The future King Edgar had been taught from boyhood by Æthelwold, who evidently inspired his pupil to take an interest in the rule of Saint Benedict.

Between 964 and 971, Æthelwold refounded monasteries at Chertsey, Milton Abbas, Peterborough, Ely and Thorney, and the Nunnaminster nunnery in Winchester.

He was also zealous in recovering land which he believed had once belonged to religious communities and subsequently been alienated, and if necessary charters were forged to prove claims to title.

[6] Æthelwold was one of the principal advocates for the Benedictine reform movement during Edgar's reign, the author of all the major works of propaganda produced in England.

[6] Æthelwold links the terms 'filth' and 'clergy' several times in his writings, regarding them (like other Benedictines) as impure and unfit to serve altars or engage in any form of divine service, because many of them were married and they did not follow a monastic rule.

[12] To Æthelwold's admirers, the epithets "father of monks" and "benevolent bishop" summarize his character as reformer and friend of Christ's poor;[13] though he suffered much from ill-health, his life as scholar, teacher, prelate and Royal counsellor was ever austere, and he was said to be "terrible as a lion" to the rebellious, yet "gentler than a dove" to the meek.

Æthelwold personally taught the older pupils at Winchester, and their works show that they regarded him with great respect and affection.

[6] Some of the wealth he accumulated was used to rebuild churches, and he was also a major patron of ecclesiastical art, although unfortunately none of his works survive, and only written accounts remain.

While his later, disreputable successor at Abingdon Spearhafoc clearly was, like Dunstan, a significant artist, that Wulfstan's contemporary Life of Æthelwold mentions him undertaking other forms of manual work, in the gardens and in building, but nothing about metalwork, suggests this legend was a later elaboration, though one that shows the high status of goldsmithing at the time.

[14] He was buried in the crypt of the Old Minster at Winchester, but twelve years later Ælfhelm, a citizen of Wallingford, claimed to have been cured of blindness by visiting Æthelwold's tomb.

Wulfstan's saint is a formidable authoritarian, who, for instance, commands a monk to show his devotion by plunging his hand into a pot of boiling stew.