Aldhelm was educated at the Canterbury school founded by Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian, then at the Irish monastery of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He became abbot of Malmesbury around 675 and bishop of Sherborne in 705 — combining both offices for the last four years of his life.
He was the first major English-born Latin poet. His prose treatise De Virginitate, his metrical De Virginitate (the same work in dactylic hexameter), his Aenigmata (hundred riddles in Latin verse), and his letters — all written before 700 — display a baroque Latinity of extraordinary range, drawing on classical, biblical, and Hisperic sources. He was also, by Bede's account, a singer of vernacular Old English songs in the marketplaces of Wessex, drawing the crowd's attention so as to slip Christian content into them.
He died on May 25, 709 at Doulting; his body was carried sixty miles in procession back to Malmesbury, every fifteen miles marked by a stone cross at the spot where his bearers rested. The Malmesbury Abbey he founded survives in part to this day.