From Warrior to Monk
Benedict began his career as a thegn, a noble warrior, in the service of King Oswiu of Bernicia, who reigned from 642 to 670. About the age of twenty-five, around 653, he made his first journey to Rome in the company of Saint Wilfrid; Wilfrid was detained at Lyon, but Benedict continued on to Rome alone.
Twelve years later he undertook a second Roman pilgrimage. Returning by way of Lérins Abbey in Provence, he spent two years there, from 665 to 667, studying monastic traditions and formally taking monastic vows, adopting the religious name Benedict. Pope Vitalian then commissioned him to accompany Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus to Canterbury in 669, and Theodore appointed him Abbot of the monastery of SS. Peter and Paul (later St Augustine's Abbey) at Canterbury for two years.
Founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow
In 674 King Ecgfrith of Northumbria granted Benedict land on which to build the monastery of St Peter at Monkwearmouth. It was among the first stone ecclesiastical buildings raised in an English kingdom and was notable for its glass windows. Because England lacked skilled craftsmen, Benedict recruited masons and glaziers from Francia, who established a glassworking workshop near the River Wear. A papal letter of 678 exempted the monastery from external control.
In 682 Ecgfrith granted further land at Jarrow, where Benedict founded a sister house dedicated to St Paul, sending Ceolfrid there as superior with twenty monks; the church was established there in 685. Benedict directed that the two sites should function as a single monastery in two places, a dual-house model that endured for roughly two hundred years. In 685 the king granted lands south of the River Wear, territory whose name, meaning 'sundered land,' eventually gave rise to the name Sunderland.
Books, Learning, and Liturgy
Known as 'the Bibliophile,' Benedict devoted much of his travel to acquiring books. Over five overseas voyages he gathered approximately 250 titles — service books together with scriptural, classical, and secular works — from Rome and from Lérins. His final journey to Rome, in 679, brought back manuscripts, relics, craftsmen, and papal privileges.
To establish Roman liturgical practice he engaged Abbot John, the arch-cantor of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, to teach Roman chant and plainsong at both monasteries. He also drew up a monastic rule that synthesised the teaching of Saint Benedict with customs he had observed at seventeen monasteries during his travels.
Legacy
The library of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, housing several hundred volumes, achieved international renown, and manuscripts copied there were prized across Europe. Among them was the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving complete manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible. Benedict's most famous pupil was the Venerable Bede.
Benedict is credited as a patron of English Benedictines, musicians, and painters, and since 24 March 2004 he has been recognised as a patron of the City of Sunderland.
Relics & Shrines
Bede's Homily 17 attests an early public cult of Benedict. His relics were later translated to Thorney Abbey under Ethelwold around 980; Glastonbury Abbey also claimed to hold his relics.
