Hidulf of Hainaut

Saint Hidulf of Hainaut (also called Hydulphe of Lobbes) was count of Hainaut in Belgium and then a Benedictine monk at Lobbes, a monastery he had helped to found. He was born around 630 in Austrasia, a grandson of Walbert III. Around 655 he married, by an arrangement of his parents, his cousin Saint Aye, daughter of Brunulph, count of the Ardennes, and both made a shared vow of continence.

Saint Ghislain advised Saint Waltrude to withdraw to the mountain of Châteaulieu and she asked Hidulf to negotiate for the land and build a place of prayer. He built a spacious house there, but a hurricane levelled it, and in its place he made a simpler hermitage and an oratory of Saint Peter, the early beginnings of present-⁠day Mons. He also helped Saint Landelin to found the abbeys of Lobbes, Crespin and Aulne, living nearby on Mont Hydulphe. No longer content with founding and protecting monasteries, he sought to renounce his wealth. After a few years of marriage he and his wife parted to give themselves fully to God: he entered the abbey of Lobbes, she the convent of Châteaulieu with her kinswoman Waltrude. He gave all his possessions to the monastery of Lobbes; by a charter of 691 he gave it over a hundred villages with their lands, meadows and woods.

He reposed on 23 June 707 at Lobbes. In the fifteenth century his relics were moved to Binche, to the church of Sainte-⁠Marie; a bone from his arm was left at Lobbes, and his head was kept in a silver reliquary. His feast was formerly kept at Lobbes and Binche on 23 June, the day on which he is also commemorated in the Orthodox calendar, as a saint of the West before the Great Schism (a saint of the undivided Church), by the New Calendar.