[In the following excerpt written in 1969, Colgrave discusses the historical sources for Bede's Ecclesiastical History.]

As Professor Levison has pointed out,¹ when Bede was writing his History, saints' Lives were being written everywhere, but other forms of historical writing were in decay. Bede was familiar with two histories, both of which may have served him as models, namely Rufinus' translation and adaptation of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius and Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks. But though Bede may have gained hints from both of these and possibly other works, he had one great aim. It was to tell the story of the development of God's plan for the conversion of the English people and the building up of one united Church in the land. He began by painting a background, geographical and historical, picturing the British inhabitants as feeble in time of war and, though Christian in name, vicious in time of peace, easily falling into heresies; but, worst of all, refusing to co-operate in the conversion of the 'heathen Saxons'. Then he plunges straight into the story of the mission of St. Augustine and its arrival in England. From this basis the other books spring directly. Bede shows how the gospel passed the bounds of the petty kingdoms and united the whole land under the aegis of the great catholic Church over which the bishops of the 'apostolic see', as he loved to call Rome, exercised a paternal and benevolent rule. The Irish Church is led into the same fold but the Britons, who refused to help in God's great task of the conversion of the English, meet their due reward and in the last chapter of the Fifth Book we find them partly subject to their English masters and wholly powerless. All other minor aims are subservient to this one. He had at his disposal fairly complete lists of the bishops of each kingdom and thereby he was able to emphasize the continuity of the Church and its close contact with the Church universal. This is only one of the many methods he employed to throw into relief the unity of the whole English race; and it is not for nothing that he ends his first book with the final and utter defeat of the British and Irish people and the firm establishment of the English people in their new land. Bede was perhaps the first to lay stress on the unity of all the smaller kingdoms in the one great English nation.

But, as Bede explains in his Preface, his motive in writing is also didactic; history tells of good men and bad, and the thoughtful listener is spurred on to follow the good and eschew the bad. Further he sees the deep spiritual significance which underlies the events of history and the lives of men and women. Nor is he unaware that what he has to say will also be welcome and give pleasure especially to the inhabitants of the various towns and districts he mentions; his desire to produce matter of special interest to some of the 'more important places' led him to insert some of the biographies and delightful stories with which his History is sprinkled. In fact there can be no doubt whatever that Bede was not only hoping to give pleasure to other people but was definitely giving himself the pleasure which every artist finds in producing a genuine work of art.

Let us consider briefly some of the historical sources on which Bede relies. His first book where he is preparing the scene for the coming of Augustine's mission is based largely upon older material and there is little that is original. His first chapter, for instance, is a mosaic of quotations from Pliny, Gildas, Solinus, and Orosius, together with a sentence from the Hexaemeron of St. Basil.² In the next few chapters he continues to use Orosius principally, with a few additions from Eutropius and Vegetius as well as from the Liber Pontificalis, the official collection of the lives of the popes which he was to use considerably in later books. When he reaches the Diocletian persecutions he is able to use the first saint's Life which had any reference to Britain, that of St. Alban. So he continues mostly from Orosius with occasional insertions from Eutropius, Gildas, and a poem of Prosper. But with the end of the Roman rule, Bede is dependent on Gildas, though with many additions and explanatory notes of his own and occasional facts drawn from other historians. The Gildas borrowings continue to the end of chapter 16 with his own important insertion about the origin of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in chapter 15. In chapter 17 he turns to another Life, that of St. Germanus written by Constantius, and this he follows almost verbally to the end of chapter 21 when the Gildas extracts begin again. Then, at the end of chapter 22, with something like a sigh of relief, he turns to his papal and other sources.

