SOURCE: J. Campbell, "Bede," in Latin Historians, edited by T. A. Dorey, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1966, pp. 159-90.

[In the following excerpt, Campbell emphasizes that Bede's main intention was to promote Christianity through his writings. He also considers Bede's sources and his occasional discrepancies on dates.]

Bede was not only, or even primarily, a historian. He finished the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum only three or four years before his death in 735. He may have known that it would be the last of his major works, for he ended it with an almost elegiac sketch of his own life and a list of his writings. These were numerous. Bede devoted a fairly long life—he was born in 672 or 673—and formidable powers to become probably the most learned and certainly the productive of the European scholars of his day. His works include treatises on grammar, metric and chronology, lives of saints, homilies and, above all, commentaries on the Bible. Much that he wrote was unoriginal, in so far as it consisted of the views—often the words—of his predecessors pieced together with some rearrangement, clarification and amendment. He set out to master and pass on a large part of the learning of the Christian Church; and succeeded in this. Many of his works became standard and remained so through the Middle Ages and sometimes beyond. His historical works comprise, if hagiography is excluded, only the Ecclesiastical History, the Lives of the abbots of his abbey of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow and the chronicles—lists of the principal events in the history of the world—appended to Liber de Temporibus (703) and De Temporum Ratione (725). They are merely a part, though an important one, of what Bede wrote and what he was valued for through many centuries. His history has to be interpreted in relation to the rest of his work, that of a man whose dominant intention was to expound, spread and defend and Christian faith by all the means in his power.¹

The Ecclesiastical History shows how great these means were. That which is first apparent to its readers is Bede's command of Latin. He writes grammatically and very clearly. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who wrote to impress by a florid style and an outré vocabulary, he intended to be understood by an audience the capacities of some of whom he did not value highly. He writes in his commentary on the Apocalypse, 'Anglorum gentis inertiae consulendum ratus … non solum dilucidare sensus verum sententias quoque stringere disposui'.² Bede knew very well how to be both simple and moving. The style in which he tells many of his stories recalls that of the gospels in its brevity, concentration on essentials, and use of direct speech. What he says is even more remarkable than the skill with which he says it. He sets out to give the history of the Church in his own land in about 85,000 words. Having begun with a short geographical and historical introduction, he gives some account of Christianity in Roman Britain, but devotes much of the first book and the whole of the remaining four to its progress in England from St Augustine's arrival in 597 until 731. The numerous sources which Bede collected and the skill with which he handled them make the Ecclesiastical History the masterpiece of Dark Age historiography. No history that can rival it appeared in Western Europe until the twelfth century.³

The Ecclesiastical History itself does much to explain how so remarkable a work could be undertaken. It shows the progress of Christianity in England to have been feeble and flickering until the generation following 635. But by 660 it was established in all the major kingdoms and began to flourish. Many monasteries were founded and many monks became learned. Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury 668-690, established a school at Canterbury where most subjects relevant to Christian learning, including Greek, could be studied. Benedict Biscop founded the twin monasteries of Monkwearmouth (674) and Jarrow (681-2) and collected abroad a library for them which must have been among the best in Europe. There were other important libraries and many monasteries owned books and contained more or less learned men, although only Aldhelm (?640-709) among Bede's English contemporaries approached him in eminence.⁴ Although Bede lived on the edge of the civilized world he did not work in intellectual isolation. His reputation and his correspondence spread far beyond the borders of Northumbria. There were others in his own house who could write as well as he: perhaps the finest example of the Bedan style is the description of Bede's death by Cuthbert, his fellow-monk.⁵ Bede's works were not only in great demand, but also occasionally criticized.⁶ He was not alone in the production of hagiography and biography. We have biographical works by five of his English contemporaries and the fewness of the manuscripts of some of these makes it likely that there were other such works, now lost.⁷ Bede would not have been able to accomplish what he did had he not been a member of a learned world with considerable intellectual resources. The achievements of his contemporaries hardly rivalled his, but we know them to have been considerable and may suspect them to have been more considerable than we know.

