SOURCE: Eleanor Shipley Duckett, "Bede of Jarrow," in Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars, The Macmillan Company, 1947, pp. 217-338.

[In the following excerpt, Duckett examines several textbooks written by Bede on grammar, writing, and chronology, and asserts they were composed before he was a mature writer.]

The bishop who ordained Bede deacon was that John of Beverley who was just then causing Wilfrid anguish of spirit in holding the see of Hexham; the same John advanced him to the priesthood in his thirtieth year.¹

Shortly after he entered the diaconate we may imagine him as not only teaching in Jarrow but also as writing manuals that would aid his instruction. His first efforts would naturally be concerned with text-books, and of these we have three from this earlier time. One of them describes itself as On Orthography;² but its matter scarcely deserves the name. It is simply a list of words arranged alphabetically, with notes on grammar applied to each: details such as derivations from the Greek, correct spellings, conjugations and usages with verbs, whether of case or of preposition, declensions and genders of nouns. In fact, it resembles notes which a modern teacher might use in quizzing his Latin class. The whole is very informally put together and seems to be a number of jottings used by Bede in drilling his students at Jarrow, written down more or less at random as they occurred to him. He did not take the trouble, for instance, to arrange words in alphabetical order within the selection allotted to each letter. There are many sentences for purposes of illustration, taken from both pagan and christian sources. As has been indicated, examples from Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and so on, probably came from the Latin grammarians and from Isidore, the compilers upon whom Bede drew so freely here and elsewhere. Vergil is much in evidence, also the Bible and the Latin Fathers. The standard is not high; evidently the book was used for pupils at an elementary stage. Occasionally a more interesting example strikes the reader:

Stranger: often followed by a noun in the dative case, as saints are said to be strangers "to this world."

Nouns in -ius have vocative in -i; so the Latin Bible has "Cornell," spoken by the angel to the centurion Cornelius in Acts X, 3.

It is correct to say "I drank half a glass," not "half the glass." For you don't drink the glass, but what is in it.³

The little book had the distinction of being used by Alcuin and by William of Malmesbury in their treatises on orthography; William maintained "that Alcuin simply plucked Bede's material, adding nothing of his own."⁴ This is not literally true, for Alcuin's work is of a rather more advanced type.

The two other text-books, On the Art of Metre and On the Figures and Tropes of Holy Scripture, were dedicated to "Cuthbert, my fellow-deacon" from which it appears that they were written before 702, or perhaps 703; in one or the other year we know that Bede was ordained priest.⁵ They, also, contain instruction for his students in Jarrow, among whom Cuthbert seems to have been numbered. Here Bede has diligently gathered from the same sources passages and paragraphs and examples for the explaining of form in poetry and in prose. The discussion on metric starts with the letters of the Latin alphabet, goes on to deal with scansion of syllables, then with the various kinds of feet and of feet combined to make the different varieties of line, with a section on verse that, although rhythmic, is bound by no exact rule. Examples of this last form, we are told by Bede, occur in the well-known volume of the poet Porphyry which won for him from the Emperor Constantine his return from exile. "But since his verses are pagan I did not care to touch them." Bede was not drawn, as was Aldhelm, by the beauty of classical Latin verse; he used it only to further his direct Christian aim. On the other hand, the far inferior Christian poetry of the earliest Middle Ages was freely represented in his work.⁶

In these treatises he wanted, above all, to show that the charm of rhythm and of metre abounded in Biblical literature long before Greek classical days. His aim was practical, and he did not linger by the way to indulge in the curiosities of acrostics and strange shapes in verse. Some have said, he affirms, that the song of Moses in the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy and the alphabetical Psalms 118 and 144 were written in elegiacs, and that the Book of Job was written in hexameter verse.⁷

For him, likewise, all pagan classical figures of rhetoric had their prototype in the Bible, with the reasoning that holy Scripture is older, is of Divine inspiration and, hence, of paramount utility as guide of mortal men toward eternal life. Away, then, with the vain boastings of the Greeks! And, therefore, as he describes these figures one after another, he explains them by Biblical illustrations.⁸ The fact that he wrote Hebrew words in one passage of his On the Figures, in explaining paronomasia, yields no proof that he could read Hebrew; he could easily have quoted the words from Jerome, his source.⁹

