Few individuals so dominate the study of a period of history that they end up giving their name to the whole era. When this does happen, often it is a monarch (“the Age of Alfred”), a politician (“the FDR era”), or the founder of a religion (“the time of Muhammad”). However, Britain in the seventh and eighth centuries has come to be synonymous with a bookish monk, who lived a cloistered life in a monastery in the north-east corner of what is now England.
This, we are told, was the Age of Bede. It is so called not because Bede dominated the politics of his day, but because he himself wrote its history, not only recording events that would otherwise have been forgotten, but also shaping and framing these events into a compelling narrative. It is said far too often that “history is written by the winners.” The truth is that history is written by those who can be bothered to write it. Bede was by no means the only major author to emerge from the first centuries of English Christianity – the poet Aldhelm was arguably just as influential in his own way. Nor was he the first Englishman to record events and personalities, since the Lives of Gregory, Cuthbert, and Wilfrid were all written in the first decades of the eighth century. But he was the first, and remains one of the greatest, to write historia.
Bede’s Life
Venerable Bede in an illustrated manuscript – Engelberg, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. 47 fol. 1v
Most of what we know about the life of Bede himself (or Bæda in his own Old Northumbrian language) is found in the epilogue of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (hereafter Ecclesiastical History):
I was born in the territory of this monastery [Wearmouth-Jarrow, near modern Sunderland]. When I was seven years of age I was, by the care of my kinsmen, put into the charge of the reverend Abbot Benedict and then of Ceolfrith, to be educated. From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write.
He goes on to tell us that he was ordained deacon at 19, priest at 30, and that at the time of the writing of the Ecclesiastical History he was 59. We know that the Ecclesiastical History was published in 731 (though he likely started working on it in c. 715), which means he was born either in 672 or 673.
Our other principal source for Bede’s life is, in fact, chiefly about his death. One of Bede’s pupils, Cuthbert (not to be confused with St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne), wrote a letter giving a vivid and moving account of the scholar’s last days before his death on 26 May (Ascension Day) 735. It is here we learn that, in addition to his copious Latin writings, Bede also worked in the English vernacular – apparently, one of his last works was a translation of the Gospel of John, which sadly has not survived. Cuthbert does preserve the short, striking Old English poem known as “Bede’s Death Song”:
“Fore thaem neidfaerae | naenig uuiurthit thoncsnotturra, | than him tharf sie to ymbhycggannae | aer his hiniongae huaet his gastae | godaes aeththa yflaes aefter deothdaege | doemid uueorthae.”
Facing that necessary journey, no one can be wiser than he needs to be if he considers – before his going hence – what of good or evil his spirit should be judged after his deathday.
Beyond these two sources, there is little concrete that can be said about Bede’s life. He would have survived a disastrous outbreak of plague, which devastated the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow when he was very young. He would also have been there to see the dedication of Jarrow Abbey on 23 April 685 – a contemporary stone plaque commemorating this event still survives in St Paul’s Church in Jarrow as a striking physical link to the abbey’s golden years. We also know that his claim to have spent his whole life at the monastery should not be taken literally, since he certainly visited Lindisfarne and possibly York. Moreover, in the early days of English Christianity – before there was such a thing as a parish church – it was expected that priests would go out from centralised monastic communities (known by historians as minsters) to preach and administer the sacraments to lay people.
There is no reason to think Bede would not have undertaken these duties. In one letter he complains that he was “irritated to the limit of what is permissible … when every day I am asked by rustici (i.e. lay country people) how many years are left in the final millennium of the world,” suggesting that he was regularly interacting with people outside the monastic community.
The Reliability of Bede
Page from Historia Ecclesiastica – British Library MS Add. 38817 fol. 6
Bede would have gathered accounts from all sorts of people, perhaps even including these “rustics,” when he came to research his magnum opus. In a preface to the Ecclesiastical History, addressed to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, he outlined his major sources for happenings outside his own kingdom. He makes special mention of Abbot Albinus of SS Peter and Paul in Canterbury, successor and student of the North African abbot Hadrian; and of a London priest named Nothhelm (Archbishop of Canterbury from 735), who travelled to Rome and brought back the papal letters that Bede made great use of in the middle section of the Ecclesiastical History. He is careful to list sources – all high ecclesiastical figures – for all the other kingdoms of early medieval England. When it comes to Northumbria, however, the sources are too many to name – “apart from those matters of which I had personal knowledge, I have learned not from any one source but from the faithful testimony of innumerable witnesses, who either knew or remember these things.”
