Baring-Gould’s sources: Venerated chiefly at Niirnberg; devotion sanctioned by Martin V. German Martyrologies. Authority: — An ancient life by an anonymous author, the date uncertain, probably of the nth cent.] Sebald was brought up in his boyhood at the court of Dagobert j1 he was the son of a petty chief on the Danube. He was in Rome when SS. Willibald and Wunibald were there, a.d. 733 — 739, and departed at the same time as Willibald,2 to carry the gospel into the wilds of Germany, where S. Boniface, the kinsman of Willibald and Wunibald, was labouring to produce a reformation among the turbulent prelates, and to spread the truth among those who as yet knew not Christ. It is probable that Sebald travelled with Willibald, and when the latter settled at Eichstadt on the confines of Franconia, Sebald pushed further north, to the bold rock rising out of the plain, above the Pegnitz, now crowned by the picturesque castle of Niirnberg, and settled there in the heart of the Franconian people. Some slight difficulty occurs in reconciling dates. Wunibald was at Rome with Willibald in 721, but apparently not in 733 and the six years following, when Willibald returned from his pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

Sebald arrived in Rome during the pontificate of Gregory II. (a.d. 715 — 731); Willibald did not start for Germany till 739. But the biographer tells us of a long period of eremitical life spent in Lombardy near Vicenza, and this may have occurred during the time that Willibald was in the East. When Gregory III. sought for missionaries to send into Germany in answer to the appeal of S. Boniface [English missionary to Germany, martyred 754], he probably summoned Sebald from his retreat to join Willibald.

1 The biographer says Pepin and Charlemagne [king of the Franks, crowned emperor in 800], but this is a gross anachronism, One day Sebald asked shelter of a labourer in bitter frosty weather. The snow was over the ground, the wind howled over the frozen marshes of the Pegnitz. He was received with great churlishness. In vain he crouched over the low embers of the fire, seeking to restore warmth to his chilled hands and feet. At last he ventured to ask if more fuel might be cast on the hearth. “ I cannot afford it,” said the surly rustic, “ it takes time to cut wood and cart it.” “ Then, good woman,” said Sebald, addressing the wife of the churl, who looked on him with pitying eyes, “ go fetch in a sheaf of icicles I saw hanging from the roof.” The woman — so runs the tale — obeyed, and, at Sebald’s command, cast them on the fire. A flame shot up and crackled among the icicles, and speedily the whole bundle was in roaring flames.

It is a pretty story, perhaps only an allegory of how Sebald quickened and made to flame with divine love the icy Franconian natures, which seemed as impossible to warm with grace as the winter’s ice.

At length he died, and those who ministered to him swung incense over the dead body of the old hermit, and lit candles about it. Now, there was a woman, a sinner, whom Sebald had turned to the love of the living God. And in memory of her sin, and in expiation thereof, she wore about her arm a hoop of iron. And she came to see the dead hermit. And one of the candles about his head was crooked, and swaled; then she stretched forth her arm and set it upright, and the iron band burst at the same moment. So she thought that the old man, as he entered into the presence of God, had not forgotten the poor woman whom he had converted on earth, and that God had heard his petition, and the snapped ring was a token sent her that her sins, which were many, were pardoned.

The body of the hermit rests in an exquisite shrine in the S. SEBALD MAKING A FIRE FROM ICICLES. A relief from the tomb of S. Sebald, by Peter Vischer and his sons in the cburch or S. Sebald, Nuremburg.

August ig.] kS". Louis. choir of S. Sebaldus’ church in Niimberg, undisturbed. The sides of the shrine are chased with scenes from his life by Adam Kraft