SOURCE: Charles W. Jones, "Bede as Early Medieval Historian," in Bede, the Schools and the Computus, edited by Wesley M. Stevens, Variorum, 1994, pp. 2636.

[In the following excerpt originally published in 1946, Jones provides background and argues that Bede's historiography, which links chronography with hagiography, was typical of historians of his time.]

Although many believe, considering his archetypal position in English thought and letters, that Bede's contributions to medieval and modern thought have been unduly neglected, his historiography has been scrutinized by two outstanding scholars, Charles Plummer¹ and Wilhelm Levison.² I shall not attempt to reproduce the picture they have painted. Rather, I want to generalize their detail by marking structural lines, showing how Bede, exceptional though he was, typifies the historiography of his age. In doing so, I shall pay particular attention to three literary forms of the period, calendar, saint's life, and chronicle—indicating their unity in trinity. Time forbids my citing proof and cogent detail, which must be left for another occasion.³ We have only begun to study the medieval calendar, which is the motive force of chronicle and martyrology and through them of medieval history. If I speak of the calendar, then, it is of the essence.

A characteristic of the early Middle Ages is poverty—economic and political disorganization and rustic isolation. We note it in the roads, in coinage, in the return to the farm. But most of all we note it in books. From the library of Alexandria, with possibly 600,000 volumes, we descend to the library of Cassiodorus, with possibly two or three thousand. Bede, who lived in an English renaissance and was the most widely-read man of his time, is known to have used some 175 titles, many of them short poems or pamphlets; his library may have been two or three times that size. Because of this dearth of books, the calendar became a primary source for historians. It also shaped the methods of historians, and even determined who the historians would be.

Today the calendar is essential; like salt it is no less necessary because it is cheap. In the Romanesque period it was equally essential, but not cheap. People had to appear in court, pay their debts, plant their crops, go to church, and honor their dead just as much as we. Our calendar is standardized and has been cheapened through mass production. But then one learned clerk had to know the caprices of a score of different calendars and keep a single one for his entire neighborhood. After the Bible it was the most necessary book—even more necessary than the ordinal, with which it was sometimes bound.

Whatever the variations in detail, all calendars of the period were alike in consisting of two parts—a solar calendar marking the days of the year, or anniversaries, which the medieval world inherited from the Rome of Julius Caesar, and a lunar calendar, inherited from the Hebrews, which marked the movable feasts for a succession of years.⁴ Either calendar consisted of only a few columns of numbers, parallel down a page. The solar calendar needed only two columns: the day of the month and the Dominical Letter or ferial number; the lunar calendar needed only the number of the year in a chosen era and the date of Easter or of the Easter moon.

The luxurious margins stimulated annotation; so did the fact that the keeper of the calendar had to remind people of necessary duties and important events. The unique event, the one that occurred but once, was recorded opposite the proper year in the lunar calendar; the anniversary, the yearly recurrence, was entered opposite the proper day in the solar calendar. The notations on the lunar calendar are annals; the notations on the solar calendar are martyrology.

Two essentials escape that host of authors who have written on the relation of annals and Easter-tables. The first is that the annalistic process begins as soon as the calendar becomes the main book in a rustic library. Such a commonplace as that of James Westfall Thompson, drawn from Poole, is clearly erroneous: "Early English monasticism invented one type of medieval historiography of a unique nature. This was the monastic annals."⁵ On the contrary, the Paschale Campanum shows Paschal annals written on Victorian tables in Italy as early as A.D. 464. The only surviving manuscript of the complete Victorian tables has an entry for A.D. 501 that must have been contemporaneous. There is evidence that the sixth-century Victor of Tonnenna used Easter-annals in composing his chronicle; there is no doubt that such annals underlie the chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine, just as they underlie the great Paschal Chronicle. The historiography of Julius Africanus, Hippolytus, and other early chronographers can only fully be explained by assuming a basic Paschal table. In fact, as much evidence survives as could be expected that the process of Paschal notation was continuous from the scribes of Palestine. Long before the English heard of monasticism, the Irish, Gauls, Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks were entering annals on Easter-tables, and chroniclers and historians were using those entries as sources.