To the period of Bede's diaconate belong the twin questions: Did he visit Rome? Was he invited by the Pope to do so? These are complicated matters, depending on the evidence of uncertain manuscript readings and the equally uncertain interpreting of human psychology.¹⁰ The answer to the first may be given in the words of a modern authority: "As far as we know, Bede never left his native shores."¹¹ For the second, it is possible, but not proved, that he received an invitation from Pope Sergius and that he did not use it, perhaps because the Pope died in 701. In this year, shortly before his death, Sergius certainly wrote to Abbot Ceolfrid requesting that he send one of his monks to confer with him on important business of the Church; we cannot now be sure whether he actually mentioned Bede in this letter or left the choice to Ceolfrid's discretion. We do know that some monks from Wearmouth Abbey were in Rome in 701 and that they brought back with them from Pope Sergius a privilege for the protection of their monastic freedom similar in content to that granted Benedict Biscop by Pope Agatho. As Egfrid had done for Biscop, so King Aldfrid, also, by assent confirmed this second charter. Bede, however, was not of their company.¹²

His own evidence concerning himself, written toward the end of his life, shows that he was no traveller from home:

I, Bede, servant of Christ and priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul at Wearmouth and Jarrow, born on the estate of this same monastery, was given by my relatives when I was seven years old to the care of the most reverend abbot Benedict, and afterward of Ceolfrid. From that time I have spent my entire life in the dwelling of this same monastery, devoting myself wholly to study of the Scriptures, to following the regular discipline and the round of daily chant within the church. I have always held it my joy to learn, to teach, and to write.

He tells us, also, that for nearly thirty years, from the time he received the priesthood until he was approaching old age, he devoted his time and energy to gathering material, mostly upon the Bible, from the Fathers of the Church in preparation of commentaries upon the same, "for the need of me and mine."¹³

Bede might be called a Christian Cicero in his intense desire to hand on knowledge. Although he does show originality, in criticism, in selection, in adaptation, this was not his primary aim. He wanted, above all, to teach, whether by his own thought or, primarily, in his humility and reverence, by that which he so freely borrowed and made available for less well-provided readers.¹⁴ The words of Seneca the philosopher might have been written by him:

Gaudeo discere, ut doceam. Nec me ulla res delectabit, licet sit eximia et salutaris, quam mihi uni sciturus sum;¹⁵

"I rejoice to learn, that I may teach. Nor will anything delight me, no matter how excellent, how good for me, if I am to know it for myself alone."

As priest, then, Bede continued to teach and to write. From work on the rules of prose and poetry, belonging to the elementary course of liberal arts, the trivium, he now turned to write for his students a little manual, De Temporibus, On Times, based on the study of one of the subjects of the more advanced quadrivium, that of chronology.¹⁶ The primary reason for this was the perennial dispute concerning the date of Easter. Although in practice this had been settled for Northumbria, home of Bede and his monastery, some forty years before this time by the synod held at Whitby in 664, yet many of the Celts still persevered in their own way of dating. It was, therefore, of great concern to Bede that the young monks of Wearmouth should full understand the true doctrine on this matter. It may be of interest to note here Bede's use in this work of the word sacramentum, "sacrament," for the mystical meaning lying behind external facts. As the Feast of Easter moves from day to day, year by year, in the calendar, so the soul of man must move, year by year, from death to life.

The progress of the book leads from the consideration of smaller divisions of time and of their names to the greater, from minutes and hours to days and nights, weeks, months, and years. Weeks are ascribed to Divine ruling, months to human custom, years to natural order. Bede's sources here were, of course, the various writings on the Paschal calculation then current in England and Ireland;¹⁷ he borrowed also from Pliny, from Macrobius, and from Isidore, that bishop of Seville in Spain from about 600 to 636, whose compilations contained vast learning and were of immense influence in the Middle Ages.¹⁸ Throughout his literary life he used Isidore so much, albeit with scholarly independence, that it is no marvel to note that Dante placed the two side by side among the scholars who dwell in the sun of Paradise, radiant with a light no words can describe.¹⁹ From Isidore, supported by the teaching of Augustine,²⁰ he derived the chronology on which he loved to dwell, of the six ages of the world; it recurs again and again in his books. The six ages run:

1. From the Creation to Noah and the Flood:
2. From Noah to Abraham:
3. From Abraham to David:
4. From David to the Captivity of the Jews:
5. From the Captivity to the Birth of Christ:
6. From the Birth of Christ to an indeterminate date, the end of the world, known to God alone.²¹

The time already passed is reckoned here as far as the fifth year of the rule of Tiberius III, Emperor of the East in Constantinople; and this gives the date of 703 for Bede's writing of his book.²² To these six ages of the world correspond in mystical interpretation the six periods of the life of each individual man: infancy, boyhood, youth, middle age, old age, last years, which are destined to end, like our present world, by death.

