Bede
Bede, an English monk of the Early Middle Ages, asked for a small box on the last afternoon of his life. His disciple Cuthbert later wrote that Bede shared out "a few treasures" among the priests of his monastery. The contents were "some pepper, and napkins, and some incense".
The man giving away these modest gifts is rated by many historians as the most important scholar of antiquity in the years between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. His best-known book earned him the title "The Father of English History".
What made a monk who rarely left his cloister into the author of that book? Why did a group of monks once accuse him of heresy over a matter of arithmetic? What led him to champion a new way of counting years? And why, after he died, did several churches claim pieces of his body?
A dedication stone at Jarrow carries the date the 23rd of April 685, and it was still standing in 1969. Bede was a boy when that church was built, and young monks were expected to do menial work. He may well have helped raise its walls.
His family had sent him at the age of seven to the monastery of Monkwearmouth as a puer oblatus, a child given to a religious house to be educated. His teachers there were the abbot Benedict Biscop and then Ceolfrith. Bede never says whether the plan was already for him to become a monk. Fostering boys, particularly those of noble birth, was common in Ireland at the time, and it was probably common among Germanic peoples in England too.
Ceolfrith founded Jarrow, the sister house of Monkwearmouth, in 682, and Bede probably moved there with him that year. Bede gave his birthplace only as "on the lands of this monastery". He says nothing about his parents, but his links with men of noble ancestry suggest a family that was well off. The names Biscop and Beda both appear in a list of the kings of Lindsey from around 800. His own name comes from an Old English root meaning to bid or command.
In 686 a plague struck Jarrow and killed most of the people there. The Life of Ceolfrith, written in about 710, records that only two surviving monks could sing the full offices. One was Ceolfrith. The other was a young boy whom the abbot had taught, almost certainly Bede, who would have been about 14. Together they carried the whole liturgy until others could be trained.
When Bede was about 17, Adomnán, abbot of Iona Abbey, visited both monasteries. Bede probably met him, and that meeting may have sparked his lifelong interest in the argument over how to date Easter.
In about 692, in his nineteenth year, Bede was ordained a deacon by John, Bishop of Hexham. Church law set the age for a deacon at 25. The early date may mean his abilities were thought exceptional, or it may show that the rule was often ignored.
In his thirtieth year, about 702, the same bishop ordained him a priest. By about 701 he had already written his first works, De Arte Metrica and De Schematibus et Tropis, both meant for the classroom.
De Arte Metrica, a guide to composing Latin verse, was dedicated to a student named Cuthbert, whom Bede called "beloved son". In the dedication he wrote, "I have laboured to educate you in divine letters and ecclesiastical statutes." The book became a standard text for teaching Latin verse over the following centuries. De Orthographia, a work on spelling, helped medieval readers puzzled by unfamiliar abbreviations and words from classical Latin authors. It appears to have been used more as a reference book than as a textbook.
Bede knew Virgil and other pagan authors well. Even so, he argued in De Schematibus et Tropis, a study of rhetoric in the Bible, that Christian texts were the right tools for understanding Christian literature.
Two passages in his commentaries have puzzled readers because they speak of a wife in the first person. In the Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles he writes, "Prayers are hindered by the conjugal duty because as often as I perform what is due to my wife I am not able to pray." The historian Benedicta Ward argued that Bede was using a rhetorical device and was not describing a marriage.
He also loved music, and he was said to be an accomplished singer and a reciter of poetry in the English of his day. The scholar Michael Lapidge surveyed the Latin poems attributed to him. Lapidge concluded that Bede wrote the Versus de die iudicii, verses on the day of judgement that survive complete in 33 manuscripts. He also wrote a metrical life of St Cuthbert, a book of epigrams and a book of hymns that includes ten liturgical hymns.
A phrase in the introduction to that verse life of Cuthbert has led some to suspect a speech impediment. Translations differ on whether Bede was saying he was cured of a speech problem or merely inspired by the saint.
Bede kept writing for the rest of his life and completed more than 60 books, most of which survive. The last one that survives is a letter written in 734 to Ecgbert of York, a former student.