This erroneous commonplace, which is a product of our century, unknown to Mommsen or De Rossi, arises from the fact that, once having used the simple word "Easter-table," historians have avoided its complexities. They have paid little or no attention to the diversity in Easter-tables, to the constant supplanting of one by another in the same province, and to the difficulty of making a concordance of annals written on two different tables. To this problem the medieval historian—Bede, for instance—was keenly alive. To equate one Easter-table with another, when each used a different era, a different beginning of the year, a different cycle of intercalations, is not easy for the modern historian, with an enormous library and a great deal of time at his disposal. It was a challenge that practically no medieval chronicler could meet, as the failures of Victorius and the oscillating dates of the Irish annals clearly indicate. Bede was the single computist in the West after A.D. 450 capable of making such equations, and he avoided doing so whenever possible. Moreover, he made mistakes occasionally when he tried.

Except for the Victorian tables in a few provinces in Gaul, no Easter-table was used consecutively for longer than fifty years in any Latin province until the Dionysiac table was accepted in that province. Moreover, because of the uncyclical construction of the Dionysiac table, it had to be discarded after ninety-five years. When these tables were discarded, the annals too were likely to be discarded.

That is the reason why there is so little direct evidence of annalistic entries on Easter-tables before the seventh century in England, when the cyclical Dionysiac table, used thereafter until the Gregorian reform, was invented. Its users could copy entries from previous Dionysiac tables, but from no others, without error. Nevertheless, as I have said, the annalistic process was operating and the calendar-keeper was perforce an historian.

The second essential that has been overlooked is that the annalist is ipso facto a martyrologist and therefore fundamentally a hagiographer. As he keeps the Easter-table, so does he keep the Julian calendar. The difficulty of using annals as an historical base contrasts with the ease of using martyrological items.

The anniversaries were entered on the Julian calendar. It was the only calendar in use in the West, and it never changed. Entries could be transferred freely from one calendar to another; selections and combinations could be made at will. Here was not paucity but wealth of material, which accumulated over the centuries. An archivist at St. Gall even created a "bibliographic calendar," in which, besides the day of the month, he noted the shelf numbers and page references to material about the commemorated saint.

Our historian, then, entered an exacting profession. He was first a scribe, second a librarian or archivist, third an astronomer, fourth an annalist, fifth a hagiographer, and sixth a teacher and probably a priest. He was almost automatically qualified for the group which Manitius calls universale Schriftsteller. If we look at the group of chronographers, we see a common pattern in them all: Hippolytus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius, Jerome, Prosper, Sulpicius Severus, and Bede. Isidore was in the tradition, though he lacked the Chronographic skill, and Gennadius shows many of the traits though we have little writing from him.

This profession, of which historiography is only a part, changed the form of history written.

I. I have said that the historian or annalist was ipso facto a hagiographer. Levison says of Bede, "Chronology was one starting-point of Bede's historiography, the literary expression of the cult of the saints, was the second." These are not two starting-points, but one. Let us look at the simple hagiological process, without its innumerable complications.

A saint dies. The priest is required in succeeding years to hold a mass for the saint. As a reminder for him, our historian jots down the anniversary in the Julian calendar. For the lection, the priest delivers a tributary biography, culled from the flagging memories of the neighborhood. To preserve its essentials for another year, the historian adds the details to his memoranda written on the calendar.

The parish prospers with the growing fame of the saint, and the single mass turns into a cult of a week's or a season's duration. More lavish lections are needed. The very prosperity which the saint has generated allows our historian to expand his library. Some of the new parchment bought in this prosperous era is dedicated to a voluminous life of the saint. The calendar-jottings and appended notes form the basis or outline for the new work.

Yet the number of authentic biographical details preserved is few, partly because of the strictures of marginal notation. Since expansion is needed and the material must be suited to ethical instruction, our historian adds some abstract saintly pictures—such commonplaces and little miracles as might reasonably be attributed to any saint.

