Bede himself relates that when he was seven years of age the care of his education was committed by his relatives to the Abbot Benedict and afterward to the Abbot Ceolfrid. He adds that from that date to the time at which he prepared the accompanying list of his works he had spent his days in the same place. His existence was passed in meditating upon the Holy Scriptures; and he “found it sweet,” in the midst of his observance of the conventual discipline and daily chanting in the church, “either to learn, or to teach, or to write.” The choice of this word “sweet” (_dulce_) is significant, for no man could more carefully have mingled the sweet with the useful. A gentle spirit breathes across his studious pages, as over the rough beards of the yellow grain a breeze moves and sways them, harsh though they are, in graceful waves. For he loved learning with a perfect avidity. His works reveal his desire to accumulate it—to teach it again in plain and simple fashions—and this benevolent desire redeems many a tedious discourse. This life of his was devoid of personal incident. He includes nothing of his individual history in the little notices which he makes of contemporary events, and he is singularly silent even about the affairs of which we should think he would naturally speak. The light which we get upon his surroundings and circumstances we must, therefore, derive from other sources, but fortunately these are at hand. We know, for example, that Benedict Biscop, who founded those twin monasteries in which Bede dwelled all his life, was himself a remarkable person. He was of noble birth, and gave up place and ambition in the court of the king to proceed to Rome, there to be trained as a monk, and then to return and found Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 682. To the second of these religious establishments, situated upon the Tyne, Bede was transferred under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and there thenceforth he remained. We are even able to determine his usual food as a school-boy, for, says his latest biographer, Rev. G. F. Browne, “we have a colloquy in which a boy is made to describe his daily food in his monastery. He had worts (_i.e._, kitchen herbs), fish, cheese, butter, beans, and flesh meats. He drank ale when he could get it, and water when he could not; wine was too dear.” There is, indeed, in these Saxon monasteries the honest and hearty food which belonged to their age and people. Cedric the Saxon, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of _Ivanhoe_, represents very fairly the popular feeling on the subject. Chaucer, too, can be quoted upon this same profusion and the generosity of the time. Of the Franklin he says: “It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”