ae 
A FRAGMENT OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF SPURN. 
By J. R. BovyLe, F.s.a. 
HAT great English Apostle to the Frisians, Wilbrord, was a 
Yorkshireman, born in the year 657 or 658. His birth- 
place is unknown, but whilst yet a child he became an inmate of 
Wilfrid’s abbey at Ripon. His later life may be gleaned from the 
pages of Beda and Alcuin. He was consecrated Archbishop of 
Utrecht in 695, died in 738 or 739, was buried in the monastery 
which he had founded at Epternach, and was afterwards 
canonised. 
His father’s name was Wilgils, a man who, “with his wife, and 
all his house, led in Christ a religious life.” His mother, before 
his birth, had a vision, to her husband’s interpretation whereof, on 
the morrow, their son owed the life to which he was devoted in 
his infancy. A second Samuel, his biographer calls him. Wilgils, 
after the birth of his son, and probably after the death of his 
wife, abandoned the world and became a monk. But, not long 
afterwards, “‘the fervour of the spiritual life increasing in him,” 
he betook himself “to the promontories which are encircled by 
the ocean sea and Humber river” (in promontoriis quae mari 
Oceano et Humbri flumine cinguntur), there to devote himself, 
with undistracted mind, to solitary study. There he remained a 
long time, even unto the end of his days, “in a little oratory, 
dedicated to the name of St. Andrew, the apostle of Christ,” 
serving God with fasts and prayers and vigils. His name became 
famous, and the report of the miracles wrought by him was noised 
abroad. Many resorted to his solitary cell, and, after a time, the 
King and the honourable magnates of the country, gave him, “as 
a perpetual gift,” certain small patches of land adjoining the 
promontory (aliquas terrarum possessiunculas illis promontoriis 
adiacentes), that there a church might be built to God. To that 
church Wilgils gathered “a small but virtuous congregation.” 
In that church, once described as ‘“‘a sea-side cell” (cellula 
quadam maritima), when Wilgils’ labours were finished, his body 
was laid at rest, and there the tradition of his holiness was long 
kept green. To him other anchorites succeeded, one of whom, 
‘per successiones legitimas,” was that great scholar, Wilbrord’s 
biographer, Alcuin of York. Filial affection is the same in all 
ages, and it is touching to read that in Wilbrord’s monastery at 
Epternach, Wilgil’s Day was celebrated as a yearly festival.* 
* Field naturalists, visiting Spurn, may care to remember that the place is 
associated with the great names of Wilgils, Wilbrord and Alcuin. So much as 
I have told above of Wilgils has not hitherto been told in our English speech. 
I have learned what I have told from Alcuin’s Vita Sancti Willibrordi, printed 
in Jaffé and Watterbach’s A/onumenta Alcuiniana (Berlin, 1873). 
