Aldegrin of Cluny

Saint Aldegrin of Cluny (also called Adalgrin, Adegrin or Aldegrin of Baume) was a nobleman who became a monk in the neighbourhood of Cluny in Burgundy. He reposed in the year 939. French sources call him a former knight and a disciple of Saint Odo of Cluny.

He served as an officer in the army of Fulk, count of Anjou, and wished to leave service and enter monastic life together with a companion. The two first tried community life. Aldegrin was sent to Rome to learn in what place in Christendom they could fulfil their desire. On the way, through Upper Burgundy, he stopped at the monastery of Baume-⁠les-⁠Messieurs, then ruled by Bernon, and, believing he had found what he sought, wrote to his friend to join him.

A legend says that one day, weighed down by regret at having left the joys of the world, he set out from his hermitage toward Baume, and a horseman met him on the road who was Saint Martin. Martin rebuked him and sent him back into solitude. From that hour Aldegrin never left the wilderness, coming to the monastery only for the Sunday services, and he lived there thirty years on bread and beans.

At Baume-⁠les-⁠Messieurs, in the church of Saint Peter, two seventeenth-⁠century reliquaries of Saints Lothain and Aldegrin are kept. He is commemorated on 4 June (and on 19 November in some lists) as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.