Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury and first bishop of Sherborne, was probably considered by his contemporaries the greatest scholar of his age. Like so many of the great ecclesiastics of this period, Aldhelm was of noble birth, a kinsman, said some, of King Ine himself. Trained in the monastic school of Hadrian at Canterbury he imbibed from his Italian instructors a large amount of classical learning, but not that purity of taste which caused his younger contemporary Bede to use his learning with discretion. Whatever may have been his literary failings, there was a fascination about his personal presence and an earnestness in his religious character which won for him a large number of loyal disciples, enabled him to develop the little community gathered by an Irish saint into the famous monastery of Malmesbury, and made him the literary apostle of Wessex. According to his great panegyrist, William of Malmesbury, he combined in his style the excellencies of various nations. Some fastidious readers in the twelfth century found his works heavy reading. “Unreasonable judges are they,” said William, “who do not know that every nation has its own different style of writing. For the Greeks write in an involved style, the Latins in a guarded one, the Gauls write with splendour, the English with pomp.... But if you will carefully read Aldhelm’s writings you will think him a Greek by the acuteness of his intellect, a Roman by his brilliancy, and an Englishman by his pomp.” The “pomposity,” or in other words, the turgidity of his style has been found quite intolerable by later scholars, but was probably considered an enviable gift by his countrymen, only just emerged from barbarism. At any rate even to the pompous and somewhat pedantic churchman much may be pardoned in consideration of the charming anecdote, related on the authority of King Alfred, that Aldhelm in his younger days seeing the “semi-barbarous” people accustomed, as soon as Mass was finished, to stream away to their houses without listening to the words of the preacher, took his station on the bridge by which they needs must pass and there sang merry ballads of his own composition, till he had gained the ear of the hurrying crowd, after which he changed his tune, gradually interwove with his song the words of Scripture, began to speak to them of serious things, and, in short, won back to sanity and devotion the citizens whom he might vainly have endeavoured to coerce by the terrors of excommunication. Aldhelm was chosen Bishop of Sherborne in 705 and died in 709.