ST. GERMER OR GEREMAR, ABBOT

HIS parents, Rigobert and Aga, were of the prime nobility in the territory of Beauvais. He was born at their castle in the village Warandra, in the reign of king Clotaire; married a pious lady named Domana, and whilst yet a layman, built a monastery in honor of St. Peter, called the Island, which was afterward destroyed by the Normans, and is now an estate belonging to St. Germer’s abbey. Germer, by the advice of St. Owen, made his monastic profession in the monastery of Pental, in the territory of Rouen. He was soon after chosen abbot, but finding the monks averse to regularity, he left the abbacy, and led an anchoretical life in a cave near the river Seine five years and six months. His only son Amalbert, dying, was buried in St. Peter’s monastery. Germer, with the estate which reverted to him from his son’s death, founded the monastery of Fley or Flaviacum, now St. Germer’s, five leagues from Beauvais toward Rouen, in which he assembled a community of fervent monks, in 655. Having governed this house three years and a half, he happily died on the 24th of September, 658. His body was interred in the church of his abbey, which soon after took his name. His relics, for fear of the Norman plunderers, were conveyed secretly to Beauvais, where they are still kept in the cathedral, except the bones of one arm, which have been given back to St. Germer’s. In 1643 Aug. Potier, bishop of Beauvais, placed monks of the congregation of St. Maur in this abbey, and erected in it a great school for the humanity studies to the end of rhetoric. See Gallia Chr. Nova, t. 9, p. 788, Mabillon, Act. Bened., &c.