English learning was fed by that of other countries.⁸ The chief debts were naturally to the sources of conversion, Italy and Ireland. Bede's scholarship depended largely on access to Italian manuscripts, the education of many of his contemporaries on access to Irish schools. Something was owed to Gaul, which gave England three bishops in the seventh century and with which some English ecclesiastics, especially Wilfred, had close connections. The cosmopolitan nature of the Church and the willingness to clerics to move to countries other than their own brought influences from further afield and created multiple opportunities for the diffusion of ideas. Archbishop Theodore came from Cilicia; his companion Hadrian was an African. The Irish founded monasteries in Gaul, Germany and Italy besides England; Ireland had access to the learning of contemporary Spain and indirect communication with the Near East. Between 690 and Bede's death Englishmen converted much of western Germany. Irish missionaries and perhaps a Spaniard were active there at the same time. One of Bede's English contemporaries went to Jerusalem and then settled at Monte Cassino. The Christian world stretched from Scotland and Ireland to Asia Minor and Spain. It was being reduced by the 'gravissima Sarracenorum lues', as Bede well knew, but it was still, if hardly united, much interconnected. The international connections of the Church were partly paralleled by those of the laity. The Anglo-Saxons had left kinsmen in Germany whom they recognized as such and sought to convert. Others had moved with the Lombards, to whom they were related, into Italy: this may have had something to do with the willingness of Englishmen to visit Italy and even to settle there.⁹ Saxons had settled in Gaul as Franks may have settled in England. The coming and going of brides and exiles to and from Gaul accompanied and was connected with that of bishops and missionaries. The accumulation of instances may deceive. Many of the contacts between England and the Continent in the seventh century and the early eighth were episodic or tenuous. But there was enough communication to enable Bede to write as the heir to much of the learning of the Church and for an audience which was not entirely insular in its knowledge and interests.

In his historical works Bede was able to draw on many models and sources.¹⁰ He made no use of the classical historians, though he could perhaps have done so— texts of some of their works which were available in Germany in the eighth century may have arrived there via England. His attitude towards most pagan authors was one of cautious reserve. The chief models and foundations for his work were, apart from the Bible, the works of Christian authors from the fourth century on. Perhaps the most important such author was Eusebius. His Ecclesiastical History set the standard for historians of the church.¹¹ It left secular affairs for the attention of the carnally minded. The wars it described were those against heresy and persecution; its heroes were the martyrs; the successions it recorded those not of emperors but of bishops. Distinguished from pagan historiography in technique as in content it included many documents and gave references to sources. Eusebius's Chronicle had a different function, to summarize universal history from a Christian point of view, correlating Biblical history with that of the rest of the world and showing the hand of God at work across millennia. Bede did not have either work in the original Greek; he used Rufinus's Latin translation and continuation of the Ecclesiastical History and Jerome's of the Chronicle. They provided models for his own work in either genre. He knew at least two other Christian histories, the Adversus Paganos of Orosius and Gregory of Tours's Historia Francorum. His view of history as the demonstration of the power of God, of orthodoxy and of sanctity, much resembles theirs and he owed a more direct debt to Orosius, whose geographical introduction he imitates and borrows from.¹² His aim seems to have been to do forthe history of the Church in England what Eusebius had done for the whole and he follows him in choice of subject-matter and in technique. Nevertheless there are important differences between Bede's Ecclesiastical History and its predecessor, which make his work in some respects more like that of Gregory of Tours. Although, like Eusebius and unlike Gregory, Bede rarely recorded secular affairs for their own sake he had to devote considerable attention to them. Eusebius, writing under Constantine, had only one Christian emperor to deal with and so was concerned with the Church as opposed to the State. Bede had to describe a Church very much involved with the State and to show how Providence had affected the affairs of kings many of whom were Christian, some even saints. Secondly, while Eusebius had incorporated accounts of martyrs in his work much more of Bede's is devoted to the lives and particularly the miracles of saints. Belief in the miraculous had increased greatly between the fourth century and the eighth. The demand for it had been fed by hagiographies in the tradition which began with the life of Anthony by Athanasius (c. 296-373). Such lives were prominent among Bede's sources and he wrote some himself. Writing with a largely didactic purpose and for an audience which needed vivid and concrete demonstration of the power of God and of virtue Bede made his Ecclesiastical History a chronological hagiography as well as a record in the manner of Eusebius.¹³ He is distinguished from most hagiographers of his time by his using miracle-stories only to rein-force religious teachings rather than to advertise the merits of a particular shrine.¹⁴

