In AD 690 Willibrord landed with eleven monks at the mouth of the Rhine river. They preached as they travelled in the area. Willibrord built small churches at Utrecht (Netherlands) and along the coast of the North Sea. His coming signaled a new beginning for Dutch church history. He died on November 6, 739, at Echternach (in present-day Luxembourg), 1250 years ago. The significance of this preacher from across the sea reaches much farther than only the Low Countries near the sea.

An Anglo-Saxon Monk⤒🔗

Willibrord was born in AD 658 in Anglo-Saxon Northumberland. His father, Wilgis, had built an abbey for prayer and meditation at the mouth of the Humber, near the North Sea. He lived there as a hermit. Also his son Willibrord would be brought up in a spirit of monastic piety. He was only a small child when he was entrusted to the Abbey of Ripon, near York. Its leader was Wilfrid, a clergyman who favoured a Romanized form of worship. From a young age Willibrord concentrated himself on Rome.

From the English Abbey of Ripon, the twenty-year-old monk moved to an Irish abbey, Rathmelsigi, where a certain Egbert was in charge. This Egbert educated the monks to become missionaries. Willibrord spent twelve years in Egbert’s community. Among the monks there was some sort of asceticism: as a group of twelve, just like the apostles, they would be sent out to preach and evangelize. It seemed to Willibrord to be more meritorious to become a missionary among the gentiles on the other side of the North Sea than to remain in the Irish abbey. With eleven others he landed in the year 690 in the land of the Frisians (current Netherlands).

The arrival of Willibrord was the beginning of an important English influence on the European continent. In the wake of the monk from York many others came over to the mainland. Only in the course of the 9^th century did the stream of missionaries come to an end. The crossing by Willibrord marked the beginning of an important development of Anglo-Saxon influences in the institutions of the Western Middle Ages. In this way the Anglo-Saxon Beda and Alcuin paved the way for the Carolingian Renaissance. They helped to organize education in the Middle Ages.

Archbishop of Frisia←⤒🔗

When Willibrord arrived at the mouth of the Rhine river, the southern part of the region ruled by the Frisian king Radbod was again under the influence of the Franks. Owing to a defeat to the Franks, the Frisians had a strong pagan aversion against Christianity, the religion of the Franks. This made for a difficult starting position for Willibrord. It was not to be expected that he would have much success in the northern part of Frisia. In the region that had recently been conquered by the Franks, an unhindered preaching appeared more promising. Under the protection of the Frankish leader Pepin Willibrord, accompanied by his eleven, the missionary work in the Frankish part of Frisia could start.

Before the actual work started, Willibrord first travelled to the bishop at Rome. Seeking papal support was a matter of principle to Willibrord. Unity with Rome marked his missionary work. Having received papal authority, blessings, and relics from the south to be distributed to the churches to be founded in the north, Willibrord returned across the Alps to southern Frisia. The missionary work could begin and was soon successful. Between July 692 and August 693, the twelve missionaries could elect someone from their midst as bishop over the new missionary area. A few years later Pepin himself took charge of the ecclesiastical organization. He determined that Willibrord would be the leader of the newly conquered area of the Frisians and sent him to Rome in 695 in order to be anointed as archbishop of the Frisian church. The Frisian church needed to be set up by Willibrord as a unique, new province of the church. In the winter of 695 Willibrord returned under his ordained name of Clemens. Pepin gave him Wiltaburg, present-day Utrecht, as the seat of his bishopric. In doing so, the old castellum of Trajectum became since 695 a cathedral seat, the centre of the new church province of Frisia.

In the following years, the Christianizing of the Frankish part of Frisia was largely achieved. Willibrord built churches and monasteries – for example, the Salvator Church in Utrecht. In this he received ample support from Pepin.

Willibrord also laboured among the Frisians who were outside of the Frankish sphere of influence. However, the results were rather poor. The leader, Radbod, treated the bishop of the mighty Frankish southern neighbour politically correct. However, he did let himself be moved to accept the Christian faith. This inaccessibility of the Frisian leader was the reason that Willibrord could not accomplish much under the subjects of Radbod.

Missionary among the Danes and the Free Frisians←⤒🔗

Willibrord then travelled further to the northeast. He became the first preacher of the Christian faith among the Danes. But here as well it did not result in a true acceptance of the Christian message. However, the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord stuck to his intentions to convert the Danes. On his travels back to southern Frisia he took along thirty Danish boys. For them, Utrecht became a missionary seminary. Willibrord baptized them and gave them instructions. They were sent out from the Frankish area as missionaries to their own native country, Denmark, to preach the gospel. From his base in Utrecht, the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord set up a missionary line to the Scandinavian countries.

On his return voyage from Denmark a storm drove his ship to the area of the independent Frisians. The party landed on the island of Helgoland, territory regarded as sacred by the Frisians. Here too Willibrord preached the gospel. He baptized three persons in a well regarded by the pagans as a holy place. The Frisians interpreted this act as a crime against the sanctity of their island and assaulted the missionary party. Willibrord managed to escape being killed, only because the lot that was cast three times did not affect him, but a fellow traveller. This fellow traveller was indeed killed. Willibrord himself received the urgent request to go back to his Frankish territory.

