The monastery of St Peter and St Paul
Monastery · 674, the second indiction and the fourth year of King Egfrid · Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey
Benedict Biscop built St Peter’s at the mouth of the Wear on seventy hides King Egfrid gave him, and after a further grant of forty hides built St Paul’s at Jarrow — on the express condition, Bede says, that no man should ever try to divide the two, which were united under the names of the first of the apostles. Bede calls the result a single monastery in two separate localities, and he should know: he was given to it at seven and stayed until he died. Its abbots brought back masons, glaziers and a chanter from Gaul and Rome, and the library Benedict began and Ceolfrith doubled is what made the Ecclesiastical History possible.
The year is the source’s own.
Who
- Benedict Biscop Founder · 674–690 · Bede’s own account: Biscop, called Benedict, minister to King Oswy, gave up his estate at twenty-five, went six times to Rome, and built the house on land Egfrid granted him, ruling it sixteen years amid innumerable perils in journeying and in illness. He fetched masons from Gaul to build in the Roman style and glaziers who were then unknown in Britain, and the books and pictures he carried back are the beginning of the library Bede grew up in.
- Ceolfrith Head · Benedict’s most zealous assistant from the first foundation, and the man he made abbot of the new house at Jarrow. Bede: he founded, completed and ruled St Paul’s seven years, and afterwards governed both monasteries — or more correctly the single monastery in its two localities — for twenty-eight, doubling the library his predecessor had begun. He set out for Rome in 716 with the great Bible now called the Codex Amiatinus and died on the road.
Where
- Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey the site; this page is the community that sat on it
Other monasteries
- Monte Cassino about 529 (Gardner, 1911 — not Gregory) · Abbey of Monte Cassino
- Clonmacnoise 547 · Clonmacnoise
- Iona 565 · Iona
- Lindisfarne 635 (the edition’s margin; Bede does not date it) · Lindisfarne
- Streaneshalch two years after Bede’s own 655 · Whitby Abbey
- Bercingum before 674, the edition’s date for Earconwald’s consecration · Barking Abbey
- Kellia no year is recorded · Kellia
- The Monastery of the Caves no year is recorded · Kyiv Pechersk Lavra
- Nitria no year is recorded · Nitria
- Sublacum no year is recorded · Subiaco
After Lives of the Holy Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Historia Abbatum) · Lives of the Holy Abbots, p. 352.