Saint Angilbert

He was born about 750. ³ Herbert Thurston, in the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, says he seems to have been brought up at Charlemagne's court, where he was the pupil and friend of the English scholar Alcuin. ¹ The New Catholic Encyclopedia places him in the palace school as Alcuin's student, and counts him among the figures of the Carolingian renaissance. ³

He was meant for the Church and must have received minor orders young, Thurston says, but his career was at court. ¹ In 782 he went to Italy with the young King Pepin as primicerius palatii, a post that brought a great deal of secular administration with it. ¹ The New Catholic Encyclopedia makes him Pepin's tutor and head of the court chapel, and says he served Charlemagne's court for more than twenty years. ³

In the academy of men of letters around Charlemagne, Angilbert was known as Homer, and Thurston says the portions of his work that survive show considerable skill in verse. ¹ The New Catholic Encyclopedia is cooler: his poems have no exceptional literary merit, but they give an interesting view of life at Charlemagne's court. ³

More has been attributed to him than can be proved. Thurston notes that he has been claimed as the author of a fragment of an epic on Charlemagne and Pope Leo III, though the authorship is disputed, and that the historian Monod thought him probably responsible for parts of the Annales Laurisenses. ¹ As abbot he wrote two treatises about his monastic work. ³

He was sent to the pope several times. ¹ The New Catholic Encyclopedia counts three embassies to Rome between 792 and 796, and says that in 794 he carried the Libri Carolini to Pope Adrian I. ³ The encyclopedia's article on Charlemagne refers to those books in its account of the controversy over sacred images, and Thurston records that it is "charged against him" that he made Charlemagne's "somewhat heterodox views" his own. ¹ That article says that the king's interference in the matter of iconoclasm was less pleasing to Adrian, and that the Synod of Frankfurt, "wrongly informed, but inspired by Charles", condemned the second Council of Nicaea although it had the sanction of the Holy See. ²

When Leo III was elected at the end of 795 and wrote to tell the king, Charlemagne sent rich presents back by Abbot Angilbert, whom he commissioned to deal with the pope on everything touching his office as Roman Patrician. ² Angilbert was present at Charlemagne's coronation in 800, and in 811 he was one of the witnesses to the emperor's will. ³

The two encyclopedias date his abbacy differently. The New Catholic Encyclopedia says he was made lay abbot of Saint-Riquier, Centula, in 781, and retired to the abbey to live an austere life at some point between 796 and 802. ³ Thurston says he was named abbot of Centula in 790, and that about 800 he was probably still leading "a very worldly life"; whether he was yet a priest, he adds, is doubtful. ¹

With the help of his powerful friends he restored or rebuilt the monastery "in a very sumptuous fashion" and endowed it with a precious library of two hundred volumes. ¹ In the year 800, Thurston writes, he "had the honour of receiving Charlemagne as his guest." ¹ The New Catholic Encyclopedia calls him an able administrator and builder, and says he introduced the laus perennis, the uninterrupted singing of the Hours, for his three hundred monks. ³

The sources agree that he had children by Charlemagne's daughter Bertha. They do not agree about what to call it. ¹³⁴ Thurston writes that "modern historians consider that Angilbert undoubtedly had an intrigue with Charlemagne's unmarried daughter Bertha," and that she bore him two children, one of them the chronicler Nithard. ¹ The relationship has "sometimes" been "regarded as a marriage", he says, and has been disputed by some scholars, "but is now generally admitted." ¹

The New Catholic Encyclopedia names both sons, Nithard and Harnid, and says they were born out of wedlock. ³ The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, says the opposite. It calls Bertha his wife, and says that he left his offices at the palace and in the army and withdrew to the monastery with her consent, and that she too took the veil. ⁴

Thurston adds two pieces of evidence from older writers. Angilbert's biographer in the twelfth century says the abbot did bitter penance before his death for this "marriage". ¹ And Nithard, in the same passage in which he claims Angilbert as his father, says the abbot's body was found incorrupt some years after his burial. ¹

He died on February 18, 814. ¹³ His cult began at Saint-Riquier in the twelfth century, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia. ³ Thurston, writing of how a man with his past came to be venerated, observes that "the popular canonizations of that age were very informal and involved little investigation of past conduct or virtue." ¹ The Church has kept the cult, and the current Martyrology still names him. ⁴

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Angilbert, so none is given here. ¹³⁴ The Martyrology remembers him as the abbot who governed the monastery of Centula well. ⁴

Saint Angilbert's feast day is February 18, the day of his death. ¹³⁴ The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, enters him that day at the monastery of Centula, in the territory of Amiens, as an abbot who left the offices of the palace and the army for monastic life and ruled the community happily. ⁴

His life does not divide neatly into a worldly half and a holy one. He was a lay abbot while he was still a courtier, an envoy while he was rebuilding a monastery, and the father of Charlemagne's grandsons. ¹³ The sources leave the overlap where it was.

What they do say is that the end was different. He retired to his abbey to live austerely, set his monks to praise God without a break, and according to his biographer did bitter penance before he died. ¹³

The Church's own record, the Martyrology, is gentler with him than the historians are. ¹⁴ Neither verdict has to be chosen to see a man who came late, and seriously, to the life he had been nominally leading for years.