Ecumenical Commemoration
Archbishop of Mainz, Apostle to the Germans, & Martyr
June 5 · d. 754
also known as Wynfrith, Winfrid
Boniface (born Wynfrith in Wessex, c. 675; died 754) was an English Benedictine monk who became the great missionary to the Germanic peoples east of the Rhine and Archbishop of Mainz. The church remembers him as the Apostle to the Germans, the feller of the pagan oak at Geismar, and a martyr who fell at Dokkum forbidding his companions to fight. He wrote of the church as a ship that must not be abandoned, but steered.
Boniface was born Wynfrith in the kingdom of Wessex, near Exeter, in what is today Devon in southwest England. He was a clever boy, and he loved books. He became a monk at Nursling in Hampshire and might have stayed there all his life, teaching and praying among brothers who loved him. He was good enough that they wanted to make him their abbot.
He said no. He had heard of the peoples across the sea who did not know Christ, and he meant to go to them.
His first crossing failed. He sailed to Frisia, the marshy country at the mouth of the Rhine, and found war and a closed door, and he came home. A lesser man would have called that an answer. Wynfrith called it a delay.
He went to Rome instead. There the Pope, Gregory the Second, blessed him, gave him a new name, and sent him out. From that day Wynfrith was Boniface, and the mission field was the whole of pagan Germany.
He went to Hesse and Thuringia, in the forests of what is now central Germany. He preached, he baptized, he built. But the people still feared the old gods, and at Geismar there stood a great oak sacred to Thor the thunderer, the god the Romans called Jupiter. To touch it was death. The pagans believed their god would strike down anyone who dared.
Boniface took an axe to it.
A great crowd gathered, cursing him under their breath, waiting for the thunder god to kill the foreigner. He cut the first notch. And then, as the church has always told it, a mighty wind came down from above and the huge tree groaned and split and crashed to the ground, shattered into four. The thunder god had not lifted a hand to save his own oak. From its timber Boniface built a chapel, and he gave it to Saint Peter. The crowd that had come to watch him die stayed to be baptized.
He labored for forty years. He founded the great abbey of Fulda. He ordered the churches of the Franks and set bishops over the German sees. The Pope made him an archbishop, and at last Archbishop of Mainz on the Rhine. He grew old in the work.
He could have rested. He was past seventy. Instead he went back to Frisia, to the one mission that had failed him at the start. On the morning of the fifth of June, in the year 754, he was waiting near Dokkum to confirm a company of new Christians when an armed band of pagans fell on the camp. His companions reached for their weapons.
Boniface stopped them. Lay down your arms, he told them, for Scripture teaches us not to render evil for evil, but to overcome evil with good. They obeyed. The old archbishop and his companions were cut down where they stood. When his people came for the bodies they found, lying in the blood, the book he had carried all his life.
The men who killed him scattered; the faith he had planted did not. They carried him home to Fulda, and the grave they made for him there has been a place of prayer ever since. He had given his body to the Lord who promised that a grain of wheat which falls into the earth and dies does not remain alone, but bears much fruit, and Germany was his harvest.
Boniface is among the best-documented figures of the early eighth century, because much of what we know comes from his own hand. Roughly 150 letters survive in the Bonifatian correspondence, exchanged with popes, kings, abbesses, and his English friends across four decades; they are translated by Ephraim Emerton in *The Letters of Saint Boniface*The Letters of Saint Boniface — Ephraim Emerton, The Letters of St. Boniface (Columbia, Records of Western Civilization), with an introduction by Thomas F. X. Noble (Columbia, 1940) and a selection by Edward Kylie. The earliest Life was written by Willibald, an Anglo-Saxon priest who came to Mainz after the saint's death, around 765, within living memory of men who had known Boniface; it is translated by George W. Robinson (1916) and by C. H. Talbot (1954). The letters give us his mind and his struggles in his own words; Willibald gives us the shape of the life and the two scenes the church has remembered above all others, the oak and the martyrdom.
He was born about 675 in Wessex and took the name Wynfrith. Willibald places his early schooling in a monastery near Exeter; the tradition that fixes his birthplace specifically at Crediton is late, first attested in John Grandisson's fourteenth-century Legenda Sanctorum, and should be held more loosely than the Devon-and-Wessex frame. He was professed and ordained at Nursling in Hampshire. A first mission to Frisia in 716 came to nothing amid the war between Charles Martel and the Frisian king Radbod. In 718 he went to Rome, where Gregory II commissioned him for Germania and gave him the name Boniface; he was consecrated bishop in 722. Gregory III sent him the pallium as archbishop in 732. With Frankish protection he organized the German church, founded or reformed numerous sees, and in 744 established the abbey of Fulda through his disciple Sturm. He was given Mainz as his metropolitan see about 747. In old age he returned to the Frisian mission and was killed near Dokkum on 5 June 754, with a large company of companions; the figure of fifty-two is traditional.
