§ 78. Now after having completed twelve1 continuous years in this place, he also entered into the joy which is above; and when Felgeld, who was the third inmate, began to inhabit this cell and oratory, it pleased Eadfrid, the very reverend bishop of the church of Lindisfarne, to restore this oratory thoroughly from its foundation, for it was falling into ruin through age. Now when this work was accomplished, many persons in their devotion besought the blessed soldier of Christ, Felgeld, to give them some particle of the relics of Cudberct, who was so beloved of God, or of Aediluuald, his successor; and so he proposed to cut in pieces and give to each of the petitioners a small part of the calf's hide mentioned above. But before he gave it to others, he thought it good first to try on himself what virtue it might possess. Now he had been afflicted for a long time with a noisome redness and tumour in the face; of which the symptoms had exhibited themselves while he was yet leading a life of community along with the brethren. But since he had become a recluse, he took less care of his body, and more of his soul, he became more austere, and as if shut up in perpetual imprisonment he rarely enjoyed either the heat of the sun, or the breath of air, so that his malady increased more and more, and the inflamed tumour covered the whole of his face. Fearing therefore that the greatness of such an infirmity should oblige him to forsake his solitary life, and to return to one of community, he ventured to take a liberty in the exercise of his faith and to hope for a cure, through the intercession of those whose abode and manner of life he rejoiced to occupy and imitate. Putting, therefore, a portion of the same calf's hide into water, he washed his face with the liquid, and immediately the foul tumour and ulcer which had afflicted it entirely departed. This I learned from a devout priest of this monastery of Jarrow, who told me that he was well acquainted with Felgeld's face when it was previously swollen and deformed, and that he had afterwards felt, with his hand through the window, that it was quite cleansed, and that, at a late period, Felgeld himself affirmed that it was exactly as the priest had related it; and that, from that time, as long as he remained a recluse, which was for a long continuance of years, his face was entirely freed from every trouble of this kind, by the grace of Almighty God; even of Him who has been ever wont to cure many in this life, of bodily infirmities, and in the life to come, of all the sicknesses of soul and body; and who, satisfying our desires with good things, crowns us for ever in His mercy and loving-kindness, Amen.

END OF THE LIFE OF SAINT CUDBERCT.

1 He died therefore in 699 or 700.

2 It was to this Eadfrid that Beda dedicated the present piece of biography.

THE LIVES OF THE BLESSED ABBOTS

BENEDICT, CEOLFRID, EOSTERWINE,

SIGFRID, AND HUUAETBERCT.

§ 1. BISCOP, the religious servant of Christ, surnamed Benedict, assisted by grace from on high, built a monastery in honour of Peter, the most blessed chief of the apostles, near the mouth of the river Wear, on the north side, being aided therein by, and having a gift of land from, Aecgfrid, the venerable and most pious king of that nation, over which monastery Biscop carefully ruled for sixteen years, amid innumerable labours arising from journeyings and sicknesses; and this he did in the same spirit of religion which had induced him to erect it. And if I may be permitted to employ the words of the blessed pope Gregory, in which he extols the life of an abbot who was a namesake, he was a man of a venerable life, blessed equally by grace and name, even from his very youth bearing the head of an aged person; his manners were in advance of his years, and he abandoned his soul to no guilty pleasures." He was descended from a noble family from among the nation of the Angles; and being in no respect inferior in nobility of mind, he was worthy to be exalted for ever into the society of the angels. And further, when he was the minister of king Osuiu,3 and had received from him a possession in land suitable to his rank,-being then of about the age of twenty-five years,-he lightly esteemed this transitory inheritance, in order that he might obtain that which is eternal; he despised the warfare of this world with its corruptible rewards, that he might be the soldier of the true King, and be thought worthy to possess an everlasting kingdom in the heavenly city. He forsook home, kindred, and country for the sake of Christ and his gospel, that he might receive one hundredfold, and possess the life which is eternal; he refused to bring himself in subjection to marriage after the flesh, that being pure in the glory of virginity, he might be enabled to follow the Lamb in the kingdom of heaven; he was unwilling to become the parent of mortal

1 Greg. Dial. ii. 1, Opp. ii. 56.

2 Benedict Biscop, called also Baducing by Fridegode, in his life of Wilfrid, was of noble family, his name occurring in the genealogy of the princes of the Lindisfaras.