Reginald of Canterbury, in the Preface to his Life of St. Malchus, clearly advises his readers to compare his story with Jerome's. Where the two agree, he says, the reader finds history; where the two disagree, the reader is to believe Jerome, not Reginald. ("Ubi discordare, non cogitur ut credat nostro; cogitur ut semper credat Hieronimo.") "If I ran across a good story anywhere," says Reginald, "I included it! for all things are common in the communion of saints. Since Malchus was just, saintly, loved by Christ, and full of the very essence of righteousness, I do not deviate from the truth, no matter what virtues I ascribe to Malchus, even though they were manifested only in some other saint."⁶

I have quoted Reginald, who lived four centuries after Bede, to show how solidly implanted was the tradition which was active in Bede's day. For the author of the oldest Life of St. Gregory, written at Whitby when Bede was a young student, makes an even stronger statement. In fact, we might believe that Reginald was paraphrasing if the limited circulation of the Life of Gregory did not make such an act improbable.

No one should take offence if any of these deeds were done by some other saint, since the holy apostle, through the mystery of the member saints united in one body, has so brought them into union that, by a comparison with the living body, we may harmonize the members, one with another, in turn (I Cor. xii, 12-14. 19-20). The function of eyes and ears, for instance, will thus serve the hands and feet quite as much as themselves. In this sense all "do not have the same office" in all things (Rom. xii, 4). Yet we know that all the saints are through charity of the body of Christ, whose members are one. Hence if any of those acts which we have written down were not of that man (for indeed we learned them orally and not from any one who had seen and heard—so much do we have it from common report), nevertheless we should little doubt that they too belong to so great a man. For that holy man himself, in his aforesaid wisdom, clearly teaches that, of all living things, there should always be attributed to one what is discovered in others. He (Gregory) declares this to be as nothing in that community of all the angels above of which, as we said before, he secretly attained a full conception, saying that there should be found anew in each and every one what is seen in another no less than what is manifest in him.⁷

This difference between ethical truth and manifestation is implicit in most of the hagiological writing of the period. Apparently it is less clear to us. Colgrave, the excellent editor of Bede and Eddius, can only account for the recurrent miracle stories by saying, "The age of Bede was primitive in its outlook; it was naturally credulous, and the nature of evidence was but vaguely understood."

As chronicler and annalist our historian records only phenomena and follows the normal rules of evidence about phenomena. His annals are remarkably factual, in conformity with those rules, though they are often under the same cover and in the same hand as the martyrology, which is ethical not factual. Bede's Lives of the Abbots is a chronicle, drawn from chronicles and annals. We need no further proof of that fact than the appearance of year-dates, drawn from the Easter-annals: "In the 674th year of Our Lord's Incarnation, in the second Indiction, in the fourth year of King Egfrid's reign," says Bede of Benedict Biscop's departure. This is a straight reading across the columns of the Easter-table. In that work he is as factual as are his sources.

If we turn to Bede's prose Life of St. Cuthbert, which is based on the solar calendar, or martyrology, we find that he mentions seasons, but not years. The two exceptions only make the case more convincing: he mentions Cuthbert's two years of episcopacy because it is bound up in the miracle of anticipation of death, and he mentions boyhood at eight years of age, which is the generalized formula for the age of purity.⁸ The work is as timeless as the solar calendar, which recurs year in, year out, like the rising and setting of the sun. The only time-references within the body of the work are such phrases as "once upon a time," "when he had remained some years," or "at about the same time." In this way the deeds of the hero are removed from this temporal world. Plummer, Levison, and Colgrave, among others, have remarked how much specific detail Bede eliminated in composing his Life of St. Cuthbert; but they have not realized that he was employing a professional author's conventions for achieving a specific result.

