Life of Saint Boniface

Willibald was a priest, not the bishop of Eichstätt of the same name. His prologue is addressed to two bishops, Lul of Mainz, whom Boniface had chosen as his successor, and Megingoz of Würzburg, and says that they asked him to write and that he gathered his material from disciples who had lived with Boniface and from the bishops themselves. That places the work in the years soon after Boniface’s death; its translator dates it not later than 768.

He did not know Boniface in person, and he writes in an inflated style with borrowed phrases, but he stands close to the witnesses. Some of his dates are wrong and can be corrected from Boniface’s own letters: he puts the giving of the name Boniface at the consecration of 722, though a papal letter of 719 already uses it, and he reckons the year of the martyrdom as 755, where the tradition of Fulda has 754. The story of the oak is told as a miracle, and is reported here as he tells it.