In 708, at a feast attended by Wilfrid, bishop of Hexham, some drunken monks accused Bede of heresy. The charge concerned his book De Temporibus. The standard view of history then divided time into the Six Ages of the World, and Isidore of Seville was the authority for its length.
Bede had worked out the age of the world for himself. He concluded that Christ was born 3,952 years after creation, while theologians commonly said the figure was over 5,000. Wilfrid did not answer the monks. Another monk who was present told Bede what had been said.
Within a few days Bede wrote a letter in his own defence and asked that it be read to Wilfrid as well. It is known as the Letter to Plegwin, and it answers the accusers, whom it calls "lewd rustics". The calculation was not forgotten. Archbishop Ussher eventually championed Bede's figure, long after the monks at that feast had gone.
Bede and Wilfrid crossed paths again at some point between 706 and 709. Bede wanted to hear about Æthelthryth, the abbess of Ely. Wilfrid had been her advisor and had been present when her body was exhumed in 695. Bede pressed him for exact details of the state of the body and for more about her life.
The bishop whose silence had left Bede to defend himself was thus also a source Bede sought out. Wilfrid would later become one of the most conspicuous gaps in Bede's great history.
In about 703 Bede wrote De Temporibus, a short introduction to the principles of computus, the science of calculating calendar dates. It drew on parts of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies. It also gave a chronology of the world taken from Eusebius, revised with help from Jerome's translation of the Bible.
About 723 brought a longer treatment, On the Reckoning of Time, which stayed influential throughout the Middle Ages. It explained how a spherical Earth produces changing lengths of daylight. It described how the seasonal motion of the Sun and Moon changes the look of the new moon at evening twilight.
It also covered tides. Bede showed that the twice-daily rhythm of tides follows the Moon, as does the monthly cycle of spring and neap tides. He noted that tide times differ along the same coast, so that low tide in one place can coincide with high tide elsewhere. He also described the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar.
The main purpose of the book was to calculate Easter, a task that was tangled in controversy. Bede gave instructions for finding Easter from the Paschal full moon. His Easter table extended the table of Dionysius Exiguus and covered the years AD 532-1063. It rested on a 532-year cycle built from a 19-year lunar cycle. The table normally travels in manuscripts alongside the book itself.
At the time he wrote his history, two methods of dating were common. One used indictions, which were 15-year cycles counted from 312 AD, in three varieties that each began on a different day of the year. The other used regnal years, the years of a given emperor or king. Describing a war between kingdoms meant quoting the regnal years of every ruler involved.
Bede used both on occasion, but his main method was Anno Domini, the system devised by Dionysius Exiguus. Bede did not invent it. His adoption of it in On the Reckoning of Time is the main reason it is so widely used today. His Greater Chronicle of 725, by contrast, dated events from the creation of the world.
His influence outlasted him. Late in the ninth century, Notker the Stammerer, a monk of St Gall in Switzerland, wrote that God had made Bede rise from the West as "a new Sun" to light the whole Earth.
The twin monastery at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow held perhaps 200 books by one estimate. Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrith had both brought volumes back from the Continent, and the house was a renowned centre of learning in Bede's day.
He did not read everything in its original language. His Eusebius came as a Latin translation of the Historia Ecclesiastica by Rufinus and Jerome's Latin version of the Chronicon. For the settlement of Britain he leaned heavily on Gildas. He also knew Orosius, Gregory of Tours, and the pagan historian Eutropius. Many classical quotations from Cicero, Plautus and Terence probably reached him through a Latin grammar. Virgil he plainly knew directly. So did he Pliny the Elder, though his copy of Pliny seems to have lacked book eighteen.
Theology filled most of his shelves and most of his output. The library held works by Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Ambrose of Milan, Origen, John Chrysostom and many others. Bede learned Greek and tried to learn Hebrew. He was the first to name Jerome, Augustine, Pope Gregory and Ambrose together as the four Latin Fathers of the Church. He felt his calling was to explain what the Fathers had thought to his students and readers.