But where, as in the Ecclesiastical History, Bede writes long passages of continuous narrative, the power of the annalist and the power of the hagiographer are met in combination. If what he is writing is didactic, the hagiographical power will predominate. Recent scholars have been at some pains to overlook the miraculous element in the History and are thereby doing it a disservice. Bede plainly states his didactic purpose in the Preface:

For if history relates good things of good men, the attentive hearer is excited to imitate that which is good; or if it mentions evil things of wicked persons, nevertheless the religious and pious hearer or reader, shunning that which is hurtful and perverse, is the more earnestly excited to perform those things which he knows to be good, and worthy of God. Of which you are deeply sensible.

Bede's citation of authority has been used as a proof of his struggle for factual accuracy, but readers have not looked to see under what conditions he quotes authority. He never mentions Isidore, Orosius, etc., from whom he drew factual detail. The greater the miracle, the more the authority quoted—a guarantee, not of factual, but of ethical truth. What Dudden said of Gregory applies even more to Bede: "He looked, not to the mental, but to the moral qualities as the guarantee of truth." The computisi who wrote his long chronicle of the world only as an illustration of a principle was bound to regard occurrences as secondary to principles; and the traditional mode of illustrating principles was the miraculous anecdote.

I do not mean that Bede was consciously as loose with fact as was Reginald of Canterbury. But he was clearly not interested in it as we are. Such a remark as, "Whether the miracle was effected by the merits of the same blessed Father Cuthbert or by his successor Aethilwald, the Searcher of the Heart knows best. There is no reason why it may not be attributed to either of the two," indicates that Bede was unconcerned about the facts when he was writing didactic works.

II. Our historian was not only a hagiographer, but a chronologist and astronomer. Hence he was a school teacher as well. By profession he was a theorist, though he taught in a professional school. He was in the neo-Platonic tradition of macrocosm and microcosm; he saw all things in terms of principles and types. God was a geometer, to be revealed in numbers and diagrams.

There is a special attribute of teaching in poverty-stricken areas where books are scarce: mnemonic devices are emphasized. There are other reasons why number-symbolism flourished, but above all they were useful to the teacher. The threes and fours and sevens of medieval art and thought took their shape in the years between Prudentius and Bede. Plummer and Levison emphasize Bede's concern with the Six Ages of the World, though a close reading of Bede's works shows that it was fundamentally a teaching-device with him, as it was with St. Augustine. It was Julian of Toledo and Ildefonsus who attached notions of reality to it and disseminated millenial doctrine that Bede found hard to combat. Nevertheless, this kind of dealing with abstraction is a part of the chronographic tradition, and Hippolytus and Julius Africanus, who fathered the tradition, were milleniarists.

The traditional textbooks consisted of two parts: the theoretical (or rules of the game) and the practical (or their application). From Hippolytus on, the chronicles that were written formed only the practical, or less important, part of the basic text. With the Eusebian Chronicle, the theoretical text is missing, as is all the text of Africanus and the theoretical parts of Jerome and Prosper; for later ages chose what they wanted. But both parts are there in pseudo-Cyprian, the Cologne Prologue, the Carthaginian and Irish computi, and in Bede.

The selection of items for the chronicle, or practical half of the volume, was therefore controlled in two ways: (1) In the main the author limited himself to what previous teachers of the subject had written— that is, chronicles, brought up to date by the annalistic entries on Easter-tables. The two were bound together in the same computistical volumes. We note, for instance, that from the point where Isidore's continuation of Jerome stops, Bede uses primarily material from the Pontifical Book (itself Chronographic) or else from Easter-annals, largely English. (2) The author selected items for his chronicle which illustrated the generalizations about time recorded in the theoretical part of the volume.

Bede's great Chronicle is Chapter 66 of his work on Times; the first 65 chapters move progressively through the theory of time from atoms to eras, and Chapters 67-72 treat of the nature of eternity. Bede's statements in the Preface, amplified in the last chapters, show that his interest lay primarily in theory—for instance, the theory of Six Ages (or eras) and their relation to eternity. His selection of events in the chronicle is haphazard so long as it fulfills the desires of the computisi or teacher for illustration of the theory. Levison's remark about the shorter chronicle can be applied equally well to the longer: "He gives us a survey which is rather poor in design and performance; the time of single events is not settled distinctly, and the duration of generations and reigns is given only to make out the length of the ages."

