Saint Bede the Venerable (ad 672– or 673–735) was born in Jarrow, in the kingdom of Northumbria. He entered the Monastery of St. Peter in nearby Wearmouth at the age of seven. At nineteen, he was ordained a deacon; at thirty, a priest. Like other monastics of his time, Bede wrote in Latin. He traveled very little, but his fame spread throughout Europe due to his writings on subjects as varied as history, poetry, grammar, mathematics, science, the scriptures, and lives of the saints. Bede's histories make fascinating reading not only for the light that they shed on the distant Anglo-Saxon past but also for their engaging accounts of miraculous and legendary events. In his histories, Bede introduced the practice of dating events from the birth of Christ (i.e., from ad 0, where ad is an abbreviation for the Latin Anno Domini, meaning "the year of our Lord"). This method of dating was adopted throughout Europe and is still in use today. Bede was canonized (made a saint of the Roman Catholic Church) in 1899, eleven hundred years after his death.