The reliability of Bede is one of the central questions for historians of seventh- and eighth-century England. It is undeniable that Bede’s account is very much a churchman’s view – not only because of his own perspective but because most of his informants were abbots and bishops of a similar bent. It is also inevitably the case that Bede is less reliable about earlier events. For the first half of Book One, he is largely reliant on earlier authors, including Orosius, Gildas, and Constantius’ Life of St Germanus. His account in the second half of Book One of the mission sponsored by Pope Gregory the Great is skewed both by his sources (papal letters and the reports of Canterbury clergy who traced their church’s origin to the first Italian missionaries) and his own desire to give Gregory the starring role – any part played by the native Britons in the conversion of the English is left out and Frankish involvement is minimised.
That said, Bede is generous in his account of the contribution of Irish missionaries, given that figures such as St Aidan came from the monastery of Iona which was on (in Bede’s view) the “wrong” side of the controversy over the dating of Easter. Indeed, for the most part, Bede tends to smooth over conflicts and irregularities in the early English Church. The often vicious conflict between Archbishop Theodore and Bishop Wilfrid, which is recorded with great relish in Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Wilfrid, is greatly downplayed in Bede’s telling. Bede’s account of Wilfrid more generally has been the topic of much scholarly debate, especially since Walter Goffart argued that Bede’s principal agenda in the Ecclesiastical History was a subtle polemic against Wilfrid and his vision of the English church (an argument that most subsequent historians would agree is overly rigid but not without some truth).
Of course, all historians write with bias, just as all humans think and speak with bias, consciously or unconsciously. There is relatively little in the Ecclesiastical History that can be outright disproven either by other written sources or by archaeology (especially once we leave aside the early section where he does at times transmit errors from previous authors, such as the pseudo-historical story of the conversion of the second-century British king “Lucius” recorded in the Liber Pontificalis). There are times where another source offers a different account, forcing us either to choose between them or to create a synthesis – for example, where Bede seems to conflict with Adomnán in his account of the Irish founder of Iona, St Columba. The greater problem is that very often Bede is our only narrative source for events in Britain in the seventh and early eighth centuries – it is Bede’s way (with Bede’s bias and selectivity) or nothing at all.
“The New Bede”
Depiction of the Venerable Bede from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
The place of miracles in Bede’s narrative is one that troubles some modern readers, although it is surely not for us to judge Bede for his belief in the miraculous – a belief which Eoghan Ahern has recently shown was not in miracles as “contraventions of natural laws” but as “divine signs,” part of God’s ongoing post-biblical communication with mankind that included both natural and supernatural events. We can either “read around” the miracles or (better) understand them as an integral part of his understanding of history as something laden with theological significance. Bede was not jotting down a series of disconnected events in the manner of a chronicler. Everything he records is a “sign” pointing the reader to God’s work in shaping the story of the English for the divine purpose of salvation.
This leads us to one of the most important things we need to understand about Bede, which is that he was a biblical exegete first, and a historian second. As he writes in the passage quoted above, he “applied [himself] entirely to the study of Scriptures.” In the past, scholars made too sharp a distinction between these two parts of Bede’s oeuvre – Bede the historian was a rational, sober recorder of events in the nineteenth-century style, his predilection for miracle stories notwithstanding. However, in the last few decades, interest in Bede’s exegetical and other writings has been renewed. English translations of most of Bede’s biblical commentaries have been published, allowing non-Latinists to access these texts, which were not only important in Bede’s own lifetime but formed a crucial part of Western biblical interpretation until at least the thirteenth century.
Historians working with these texts have drawn attention to Bede’s agenda for church reform and renewal, particularly in commentaries written from the 720s onwards, which in turn sheds light on the Ecclesiastical History. Was it written not only as a celebration of the English church’s past, but as a warning and a corrective for the errors of the present? As with Goffart’s claim about Bede’s anti-Wilfrid bias, it is likely that this was not all Bede was trying to achieve with his history. Bede’s purposes were as many and varied as Bede’s interests, shifting and changing as the process of writing went on. The job of sorting out what Bede was trying to say is not only a rewarding study in its own right – it is vital for assessing the credibility of his account of the English past.
SamuelCardwell is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham. He completed a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, writing on the development of ideas of evangelization in early medieval Europe. He has published articles in journals including Anglo-Saxon England, The Journal of Medieval History and Parergon. This article was first published in the The Medieval Magazine.
Further Readings
Colgrave, Bertram, and R. A. B. Mynors, editors and translators. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Clarendon Press, 1969.
Ahern, Eoghan. “Bede’s Miracles Reconsidered.” Early Medieval Europe, vol. 26, no. 3, 2018, pp. 282–303.