I shall pause to indicate the influence of professional bent upon literary selection in only two particulars. As computist, our historian is an astronomer. His history contains an abnormal number of astronomical items, but not because he is superstitious. As annalist he constantly thinks about astronomy, and as naturally footnotes with astronomical items as we foot-note with statistics. Why not? Is not that same book the textbook in astronomy? Bede is by no means unique. Idatius is a case in point. Using annals compiled in the flux of the Iberian invasions and living at a time when controversies over the calendar were at their height in the early years of Leo's episcopate, he reflects the interests and concern, not so much of the people, as of himself and the annalist-astronomers on whom he drew.

The other detail is Bede's employment of the Christian Era. We commonly trace the use of our Incarnation era to his Ecclesiastical History. It was the first true history to date according to the Year of Our Lord. But we have not asked why. It is a difficult process to adjust dates to another era, especially when the beginnings of the year differ. The wise author will choose to adjust the fewest. Bede's primary source for his Chronicle was Eusebius-Jerome and their continuators; hence he adopted as his pattern their mundane era and adjusted other dates to it. But when he came to write his History, his primary source for dated matter was the Dionysiac Easter-table. Inevitably he changed his chronological pattern to the era of Dionysius.

III. That content determines style may be a clouded concept in our own day, but not in Bede's. Here I can but suggest the overwhelming evidence. Delehaye points to the amazing difference in style between Eusebius' Life of Constantine and his Ecclesiastical History. One was in the panegyric tradition, the other in the historical. The fourth book of Augustine's Christian Doctrine, which was Bede's handbook as it was the handbook for every doctor ecclesiasticus, devotes itself to instructing teachers how to shift from one style to another.

Those who have pointed out Bede's debt to Eusebius and Gregory of Tours have had some difficulty developing their case. To be sure, Bede used and venerated the works of each, but his own composition arises naturally from another tradition. Fundamentally his History is not that of an English Eusebius, but a hagiography imposed upon the outline provided by a chronicle or assemblage of annals. His was a unique but natural enough invention. The separate "styles" of the two literary forms shine out from its pages.⁹

As an archivist or annalist, Bede writes succinctly. The archivist and reporter are antithetical in style as well as point of view. The margins of calendars, which were our historian's creative sphere, are not so ample as to allow detail and surmise. The prolixity of normal reporting was automatically eliminated. But as hagiographer he not only was diffuse but followed myriad conventions that arose from the tradition I have already dealt with: the elimination of the particular, the relevant (or irrelevant) Biblical quotation, the type or ancient analogy, the superlative good and bad. These two styles are manifest in the History though Bede may have meant to fuse them.

How much of each Bede copied verbatim from others and how much is his own is a question that has not seriously been examined. Here I can look at but one phase, his time-references,—and that sketchily.

According to Mommsen, Bede was

first and foremost a man of integrity and a faithful witness. He calls himself a verax historicus and he has a right to the title; all who have followed his track will testify that few writers have treated matters of fact with such, and often such laborious, accuracy.¹⁰

"Witness" is not meant in the sense of eye-witness. Bede quoted Vegetius about the construction of the Roman Wall rather than walk two miles to look for himself. Mommsen had traced Bede's sources and knew how faithfully he repeated them, not necessarily to the letter (if that did not fit his purpose or syntax) but to the spirit. Above all, Bede seldom, if ever, made a surmise; he was far more apt to omit because he was not sure of himself than he was to guess. This quality shines out particularly in his chronological references. We may be sure that those references come directly from Bede's archives, unless there is such an expression as circiter to accompany them.

It is surprising how little historians have questioned where Bede got his dates. The Old English Chronicle, the Irish Annals, the British Annals, and Nennius have all been subjected to scrutiny, with Bede's chronology used as a standard of judgment. But seldom has anyone asked where or how Bede got his information.