The works of earlier writers provided Bede not only with models, but with much of the information used in the first book of the Ecclesiastical History.¹⁵ His account of the Romans in Britain came largely from Orosius and the pagan historian Eutropius. The interest taken by Gaulish historians in the Pelagian heresy enabled him to gain valuable information from the Vita Sancti Germani of Constantius. These, with an important British source—Gildas's De Excidio—a Passio Sancti Albani, some English tradition and a certain amount of misinformation from the Liber Pontificalis largely saw him through the twenty-two chapters devoted to the period before Augustine's mission.¹⁶ His task in compiling his much fuller account of subsequent events was more difficult. Much is known of his sources for this since he describes some of them in his introduction and mentions others later. He obtained a considerable number of documents, especially papal letters, from Rome and Canterbury. Like a true successor to Eusebius he inserted many of them into his text; they comprise about a fifth of it and provide the backbone of his account of the conversion and of subsequent relations with Rome. His contacts with Rome were good enough to allow him access not only to such letters but also to the official history of the popes, the Liber Pontificalis; he used its account of Gregory II even while that pope was still alive. Otherwise his chief written sources were biographical—mainly hagiographical. He had Vitae of Fursey, Cuthbert, Wilfred, Ceolfrith, Aethelburh and perhaps of others. Some annals, regnal lists and genealogies were available to him but they seem to have afforded little information on events outside Kent and Northumbria or, for the earlier part of the seventh century, within them.¹⁷ He was, for example, unable to record even the year in which Augustine died.

The written sources of which we know leave the origins of much of the Ecclesiastical History unaccounted for. Bede tells us that much of his information came from oral tradition, either directly or through correspondents.¹⁸ To determine, or guess, the value of such information it is necessary to consider the forms in which it may have been preserved. Mrs Chadwick has recently suggested that many of Bede's sources were 'ecclesiastical sagas'. These were, she thinks, sometimes transmitted orally, sometimes at some stage written down, but retaining the characteristics of oral saga style—'leisurely, detailed, circumstantial and dramatic', often divided into three parts, recording proper names and retailing conversations verbatim.¹⁹ In the extreme form in which she presents this theory—for example, maintaining that Bede's account of the Synod of Whitby is 'certainly an elaborate form of ecclesiastical saga'—it does seem altogether helpful.²⁰ Her criteria appear to be capable of including very diverse works and hardly enable one to distinguish an 'ecclesiastical saga' from a Vita of a saint. Nevertheless, it is very likely that many of the traditions used by Bede had been transmitted in fairly defined and constant forms and this may have made them more reliable. How reliable is a matter for conjecture. Certainly even detail could be preserved from the fairly remote past. Bede was able to give a detailed description of the appearance of Paulinus from an oral tradition a century old.²¹ Oral tradition can, however, be as false as it is circumstantial and if it is accurate in details may be so in nothing else. We cannot verify many of the traditions Bede records. He must himself have often lacked the means to do so, and sometimes, it may be, the inclination.

There is no doubt that Bede was exceptionally fitted to deal with such diverse and often bad sources. More learned in chronology and computation than any other scholar of his day he was well qualified to correlate chronological data which, although often scanty, were in diverse forms. His Biblical studies had involved the use of many of the techniques of the historian. He had taken particular care in the comparison of different texts of the scriptures. His preference of Jerome's more recent Latin translation of the Old Testament to the Greek of the Septuagint led him radically to revise Eusebius's chronology.²² His Biblical work naturally involved chronological problems and the comparison of divergent texts describing the same events.²³ The compilation of commentaries required, inter alia, the exposition of the literal meaning of scripture and so enquiry into topographical and other facts; this may help to account for the interest in imparting topographical information apparent in parts of the Ecclesiastical History. Spurious texts required the attention of a Biblical scholar. Bede showed himself able to expose at least one such, the De Transitu Beatae Virginis, partly on historical grounds.²⁴ In writing the Ecclesiastical History at the end of such a scholarly career Bede might have been expected to produce a work of more than ordinary reliability and it is agreed that he did.

