Saint Aldhelm of the Wessex town of Frome
Abstract
The Anglo-Saxon abbot, Saint Aldhelm (c 639-709), has been described as the first great English scholar. Besides being a popular teacher and song writer, he was a Latin poet, bishop and counsellor who built churches and monasteries. Biography of Saint Aldhelm, founder of the Wessex town of Frome
Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
- Education of St Aldhelm
- Malmesbury Abbey
- Founder of Frome and Bishop of Sherborne
- Educator and Popular Song Writer
- Latin scholar and Man of Letters
- Contemporaries
Education of St Aldhelm
The Anglo-Saxon abbot, Saint Aldhelm (c 639-709), has been described as the first great English scholar. Besides being a popular teacher and song writer, he was a Latin poet, bishop and counsellor who built churches and monasteries.
Aldhelm was related to the king of the West Saxons (from which derives the name Wessex, formerly the name of the kingdom of the West Saxons and still the popular name of the region covered by the English counties of Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire). His early education was under the Irish monk, Maeldubh, at Malmesbury Abbey which was founded in the 7th century. William of Malmesbury was also a monk of the abbey.
Malmesbury Abbey
Malmesbury is a market town not far from Frome, just over the county border in Wiltshire, England, on the river Avon, a pretty river upon which also stands Bath and Bradford on Avon. Its charter of 924 granted by Edward the Elder is one of the oldest in England. The notable market cross dates from around 1490. The philosopher, Thomas Hobbes was born at nearby Westport. Malmesbury Abbey survives as the parish church of Malmesbury and Athelstan was buried there. Its elaborate but decayed 12th-century south porch includes some of the finest pieces of Romanesque sculpture in Britain.
Founder of Frome and Bishop of Sherborne
From Malmesbury, Aldhelm went to the renowned school at Canterbury in Kent where he trained as a Benedictine monk under Saint Adrian, an advisor of the archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore. He returned to Malmesbury to become the head of the school he had not long left as a pupil and then became abbot of the monastery from about 675.
In about 685 AD Aldhelm, with a group of monks, settled on a clearing by the edge of the great forest of Selwood, by a handy ford over the river Frome and close to the ancient tracks across the hill tops, as tha place to found the monastery which was to become the town of Frome. The church was dedicated to John the Baptist, an unusually common dedication in this area, connected with Somerset’s reputation as a wet county, but really to accommodate into Christianity a local Pagan custom of venerating a water deity.
Many Celtic deities were associated with water and the local one was Sul, venerated nowhere else in the whole Roman empire. Bath was called by the Romans, Aquae Sulis, the Waters of Sul. To judge by the gorgon-like head in the baths at Bath, a water god also had a presence here, depicted like the god, Oceanus, though the Romans associated Sul with Minerva (the Greek Pallas Athene) who had a Gorgon head on her breastplate.
His elevation to bishop came when the diocese of Wessex was divided in 705 AD into eastern and western halves. Aldhelm was given the western half and he set up his see at Sherborne, just over the county border into Dorset, but he remained abbot of Malmesbury. Though he only lived four more years he had time to build several churches. His acknowledged wisdom led to his being appointed as a counsellor to the king of Wessex, Ine.
In the Domesday Book (1086 AD) was a mention of a market at Frome, so the town was already flourishing. In later years it was to prosper more as a woollen town before it yielded to its genteel neighbour, Bath. After the monasteries were dissoved in 1539 AD, however, the recipient of the confiscated church lands was the Thynne family, the Lords Bath, the latest of whom is the eccentricly hippy Alexander Thynne who runs the nearby country house of Longleat with its safari and theme parks.
Educator and Popular Song Writer
Aldhelm was a scholarly and devout man, dedicated to improving the education of the Saxon peasantry. It seems his zeal for setting up monasteries was to train monks as teachers of the people. The Anglo-Saxon church at nearby Bradford on Avon is believed to have been built in part by Aldhelm’s monks. Rather like Baron Cuvier a thousand years later, Aldhelm realised that the attention span of the peasants was short and they had to be entertained to be educated. He did not hesitate to tell jokes and use tomfoolery to make his points. He was also a great song writer. He wrote many songs, not in Latin but in the peasants’ Anglo-Saxon language, to entertain and educate them. He appreciated that a song was much more memorable to an illiterate serf than a few dry words from a pulpit, but though he wrote hymns as well as popular songs, and was hailed by the nobility for all this, none of them have survived.
Latin scholar and Man of Letters
As well as songs in English, as a scholar he wrote Latin poems and even a treatise on Latin prosody. Another treatise, on virginity, he dedicated to the nuns of Barking and later put it too into poetic form as hexameters. Famous also is his 100 riddles written for King Aldfrith. The first books specifically intended for the young were Latin collections of the 7th century and among the best-known works of this type, were those written by Aldhelm. They were used as lesson books in the monastery schools.
He was also a man of letters, being a great lover of the evolving English language. At that time, in the British Isles the Celtic church rivalled Rome but Aldhelm sided with Rome. He taught the Roman observance of Easter rather than the Celtic one. To this end he wrote a letter to king Geraint, the Celtic king of Cornwall and Devon, called in those days Dumnonia after the Celtic tribe which lived there. This letter is one of his few works to survive.
Contemporaries
St Hilda, who died in 680 AD, founded Whitby Abbey set high on the cliftop overlooking Whitby harbour in North Yorkshire. The east end of the abbey is largely intact, its towering mass a magnificent reminder of the church’s power. Whitby Abbey has a shrine to St Hilda, an example of how the church made saints as minor gods often to substitute for some local Pagan deity.
St Hilda brought nuns and monks including the poet Caedmon to this part of Yorkshire in 657 AD. The synod of 664 was held there and the ancient Celtic church was obliged to yield to the greater power and prestige of Rome. The abbey was destroyed by Vikings in 867 AD but rebuilt by the Norman Reinfrid in 1070 AD. Further building was necessary in 1220 AD from the needs of all the pilgrims arriving there. The monastry was dissolved in 1538.
Its elevated and dramatic setting has always attracted painters and writers and it was used in the novel Dracula as the bleak spot where the vampire touched down on English soil.