Organizer of the New Missionary Church←⤒🔗

After this Willibrord again picked up his activities in the Frankish part of Friesland. The church’s position in the boundary zone did not appear at all consolidated to him. Therefore, he started to look for an ecclesiastic anchor point in an area where Frankish authority was well recognized, and not as volatile as in the boundary regions of southern Frisia. In 690, at his arrival on the continent, Willibrord had already received such an anchor point from Pepin. It was the small church founded by Amandus in the fortress of Antwerp. Already in the time before Willibrord, this Amandus had undertaken missionary activities beyond Antwerp and Ghent. He was called the missionary of Flanders. That small church in the fortress of Antwerp was situated just outside the boundaries with Frisia. It remained a vulnerable position whenever the Frisians moved south ever so slightly. In addition to the anchor point of Antwerp, Willibrord had also received another anchor point shortly after his ordination, Echternach, which was more southeastern. Pepin provided the means to start an abbey in this place. This anchor point for the ecclesiastical consolidation of the bishopric of Trier dates from 706. Shortly before Pepin died in 714, he granted Willibrord yet a second Frankish monastery, Susteren. This monastery was in the diocese of Maastricht, at a reasonable distance from the boundary with the Frisians.

With Utrecht as the centre of the Frankish portion of Frisia, and with these anchor locations of Antwerp, Echternach, and Susteren, the Frisian church was established. Utrecht, the cathedral seat of the new church province of Frisia, was at the centre of a missionary area. Willibrord, as archbishop, was at the head of the missionary church, the young church of the Frisians. The southern part had become more or less Christianized although it had not been consolidated altogether. The northern, independent part under Radbod was still entirely pagan. Yet Willibrord succeeded in instructing an indigenous clergy in Frisia, Frisians who would accomplish to do missionary work among their people. And soon Liudger, a real Frisian, would become the first bishop of Munster.

Working to Restore the Church←⤒🔗

After Pepin’s death the relations in the boundary areas began to change. In a power struggle for Pepin’s dynasty, Radbod got involved. He defeated the new Frankish leader, Martel. This conquest meant a disaster for the church in what had been the Frankish portion of Frisia. It fell entirely to the Frisian Radbod. The Frankish rule and the newly established Christian churches both broke apart. Everywhere the priests were being chased away, churches were destroyed, and the pagan forms of worship were restored. The entire missionary work of the by-then fifty-six-year-old Willibrord appeared to be completely destroyed as a result of the political power struggle. He himself returned and withdrew to Echternach.

When a few years later southern Frisia came back under Frankish rule, Willibrord returned to Utrecht. From 719 until 739 a second period of building up the churches followed. With the support of Charles Martel, Willibrord restored the Christianizing of southern Frisia that was broken off by the war. Not much is known about this period of rebuilding the church. It did not result in expansion of the archdiocese of Utrecht. The free Frisians north of Utrecht remained pagan. Only among the Frisians west and south of the South Sea (present-day Ijsselmeer) had his preaching taken root. Thus, it was successful only where Frankish authority provided protection for him. The success of Willbrord’s missionary work depended strongly on the support of secular authorities. The aged Willibrord had the assistant Boniface for three years. But nothing came of the wish to establish this Boniface for a long time in Frisia and to ordain him there as Willibrord’s successor. Willibrord died at the old age of eighty-one years old, on November 6, 739. He died in the Abbey of Esternach. This place of refuge, south of the boundary with Frisia, became the last resting place of a man who landed in 690 at the mouth of the Rhine river. His date of death marks the end of a period of forty-nine years of Anglo-Saxon missionary work on the European continent.

Boniface, Willibrord’s assistant in Frisia, returned many years later for a second time to Frisia. There he experienced a martyr’s death. But Willibrord had opened the road to Dokkum. In the mission field, Willibrord had made the start. He had shown Boniface the way to Frisia. Willibrord has been the first in a long array of Anglo-Saxons to come to the shores of the continent–Boniface, Lull of Mainz, Burchard, the first bishop of Würzburg, Willibald the first bishop of Eichstätt, his brother, the abbot Wynnebald of Heidenheim, yet another Willebald, Lebuïnus, the founder of Deventer, missionary among the Saxons, and Willehad, just like Willibrord from Northumberland, the first bishop of Bremen, the Englishman Beornrad, abbot of Echternach and archbishop of Sens in France, related to Willibrord; and Alcuin, who exported the tradition of Northumberland to the court of Charlemagne. Frigidus, a student of Alcuin, became abbot of St. Martin in Tours, and for a period of ten years even the head of the chancellery of Louis the Pious. Missionaries of the first hour had become scholars at court schools. But yet at the beginning of this stream from England stood Willibrord. It all started with the boat with which Willibrord and his eleven companions crossed the North Sea and established a foothold at the mouth of the Rhine river.

What motivated these preachers to come from across the sea? It is possible to point to the ascetic motif that became very important in their view (the so-called consu-etudo pregrinandi, an ascetic expression of leaving the mother country to sojourn elsewhere). We can also stress the close connection that they felt with Rome. Or we can point to their strong leaning on the government. However, this is central: they came to the continent to preach Christ there. A contemporary, Bede, clearly articulated this aspect: that they had come to Frisia in order to proclaim Christ. They familiarized the people with the Word of Truth. They baptized them. They proclaimed to them the washing away of their sins. They pointed to the source that made it all possible: the source of the Saviour. In grateful remembrance we hold on to this essential fact. God gave us, from the Anglo-Saxon world of 1250 years ago, in Willibrord’s arrival, the gospel of the Redeemer.

This article was translated by Wim Kanis