The life of St Botolph of Ikanhoe
Adulph remained there, but Botolph returned to England, where a king of the East Angles, whose sisters he had known abroad, granted him a tract of remote, marshy land on which to build a monastery. According to the near-contemporary English Chronicle, Botolph began building his monastery, called Icanhoe, in the year 654. The site is usually identified with Iken in Suffolk, on the estuary of the River Alde. The later market town of Boston, Lincolnshire, whose name derives from Botolph, commemorates him through a much later church dedication and is a separate tradition, not a rival claim to the original monastery's location.
Around the year 670 the monastery was visited by Ceolfrid, later abbot of Wearmouth and the teacher of the historian Bede, who came away deeply impressed by the learning and holiness of Botolph's community. Later medieval accounts, written centuries after Botolph's own time, add vivid stories of the site's earlier haunting by evil spirits which he drove out by prayer and the sign of the cross; these belong to legend rather than to the sparse contemporary record. Botolph died around 680, and after his monastery's later destruction his relics were divided and dispersed among several English churches.
