Let us programme our time machine to appear in Kent in the year 653. We want to meet a young man named Biscop before he sets off on his travels. Given that Biscop was a Northumbrian, Kent might seem a strange location but we know that Biscop was there in 653.

Biscop was about 25 years old. He came from a family of Northumbrian nobility, the Baducinga according to Stephen of Ripon. Nobility at the time was mainly a measure of ability with weapons and utility to the king. In one sense, these men were not dissimilar from the enforcers of a Mafia capo. But while they shared with gangsters a propensity for ultra-violence, the warriors of early-medieval Britain were different in an important respect: they were poet warriors. The culture of the mead hall demanded of them a facility and appreciation of words that you won’t find among mafiosi or narcos (transcripts of their conversations reveal a level of verbal banality that would make reality-TV viewers blanch).

This is a characteristic often shared among martial cultures. Woven through the violence is a thread of exquisite, often delicate, beauty. It’s there in the lament of the exiled Wanderer, one of the few Anglo-Saxon poems to have survived. It’s there in the jewelled intricacy of the sword hilts uncovered in Staffordshire and the glitter of garnets in the buckle discovered at Sutton Hoo.

It’s likely that that love of words was even more pronounced in the young Biscop than it was among his fellow gesith, the men who made up King Oswiu’s warband. For the young Biscop, having been one of the king’s men, decided to give up the life of arms, the company of his kin and his warrior brethren, and go on pilgrimage to Rome.