Wulfhild was born about the year 940, the daughter of a Wessex nobleman named Wulfhelm. Tradition, preserved in her Life, holds that her parents had lived together for eighteen years as brother and sister, and came together only after an angel appeared to announce the birth of a daughter who would become a bride of Christ. Whatever the origin of that story, the child's whole life bore out its promise: from infancy she was taught to despise what passes away and to love what is heavenly, and she was entrusted to the Benedictine nuns of Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, where she was raised, educated, and in due time received into the community.
Her beauty and gentleness drew the eye of the king, Edgar the Peaceful. He pressed her with offers, entreaties, gifts and messengers, and Wulfhild refused them all, knowing that purity is safeguarded not by parley but by flight. According to the account handed down by Butler, an aunt of the maiden let herself be won over by the king, feigned illness, and had Wulfhild summoned out of her monastery to her bedside. Scarcely had the girl arrived when the king came upon her. In terror for her soul she tore herself free and fled, leaving part of her sleeve in the hands of the king who tried to hold her; running to the church, she seized the altar and implored God's protection with many tears. Tradition adds that Edgar at last desisted after a miracle revealed to him the true consecration of the young nun. The king turned his attentions instead to her kinswoman Wulfthryth, who bore him a daughter, Edith; and the horror of the danger she had escaped served Wulfhild as a spur to give herself wholly and fervently to her heavenly Bridegroom.
Around the year 970 the same king, seeking as it were to make amends, named Wulfhild abbess of Barking Abbey in Essex, an ancient house rebuilt from the ruins left by the Danish devastations of the previous century, and endowed it with many fair possessions. Under her rule Barking flourished and expanded. She settled upon it twenty villages of her own patrimony, and founded a second monastery at Horton in Dorset. Both houses she governed with sanctity and prudence, living in great austerity herself while showing to others only kindness.
Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, who wrote her Life and dedicated it to Bishop Maurice of London, compares her conduct toward her nuns to that of a humble, watchful and nurturing mother: she drew water, gathered wood, kindled the fires, prepared the provisions, distributed clothing and bathed her sisters with her own hands. This, he says, was her ministry. He praises those same hands for another habit, practised regularly and in secret: she would sit before the doors of the abbey church and give alms to the poor as they passed by. Her disciple and successor, Leofflæd, was praised in turn for following Wulfhild's teaching and example of compassion.
After King Edgar's death her inflexible virtue became a reproach to others. Some of the nuns of Barking laid complaints against their abbess, and Queen Ælfthryth deposed her and drove her from her monastery — an act attributed to jealousy over Edgar's former interest in her, and to a desire to seize the abbey's wealth. Wulfhild withdrew to Horton with a group of faithful sisters and remained in that exile for twenty years, never ceasing to be a mother to those entrusted to her. Meanwhile Barking, under the prelates the queen had installed, was driven to the edge of financial ruin. Only when the community received a vision of Saint Æthelburh, the abbey's foundress of three centuries before, commanding that Wulfhild be brought back, was she restored with honour; some accounts credit her restoration to King Æthelred II, Ælfthryth's son.
Seven years after her return she was forced to leave Barking again, this time fleeing the Viking raiders, and took refuge in London. There she died on 9 September, in a year after 996, and her body was carried back and buried at Barking. Some thirty years later, on 2 September 1030, the Abbess Leofflæd had her relics translated, and she was laid with the abbey's first two abbesses, Saints Æthelburh and Hildelith — the three holy women of Barking. Goscelin records the miracles worked through her intercession at Barking and at Horton after her death, and William of Malmesbury and others likewise testify to the wonders at her tomb; her veneration, Goscelin says, was widespread and long-lasting. She is honoured as a saint in the Catholic Church, and her feast is kept on 9 September, the anniversary of her death, though Butler places her memory on 9 December.
Wulfhild teaches that chastity is defended by flight rather than by argument, that authority is exercised best by the one who carries the wood and lights the fire for her sisters, and that unjust exile can be borne for twenty years without bitterness.
May her prayers obtain for us the courage to guard our hearts for God alone, and the humility to serve those nearest us with our own hands today.
