Highly educated, Boniface left behind a promising ecclesial career in England to proclaim the Gospel to the Northern Germans. His preaching was so successful that he was forced to write to the people of his homeland begging for books, vestments and money to support “those who are of one blood and bone with you” He drew from the ranks of the monasteries of his homeland the abbots and abbesses of Germany’s first abbeys – and its first saints, including Lull and Wigbert, Thecla and Walburga. In 754 he retired as archbishop to pursue a final mission to Friesland. There he perished at the hands of marauding bands, slain over the book he was reading.
