Wilfrid was educated at Lindisfarne but as a young man traveled to Rome and Lyon, returning a passionate advocate for Roman over Celtic Christian custom. At the Synod of Whitby in 664 he argued the Roman case for the dating of Easter; his eloquence carried the day for the Roman computation against the Irish.
Made bishop of York shortly afterward, he had several stormy quarrels with successive kings and archbishops of Canterbury — was expelled from his see three times and twice traveled to Rome to appeal his case before the pope, becoming one of the first English bishops to make extensive use of the Roman court of appeal.
Despite the turmoil, his contributions were vast. He built great stone churches at Ripon and Hexham — the latter, until the Reformation, the largest north of the Alps. He introduced the Rule of Benedict to northern England, displacing the older Irish monastic customs. He sent the first English mission to Frisia in 678, beginning the Anglo-Saxon evangelization of the Germanic continent that would culminate in Boniface.
He died at Oundle returning from a journey to Rome in 709 — the last and stormiest of the great seventh-century English bishops. Bede's biographer Eddius Stephanus wrote his Vita, one of the most extensive surviving Anglo-Saxon biographies.