It is at this point that he begins to use the chief sources of his information concerning Augustine's mission, namely the material collected by Abbot Albinus gathered both from tradition and from the written records which at that time existed in Kent; besides this there were the letters of Gregory transcribed by Nothhelm from the papal registers and brought to him by the latter. He also had the copy of Gregory's Responsiones³ which he had used ten years before when writing the Life of St. Cuthbert⁴ and a copy of the second recension of the Liber Pontificalis. Of the twenty-nine letters which are still extant referring to the mission of Augustine he uses sixteen, eight from Gregory and eight from other popes, all those from Gregory appearing in the first book. These he quotes verbally, though not always in full, which makes the first book seem heavy and overweighted to the modern reader. But for Bede it is an assurance of accuracy; though he uses oral tradition freely in this and the other books, yet he likes to rely on written documents and his great reverence for Gregory made him choose, when possible, to use the words of the saint himself. The last chapter of the first book reminds us that he had some Northumbrian annals at his disposal which he was to use later on. In spite of all this mosaic the book serves its purpose and moves steadily on through the course of the early history, leaving the English nation firmly settled in their new land and the Christian mission well under way.

At the end of his History Bede describes how he 'put together this account of the church of Britain and of the English people in particular, gleaned either from ancient documents, or from tradition or from my own knowledge'.⁵ This is an exact description of his sources for the rest of the History. The ancient documents are there in the form of more letters from the popes, from Boniface V to Vitalian, seven in book two and one in book three:⁶ there are the proceedings of the first two synods of the English church, that of Hertford in 672 and Hatfield in 679.⁷ He makes plenty of use of saints' Lives, some of which are still extant, like the Lives of Fursa, Wilfrid, and Cuthbert, while he also uses a lost Life of Æthelburh for the miracles of the nuns of Barking.⁸ Other sources which come under the same heading are genealogies, regnal lists, annals and lists of bishops, and records which he obtained from his various friends and helpers such as those referred to in the Preface—from Kent, Wessex, East Anglia, Lastingham, and Lindsey and perhaps some Celtic sources too, though these are uncertain. Then of course there was still much information to be gained from the floating traditions, preserved possibly in the form of a saga, such as Bede brings together in the differing accounts of Edwin's conversion, which he attempts to make, not altogether convincingly, into one whole.⁹

As Bede reaches his own times he is dependent to a much greater extent on what he calls in the Preface 'the faithful testimony of innumerable witnesses'; these he usually names and at the same time attempts to distinguish between first-hand and second-hand information.¹⁰ Though Bede himself, so far as we know, travelled but little, yet he was living in a monastery which was very much in touch with the outside world, and much information from all parts of England, from Ireland, and the Continent would quickly reach them. Thus he is aware of the Moslem invasions; some Roman pilgrim has given him a copy of the epitaphs on Gregory the Great and on Cædwalla in Rome. It is the miscellaneous nature of his information which makes his last book less of an integrated whole than the other books.

The five books into which the History is divided differ slightly in length, the first two being slightly shorter than the other three. The first book, as we have already seen, builds up a background and sees the English people firmly planted in their own land and the mission begun. The second book begins with a brief biography of Gregory and an account of his works, emphasizing the important part played by Gregory in English tradition; it goes on to describe the conversion of the north and reaches up to the fall of Edwin and the temporary destruction of the Northumbrian Church. It covers a period of twenty-seven years. The third book deals very largely with the spread of the Celtic Church chiefly in Northumbria but in other parts of the country too. The book reaches a climax with the Council of Whitby after which there follows an uneasy period of reaction and decline in the Church all through the midlands and the south and ends up with the events which led to the appointment of Theodore. The fourth book describes the great revival of Church life which followed the coming of Theodore, all over the country. It finishes with the death of Cuthbert in 687, a saint whom Bede regarded with special veneration. It may well have been that to Bede Cuthbert symbolized the union of the Celtic and Roman churches, the establishment of good relations with Rome again while all that was best of the Irish tradition remained. The two miracles of Cuthbert which form the last two chapters are no more than an appendix to his own earlier Life of the saint and were always so treated in the manuscripts of the Life which have survived. Finally the fifth book covers the rest of the period from 687 to 731. It is, as we have seen, the most miscellaneous of all the books and the weakest in construction. It contains the biographies of John of Beverley, Willibrord, Wilfrid, and Dryhthelm, while Bede's friend Egbert hovers vaguely in the background as a sort of champion of the Roman way of reckoning Easter in Ireland and Iona. It is possible that Bede felt some hesitation about going into the history of his own times and discussing his own contemporaries in quite the same way as he had dealt with the preceding period. But it is difficult to justify the section on the holy places on any count. The very long letter to the king of the Picts on the date of Easter seems tiresome and unnecessary to modern readers but for Bede it sums up the controversy which occupies much space in the History and forms one of its central themes: could the English Church accept her position as the true and loyal offspring of the Roman Church, free from any taint of heresy or particularist error? Or was she to slip back into insular withdrawal and cut herself off from all the spiritual inheritance and cultural influences which Rome stood for? The letter is, in fact, one of the clearest accounts of the Easter controversy to be found anywhere in writers ancient or modern and forms a fitting and final summary of this all-pervasive topic. If Ceolfrith actually wrote it, then he must have been a very able chronologer and master of a clear incisive style. But there are echoes of Bede's style in it so that it is likely that Bede edited the letter freely if he did not actually write it. At the end of the History, Bede, like Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks, gives a brief epitome of his life and works.