Five years later Bede heard that this little book had brought on him an unspeakable charge. A messenger arrived one day at Jarrow, bearing friendly greetings from Plegwin, a monk of the same diocese of Hexham in whihc Jarrow lay. Less welcome words followed. Certain "rustics" at a feast, so Plegwin was informed, had drunkenly shouted that Bede was a heretic, and this, too, in the presence of his and their bishop, Wilfrid, who held the see of Hexham from 706 to 709. It seems that those who thus jeered at Bede's views on theology must have been monks; we shall find other evidence of looseness of monastic living in this age. On the other hand, that monks commonly read and discussed such books as this is to the credit of the time.

Bede turned pale with horror and asked what could the heresy be? "According to them," was the answer, "you denied that the Lord came in the flesh during the sixth age of the world."

For two days he pondered. Then he poured out his indignation in a long letter to Plegwin.²³ As a priest of the Church of Christ, he wrote, he could not possibly have denied His Incarnation; as a student of the Bible, he could not deny that the Lord had come as very Man in the sixth age of the world. This most false slander had arisen from a misunderstanding of his description of the successive eras in the De Temporibus. It was, he said, purely a question of the number of years assigned to each of the five ages preceding the sixth. In his calculating Bede had considered the authority of the Vulgate, translated from the Hebrew, to be better than that of the Greek Septuagint, followed by Isidore and the writers, including Jerome, from whom Isidore had drawn. Thus, although he had certainly placed the Incarnation in what he himself held to be the sixth age according to the Hebrew-Vulgate calculation, yet he had dated it at a considerably earlier time after the Creation than the Septuagint reckoning had done, the reckoning followed by Isidore and his sources; in fact, Bede's date for it lay within their fifth age of the world. Hence all the trouble. We may note that Bede showed scholarly independence of judgment in differing thus from Isidore and Jerome.²⁴

While he was on the subject, it would be good, he decided, to warn Plegwin not to let himself be deceived, like so many people, by the idea that this present age of the world was to last six thousand years, or, "as I remember reading in some heretic's book when I was a boy," that the year of the Last Judgment could be foretold by men. No, indeed! When the Lord said, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man," He did not mean that we could tell the year.

I get really sad and even more angry than sad when the country people round here ask me how many years still remain to this world. The Lord never has told us whether His coming is near or far off; He only bids us watch and wait with loins girded and with lamps burning until He shall come.

His letter ended with an admonition that it be read in the presence of "our reverend Lord and Father, Wilfrid, our bishop, in order that, since in his presence and his hearing I was stupidly insulted, he may now hear and know how wrongly I have been used."

The relation of Bede toward Wilfrid is of interest. He met and talked with him, and he wrote of him at a later time with that courtesy which was his unfailing characteristic. He praised Wilfrid's work among the people of Sussex, a work that had rescued them "not only from the bitterness of everlasting damnation, but also from the unspeakable disaster of temporal death." He called him "a man most learned," "a man most reverend, who first among the bishops that were of the English people learned to pass on the Catholic manner of living to the churches of the English," a statement which was certainly in error. He repeatedly referred to him after his death as "of blessed memory."²⁵ Yet "it is evident that there was but little sympathy between Wilfrid and the great scholar."²⁶ In writing of the Church history of his time Bede deliberately omitted much that was of importance in Wilfrid's life. He himself was devoted to John of Hexham, the bishop who ordained him deacon and priest, and to Cuthbert of Lindisfarne; yet both of these held their sees contrary to Wilfrid's will. He admired greatly Egfrid and Aldfrid, those kings of Northumbria who were Wilfrid's enemies. Finally and chiefly, we may reasonably surmise that Bede wholly sympathized with Archbishop Theodore's desire to divide responsibility in the greater English dioceses, and that Bede, the monk of simple life and intellectual interests, found little to attract him in the relatively worldly ambitions of this bishop of York.

With his On Times Bede on three occasions couples another treatise of his, On the Nature of Things.²⁷ As he does not give us its date, we only know that it was written before 725.²⁸ But as it also seems to have been intended for the use of his students in elementary science, there is some ground for supposing its date to have been near that of On Times, in or about the year 703. Here he deals with cosmography, teaching his monks what Pliny in his Natural History and Isidore in his Etymologies had told concerning Nature.²⁹ They read of the heavens and the waters above the firmament; of the sun and the moon and the stars of heaven; of showers and winds, of hail and snow, of lightnings and clouds; of why the sea is salt and why the Red Sea is red; of the earth and its shape, its inner fires and quakings, its divisions and their placing.

