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Æthelwold of Winchester was born in Winchester to a noble family during the reign of King Edward the Elder, in the first decade of the tenth century. As a young man he served at the court of King Æthelstan, where he came to know other future leaders of the English church, among them Dunstan. He was ordained priest by Bishop Ælfheah of Winchester, according to later tradition on the same day as Dunstan. Drawn to the monastic life then being revived in England, he entered Glastonbury Abbey under Dunstan, became a monk there, and later served as dean. In the mid-tenth century King Eadred granted him the ruined house at Abingdon, which Æthelwold refounded as a Benedictine monastery; as its abbot he gathered monks from Glastonbury and from Continental houses and imposed a strict observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

In 963 King Edgar appointed him Bishop of Winchester, one of the richest and most influential sees in the English kingdom. With royal backing he expelled the secular clergy from the Old Minster and the New Minster at Winchester and installed Benedictine monks in their place, a decisive act in the tenth-century English monastic reform. He likewise reformed or refounded other communities, including Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney, endowing them with estates and binding them to Benedictine custom. Together with Dunstan and Oswald of Worcester he was a principal figure behind the Regularis Concordia, the customary drawn up at Winchester in the later tenth century to unify English monastic practice and to link the monasteries closely to the West Saxon monarchy.

Æthelwold was also a scholar and a notable patron of learning, liturgy, and the visual arts. He produced or commissioned an Old English translation of the Rule of Saint Benedict for his monks, and the scriptorium associated with his episcopate developed the so-called Winchester style of illumination, of which the Benedictional made for him is the outstanding surviving example. He took a close interest in church building, liturgical observance, and the education of the young, and contemporary writers, especially his pupil Wulfstan of Winchester, depicted him as an austere and energetic reformer who inspired both fear and devoted loyalty.

He died on 1 August 984 at Beddington in Surrey while travelling in the course of his duties. His body was brought to Winchester and buried in the Old Minster. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and in 996 Bishop Ælfheah translated the remains to a more prominent shrine in the choir. A cult developed in late Anglo-Saxon England, and he was commemorated as a saint, with his principal feast on 1 August. With Dunstan and Oswald he is remembered as one of the three leaders of the tenth-century Benedictine reform in England.

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