He wrote commentaries on books such as Mark, Revelation, Acts, Genesis and Ezra and Nehemiah, choosing ones that earlier authors had not treated in depth. In two cases he left instructions that copyists must keep his marginal notes naming his sources. His theological works earned him the title Doctor Anglorum. Some of his commentaries were absorbed into the Glossa Ordinaria, an 11th-century collection of biblical commentary. Boniface used his homilies in missionary work on the Continent.
Bede also relied on letters. Albinus, abbot of the monastery in Canterbury, supplied much about the church in Kent. With help from Nothhelm, then a priest in London, Albinus obtained copies of Gregory the Great's letters from Rome about Augustine's mission. Bede never went to Rome himself. He wrote to Bishop Daniel of Winchester about Wessex and to the monastery at Lastingham about Cedd and Chad. He also names Abbot Esi for East Anglia and Bishop Cynibert for Lindsey. Even a description of the appearance of Paulinus of York, who had died nearly 90 years earlier, came to him by oral tradition.
Correspondence was not his only contact with the wider world. In 733 Bede travelled to York to visit Ecgbert, then bishop there. The See of York became an archbishopric in 735, and the two men probably discussed the proposal. Bede hoped to return in 734 but was too ill to make the journey.
Bede completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in about 731, with help from Albinus. It runs to five books. The first opens with Caesar's invasion in 55 BC and reaches the martyrdom of St Alban and Augustine's mission of 597. The second begins with the death of Gregory the Great in 604. It includes the disaster at Hatfield Chase in about 632, where Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, killed the newly Christian Edwin of Northumbria.
The third book follows Christianity's growth under Oswald and Oswy and climaxes at the Council of Whitby, traditionally seen as a turning point in English history. The fourth begins with the consecration of Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury. The fifth reaches Bede's own day, with missionary work in Frisia and the dispute with the British church over Easter. He dedicated the work to Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria, who had asked for an earlier draft and approved it.
The plan borrowed widely. Bede's title echoes Eusebius, and like Eusebius he took the Acts of the Apostles as a model. He quoted sources at length, as Eusebius had done. He took the idea of a short autobiographical note at the end from Gregory of Tours. The historian Walter Goffart argues that three earlier works gave the book its framework: Gildas for the early part, the Whitby Life of Gregory the Great for the mission of Augustine, and the Life of Wilfrid for what followed.
Michael Lapidge calls Bede "without question the most accomplished Latinist produced in these islands in the Anglo-Saxon period". The editor Charles Plummer found his Latin "clear and limpid". The style is still not plain. Bede used figures of speech that depend on the shades of Latin words and resist translation. Contemporaries such as Aldhelm wrote far more difficult Latin.
Bede's chief aim was to show the growth of a united church across England. The native Britons earn his anger because they would not help convert the Anglo-Saxons. His long treatment of the Easter dispute serves the same theme. N. J. Higham argues that he also meant the book to press a reform agenda on King Ceolwulf, painting a rosier picture of the church than his private letters do. Miracles fill the book, and Bede held with Gregory the Great that faith born of miracles can lead to a deeper one.
The silences are as telling as the contents. Bede says little of Wilfrid, whose lavish lifestyle may have jarred with Bede's monastic outlook, and whose divisive career did not fit a story of harmony. Frank Stenton explained Bede's omission of a migration from Britain to Brittany, reported by Procopius, as "a scholar's dislike of the indefinite". Bede, a Northumbrian, wrote little about Mercia and Wessex. He never mentions Boniface, although he had almost certainly heard of him. Of seven kings he lists as holding overlordship, only Ceawlin represents Wessex and none comes from Mercia. Robin Fleming says Bede disliked Mercia so much that he consulted no Mercian informants. Barbara Yorke observes that centuries of warfare with the Anglo-Saxons would naturally have curbed any British missionary impulse, a point Bede ignores.
About 160 manuscripts of the History survive, roughly half of them on the Continent, with another 100 or so containing only part. Patrick Wormald called Bede "the first and greatest of England's historians". Thomas Carlyle named him "the greatest historical writer since Herodotus". Because the book was copied so widely, it may have discouraged others from writing histories and may even have caused older ones to vanish. The first printed edition appeared between 1474 and 1482, probably at Strasbourg.
