Willibrord was born in Northumbria and trained at Ripon under St. Wilfrid before spending twelve years (678–690) in Ireland at the great monastic school of Rathmelsigi. In 690 he was sent by his Irish abbot — with eleven companions — as a missionary to the still-pagan Frisians of the lower Rhine and the North Sea coast.
He worked first under the protection of the Frankish mayor Pepin of Herstal. In 695 Pope Sergius I consecrated him 'Archbishop of the Frisians' at Rome, with his see at Utrecht — the foundation of what would become one of the great metropolitan sees of northern Europe. He evangelized for nearly fifty years across Frisia, Brabant, and Denmark.
Around 698 he founded the great Abbey of Echternach in modern Luxembourg, which became the principal center of his Anglo-Saxon and Frankish mission and the source of the magnificent Echternach Gospels (c. 700). His annual Dancing Procession in Echternach on the Tuesday after Pentecost — a folk-liturgical procession in which thousands of pilgrims dance through the streets in honor of his memory — has been observed continuously since the 9th century and is inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list.