He was nearly related to Pepin of Landen and Erchinoald, the two
first lords in the kingdom of Austrasia; and in his youth was made
count of the palace under Dagobert I. He was humble on the highest
pinnacle of honors, and mortified amidst pleasures. To retrieve
himself from the dissipation and other ill effects, of which hurry
and much conversation with the world are dangerous occasions, he
frequently retired into his closet, and there conversed much with
God by devout prayer, and with himself by serious consideration on
his own duties, condition, and spiritual miseries. In compliance
with the will of his parents he took to wife a virtuous and noble
lady; but, on the very day of his marriage, obtained her consent
that they should both consecrate their virginity to God; which they
did by a mutual vow on the same day. Vandrille in 629 took the
monastic habit at Montfaucon in Champagne, an abbey then lately
founded by St. Baudri. He afterward built a monastery upon his own
estate, called Elisang. In order to perfect himself in the most
approved rules and exercises of an ascetic or monastic life, he
took a journey to Bobio and to Rome. After his return into France
he spent ten years in the monastery of Romans, on the Isere. After
which term, with the blessing of his abbot, he repaired to St. Oüen,
archbishop of Rouen, by whom he was some time after ordained priest.
In 648 the saint founded the famous monastery of Fontenelles, five
leagues below Rouen, in the territory of Caux, in which he in a short
time saw himself at the head of three hundred monks. His life was
always most austere; he slept little, was clad in sackcloth, and
was most scrupulously exact in all the exercises of the monastic
rule, in which, he was well assured, the sanctification of his state
consisted. He went to receive the recompense of his labors on the
22d of July in 666, being ninety-six years old. He was buried in the
church of St. Paul, now in ruins: his body was translated by St.
Bainus into that of St. Peter’s, still standing; and in 944 to Ghent.
It was lost in the persecution of the Calvinists in 1578; but an arm
had been restored to Fontenelles, and the other arm been given to
the abbey of Brone; where these relics are still preserved. See his
two lives of the same age in Mabillon, and in Bosch the Bollandist,
Julij, t. 5, p. 253. Also Gallia Christ. Nova, t. 11, p. 155, 166,
and the history of the translation of his relics to the abbey of
Blandine, now St. Peter’s at Ghent, and a history of his miracles,
with F. Bosch’s notes, t. 5, p. 281; also F. Toussaint-du-Plessis,
Descript. Geogr. Hist. de la Haute Normandie.