Herewith there stepped on to the stage of English history an actor who was never to be long absent thence through more than forty troublous years. Wilfrid, who was now about thirty years of age, was the son of a Northumbrian thegn, a youth brought up in the rude luxury of a rich Anglian’s hall, with horses, armour and goodly raiment at his disposal; but at the age of fourteen a harsh step-mother in his home, and some instinct of aspiration after a holier life, sent him to Lindisfarne, where he learned much, but gradually became dissatisfied with the Celtic position of isolation from Rome. Queen Eanfled, encouraging his disaffection, assisted him to visit the court of her cousin, Erconbert of Kent, from whence in his twentieth year he set out for Rome. On his way through Gaul the bright and handsome Northumbrian had offers of worldly preferment and a rich marriage from the Archbishop of Lyons, but refusing all such worldly advantages, he pressed on to “the tombs of the apostles”. Though to the reader of the pontifical annals, Rome in the middle of the seventh century, with its Monotheletic controversy and its Lombard wars, may not seem a very inspiring theme, it is clear that the great world-city, with its stately ruins and statelier church-organisation, exerted a powerful fascination over the mind of the young Northumbrian, and during all the rest of his life we find him, like another Loyola, staunch in his resolve to live or die for the defence of the Holy See. He learned from a certain Archdeacon Boniface “the daily lessons from the four gospels, the reasonable mode of calculating Easter, and many other things relating to the discipline of the Church of which he had been ignorant in his own country,” and then returning through Gaul he again visited his friend, the Archbishop of Lyons, and received from him the monastic tonsure. The archbishop was still minded to make him his heir, and apparently with some such expectation Wilfrid remained for three years in attendance upon him. By one of those reverses of fortune to which the courtier-prelates of Merovingian Gaul were frequently subject, Wilfrid’s patron lost both office and life, and Wilfrid himself narrowly, and only on account of his foreign origin, escaped sharing his doom.[72] Returning at last (in 658), after long wanderings, to his native Deira, he there found Alchfrid reigning, a man like-minded with himself in his preference of Rome to Iona. He settled eventually in a monastery at Ripon, from which Eata, friend and pupil of Aidan, had been expelled on account of his adherence to the Celtic usages by the hotly partisan king. Here Wilfrid, a year before the convocation of the synod, had been ordained as priest by Bishop Agilbert and installed as abbot of the monastery, which seems to have been to the end of his days the most dearly loved of his homes.