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When this youth, as highly endowed with sacred learning as he was with selfcontrol and integrity, reached the twentieth year of his age he felt an urge to pursue a more rigorous mode of life and was stirred with a desire to travel abroad. And because he had heard that schools and learning flourished in Ireland,³ he was encoutaged further by what he was told of the manner of life adopted there by certain holy men, particularly by the blessed [6] bishop Ecgbert,¹ to whom was given the title of Saint, and by Wichtberct,²  the venerable servant and priest of God, both of whom, for love of Christ, forsook home, fatherland and family and retired to Ireland, where, cut off from the world though close to God, they lived as solitaries enjoying the blessings of heavenly contemplation. The blessed youth wished to imitate the godly life of these men and, after obtaining the consent of his abbot and brethren, hastened quickly across the sea to join the intimate circle of the said fathers, so that by contact with them he might atain the same degree of holiness and possess the same virtues, much as a bee sucks honey from the fiowers and stores it up in its honeycomb. There among these masters, eminent both for sanctity and sacred learning, he who was one day to preach to many peoples was trained for twelve years, until he reached the mature age of manhood and the full age of Christ.