Wala (Latin Vala) was the younger brother of St. Adalhard of Corbie — both grandsons of Charles Martel and first cousins of Charlemagne. Like his brother he served in the Carolingian inner circle, but with a more pronounced political-statesman vocation.
Charlemagne appointed him principal tutor (along with his brother Adalhard) of the boy-king Pippin of Italy. After Pippin's death in 810, Wala served as regent for his minor son Bernard until 814. When Louis the Pious displaced Bernard from the Italian throne in 817 (and blinded him to death in 818), Wala — already exiled along with Adalhard to monastic seclusion — entered Corbie as a monk under his brother's abbacy.
On Adalhard's death in 827, Wala succeeded as abbot of Corbie (and also of Corvey, the new Saxon foundation). For the next six years he was the monastic statesman of the empire — leader of the so-called 'Adalhardine' party of Carolingian reform.
In the great civil war of 830–833 between Louis the Pious and his sons, Wala took the side of the elder sons (Lothair, Pippin, Louis the German) against the partition that Louis had decreed in favour of his youngest son Charles the Bald (born to his second wife Judith of Bavaria). At the Field of Lies (Campus Mendacii, June 833), where Louis the Pious was abandoned by his army and forced to undergo public penance at Soissons, Wala was the principal monastic-clerical figure of the rebellion.
When Louis the Pious returned to power in 834, Wala was sent into permanent exile at the Columbanian abbey of Bobbio in Lombardy, where he died on August 31, 836 — making him among the Catholic political confessors-of-conscience among the higher Carolingian ecclesiastical hierarchy.