CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 4
AFTER two years in charge of the monastery he left Britain for Rome, this being the third time,2 and completed the journey as successfully as before. He brought back a large number of books on all branches of sacred knowledge, some bought at a favourable price, others the gifts of well-wishers. At Vienne on the journey home he picked up the books he had left there in the care of his friends. When he reached Britain he thought he might pay a visit to Cenwalh, king of the West Saxons, whose friendship he had enjoyed and by whose kindness he had been helped on more than one occasion. At that very time, however, Cenwalh was carried off by a sudden and early death;3 so Benedict went back to his own people and, turning his steps to his own birthplace, visited Egfrid, King of Northumbria. He told the king all he had done since leaving home as a young man; he revealed his ambition to build up monastic life in the area and he expounded all he had learnt of church and monastic life, both at Rome and everywhere else; and he told him how many sacred books and holy relics of the blessed apostles and martyrs he had brought back. Egfrid took to Benedict so warmly that he immediately gave him from his personal property an area of land comprising seventy hides1 and ordered him to build a monastery there in honour of St Peter, the chief pastor of the church. The monastery was built, as I mentioned at the beginning, on the north bank at the mouth of the Wear, in the year of Our Lord six hundred and seventy-four, in the second indiction and in the fourth year of King Egfrid’s reign.