This is not to say that the Ecclesiastical History is technically flawless within the limits of Bede's intentions. The most conspicuous faults are chronological; the dates he gives are not always mutually consistent. Although Bede was the most expert chronologist of his day his task in dating events in England was very difficult. He had to correlate dates given according to the regnal years of the kings of different kingdoms with one another and with dates from ecclesiastical sources expressed in imperial or consular years or in terms of the position of the year in a nineteen-year cycle, the indiction. He gives dates according to several systems, frequently as years A.D.—it was largely through him that this system became current. The correlation of different dates which Bede gives according to different systems reveals discrepancies. Various attempts have been made to explain and correct these but many of the problems involved remain controversial. There is disagreement on when Bede began the year and on how he calculated regnal years. Thus cases have been put for the battle on the Winwaed's having taken place in 655, which is the year Bede gives, in 654 and in 656. All the theories advanced require the assumption that Bede made some mistakes. It is doubtful whether some of the problems will ever be completely solved. We have little evidence beyond what Bede himself provides. For many secular events he was dependent on dates expressed in regnal years. These may have often been inaccurate or expressed in complete years only. Different systems of calculation may have been used in different kingdoms at different times and Bede may not have been well informed about them. He may have made corrections or alterations on the basis of information unknown to us.²⁵

Other errors can be detected in Bede's work which are due to slips, or to the difficulties of his material. Mr D. P. Kirby has shown recently that although Bede clearly implies that the marriage of Edwin of Northumbria to a Kentish princess took place in 625 he provides other evidence which makes it very likely that the marriage took place in or very near to 619. Either Bede made a false assumption—that Paulinus was consecrated before he left for Northumbria—or else he wrote the passage concerned rather carelessly.²⁶ Arch-Abbot Brechter in an elaborate study of Bede's account of St Augustine's mission to Kent has alleged that Bede knowingly falsified its chronology, ante-dating Ethelbert's baptism, post-dating Augustine's episcopal consecration, reversing their order and discarding a papal letter which showed him to be wrong.²⁷ This is too dramatic. Brechter's arguments for what the course of events really was are not conclusive, though neither are they implausible, especially on the date of Ethelbert's baptism. The evidence he offers for Bede's dishonesty is unconvincing. Bede may have erred through carelessness in saying that Ethelbert received the faith in 597, if he meant by this that he was baptized then.²⁸ He may have been wrong about the time at which Augustine was consecrated and certainly confused the archbishop of Lyons with the bishop of Arles and misdated a journey to Rome.²⁹ He had difficult sources to deal with, could slip, and did not write in an age in which it was thought necessary to distinguish between known facts and deductions or assumptions.³⁰ There is no need to assume more.

Some of the discrepancies and awkwardnesses in Bede's text may be attributable to the method and circumstances of his writing. He does not seem to have gathered all his evidence before he began to write, but rather to have made insertions in what he had already written as new material reached him. The type of text which Plummer calls C appears to preserve one recension slightly earlier than the last, differing from it chiefly in not including chapter XIV of the fourth book: traces of other insertions into an earlier version or versions appear in the text as we have it.³¹ It may well be that Bede had to write under difficulties. He was fairly old by the time he wrote the Ecclesiastical History; the tone and nature of the last chapter suggest that he may have been ill. He may have been hindered by liturgical duties and shortages of writing materials and copyists. It was not perhaps easy for him to find his way about his own text or materials; indexes have been invented since his day. One may fancy the Ecclesiastical History as the last great work of an elderly and ailing scholar compelled to great labours by a sense of religious duty. It is surprising, not that there are inconsistencies, ambiguities, or loose ends in the Ecclesiastical History; but that they are so few. It is to Bede's credit rather than his discredit that it is possible to criticize him largely on a basis of evidence he himself provides. The quantity of the information he records and the care with which he uses it are such that he may be regarded almost as if he were a modern historian. Almost and sometimes, but it is wrong to judge his work, or to use it, as if he really were one.

