[In the following excerpt, Stenton asserts that Bede's greatest talent was his ability to coordinate fragments of information from assorted sources.]

Among the men who brought Northumbrian learning out of isolation, Benedict Biscop, the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow, deserves to be regarded as the leader. In the history of his time he is overshadowed by his younger contemporary Wilfrid. But Wilfrid's contribution to the enlightenment of the north was made in the spheres of ecclesiastical observance and regulation; he was too impatient to create a great monastic school, and his churches of Hexham and Ripon were not remarkable for their learning. Benedict devoted the knowledge and experience of half a lifetime to the establishment of two monasteries. By 674, when Ecgfrith, king of Northumbria, gave him land for the foundation of his house at Wearmouth, he had made three separate journeys from England to Rome, lived for two years in retirement on the island of Lerins, guided the newly consecrated Archbishop Theodore from Rome to England, and spent two more years as abbot of the monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul outside Canterbury. His importance in the history of English learning is due to the libraries which his knowledge of southern cities enabled him to bring together at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Before there was any prospect of the foundation of Wearmouth he had accumulated a large collection of purchased books at Vienne. Transported to England, these books became the nucleus of the library at Wearmouth, which was increased as a result of a fourth journey to Rome in 679. Two years later a new grant of land from Ecgfrith enabled Benedict to found a second monastery at Jarrow on Tyne, seven miles north-west of Wearmouth, and in 684 he undertook the last of his journeys to Rome in order to obtain books and relics for the new house. When he died, in 689, he had brought into being two neighbouring monasteries, governed as a single community, which possessed an endowment in relics, religious ornaments, and books unparalleled in England.

The books collected by Benedict made possible the work of Bede. The commentaries on scripture and the scientific works, through which he first became famous, prove his acquaintance with a singularly wide range of patristic and historical literature.¹ Only a small proportion of his work has been edited in such a way as to show the exact extent of his debt to his predecessors. Like other ancient scholars, Bede often quotes or refers to authors whose work he only knew through epitomes, or through isolated sentences embedded in later texts. His knowledge of classical literature, for example, was much narrower than has sometimes been inferred from the extent to which classical reminiscence enters into his writing. Even so, his work could never have been done without recourse to libraries of wholly exceptional size and quality. From his admission as a child of seven until his death at the age of sixty-three he was a member of the monastery which Benedict had founded at Jarrow. There is no evidence that he travelled widely in search of books; he never refers to distant libraries which he has visited, and the range of his recorded travel does not extend beyond York and Lindisfarne. Apart from occasional books which he may have obtained through the favour of learned correspondents, it is probable that his work rested on the collections of books made by Benedict, and increased by Bede's own master Ceolfrith, Benedict's successor in the rule of both his monasteries.

Later generations, considering the long series of Bede's commentaries, placed him in the succession of the great fathers of the church.² He himself would certainly have wished to be remembered by these works of exposition. His scientific treatises, which form a link between his commentaries and his Ecclesiastical History, arose naturally from his conception of his responsibilities as a teacher. Some scheme of chronology was necessary to the understanding of scripture, and the date of Easter was fixed by astronomical calculation. In 703, early in his literary course, he produced the elementary manual of chronology known under the title De Temporibus. It is a meagre work, and it involved Bede for once in a charge of heresy, brought by certain individuals whom he describes as rustics wallowing in their cups. The work through which he ranks as a master of technical chronology, the treatise De Temporum Ratione, was written in 725. Its influence is not yet spent, for it established in England the custom of reckoning years from the era of the Incarnation. Bede was in no sense the originator of this system, which formed part of a calculus for determining the date of Easter devised by the computisi Dionysius Exiguus early in the sixth century. It was ignored by the Roman church and indeed by all ecclesiastical authorities until 663, when Wilfrid, who had probably become acquainted with it during his first Italian journey, brought it forward at the council of Whitby. There is no unequivocal proof of its employment in English documents before the appearance of the De Temporum Ratione, and its rapid adoption thereafter was undoubtedly due to the influence of Bede's historical work.

Through this work Bede emerges at last from the atmosphere of ancient science and exegesis to prove himself the master of a living art. As a historian Bede was singularly fortunate in his environment. An interest in history was one of the features which distinguished the northern from the southern scholarship of the eighth century. Between 698 and 705 a monk of Lindisfarne had described the life and personality of St. Cuthbert in writing which moves stiffly but rises at times to a curious and sinister power. [See Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, edited by B. Colgrave. Cambridge, 1940.] Bede himself never surpassed this nameless writer's description of the sudden sense of disaster which came to Cuthbert as he stood in Carlisle with the queen of Northumbria on the day of the battle of Nechtanesmere. A monk of Whitby had attempted the hopeless task of writing the life of Gregory the Great on the basis of the materials supplied by Northumbrian tradition. Eddi's tendentious life of Wilfrid had been written at the request of Acca, bishop of Hexham, and Tatberht, abbot of Ripon. Within Bede's immediate circle, a monk of Wearmouth had written a life of his master, Abbot Ceolfrith. It is remarkable as a piece of pure biography, without any hagiographical admixture, and it received the compliment of imitation from Bede himself in his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow. By 731, when Bede put forth his Ecclesiastical History, there plainly existed in Northumbria an audience for a work of erudition devoted to the growth of the English church. Bede's Ecclesiastical History, which King Ceolwulf of Northumbria read and criticized in draft, is the response of a great scholar to a great opportunity.

Nevertheless, its essential quality carries it into the small class of books which transcend all but the most fundamental conditions of time and place. Bede was a monk to whom the miraculous seemed a manifestation of the divine government of the world. But his critical faculty was always alert; his narrative never degenerates into a tissue of ill-attested wonders, and in regard to all the normal substance of history his work can be judged as strictly as any historical writing of any time. His preface, in which he acknowledges the help received from learned friends, reads like the introduction to a modern work of scholarship. But the quality which makes his work great is not his scholarship, nor the faculty of narrative which he shared with many contemporaries, but his astonishing power of co-ordinating the fragments of information which came to him through tradition, the relation of friends, or documentary evidence. In an age when little was attempted beyond the registration of fact, he had reached the conception of history. It is in virtue of this conception that the Historia Ecclesiastica still lives after twelve hundred years.…

Notes

1. On the character of Bede's literary equipment see M. L. W. Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and Patristic Scholar', Trans. R. Hist. Soc., 4th Series, xvi. 69-94.
2. Bede's reputation abroad in the Carolingian age is proved by many copies of individual works written on the Continent in hands of this period.