Early medieval (7th–8th century)
Feast: October 12
He was exiled three times, appealed to the Pope twice, and spent every year in between building churches so beautiful they stunned a rough island into wanting more.
Wilfrid was not a humble man, and nobody pretended he was. A nobleman's son from Northumbria, he traveled to Rome as a teenager and came back with a taste for grandeur that the English church had never seen. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, he argued the Roman case for calculating Easter with such sharp rhetoric that he won the debate and humiliated the Irish party. King Oswiu sided with Rome largely because of Wilfrid's argument about Peter holding the keys to heaven: 'I will not contradict the gatekeeper,' the king said. Wilfrid became Bishop of York and immediately began building. His church at Ripon had a stone crypt — almost unheard of in England — and his church at Hexham was reportedly the finest building north of the Alps. But his ambition made enemies. He was exiled from Northumbria three times. Each time he went south, evangelized new territories (he converted Sussex and the Isle of Wight during one exile), and appealed to Rome for restoration. The Pope kept siding with him. During his final years he gave up York and accepted the smaller see of Hexham, founding monasteries and distributing his wealth to the communities that had sheltered him. He died in 709. Even Bede, who disliked Wilfrid's showiness, couldn't deny what he'd built.