Bede's very considerable use of saints' Lives, of the sagas associated with them in tradition, together with the stories supplied by friends and contemporaries, is responsible for one of the chief difficulties which faces a modern reader of the History. How is it that one who is supposed to be our greatest medieval historian can spend so much time telling wonder tales? It seems strange too when we remember that Bede, borrowing from Gregory the Great, declares that miracles are necessary at the beginning of the history of the Church, just as water is necessary for a plant until it has taken root: then it need be watered no longer.¹¹ It may be that they felt that the new Church in England needed this help. Yet, even so, Gregory and Bede both fill their writings with every kind of miracle story, some of them being little more than fairy tales. How can a historian expect to be taken seriously who tells a fantastic tale about a bishop being violently beaten by St. Peter at his shrine in Canterbury, so that the bishop when he leaves the saint's shrine is black and blue?¹² or in what sense are we to take the story of the Northumbrian captive whose fetters fall from him whenever his brother, who is a priest, says a mass on his behalf?¹³

The answer to this question seems to stem from the historic association in the Graeco-Roman culture of the second and third centuries between a belief in the marvellous and true devotion. The truly pious person naturally believed strongly in the miraculous element in his religion. Apostolic Christianity took its own line on this question and maintained that only such marvels as were done in Christ's name were true miracles; and that a belief in the miraculous did not necessarily imply true faith and devotion. But this was difficult for the ordinary man to accept and so, although the theologians, such as Bede, knew well the difference between true faith and mere faith in the marvellous, yet they seem to have felt that the latter might be a stepping-stone to the former. Not to have believed in miracles performed by the saints might well seem to the ordinary man to be equivalent to having no faith at all. And Bede, whatever his opinion of the importance of miracles, freely accepted the stories of the marvels wrought by the saints if related by credible witnesses. Yet to him as to Gregory this faith in the marvellous did not seem to be the highest form of faith nor was the gift of working miracles the only sign of sanctity. Indeed, Gregory in a letter which Bede preserves in his History warns Augustine against the dangers which may assail the worker of miracles. But Bede and Gregory and their contemporaries took it for granted that God could and did work miracles through and on behalf of those who were very near and devoted to Him. Those who heard these stories were both delighted and edified. They learned from them that God was still ruling in spite of the many troubles that harassed the lives of ordinary men, and that from time to time He could still intervene on their behalf. Nowadays we may not regard the miracle stories in precisely the same light as did Bede and his contemporaries; but we ought to treat them with reverent sympathy, for it was in such ways that they projected their own faith and hope upon the external world. Furthermore, even when the stories seem fantastic and incredible to the modern reader, there is often to be found in them a certain background of historical information which has its value; besides, many of these stories are delightful for their own sake as every reader of Bede's History knows.

