Milred (died 774) (also recorded as Mildred and Hildred) was an
Anglo-Saxon prelate who served as
Bishop of Worcester from until his death in 774.
Life
Milred was consecrated between 743 and 745.
He attended the major
council of Clofesho in 747, and is found as a regular witness to charters of the
Mercia
la, Merciorum regnum
, conventional_long_name=Kingdom of Mercia
, common_name=Mercia
, status=Kingdom
, status_text=Independent kingdom (527–879) Client state of Wessex ()
, life_span=527–918
, era= Heptarchy
, event_start=
, date_start=
, ...
n kings
Æthelbald and
Offa. Milred is known to have travelled to Germany, where he met
Boniface
Boniface, OSB ( la, Bonifatius; 675 – 5 June 754) was an English Benedictine monk and leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic parts of the Frankish Empire during the eighth century. He organised significant foundations o ...
and
Lull, in the early 750s. A letter from Milred to Lull written soon after his return, on the subject of Boniface's
martyr
A martyr (, ''mártys'', "witness", or , ''marturia'', stem , ''martyr-'') is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, or refusing to renounce or advocate, a religious belief or other cause as demanded by an externa ...
dom shows that the writer was familiar with the works of
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: th ...
and
Horace.
A work by Milred, a compilation of
epigrams and
epigraphs on Anglo-Saxon churchmen, some of whom are known only from this work, is now lost apart from a single 10th-century copy of one page, held by the library of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...
.
Antiquarian John Leland recorded some other parts of this work, which now survive only in his 16th-century copies.
[Patrick, Sims-Williams, ''Religion and Literature in Western England 600-800'', Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 328-59.]
Milred died in 774,
[ and the event is recorded in the '' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle''.
]
References
Bibliography
* Lapidge, M., "Milred", in Michael Lapidge et al., ''The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England.'' Blackwell, 1999.
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Milred
Bishops of Worcester
774 deaths
8th-century English bishops
Year of birth unknown
8th-century Latin writers
8th-century English writers
Latin letter writers