A previously unrecognised manuscript fragment from Bede's monastery, with part of a commentary on Matthew's gospel which has never previously been studied – my article in Early Medieval Europe has just been published in Open Access.https://t.co/v85bDS19tL
By Samuel Cardwell
Few individuals so dominate the study of a period of history that they end up giving their name to the whole era. When this does happen, often it is a monarch (“the Age of Alfred”), a politician (“the FDR era”), or the founder of a religion (“the time of Muhammad”). However, Britain in the seventh and eighth centuries has come to be synonymous with a bookish monk, who lived a cloistered life in a monastery in the north-east corner of what is now England.
This, we are told, was the Age of Bede. It is so called not because Bede dominated the politics of his day, but because he himself wrote its history, not only recording events that would otherwise have been forgotten, but also shaping and framing these events into a compelling narrative. It is said far too often that “history is written by the winners.” The truth is that history is written by those who can be bothered to write it. Bede was by no means the only major author to emerge from the first centuries of English Christianity – the poet Aldhelm was arguably just as influential in his own way. Nor was he the first Englishman to record events and personalities, since the Lives of Gregory, Cuthbert, and Wilfrid were all written in the first decades of the eighth century. But he was the first, and remains one of the greatest, to write historia.
Bede’s Life
Most of what we know about the life of Bede himself (or Bæda in his own Old Northumbrian language) is found in the epilogue of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (hereafter Ecclesiastical History):
I was born in the territory of this monastery [Wearmouth-Jarrow, near modern Sunderland]. When I was seven years of age I was, by the care of my kinsmen, put into the charge of the reverend Abbot Benedict and then of Ceolfrith, to be educated. From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write.
He goes on to tell us that he was ordained deacon at 19, priest at 30, and that at the time of the writing of the Ecclesiastical History he was 59. We know that the Ecclesiastical History was published in 731 (though he likely started working on it in c. 715), which means he was born either in 672 or 673.
Our other principal source for Bede’s life is, in fact, chiefly about his death. One of Bede’s pupils, Cuthbert (not to be confused with St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne), wrote a letter giving a vivid and moving account of the scholar’s last days before his death on 26 May (Ascension Day) 735. It is here we learn that, in addition to his copious Latin writings, Bede also worked in the English vernacular – apparently, one of his last works was a translation of the Gospel of John, which sadly has not survived. Cuthbert does preserve the short, striking Old English poem known as “Bede’s Death Song”:
“Fore thaem neidfaerae | naenig uuiurthit thoncsnotturra, | than him tharf sie to ymbhycggannae | aer his hiniongae huaet his gastae | godaes aeththa yflaes aefter deothdaege | doemid uueorthae.”
Facing that necessary journey, no one can be wiser than he needs to be if he considers – before his going hence – what of good or evil his spirit should be judged after his deathday.
Beyond these two sources, there is little concrete that can be said about Bede’s life. He would have survived a disastrous outbreak of plague, which devastated the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow when he was very young. He would also have been there to see the dedication of Jarrow Abbey on 23 April 685 – a contemporary stone plaque commemorating this event still survives in St Paul’s Church in Jarrow as a striking physical link to the abbey’s golden years. We also know that his claim to have spent his whole life at the monastery should not be taken literally, since he certainly visited Lindisfarne and possibly York. Moreover, in the early days of English Christianity – before there was such a thing as a parish church – it was expected that priests would go out from centralised monastic communities (known by historians as minsters) to preach and administer the sacraments to lay people.
There is no reason to think Bede would not have undertaken these duties. In one letter he complains that he was “irritated to the limit of what is permissible … when every day I am asked by rustici (i.e. lay country people) how many years are left in the final millennium of the world,” suggesting that he was regularly interacting with people outside the monastic community.
The Reliability of Bede
Bede would have gathered accounts from all sorts of people, perhaps even including these “rustics,” when he came to research his magnum opus. In a preface to the Ecclesiastical History, addressed to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, he outlined his major sources for happenings outside his own kingdom. He makes special mention of Abbot Albinus of SS Peter and Paul in Canterbury, successor and student of the North African abbot Hadrian; and of a London priest named Nothhelm (Archbishop of Canterbury from 735), who travelled to Rome and brought back the papal letters that Bede made great use of in the middle section of the Ecclesiastical History. He is careful to list sources – all high ecclesiastical figures – for all the other kingdoms of early medieval England. When it comes to Northumbria, however, the sources are too many to name – “apart from those matters of which I had personal knowledge, I have learned not from any one source but from the faithful testimony of innumerable witnesses, who either knew or remember these things.”
