Ceowulf

Ceowulf is the name of several early Christian characters:.

1. King of Northumbria, from A.D. 729 to 737, is chiefly known from the circumstance of Bede dedicating to him his Ecclesiastical History. In 731 there seems to have been an insurrection in his kingdom, in which Ceowulf was seized and forcibly tonsured, as if to mock his ecclesiastical tastes. In 737 Ceowulf gave up his kingdom and became a monk in Lindisfarne, to which monastery he had been a liberal benefactor. Here he died in 764. After a time his body was removed by bishop Eogred to the Church of Norham, and at a still later period his skull had a conspicuous place among the saintly relics in Durham.

2. The seventh bishop of the Lindisfari, at Sidnacester, who, according to Simeon of Durham, was consecrated April 24, 767. His name appears miswritten "Edeulfus Lindensis Faronensis episcopus," among the attestations of the Legantine Synod of 787, and is very frequently attached to the Mercian chapters from 767 to 796. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle mentions his departure from the land, and death in the year of Offa's death, A.D. 796.