Botolph of Iken
Our Venerable Father Botolph, Abbot of Icanho
Venerable · d. c. 680
Commemorated 17 June — Repose at Icanho, 1 December — Translation of the relics under King Edgar
The Anglo-Saxon abbot of Icanho, whose monastery the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records him beginning to build in 654 — a fixed point in a century that gives historians very few. Botolph was formed as a monk on the Continent, returned to East Anglia, and settled with his brother on a tract of marsh and heath on the tidal Alde in what is now Suffolk, where he governed a community for some quarter of a century until his repose about 680. The near-contemporary Life of Ceolfrith — the best witness to him, written by someone who had no reason to flatter — calls him a man of unequalled life and learning, full of the grace of the Holy Spirit. When the Danes came, his relics were carried inland and eventually divided between Thorney, Ely and Westminster; from the churches at the gates of London that bear his name he became the patron of travellers, and the town of Boston — Botolph's stone — carries his name still.
Formation
Botolph was, by the medieval Life, of noble English birth and Christian parents, and had a brother, Adulph, who went with him. The two crossed to the Continent, where the Irish and Frankish monasteries of the seventh century were the school of the entire English monastic movement, and were formed there in the regular life — the tradition attaches him to the circle of Fursey, the Irish monk whose East Anglian mission is described by Bede, and to houses in Gaul. He returned to England about the middle of the century.
The claim of the later Life that Adulph became a bishop in the Low Countries — at Utrecht, or at Maastricht — is a piece of eleventh-century embroidery: no continental list has him, and the chronology does not work. Adulph is remembered with his brother nonetheless, and appears beside him in the English day-lists for June 17.
Icanho, 654
Botolph asked and obtained from the East Anglian royal house a grant of land for a monastery, and — with the delicacy of a man who did not want to build on ground someone else had a claim to — asked for a waste place. He was given one. The entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 654 is short and unmistakable: Botwulf began to build the minster at Icanho.
Icanho — "ox hill," or possibly "Ica's spur" — is now generally identified with Iken on the tidal reach of the Alde in Suffolk, a low promontory in the marsh, effectively an island at high water: exactly the kind of site the seventh century chose, defensible, isolated, and reachable by boat. The identification is supported by the discovery at Iken church of the shaft of a ninth-century carved cross, evidence of a monastic site of the right period and standing. A rival identification with Boston in Lincolnshire rests on the name (Botolph's stone) and on the later cult, not on early evidence.
There Botolph drained and worked the marsh, and — this is the note the sources sound about him rather than any wonder — he taught. The monastery became a place people came to in order to learn how the monastic life was actually to be conducted.
The witness of Ceolfrith's Life
The decisive testimony is early and incidental. The anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, written at Wearmouth-Jarrow about 716 by a monk of the community — the same community that produced Bede — records that Ceolfrith, before he became abbot, travelled into East Anglia expressly to see the institutions of Abbot Botolph, whom it describes as a man of unparalleled life and learning, and full of the grace of the Holy Spirit; and that Ceolfrith came home and applied what he had seen.
This is worth more than the whole of the later hagiography. It is a Northumbrian source, written within a generation or two of Botolph's death, with no local interest in promoting an East Anglian saint, testifying that his monastery was regarded in the greatest scholarly house in England as a model worth crossing the country to study.
Botolph died at Icanho about 680, and was buried there.
The Danes, and the division of the relics
Icanho was destroyed in the Danish wars of the ninth century, and the site abandoned. In the monastic revival under King Edgar (959–975), Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester sought out and recovered the relics — the account of the search, and of the difficulty of finding the ruined church, is the most circumstantial part of the eleventh-century Life written by Folcard of Saint-Bertin for the abbey of Thorney.
The relics were then divided, as the age habitually divided the relics of a great saint among the houses that had a claim: the body, or the greater part of it, to the fen abbey of Thorney; the head to Ely; and a portion to the king, who gave it to Westminster. Other houses obtained fragments later. It is from Thorney that the saint acquired the style Botwulf of Thorney, under which he is catalogued in reference works — though he never saw the place, and Iken is where he lived and died.
Patron of travellers
Botolph's cult in England was very wide: over seventy ancient churches bear his name. Their distribution explains what he became. His churches stand characteristically at gates, fords, bridges and the edges of towns — in London at four of the city gates, Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate and Billingsgate, where a man going out of the city on a journey stopped to pray, and a man coming in gave thanks. From that he is the English patron of travellers, wayfarers and boundaries, and the patron of the trades that move about. Boston in Lincolnshire — Botolph's stone — takes its name from him, and Boston in Massachusetts from that.
Feast and commemoration
June 17 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 30) — his repose, and his principal feast in England and on the OCA calendar. December 1 (Old Calendar civil December 14) is kept as the translation of his relics under King Edgar. June 25 is a Scottish usage. He is commemorated locally in the Western and Western-rite Orthodox calendars and by the OCA; the Greek and Slavonic books for June 17 do not carry him. The feast falls within the window of the Apostles' Fast in most years, though not in all — the fast has no fixed beginning.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and with sighs from the depths thou didst bring forth fruit a hundredfold in labours; thou becamest a beacon shining upon the world by thy wonders, O Botolph our father: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Botolph is painted as an abbot: tonsured, in the monastic habit, holding an abbot's staff and often a book or a small church in his hand — the church being the sign of a founder, and in his case specifically of Icanho. Where the English medieval painters and glaziers show him, in the East Anglian churches and on the painted screens of Norfolk and Suffolk, he is frequently given a ship or is shown beside water, from his patronage of travellers and the tidal setting of his monastery; in the London gate-churches his image stood over the road out of the city.
No pre-1900 image of him has been stored for this collection. A search of Wikimedia Commons returns several hundred photographs of churches dedicated to him and nothing that can be verified as a representation of the saint himself; the one rood-screen result is a screen in a church of his dedication, not a painting of him, and was rejected on that ground.
Disputed questions
- Icanho: Iken or Boston? The corpus follows the identification with Iken, Suffolk, on the strength of the site, the name, the ninth-century cross-shaft and the East Anglian context of the grant. The Lincolnshire claim depends on the place-name Botolph's stone and on Boston's later possession of a great church of the saint, and cannot be excluded; it is recorded rather than dismissed.
- Adulph. Botolph's brother is firmly attached to him in the English tradition and is commemorated with him. The assertion that he was a bishop in the Low Countries is late, unsupported by continental evidence, and is treated here as legend.
- The date of repose. About 680; some accounts give 655 (a misreading of the foundation date) and others "c. 670". A quarter-century's rule at Icanho after 654 is what the sources imply.
- Orthodox attestation. Botolph is a pre-schism Western saint. His Orthodox commemoration is not merely inferred: he is carried by name on the OCA calendar, on June 17 and again on December 1, and he is kept in Western-rite Orthodox usage. He is not in the Greek Menaion or the Slavonic books for the day.