The reliability of Bede is one of the central questions for historians of seventh- and eighth-century England. It is undeniable that Bede’s account is very much a churchman’s view – not only because of his own perspective but because most of his informants were abbots and bishops of a similar bent. It is also inevitably the case that Bede is less reliable about earlier events. For the first half of Book One, he is largely reliant on earlier authors, including Orosius, Gildas, and Constantius’ Life of St Germanus. His account in the second half of Book One of the mission sponsored by Pope Gregory the Great is skewed both by his sources (papal letters and the reports of Canterbury clergy who traced their church’s origin to the first Italian missionaries) and his own desire to give Gregory the starring role – any part played by the native Britons in the conversion of the English is left out and Frankish involvement is minimised.
That said, Bede is generous in his account of the contribution of Irish missionaries, given that figures such as St Aidan came from the monastery of Iona which was on (in Bede’s view) the “wrong” side of the controversy over the dating of Easter. Indeed, for the most part, Bede tends to smooth over conflicts and irregularities in the early English Church. The often vicious conflict between Archbishop Theodore and Bishop Wilfrid, which is recorded with great relish in Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Wilfrid, is greatly downplayed in Bede’s telling. Bede’s account of Wilfrid more generally has been the topic of much scholarly debate, especially since Walter Goffart argued that Bede’s principal agenda in the Ecclesiastical History was a subtle polemic against Wilfrid and his vision of the English church (an argument that most subsequent historians would agree is overly rigid but not without some truth).
Of course, all historians write with bias, just as all humans think and speak with bias, consciously or unconsciously. There is relatively little in the Ecclesiastical History that can be outright disproven either by other written sources or by archaeology (especially once we leave aside the early section where he does at times transmit errors from previous authors, such as the pseudo-historical story of the conversion of the second-century British king “Lucius” recorded in the Liber Pontificalis). There are times where another source offers a different account, forcing us either to choose between them or to create a synthesis – for example, where Bede seems to conflict with Adomnán in his account of the Irish founder of Iona, St Columba. The greater problem is that very often Bede is our only narrative source for events in Britain in the seventh and early eighth centuries – it is Bede’s way (with Bede’s bias and selectivity) or nothing at all.
“The New Bede”
The place of miracles in Bede’s narrative is one that troubles some modern readers, although it is surely not for us to judge Bede for his belief in the miraculous – a belief which Eoghan Ahern has recently shown was not in miracles as “contraventions of natural laws” but as “divine signs,” part of God’s ongoing post-biblical communication with mankind that included both natural and supernatural events. We can either “read around” the miracles or (better) understand them as an integral part of his understanding of history as something laden with theological significance. Bede was not jotting down a series of disconnected events in the manner of a chronicler. Everything he records is a “sign” pointing the reader to God’s work in shaping the story of the English for the divine purpose of salvation.
This leads us to one of the most important things we need to understand about Bede, which is that he was a biblical exegete first, and a historian second. As he writes in the passage quoted above, he “applied [himself] entirely to the study of Scriptures.” In the past, scholars made too sharp a distinction between these two parts of Bede’s oeuvre – Bede the historian was a rational, sober recorder of events in the nineteenth-century style, his predilection for miracle stories notwithstanding. However, in the last few decades, interest in Bede’s exegetical and other writings has been renewed. English translations of most of Bede’s biblical commentaries have been published, allowing non-Latinists to access these texts, which were not only important in Bede’s own lifetime but formed a crucial part of Western biblical interpretation until at least the thirteenth century.
Historians working with these texts have drawn attention to Bede’s agenda for church reform and renewal, particularly in commentaries written from the 720s onwards, which in turn sheds light on the Ecclesiastical History. Was it written not only as a celebration of the English church’s past, but as a warning and a corrective for the errors of the present? As with Goffart’s claim about Bede’s anti-Wilfrid bias, it is likely that this was not all Bede was trying to achieve with his history. Bede’s purposes were as many and varied as Bede’s interests, shifting and changing as the process of writing went on. The job of sorting out what Bede was trying to say is not only a rewarding study in its own right – it is vital for assessing the credibility of his account of the English past.
Samuel Cardwell is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham. He completed a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, writing on the development of ideas of evangelization in early medieval Europe. He has published articles in journals including Anglo-Saxon England, The Journal of Medieval History and Parergon. This article was first published in the The Medieval Magazine.
Further Readings
Colgrave, Bertram, and R. A. B. Mynors, editors and translators. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Clarendon Press, 1969.
Ahern, Eoghan. “Bede’s Miracles Reconsidered.” Early Medieval Europe, vol. 26, no. 3, 2018, pp. 282–303.
DeGregorio, Scott, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Shaw, Richard. How, When and Why did Bede Write his Ecclesiastical History? Routledge, 2023.
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