3 Osuiu began to reign in 642, and died 15th Feb. 670.

Beda here seems to have had in view the sermon, which he wrote upon this text, "On the nativity of St. Benedict the abbot," a translation of which is appended to this present treatise, p. 620.

children according to the flesh, having been predestinated by Christ to rear, by spiritual instruction, for Him sons who should be eternal in the life which is in heaven.

§ 2. Therefore, having left his country he went to Rome,' being anxious personally to visit and worship at the places in which were deposited even the bodies of the blessed apostles, towards whom it had always been his wont to feel an ardent devotion. Having speedily returned to his own country, he did not desist from carefully loving, and venerating, and proclaiming to all to whom he could address himself, the institutes of ecclesiastical life which he had witnessed. At this time Alchfrid, son of the before-named king Osuiu, having planned a journey to Rome that he might worship at the shrines of the apostles, accepted Benedict as the companion of his journey. But the king, his father, recalling him from this intended expedition, and causing him to reside in his own country and kingdom, Benedict nevertheless, like a youth of a good disposition, immediately put into execution this journey which he had projected, and with the greatest haste returned to Rome during the pontificate of the pope Vitalian of blessed memory, whom we have mentioned above. On this, as on the former occasion, he imbibed the sweets of no small amount of salutary learning; and after some few months, departing from thence, on his return he went to the island of Lirins, where he associated himself with the society of monks there resident, where he received the tonsure, and having taken on himself the discipline which is according to rule and the monastic vow, he kept the same with all due care; and here, after having been instructed for the course of two years in the learning suited for the monastic conversation, he felt himself constrained by the love of the blessed Peter, the chief of the apostles, again to revisit the city consecrated by his body.

§ 3. Not long after this, the arrival of a trading vessel enabled him to gratify his desire. Ecgbercht, king of Kent, had at that time sent out of Britain a person named Uigghard, who had been elected to the office of bishop; he was a person who had been sufficiently instructed in every kind of ecclesiastical institution by the Roman disciples of the blessed pope Gregory, in Kent. It was Ecgbercht's desire that he should be ordained at Rome as his own bishop, so that possessing a bishop of his own nation and language, he himself, and the people who were subject to him, might become the more perfectly instructed in the words and the mysteries of the faith, inasmuch as he would then receive them, not through the medium of an interpreter, but from the tongue and the hands of a kinsman and fellow-countryman. This Uicghard,

1 He left England in the society of Wilfrid, whom he accompanied as far as Lyons (Eccl. Hist. V. xix. § 413). This was in the middle of the year 654, according to Pagi (A.D. 658, § 9), or in the previous year, according to Smith's calculation. 2 See Eccl. Hist. IV. xix. § 416.

3 Florence of Worcester places this in 665, with which Smith agrees.

This his third voyage to Rome was accomplished in 667, or 668, as appears from a comparison of these facts with the incidents mentioned in the Eccl. Hist. III. xxix. and IV. i.

5 See Eccl. Hist. IV. i. § 252.

however, on his arrival at Rome, died, of a disease then spreading, before he had attained to the rank of the pontificate, as also did all his companions who accompanied him. In order that this pious embassy of the faithful should not fail in its due fruits by consequence of the decease of the ambassadors, the apostolic pope, having taken the matter into deliberation, chose one of his own people to send as an archbishop into Britain; Theodore, namely, a person skilled no less in secular than in ecclesiastical philosophy, and this in Greek as well as in Latin; and he assigned to him, as his colleague and counsellor, a man equally energetic and prudent, the abbot Hadrian. And as he had observed that the venerable Benedict was a man of a mind fraught with wisdom, perseverance, religion, and nobleness, to him he entrusted the bishop whom he had ordained, together with all his party; and he enjoined Benedict to abandon the pilgrimage which he had undertaken for Christ's sake, and out of regard to a higher advantage to return homewards and introduce into England that teacher of the truth whom it had so earnestly sought after; to whom he might become no less a guide on the journey than an interpreter in his teaching after his arrival. Benedict did as he was commanded; they arrived in Kent;' they were most cordially received; Theodore ascended the throne of his episcopal see; Benedict undertook the government of the monastery of the blessed Peter the apostle, of which at a later period the aforesaid Hadrian was made the abbot.

