Gaudinus

ON ST. GAUDINUS, BISHOP AND MARTYR OF SOISSONS

CIRCA AD 720

Gaudinus, Bishop and Martyr of Soissons (St.)

By G. H.

[1] Soissons, the Augusta of the Suessonians, situated in Belgica Secunda on the left bank of the river Aisne, was once the seat of the Merovingian Kings of the Franks in the tetrarchic division of the kingdom; now it is distinguished by the title of a County. No less ancient is the Episcopal See there under the metropolis of Rheims, over which, as Claude Robert reports in Gallia Christiana, the commemoration of St. Gaudinus, Bishop of Soissons, on February 8, the twenty-sixth Bishop, St. Gaudinus, presided, who, as he says, is said to have been impiously thrown into a well by butchers: whose commemoration is observed as a Martyr on February 8. Saussay marks his feast day in the Gallican Martyrology on February 11 with these words: At Soissons, of St. Gaudinus, Bishop of the same city and Martyr, who, Feast day on February 11. when he publicly rebuked certain citizens for usury, in hatred of the Evangelical truth which he preached, was secretly seized by them and dragged to the village of Herlin, and there thrown headlong into an open well and drowned, and by this noble struggle received the unfading palm of victory and the laurel of eternal life.

[2] Concerning the elevation of the same and of other Saints, Molanus writes thus in his additions to Usuard on the Kalends of June: At Soissons, the elevation of the holy Bishops Principius and Lupus, Confessors, elevation, Gandinus the Martyr, and Agricola the Priest, Confessor. or translation on June 1, Galesinius, following Molanus, and after both of them Ferrarius, report the same things, but call it not an elevation but a translation. But Saussay writes thus: Likewise at Soissons, the elevation of St. Gaudinus, Bishop and Martyr, and also of the Blessed Bishops Principius and Lupus, and of Agricola the Priest, Confessors. The feast day of St. Principius is September 25.

[3] We calculate the time of St. Gaudinus's See thus: St. Drausius, or Drauscio, Bishop of Soissons (about whom see March 5), subscribed to the privilege of liberty granted to the monastery of Corbie by Bertefrid, Bishop of Amiens, in the seventh year of King Chlothar III, the year of Christ 668. Drausius was succeeded by Autbert, Walambert, and Adalbert; then St. Gaudinus, he flourished around the year 720. so that we may conjecture him to have flourished around the year 720. Gaudinus, after seven others whose bare names survive, was succeeded in the eighth place by Rothardus, between whom and Wendilmarus, Bishop of Noyon, a controversy over the boundaries of the dioceses was settled in the Council of Noyon in the year 814, as recorded by Flodoard in book 2 of the History of Rheims, chapter 18.