Ingulf

From the Catholic Encyclopedia

Abbot of Croyland, Lincolnshire; d. there 17 December 1109. he is first heard of as secretary to William the Conqueror, in which capacity he visited England in 1051. After making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem he entered the Norman monastery of Fontenelle, or Saint-Wandrille, under Abbot Gerbert, who appointed him prior. The English Abbey of Croyland falling vacant, owing to the deposition by Lanfranc of Abbot Ulfeytel, Ingulf was nominated to the office in 1087 at the special instance of King William. he was not only an able but a kindly man, as was shown by his successful efforts to obtain his predecessor's release from Glastonbury, where he was confined, and his return to Peterborough (the house of his profession), where he died. Ingulf governed Croyland for twenty-four years, and with success, though in the face of many difficulties, not the least being his own bad health, for he suffered greatly from gout. Another of his troubles was the partial destruction by fire of the abbey church, with the sacristies, vestments, and books. An event of his abbacy was the interment in Croyland church of the Saxon Earl Walthe of Northumbria, who was executed by William's orders, and was a martyr as well as a national hero in the popular estimation.

ORDERCIUS, VITALIS, Historia Ecclesiastica, pars II, lib. IV (ed. MIGNE, Paris, 1855), 364 [ORDERICUS is the onlly extant authority for the few fact known about Ingulf's life. the chronicle known as his Historia Anglicana, containing many autobiographical details, is a fourteenth-or fifteenth-century forgery]: see also FREEMAN, Conquest of England, IV (Oxford, 1871), 600, 601, 690.

D.O. HUNTER-BLAIR