Notes

1. HE [Bede; Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum] V, c. 24.
2. Ed. Keil [Keil; H.: Grammatici Latini; vol. VII, 1880] 261ff; Giles [Patres Ecclesiae Anglicanae; ed. J. A. Giles: Bede, Opera, 1843-1844] VI, 1ff.
3. Keil, ibid., 269, 278, 286.
4. William of Malmesbury: De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, vol. I, cxli, 1887-1889. For the light which the De Orthographia throws upon the MSS. of Bede see Laistner, American Historical Review, XLVI, New York 1941, 380.
5. Ed. Keil, ibid, 227ff.; Halm, Rhet. lat. min. 607ff; Giles VI, 40ff., 80ff.
6. See Laistner, TRHS [Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, London] 72ff.; Thought and Letters, 122f; also in Thompson [Alexander Hamilton Thompson: ed. Bede, his Life, Times, and Writings, 1935], 241f. He points out that quotations from ancient authors in Bede may have been borrowed from grammarians or from Isidore, Etymologies. Cf E. F. Sutcliffe, "The Venerable Bede's Knowledge of Hebrew," Biblica XVI, 1935, 300ff.: "a few scraps … from the writings of St. Jerome."
7. Keil VII, 243, 252.
8. See J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase, 1943, 46ff. He points out that here is the first reference of an English scholar to the literary "kinds" (i.e., dramatic, narrative, and mixed); that Bede "is the first to attempt an appreciation of Biblical literature"; that he "enlisted grammar in the service of religion."
9. Jenkins, in Thompson, 163.
10. Stubbs, Dictionary of Christian Biography (to about A. D. 800), ed. Smith and Wace, I, 300f.; Hunt, Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, IV, 98f.; Haddan, A. W., and Stubbs, W.: ed. Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 1869-1878, III, 248ff.; Whiting, in Thompson, 11ff.
11. Whiting, 13.
12. Bede, Vita beatorum abbatum Benedicti, Ceolfridi, Eosterwini, Sigfridi atque Hwaetberhti: Plummer I, pp. 364ff. c. 15; De temp. rat. c. 47; Jones, C.W.: ed. ODT [Bedae Opera de Temporibus: Publications, Medieval Academy of America, XLI, 1943] p. 267.
13. HE V, c. 24.
14. Jenkins, in Thompson, 170; cf Jones, "Bede and Vegetius," Classical Review XLVI, London, 1932, 249: "It is dangerous to assert that any words in Bede's works were his own; it is less dangerous to say that, if we had all the materials with which Bede worked, we should find very few statements originating with him."
15. Epp. Morales I, 6.
16. Jones, ODT 130f., 295ff.; Manitius, Max: Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, vol. I, 1911, p. 77.
17. Jones, ODT 105ff.
18. Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay V, 38f.; De nat. rerum, PL [Patrologia Latina, ed. J. Migne] LXXXIII, coll. 963ff.; Chronicon, PL ibid., coll. 1017ff.
19. Paradiso X, 130f. For Bede's independence see Laistner, in Thompson, 256; Jones, ODT 131.
20. De civ. Dei XXII, 30.
21. De temp. 16: Jones, ODT 303.
22. Plummer, Charles: Bedae Opera Historica; vol. I, 1896, cxlvi.
23. Ed. Jones, ODT 132ff., 307ff.
24. Levison, in Thompson, 116f.
25. HE IV, c. 19; III, c. 25; IV, c. 2; Plummer II, 206.
26. Raine, James, Jr.: ed. The Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, vol. I, 1879, xxxiv; W. Bright, Waymarks in Church History, 1894, 285: "In fact, if one could be angry with Bede, it would be for his leaving us so much to depend on Eddi for information about Wilfrid." On Bede's account of Wilfrid see Plummer II, 315ff., 325, 327; Colgrave, Bertram: ed. Eddius Stephanus, Life of Bishop Wilfrid, 1927, xiif.
27. Giles VI, 99ff.
28. Ibid., 139; HE V, 24. The mention of the De nat. rerum in the De temp. rat., written in 725, shows its earlier date.
29. On Bede's sources here see Karl Werner: Beda der Ehrwürdige und seine Zeit, 1881, 107ff.; Manitius, Gesch., 77f. …