Felix and Augebert

The story of Felix and Augebert belongs to the margin of one of the best-documented enterprises of their age. St Gregory the Great's concern for the enslaved English is a matter of primary record: in a surviving letter of September 595 he instructed the priest Candidus, administrator of the papal patrimony in Gaul, to spend its revenues on buying English slave-boys of seventeen or eighteen years, that they might be given to God in monasteries — the seed of the mission that sent Augustine to Canterbury in 597. The tradition of Felix and Augebert is exactly the shape of that instruction: two English captives sold in Gaul, ransomed for Gregory, and set in a monastery to be formed as future missionaries to England. Felix reached the priesthood and Augebert the diaconate; then, before the mission could be undertaken, both were murdered by pagans in Champagne — the place is given in the modern accounts as near Chaumont. Killed on the threshold of the work they were freed for, they were accounted martyrs.

The honest limit of the record must be stated. Gregory's letter, though it documents the ransom-policy precisely, does not name these two men. No entry for them in the ancient martyrologies was found in the research for this entry; the earliest witness identified is the modern Benedictine Book of Saints and the calendars that draw on it, from which Orthodox England and the York calendar take their notice. Between the seventh century and these modern compilations the chain of transmission could not be traced here, and this entry does not pretend otherwise: what is certain is the policy under which such men lived and died; what is received on the tradition's word is their names and their end.