Wulstan was born at Long Itchington, a village in Warwickshire, in the time of Ethelred the Unready. He was the son of the Thane Athelstan, and was educated in the monasteries of Evesham and Peterborough. When he had been trained in such learning as these could afford, he came home for a few years, and entered into the sports and occupations of the noble youths of the time, without parting with the piety and purity of his conventual life, and steadily resisting temptation. His parents were grown old, and having become impoverished, perhaps by the exactions perpetrated either by the Danes, or to bribe them away, retired from the world, and entered convents at Worcester. Wulstan, wishing to devote himself to the Church, sought the service of the Bishop, who ordained him to the priesthood. He lived, though a secular priest, with monastic strictness, and in time obtained permission from the Bishop to become a monk in the convent, where he continued for twenty-five years, and at length became Prior of the Convent. The Prior was the person next in office to the Abbot, and governed the monastery in his absence; and in some religious orders, where there was no Abbot, the Prior was the superior. Wulstan’s habits in the convent show us what the devotional life of that time was. Each day he bent the knee at each verse of the seven Penitential Psalms, and the same at the 119th Psalm at night. He would lock himself into the church, and pray aloud with tears and cries, and at night he would often retire into some solitary spot, the graveyard, or lonely village church, to pray and meditate. His bed was the church floor, or a narrow board, and stern were his habits of fasting and mortification; but all the time he was full of activity in the cause of the poor, and, finishing his devotions early in the morning, gave up the whole day to attend to the common people, sitting at the church door to listen to, and redress, as far as in him lay, the grievances that they brought him--at any rate, to console and advise. The rude, secular country clergy, at that time, it may be feared, a corrupt, untaught race, had in great measure ceased to instruct or exhort their flocks, and even refund baptism without payment. He did his best to remedy these abuses, and from all parts of the country children were brought to the good Prior for baptism. Every Sunday, too, he preached, and the Worcestershire people flocked from all sides to hear his plain, forcible language, though he never failed to rebuke them sharply for their most prevalent sins. The fame of the holy Prior of Worcester began to spread, and on one occasion Earl Harold himself came thirty miles out of his way to confess his sins to him and desire his prayers.