Nothing is more impossible to transmit orally than a date; and, as I have said, nothing was harder for an historian of Bede's time to translate from one of the numerous chronological systems to another. Hence we can analyze the History and learn with some clarity what Bede's sources of information were; for we can assume: (1) that Bede copied his material, if not verbatim, at least so as to hold onto the factual content of the original document, and (2) that the method of dating employed by Bede will, barring necessary changes, be that of the document on which he was working.

That remarkable student of diplomatics, Reginald Lane Poole, employed this method in a series of papers that were published about the time of his death in Studies in Chronology and History. That certain erroneous assumptions, largely centering in the history of the Dionysiac table, kept his studies from being as fruitful as they might have been only indicates how much study and care are yet necessary and does not vitiate the method, or many of his results.

Seven principles apply in the analysis of Bede's time-references:

1. Items containing an annus Domini without days come from a Dionysiac annal. If the days are given, the item may have come from such an annal.
2. Days of the month without a year come from a Julian calendar or martyrology.
3. Indictions without days of the month come from a Dionysiac annal.
4. Indications with days of the month come from a letter or charter written under the supervision of a Romanist.
5. The length of a reign given in years, or in years, months, and days, comes from a native regnal list. If the length is given in years, months, and days, the archivist was a Christian. The length of a bishop's tenure comes from an episcopal list.
6. Verbal formulas that are unquestionably annalistic but lack the era come from non-Dionysiac Paschal annals, probably Victorian or Irish.
7. Items which give an erroneous annus Domini probably originated in a non-Dionysiac table.

As I said at the beginning, the occasion prevents my citing details or more than a few results. I select here four different results of such analysis:

1. Though Poole was right in asserting that Bede's annalistic year began September 1, Bede copied from his sources without adjustment, and other dates for beginning the year were used by other English archivists. Therefore, to adjust the dates given in Bede's History without reference to his source is erroneous. The Council of Hertford was, as Poole and Stenton would have it, in 672, not 673. On the other hand, Stenton's assertion¹¹ that the Council of Whitby occurred in 663 has no justification, and to shift the accepted date of the Battle of Hatfield to 632 is to go beyond the evidence.
2. In the main, the records kept at Canterbury during the mission were few—fewer than would reasonably be expected. Hence Nothelm was forced to derive most of the history of the mission from Rome. The records grew in number and quality under Deusdedit and took on some oriental patterns under Theodore. Kentish regnal lists were less developed before Christianity than were those of Northumbria, the one kingdom that may have had a pre-Christian group of scholars of some importance. Paulinus introduced annalistic notation in Northumbria, but it was carried on after he fled, possibly by the deacon James. There is no indication of a Mercian regnal list or genealogy or of annalistic notation as late as the death of Coinred.
3. Bede simply did not have satisfactory information about Wessex. Bishop Daniel, who seems in his correspondence with Boniface to have been somewhat loose about detail, supplied Bede with far less than was obviously extant, to judge by the writings of Aldhelm alone. Therefore, to use Bede as a standard for judging the reliability of the Parker Chronicle is not satisfactory.
4. Bede had not read Eddius' Life of Wilfrid when he wrote the History. H.E. v, 19, was, like i, 34 and iv, 14-15, an insertion after the first draft was written. What may have happened is that Bede sent his draft to Acca to read. Acca sent back some notes based on his own memory (iv, 14-15) and ordered a copy of Eddius for Bede, which he digested and inserted as H.E. v. 19. The anomaly of Bede's treatment of Wilfrid, which has long puzzled historians, is intelligible on these grounds, which are consistent with Bede's practice and the book-making practices of the age.

These are details of medieval history. But in bulk they teach us Bede's methods in composing his History. Plummer and others have said that he "wrote his History by subjects rather than by order of time."

Quite the contrary. He was simply limited in his all-important time-references. Any exact time-references, taken from an Easter-table, appear in their proper order; only where modern scholarship knows more than Bede about the sequence of events is error apparent. Moreover, Bede had neither the time nor the scratch paper to polish his product as could be done in other ages.

