Biography
Milon of Fontenelle
About Milon of Fontenelle
Milon entered the monastic community of Fontenelle with his father Hrotmundus. The Gesta records their gift of two estates in 713. With Abbot Benignus’s permission, Milon later became a hermit, cutting a dwelling into rock above the Seine. His mother Wisla led the monastery of Logium.
The chronicle describes him as a priest who celebrated worship in a church below the rock and cultivated vines to live by his own labor. It presents his solitude as a spiritual struggle against demons. Its author drew on monastic records and oral testimony, including an elderly informant who had heard from someone who knew Milon.
The account preserves disagreement about his burial: Saint Paul’s church at Fontenelle or the entrance to Logium. The writer favored burial in his own monastery while acknowledging the competing report.
The historian Jacques Le Maho places the remembered hermitage on the hillside at Caudebecquet. He cautions that the low caves traditionally identified with it fit poorly with the chronicle’s description of a high rock. The name of the hermitage preserves a local memory, but identifying one surviving cavity as Milon’s dwelling remains uncertain. Le Maho also distinguishes the entrance to the monastery at Logium from the church doorway sometimes substituted in later translations.
Saint-Wandrille commemorates Milon on August 18 and places his death around 730.
The IRHT’s reference list instead gives about 740, also with August 18. The death year therefore remains approximate.
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