Freithegod, sometimes Frithegode or Fredegaud was a poet and clergyman in the middle 10th-century who served Oda of Canterbury, an Archbishop of Canterbury

Archbishop of Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. In his role as head of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop leads the third largest group...

.

Frithegod was probably a native of France, as his name is obviously not Anglo-Saxon, and was probably an attempt to Anglicize the Frankish name Fredegaud. Where in France he originated is unknown, as is when he met Oda. It may have been in 936, when Oda visited France.

Frithegod served Oda as one of the teachers of Oda's nephew Oswald of Worcester

Oswald of Worcester

Oswald of Worcester was Archbishop of York from 972 to his death in 992. He was of Danish ancestry, but brought up by his uncle, Oda, who sent him to France to the abbey of Fleury to become a monk. After a number of years at Fleury, Oswald returned to England at the request of his uncle, who died...

, but he is generally known for his Latin

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

 poem Breviloquium Vitae Wilfridi, a hexameter work based on Stephen of Ripon's prose Life of St Wilfrid. The subject of both Frithegod and Stephen's works was Wilfrid

Wilfrid

Wilfrid was an English bishop and saint. Born a Northumbrian noble, he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Gaul, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and became the abbot of a newly founded monastery at Ripon...

, a late 7th and early 8th-century bishop and saint. Oda ordered the Breviloquium to commemorate Oda's securing of Wilfrid's relics around 950. Preceding the poem is a prose description of the actual acquisition, supposedly written by Oda, but more probably, on the basis of the writing style, written by Frithegod. The historian Michael Lapidge

Michael Lapidge

Michael Lapidge D.Litt. is a Canadian historical linguist, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy A lecturer in Anglo-Saxon studies at Cambridge from 1974 onwards, Lapidge was Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1991 to 1998...

 describes the Breviloquium as "one of the most difficult Latin poems written in pre-conquest England". It is 1400 lines and its meaning is not always clear, even when compared to the Life of St Wilfrid which was its basis. The poetic word adds nothing new to historian's knowledge of Wilfrid, being mainly a poetic exercise to show off Frithegod's writing. It contains a number of neologisms and Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

 words, the rarity of some of which imply that Frithegod had some knowledge of the Greek language. The Breviloquium was influenced by Biblical hermeneutics

Biblical hermeneutics

Biblical hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible. It is part of the broader field of hermeneutics which involves the study of principles for the text and includes all forms of communication: verbal and nonverbal.While Jewish and Christian...

, a type of study of biblical texts.

Frithegod wrote a number of other works, not all of which survive to the present day. A 16th-century antiquary, John Bale

John Bale

John Bale was an English churchman, historian and controversialist, and Bishop of Ossory. He wrote the oldest known historical verse drama in English , and developed and published a very extensive list of the works of British authors down to his own time, just as the monastic libraries were being...

, knew of a manuscript that contained, besides the Breviloquium, a work on the life of St Ouen

Ouen

Audoin, Audoen or Ouen, and Dado to his contemporaries, , was a Frankish bishop, courtier, chronicler, and Catholic saint....

– whose relics Oda had also acquired, two poems, another work entitled De Visione Beatorum, and a work given the title of Contemplationes Variae. Although the Life of Ouen and the two named works do not survive, the two poems do in other manuscripts.

It appears that after Oda's death in 958, Frithegod returned to the continent, and his date of death is unknown.