The felling of the oak at Geismar is reported by Willibald, and the sudden wind that brought the tree down is told in his account as a divine sign. Historians note that the toppling of a pagan sacred tree by a missionary is a recurring motif in early medieval hagiography, and that Willibald's framing is shaped by the conventions of the genre; this is reported as a feature of the sources, not as a verdict against the event, which is geographically and historically plausible and stands close to Boniface's own documented campaign against German paganism. The detail that has fixed itself most firmly in art, that Boniface held a book over his head to ward off the death blow, is not in Willibald. It first appears in a tenth-century Utrecht , which says he raised a gospel-book against the swords; the modern scholarly literature treats this protection motif as a later accretion. What is early and secure is that a blood-stained codex was preserved at Fulda among his relics: the Ragyndrudis Codex, a collection of patristic texts including Ambrose's , on the goodness of death.
Boniface is commemorated on 5 June, the day of his martyrdom, across the Western calendars and in the Anglican kalendar that claims him as one of England's own. His body was carried first to Utrecht, then to Mainz, and at last, by his own wish, to the abbey of Fulda, which became the center of his cult and remains the seat of his shrine. Among its treasures is the relic that carries his death most vividly: the Ragyndrudis Codex, the book found beside his body, its leaves marked by deep cuts that pious tradition reads as the wounds of the swords that killed him.
He is the patron of Germany, and the diocese of Fulda keeps him as its founder. By a happy custom he is also patron of brewers and tailors. In England his native Devon honors him, and Crediton, the town that tradition names as his birthplace, bears his name in its parish church.
In Christian art he is known by the instruments of his story. He carries an axe, or stands beside the felled oak, for Geismar; he holds a book pierced through by a sword, for the codex and the martyrdom together. The chapel he raised at Geismar from the timber of the thunder god's oak he dedicated to Saint Peter, and the church has loved that detail as a parable in wood: the wood of idolatry remade into the house of God.
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The Letters of Saint Boniface(Latin, c. 716-754)
The standard English translation of the roughly 150-letter Bonifatian correspondence, the saint in his own words; the in-print Columbia paperback carries Noble's introduction.
Other translations: Edward Kylie, The English Correspondence of Saint Boniface (public domain, elfinspell)
Public domain: Emerton 1940 translation (Internet Archive), Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook (selected letters)
Vita Bonifatii (The Life of Saint Boniface)(Latin, c. 765)
The earliest Life, written at Mainz within a decade of the martyrdom; Talbot's is the most widely cited modern translation, Robinson's 1916 the public-domain one.
Public domain: George W. Robinson translation, 1916 (Internet Archive), Talbot translation excerpt (Fordham)
Boniface of Devon: Apostle of Germany(English, 1980)
A believing, readable life by John Cyril Sladden, written from within the tradition with affection for its Devon-born subject; out of print, best found through a library.
Public domain: WorldCat library finder
Primary sources. Boniface's own letters are the first place to go, and they read with a directness that closes the distance of thirteen centuries. The standard English translation is Ephraim Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface (Columbia University Press, 1940), reissued in the Records of Western Civilization series with a new introduction by Thomas F. X. Noble. An older public-domain selection by Edward Kylie, The English Correspondence of Saint Boniface, is freely readable online and carries the letter to Cuthbert with its image of the church as a ship. Fordham's Internet Medieval Sourcebook gathers a generous run of the correspondence.
Principal hagiography. The life by Willibald, written at Mainz within a decade or so of the saint's death, is the indispensable narrative source. George W. Robinson's 1916 translation, The Life of Saint Boniface by Willibald, is in the public domain; C. H. Talbot's rendering in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (1954) is the more widely cited modern version and is reproduced in part at Fordham.
Recommended modern study. For a believing, readable life that takes both the saint and the sources seriously, John Cyril Sladden's Boniface of Devon: Apostle of Germany (1980) is written from within the tradition and with affection for its Devon-born subject; it is out of print and best found through a library or WorldCat. Eleanor Shipley Duckett's Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars sets Boniface among his English contemporaries with the same warmth and learning.
Further reading. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Boniface at New Advent remains a solid public-domain overview of the life and cult. On the relic and the protection legend, Michel Aaij, "Boniface and the Ragyndrudis Codex" in , surveys the manuscript and the scholarship on the book-over-the-head tradition.
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Online resources. Fordham's Internet Medieval Sourcebook is the most convenient single gateway to the letters and the Life in English.
British (Received Pronunciation): Dokkum /ˈdɒk.əm/; Legenda Sanctorum /lɪˈdʒɛndə sæŋkˈtɔːrəm/; Sanctorum /sæŋkˈtɔːrəm/
Almighty God, you gave your servant Boniface boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12