Ceolfrith was a Northumbrian nobleman who entered religious life at age eighteen at the abbey of Gilling. He travelled to Canterbury under Theodore of Tarsus, then to Ripon under Wilfrid, before joining Benedict Biscop in founding the twin monastery of Wearmouth (674) and Jarrow (681).
On Benedict Biscop's death in 690, Ceolfrith succeeded as abbot of both houses. For twenty-six years he governed the foundational Anglo-Saxon scriptorium that produced — among many works — the Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Vulgate Bible in existence and the single most important monument of pre-Carolingian biblical scholarship.
Ceolfrith commissioned three great pandect Bibles at Wearmouth-Jarrow (one for each church, one for the pope); the surviving Codex Amiatinus, now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, is the third — the papal copy that Ceolfrith himself was personally carrying to Rome as a gift to Pope Gregory II when he died at Langres on September 25, 716.
His pupil Bede — who had entered Wearmouth at age seven and remained there for life — recorded Ceolfrith's life in his Historia Abbatum and Vita Ceolfridi. The Codex Amiatinus eventually reached Italy (though Ceolfrith never did), survived the medieval centuries at Monte Amiata Abbey, and is today the foundational textual witness of the Latin Vulgate.