Saint Adulf (also Adolph, Adolf, Athwulf, Æthelwulf or Æðelwulf) (died ) was an
Anglo-Saxon
The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...
saint.
Life
Adulf is said to have been the brother of
Botolph, but virtually nothing is known about his life. Church historian
Frederick George Holweck
Frederick George Holweck (born Friedrich Georg Holweck; December 29, 1856 – February 15, 1927) was a German-Americans, German-American Catholic Church, Catholic parish priest and scholar, hagiographer and church historian. Monsignor Holweck co ...
says he was not Botolph's brother.
The story, which originated with a monk of Thorney,
Folcard's account of Botolph's life, that Adulf was at one-time bishop of
Maastricht
Maastricht ( , , ; ; ; ) is a city and a Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the southeastern Netherlands. It is the capital city, capital and largest city of the province of Limburg (Netherlands), Limburg. Maastricht is loca ...
, is now generally thought to rest on a confusion of names and to have no substance. However, it does explain the reason today's saint is often honoured as a bishop.
The monastery at
Iken
Iken is a small village and civil parish in the Suffolk sandlands, sandlands of the England, English county of Suffolk, an area formerly of heathland and sheep pasture. It is near the estuary of the River Alde on the North Sea coast and is loca ...
, in the
Kingdom of East Anglia
The Kingdom of the East Angles (; ), informally known as the Kingdom of East Anglia, was a small independent Monarchy, kingdom of the Angles (tribe), Angles during the History of Anglo-Saxon England, Anglo-Saxon period comprising what are now t ...
, was destroyed in
Viking
Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden),
who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9â ...
raids. It is said that when by the orders of
Æthelwold of Winchester
Æthelwold of Winchester (also Aethelwold and Ethelwold, 904/9 – 984) was Bishop of Winchester from 963 to 984 and one of the leaders of the tenth-century monastic reform movement in Anglo-Saxon England.
Monastic life had declined to a l ...
, Botolph's body was disinterred for
translation
Translation is the communication of the semantics, meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The English la ...
to the new
abbey of Thorney, Adulf's body was buried with it, and as it proved impossible to disentangle the bones, the remains of both saints were taken to
Thorney, where the relics of Adulf remained.
"Saint Adulf", Newman Connection
/ref> The feast day of both saints is 17 June.
References and notes
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Adulf
Year of birth unknown
680s deaths
East Anglian saints
7th-century Christian saints