Ludger grew up in Frisia, and he was descended from Burdo, who had been among the first converts to be baptised by St. Wulfram. Young Ludger was away studying for ordination in Utrecht when a pagan Saxon king named Widukind the Unwashed invaded and laid waste to Ludger's home town of Ostracha. Bathers were pulled from the North Sea and slathered in mud before being sent to shovel manure in the Saxon heartlands, and before long, the sweet fragrances for which Frisia was known receded into memory.
When Charlemagne finally defeated Old Widukind a few years hence, Ludger's home had been rendered uninhabitable, and he was tasked with rebuilding the churches and making it fit for refugees to move back. The main problem lay in the odor; besides the charred remnants of animal sacrifice, Widukind's soldiers had left behind their standards. Everywhere they went, they erected monuments to Nucho, the Saxon god of Stench. In effect, they were giant wooden poles festooned with garlic or bags of rotting cheese, some of which they had been left standing across four summers.
Luckily, the Frisians had stockpiled their specific brand of "parfum" at Charlemagne's castle in Cologne, and they returned from Cologne with great cisterns of the sweet-smelling water, which they systematically used to purify the devastated villages of their homeland. The mission was a success, but it had an unexpected consequence: one of Ludger's fellow priests had gotten quite hungry and tried some of Widukind's rotting cheese. He was quite taken with the flavor, going so far as to insist it tasted better than it smelled. Other priests tried it and reached the same verdict, and before long, their taste for mature cheese would spread across Charlemagne's kingdom.
