Ceolfrid of Wearmouth

Origins and early life

Ceolfrid was born about 642, of a noble Northumbrian family. At eighteen, the anonymous Life relates, he entered the monastery of Gilling in Yorkshire, a house then ruled by his own brother Cynefrid; when Cynefrid departed for Ireland to give himself to the study of the Scriptures, their kinsman Tunbert succeeded him, and afterwards Tunbert, Ceolfrid and a company of the brethren removed at the invitation of Wilfrid to his monastery at Ripon. There Ceolfrid was ordained priest by Wilfrid at about the age of twenty-seven. Eager to master monastic and liturgical practice, he travelled to Kent, and into East Anglia to see the observance of Botolph at Icanho — a man, the Life says, of unparalleled life and learning and full of the grace of the Holy Spirit — and came home so instructed that no one could be found more learned than he in ecclesiastical or monastic usage. Nor did learning make him proud: while a priest at Ripon he took his turn at the humblest offices, serving as the monastery's baker, sifting the flour and firing the oven with his own hands.

Prior of Wearmouth, abbot of Jarrow

When Benedict Biscop founded his monastery of St Peter at the mouth of the Wear (674), he asked Wilfrid for Ceolfrid, and made him prior of the new house. The zeal of his discipline provoked the resentment of certain well-born brethren who could not bear his correction, and for a time he withdrew back to Ripon; Benedict recalled him, and thereafter the two men worked as one — Ceolfrid accompanied Benedict to Rome on the journey from which the monastery's first great store of books was brought.

When King Ecgfrith enlarged his grant and Benedict founded the sister monastery of St Paul at Jarrow (681/2), he set Ceolfrid over it as abbot, with twenty-two brethren from Wearmouth. The dedication inscription of the church, still preserved at Jarrow, dates its consecration to 23 April 685, "in the fifteenth year of King Ecgfrith and the fourth of Ceolfrid the abbot." In the pestilence of about 686 the plague swept the young community so bare that, as the anonymous Life records, no one at Jarrow could sing the antiphons except the abbot himself and one small boy reared under his care; for a week they attempted the psalmody without antiphons, and then, unable to bear the bareness of the office, the two of them restored the full chant alone until the community could be rebuilt. The boy is not named in the Life, but readers ancient and modern have recognised in him the young Bede, who had entered the monastery at the age of seven and passed his whole life there under Benedict and then Ceolfrid.

Abbot of the united monastery

Before his death (689) Benedict Biscop appointed Ceolfrid abbot over both houses, to be governed as one monastery in two places. He ruled, by Bede's reckoning, twenty-eight years in all. Under him, Bede writes, the twin monastery flourished in everything: he doubled the library that he and Benedict had gathered; obtained for the monastery a papal privilege of protection from Pope Sergius, as Benedict had from Agatho; increased the offerings of church plate and vestments; and the community grew until the two houses together numbered some six hundred brethren. His learning had a public reach: when Nechtan, king of the Picts, sought guidance on the reckoning of Pascha and the form of the tonsure, it was to Ceolfrid that he sent, and the long letter returned in the abbot's name — preserved entire by Bede in the Ecclesiastical History — helped bring the Pictish church into step with the universal paschal observance.

The Codex Amiatinus

Among the works of his abbacy one has proved imperishable. Ceolfrid had brought from Rome a pandect — a complete Bible in a single volume — of the old translation; he commissioned his scriptorium to produce three new pandects of St Jerome's Vulgate text, one for each of the two churches, and the third destined as his gift to the shrine of St Peter in Rome. The two house copies survive only in fragments, but the Roman pandect — carried with him on his last journey and delivered by his companions after his death — survives whole: it is the Codex Amiatinus, now in the Laurentian Library at Florence, the oldest complete one-volume Latin Bible in existence. Nineteenth-century scholarship restored its altered dedication verses to their original reading, which names "Ceolfridus, abbot from the farthest bounds of the English," and so returned the greatest surviving monument of Northumbrian book-craft to its maker.

Last journey and repose

In 716, old and worn, Ceolfrid resolved to end his days as a pilgrim at the tombs of the apostles, judging also that his monasteries would be better served by a younger ruler. The anonymous Life gives one of the most moving scenes in early English literature: on the morning of Thursday, June 4, 716, after Mass in St Peter's at Wearmouth, the old abbot, censer in hand, gave the kiss of peace to his weeping brethren, and was accompanied with psalms — interrupted by the sobbing of the community — down to the river, where he kissed each one, and sailed. The brethren elected Hwaetberht abbot in his place, and their letter announcing the election overtook and pleased him. He travelled through Gaul with a company of some eighty men, sick and weakening, yet keeping the daily round of psalmody to the end; he reached Langres in Burgundy and there reposed on September 25, 716, aged seventy-four — forty-seven years a priest, thirty-five years an abbot. He was buried at Langres in the church of the Three Twin Martyrs; part of his company remained by his tomb, part turned home, and part went on to Rome to deliver the great Bible, for which Pope Gregory II sent back a letter of thanks that the anonymous Life preserves.