Ceolfrith left behind him at Wearmouth and Jarrow a cohors militum Christi more than 600 hundred strong. The conception of the monks as a regiment of soldiers expresses the contemporary attitude towards the monastic life which Bede, like Honoratus at Lérins centuries earlier, regarded as the constant performance of celestial military service under the discipline imposed by the observance of a regular rule of life. Significantly, in the few short lines in which he writes of his own life, he places the delight which he took in learning, teaching and writing in second place to what he regarded as his prime duties — the observance of the monastic rule and the daily charge of singing in the church. It has often been claimed that Wearmouth and Jarrow were centres of Benedictine monasticism and that from his earliest profession Bede was a Benedictine monk whose life was guided by the Rule compiled by St Benedict of Nursia at Monte Cassino in the earlier part of the sixth century, but contemporary evidence, deriving in part from Bede himself lends no support to this claim.

Describing Benedict Biscop's death in 689 Bede wrote, some 35 years after the event itself: