OF THE VENERABLE BEDE

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

BOOK FOUR

CHAP. I

How, after the death of Deusdedit, Wighard was sent to Rome to receive the bishopric; but he having died there, Theodore was ordained archbishop and sent to Britain with the Abbot Hadrian.

In the year mentioned of the aforementioned eclipse and the plague that soon followed, in which Bishop Colman, having been overcome by the unanimous intention of the catholics, returned to his own people, Deusdedit, the sixth bishop of the church of Canterbury, died on the fourteenth of July original: "pridie Iduum Iuliarum"; and Erconberht, king of the Kentish, died in the same month and on the same day, leaving the seat of the kingdom to his son Ecgberht, which he held for nine years after receiving it. Then, the bishopric having been vacant for quite some time, Wighard the priest, a man most learned in ecclesiastical disciplines and of the English race, was sent to Rome by him and by Oswiu, king of the Northumbrians, as we said briefly in the previous book, requesting that he be ordained archbishop of the English church; gifts were sent along with him

¹ July 664 until May 669, when Theodore reached Canterbury.