His method seems to have been this: Inspired by the concept of a didactic work on a chronographical outline, he created a list of his several Easter-annals and earlier chronological notices. This list he eventually transcribed as his recapitulatio. With this outline he tried to place the entries of the regnal and bishops' lists, the Irish and Victorian records, and the letters and acts. Then he wrote in between the dated events the vast amount of undated material—the saints' lives, the accounts of battle, the biographies, and the few legends that he thought purposeful. For Canterbury, the East Saxons, and Northumbria he could place events with fair accuracy, though his annals hardly gave him a sufficient skeleton to bear the mass of material he had on Northumbria. For Wessex, Mercia, Britain, and Ireland, the chronological pattern is confused, and the dates which he gives are often suspect.

The purpose of this paper is to show how Bede's authorship is consistent with the culture of his time. I hope that I have shown not only that the audience had certain predilections which are not our own, but that the author, as a professional man, was controlled by his professional training and interests. I have consciously spoken against a prevalent notion that Bede was phenomenal—that he stands apart from the historians of his time. Yet, now that the paper is over, I grant that he was phenomenal—in his balanced good sense, his vigorous, penetrating prose, in his love of true scholarship and the unremitting study which he took as his portion in life. Even more, he is phenomenal in his optimistic view of the world. He could praise virtue without being trite, and he condemned evil sharply only because he knew it could be corrected. His mind naturally dwelt on the good in this world, not on the bad.

In current literature the pendulum has swung from praise of progress to cries of chaos; Jeremiah has the floor. Our generation is like Bede's, except that for him it was not a generation but an era; the whole age, from Cyprian on, howled calamity. Gregory, who was one of Bede's favorite authors, pointed endlessly the descent into the pit. But not Bede. As we read his words we see him, slightly regretful that the Second Advent will come, he knows not when, to wipe away this shining earth that has so many potentialities for good.

Notes

1. Baedae Opera Historica (Oxford, 1894), 2 vols. Plummer's rare combination of good sense and erudition will always be remarkable and any criticism of detail only accents the monumental quality of the work. Nevertheless, his insularity (see esp. M. L. W. Laistner, Hand-List of Bede MSS, p. 93) encouraged an even greater insularity in certain discipuli Oxonienses (cf., for example, R. W. Chambers' centenary lecture on Bede before the British Academy, Proceedings XXII [1936], 129-156; reprinted in his Man's Unconquerable Mind [London, 1939], pp. 23-52). And his neglect of chronicles and martyrology distorted the picture of Bede's historiography, a distortion that Levison has done much to correct.
2. "Bede as Historian," Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed., A. H. Thompson, (Oxford, 1935), 111-151. Very recently Dr. Levison has surveyed the editing of Bede's works in an essay which should be very useful for interested readers: "Modern Editions of Bede," The Durham University Journal, N.S. VI (1945), 78-85.
3. The reader will find such detail in my forthcoming volume, Saints Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Romanesque Literature, I).
4. The reader will do well to remind himself of the construction of the medieval calendars by consulting facsimiles. For instance, the solar calendar, showing the accretion of martyrology, can be seen in a reproduction of mensis November of the Calendar of Willibrord in the edition of H. A. Wilson (Henry Bradshaw Society Publications) or in Cabrol and Leclercq's Dictionnaire III (1914), 2604. For the lunar calendar or Paschal table, showing the accretion of annals, see facsimiles in R. L. Poole's Chronicles and Anuals.
5. A History of Historical Writing I, 158.
6. Levi R. Lind, The Vita Sancii Malchi of Reginald of Canterbury, pp. 40-1.
7. F. A. Gasquet, A Life of Pope St. Gregory the Great, pp. 40-1. A translation of the complete work will be published in Saints' Lives and Chronicles.
8. Cf. Isidore, Etymologiae xi, 2, 3.
9. Such a change of style, for instance, as that at the end of the first paragraph of H E. iii, 8.
10. Neues Archiv, XVII (1892), 389; quoted Poole, Studies, p. 57.
11. Anglo-Saxon England, p. 129.