Before Easter in 735, Cuthbert wrote, Bede fell ill with "frequent attacks of breathlessness but almost without pain". Two days before the end, his breathing grew worse and his feet swelled. He still dictated to a scribe, and after a night awake in prayer he dictated again the next day.
For his last 40 days he had been translating the Gospel of John into English. When the final passage was done, he said, "All is finished." That night he dictated one more sentence to a boy named Wilberht, and he died soon afterwards at Jarrow on the Feast of the Ascension, the 26th of May 735. Because days then began at sunset, he died on the 26th in the reckoning of his own time, though a modern clock might still say the 25th.
Cuthbert's letter also preserves a five-line poem in English, known as Bede's Death Song. It is the most widely copied Old English poem, found in 45 manuscripts. Whether Bede wrote it is uncertain, since the manuscripts naming him as author are later than those that do not.
In the eighth century there is no evidence of anyone praying to Bede in England. One reason may be that he died on the feast day of Augustine of Canterbury. Abroad it was different. Boniface wrote back to England repeatedly to ask for copies of his theological works. Alcuin, taught at the York school set up by Bede's pupil Ecgbert, held Bede up as a model for monks and spread his writings among friends.
Bede's cult became prominent in England during the tenth-century revival of monasticism. His body was moved from Jarrow to Durham Cathedral around 1020 and placed in the tomb of St Cuthbert. In 1062 Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, dedicated a church to him, his first act after becoming a bishop. In 1370 the remains went to a shrine in the Galilee Chapel. The Reformation destroyed the shrine, but the bones were reburied in the chapel. They were dug up again in 1831 and laid in a new tomb that is still there. York, Glastonbury and Fulda each claimed other relics.
By the ninth century he was being called Venerable Bede, a title linked to his holiness and not to any process of sainthood. A legend says angels supplied the word to finish his unfinished epitaph. It appears in connection with two church councils held at Aachen in 816 and 836, and Paul the Deacon used it consistently. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII declared him a saint and a Doctor of the Church, the first native of Great Britain to be so named. No other Englishman held that title until John Henry Newman in 2025. Bede is also the only Englishman mentioned in Dante's Paradise.
His feast was placed on the General Roman Calendar for the 27th of May, since the 26th already belonged to Augustine of Canterbury. The Eastern Orthodox Church also keeps the 27th. Beda College in Rome, which prepares older men for the Catholic priesthood, takes him as patron. The Jarrow Lecture has been held at St Paul's Church in Jarrow every year since 1958. Jarrow Hall, formerly Bede's World, stands on the site where he lived, and a station on the Tyne and Wear Metro carries his name.
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Common questions
Who was Bede?
Bede was an English monk, author and scholar who lived at the twin monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria. He died on the 26th of May 735.
What is Bede's most famous work?
His most famous work is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in about 731. It earned him the title "The Father of English History".
Why is Bede linked to the Anno Domini dating system?
Dionysius Exiguus devised Anno Domini, but Bede adopted it and promulgated it in his work On the Reckoning of Time. That is the main reason it became so widely used.
Why was Bede accused of heresy?
In 708 some monks at Hexham objected to his calculation in De Temporibus that Christ was born 3,952 years after creation. The commonly accepted figure was over 5,000 years.
When was Bede declared a saint?
Pope Leo XIII canonized Bede in 1899 and declared him a Doctor of the Church. He was the first native of Great Britain to receive that designation.
Where is Bede buried?
His bones lie in a tomb in the Galilee Chapel at Durham Cathedral. They were moved there from Jarrow around 1020 and reburied in a new tomb in 1831.
All sources
102 references cited across the entry
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- 38Colgrave gives the example of Desiderius of Vienne, who was reprimanded by Gregory the Great for using "heathen" authors in his teaching.
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- 86BookThe Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian EraAlden A. Mosshammer — Oxford University Press — 2008
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- 94JournalReluctant Kings and Christian Conversion in Seventh-Century EnglandDamian Tyler — April 2007
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- 102BookThe Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain c. 600–800Barbara Yorke — Pearson/Longman — 2006
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