§ 4. Here he ruled this monastery for two years, after which he completed, with his usual good success, a third journey which he undertook to Rome, and brought back with him no inconsiderable number of books on every branch of sacred literature; and these he had either bought at a price, or received as presents from his friends. Arriving at Vienne on his homeward journey, he received back the books which he had purchased, and which he had entrusted to their keeping. On his entry into Britain, he thought to have gone to Conuualh, king of the West Saxons, (whose friendship he had more than once experienced, and by whose good services he had been assisted,) but at this very time he was cut off by a premature death; and Benedict, bending his steps to his native people and the district in which he had been born, visited Aecfrid, the king of the region beyond the Humber. To him he recapitulated all his exploits since the time when, in his youth, he had left his home; he did not conceal the desire for a religious life with which he burned; he explained to him the whole of the ecclesiastical and monastic institutions which he had learned either at Rome or elsewhere; he displayed the many divine volumes and the numerous relics of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ; and so intimate was the gracious friendship to which he was admitted, that the king immediately granted him, from his own property, land for seventy families, and commanded him thereon to erect a monastery [to be

1 Theodore arrived in Kent 679.

2 The third journey from Britain, but in reality the fourth to Rome, took place in 671, two years, namely, after the arrival of Theodore at Canterbury. 3 The Saxon Chronicle places the death of Conuualh in 672.

dedicated] to the chief pastor of the church. And this he did, as I mentioned in the prologue,' at the left of the river Wear, in the year 674 from our Lord's incarnation, in the second indiction, and in the fourth year of the reign of king Ecgfrid.

§ 5. After an interval of not more than a single3 year from the foundation of the monastery, Benedict crossed the ocean and passed into Gaul, when he made inquiry for masons who could build him a church of stone after the Roman style, which he always loved. These he obtained, and brought them home with him; and such zeal in the work did he exhibit-out of his love for the blessed Peter, to whose honour he was doing this-that in the course of one year from the time when the foundations were laid, the church was roofed over, and within it you might have witnessed the celebration of masses. When the work was drawing to its completion, he sent messengers to Gaul to bring over glassmakers (a kind of workman hitherto unknown in Britain) to glaze the windows of the church, and its aisles and chancels. And so it happened that when they came they not only accomplished that particular work which was required of them, but from this time they caused the English nation to understand and learn this kind of handicraft, which was of no inconsiderable utility for the enclosing of the lamps of the church, or for various uses to which vessels are put. Moreover this religious trader took care to import from the regions beyond the sea, if he could not find them at home, whatever related to the ministry of the altar and the church, and to holy vessels, and vestments.

§ 6. And since there were some things necessary for the ornament and defence of his church, which this diligent provider could not discover even in Gaul, these he obtained from Rome; and thus completing his fourth journey, (after he had established his monastery according to rule,) he returned laden with a more. abundant supply of spiritual merchandize than hitherto. In the first place, he imported a numberless collection of all kinds of books. Secondly, he introduced an abundant grace of the relics of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ, which were profitable to many a church of the English. Thirdly, he brought in to his own monastery the order of chanting, singing, and ministering in the church, according to the manner of the Roman institution; having

1 See § 1.

2 That is, on the northern bank.

3 Beda here means that only one completed year intervened; for we learn from the anonymous narrative, upon which this present piece of biography is founded, that this event occurred during the second year after the monastery had been founded; therefore in 676, or, perhaps, in 677.

"... ad cancellandas ecclesiæ, porticuumque et coenaculorum ejus fenestras..." are the expressions used in the original. The translation is offered with hesitation. "The Latin term, porticus, which certainly sometimes means a porch, is used by Middle-age authors in various senses, sometimes for a bay of an aisle, especially if fitted up with an altar as a chapel. See Bentham's History of Ely, p. 18, and Archæolog. xiii. 290, 308."-Glossary of Architecture.

5 This expedition (his fourth from England, but really his fifth to Rome) should probably be referred to the year 678, pope Agatho, who is presently mentioned in conjunction with it, having been consecrated in the June or July of that year.