ¹²³

Saint Aldhelm's feast is May 25. ¹ The current Roman Martyrology enters him on that day, and so does the 1897 English edition, which reads simply: "In England, of St. Aldhelm, bishop of Sherburn." ³⁴

If Thurston's arithmetic is right, he went back to school at thirty or forty, to learn from a man who had come from Roman Africa by way of Monte Cassino. ¹ Whatever else his life shows, it shows that he did not think he had finished learning.

He wrote, at the end of the seventh century, with obvious devotion to Mary, to Peter and to the dead, and Thurston read the poems as a window on the prayer of the English Church in his time. ¹ It is the prayer of a young church, and much of it is still ours.

Two of his judges disagreed about how he wrote. Bede found him clear; Thurston, twelve hundred years on, found him overwrought. ¹² Both agreed that he was learned, and that the learning was for the Church: a book to bring the Britons to the common Easter, and a book for the nuns of Barking. ¹²

He accepted Sherborne reluctantly, and held it four years. ¹² Most of his life was spent where he started, at Malmesbury. ¹