In the Lives of the Abbots, which is mainly a portrait of Benedict Biscop, Bede is pure historian. He deals with the life of Benedict Biscop just as a modern biographer would, bringing in much material about the lives of other abbots of the monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. However much he was tempted to add stories of miracles, and there was already a saga growing up about Ceolfrith, who was dearest of all the abbots to him, yet Bede does nothing else but recite sober history as any modern biographer would do. In the History, however, Bede is both historian and relater of saints' Lives. We must remember that the History was appealing to a much wider audience and so Bede did not refrain from telling the sagas of the saints wherever they seemed appropriate; but in spite of all this his story is firmly based on historical materials, and when we read it in the light of contemporary literature we are not surprised that this miraculous element is present, for it is a true reflection of the mind of the people of his day; we are only surprised that there is not more of it. He was living in an age very different from our own in its attitude to the laws of nature. Yet compared with Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks, Bede seems to keep the miraculous element in check, possibly because he was modelling himself on Rufinus who also keeps the wonder element in the background.

Many scholars have praised Bede's Latin style for its straightforwardness and simplicity but it has more than that. Few writers, before or since, have produced so many vivid incidents so dramatically told, in one single work. Many of these, as we have seen, are now part and parcel of our literature; but there are a few which have not received the praise they deserve. One such is the healing of the dumb youth by St. John of Beverley, which is not without its touch of humour: others are the pair of stories of the two men who, each in his own way, discovered the virtues of the soil where Oswald fell.¹⁴ The experiences of Dryhthelm in the other world must surely be one of the most striking examples of a literary genre which was very popular in the Middle Ages.¹⁵ Bede is in fact a master of dramatic effect and his incidents are built up with the skill of a practised writer. He was also familiar with the arts of the rhetoricians and had written a book on the subject himself. He frequently makes use of figures of speech, epigrammatic contrasts, plays upon the meanings of words with implied secondary allusions, all of which are extremely difficult to reproduce in translation. To make Bede's History read in translation like any modern history book is not impossible, but it is only done at the cost of losing most of his overtones and producing a result which may be highly readable but is emphatically not Bede.

Bede's respect for Irish scholarship was high,¹⁶ but fortunately he never gave way to the popular Hisperica Famina type of Latin with its alliteration, periphrasis, and exotic vocabulary, consisting of a strange combination of new formations based on other Latin or Greek or Hebrew words and rare expressions borrowed from the glosses of grammarians. His contemporary Aldhelm used this form of writing largely and Bede refers to him politely as being 'sermone nitidus';¹⁷ if Bede had followed in his footsteps he could certainly have been more 'nitidus' than Aldhelm, but the result would have been fatal and the History would have been something very different from what we know today. It is true that there are obscurities in the course of the work, but these are found mostly either in the documents which he inserts verbatim into his text or in passages where he borrows phrases from other sources. The occasional difficulties which arise elsewhere are generally due to a faulty text or to his habit of bringing in remote scriptural references which were familiar enough in his day but are less familiar nowadays; such for instance is his description of Cædmon ruminating over the scripture stories 'like a clean beast';¹⁸ but taken as a whole Bede's Latin was worthy of the story he had to tell and worthy of the simple, pious, learned scholar who wrote it; and that is perhaps the highest praise we can give it.

Notes

1. BLTW [Bede, his Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson. Oxford, 1935.], p. III.
2. See also footnotes to the various chapters especially in Books i and ii, and Index of Quotations.
3. See notes on the Libellus Responsionum at i. 27.
4. BLTW, p. 128 n. 2.
5. v. 24.
6. ii. 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19 (two); iii. 29.
7. iv. 5; iv. 17. Cf. W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, p. 275.
8. iii. 19; iv. 7-10, 27-33; v. 19.
9. See ii. 13 and note.
10. There is an important note on the subject at Plummer [Baedae Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: Venerabilis Baedae opera historica, 2 vols. Oxford, 1896], I. xliv, n. 3.
11. Opp. x. 261.
12. ii. 6.
13. iv. 22.
14. iii. 9, 10; v. 2.
15. v. 12 and note; also BLTW, pp. 214-15.
16. iii. 27.
17. v. 18.
18. iv. 24.