It is not Bede's competence which marks him as the product of a distant age, but his purpose. His general aim is explicit and inevitable, to describe men and their deeds so that the religious et pius auditor may be excited to imitate good and to shun evil.³² Much of the Ecclesiastical History is devoted to inculcating through stories about the past the virtues and the dogmas which Bede had spent most of his life expounding, probably to a narrower and more learned audience, in his commentaries. For example, in the commentaries Bede says that there are two kinds of compunction with the same outward manifestations. One came from the fear of hell and could develop into the other which came from the love of heaven. The story of Adamnan of Coldingham in the Ecclesiastical History gives an instance of this. Adamnan, thanks to an accident and his own scrupulousness, continued throughout his life a regime of mortification which had been intended to last for a shorter time and

quod causa divini timoris semel ob reatum compunctus coeperat, iam causa divini amoris delectatus praemiis indefessus agebat.³³

Most of the doctrines which Bede dramatizes and makes memorable in the Ecclesiastical History are naturally of more general application than this. Thus his accounts of visions of the other world, which are perhaps the most obvious demonstrations of his homilectic intentions, drive home such points as the folly of depending on the chance of being able to make a deathbed repentance, the certainty that even the least thought or action will be taken into account after death, the purpose and frightfulness of purgatory and the much greater frightfulness and eternity of hell.³⁴ The value of such instruction remains, no doubt, semper, ubique et pro omnibus. But much of what Bede seeks to teach by giving examples in the Ecclesiastical History is directed towards the particular circumstances of England in his own day and the nature of his work can be fully understood only in relation to these.

The Ecclesiastical History was intended to reach a lay as well as a clerical audience. It is the only one of Bede's works to be dedicated to a layman, Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria 729-37 or 38; he had been sent a draft to comment upon. It is not known whether he or other laymen were capable of reading it.³⁵ A few may have been, but in any case Bede's references to those who were either to read or to hear it suggest that he did not expect knowledge of it to be confined to the literate but rather that it would be read out and, presumably, translated.³⁶ Offa, king of Mercia 756-97, had a copy of the Ecclesiastical History and it was the Alfred one of had Bede's works which alfred had translated.³⁷ No doubt Bede knew and intended that its main audience would be clerical. But the English Church contained too many nobles and was too dependent upon kings to be indifferent to the needs and interests of secular rulers. Much of the Ecclesiastical History was intended to show how the needs of kings could best be fulfilled and where their true interests lay.

England in Bede's day was divided into a number of kingdoms whose relative power fluctuated and whose rulers lacked security. In the course of the seventh century the dynasties of Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex had in turn been the most powerful in England. All at some stage fell from greatness, some to recover it later, others not. All kings had enemies inside as well as outside their kingdoms. Aethelbald of Mercia, whose superiority south of the Humber was recognized at the time when Bede completed the Ecclesiastical History, was to die at the hands of his own bodyguard. A major theme of the probably near-contemporary poem Beowulf is that the wages of greatness and heroism is death. The poet constantly reminds his audience that the great kings and kingdoms with which he is concerned all came to disaster.³⁸ English kings had to struggle hard to stay successful, and alive, in a very dangerous world. It is a question what part the Church and Christianity played in this struggle and it was a question then what part they could and should play. The acceptance of Christianity in the seventh century was part of the process by which England grew more civilized under the influence of those parts of the Continent where the wreck of Roman civilization had been less complete than it had been in Britain. The Church was successful in England partly because it suited the needs and aspirations of kings. It made some contribution to royal government, which may have had to face new problems in the seventh century as some dynasties built up kingdoms of a size unprecedented since the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England. It must in some degree have changed kings' views of themselves and of their functions. But if kings owed something to the Church, the Church was very dependent upon kings and by the time that Bede wrote some kings were seeing their interest in exploiting rather than in protecting it. Although the English Church had a unity which transcended the boundaries of individual kingdoms and although it always in some degree acted in accordance with its own principles rather than with royal demands it was, nevertheless, very much subject to royal power. Bishops were often or usually appointed in accordance with the will of a king. A monastery which lacked royal favour could hardly hope to prosper.³⁹ Kings were becoming covetous of the wealth of the Church and demanding a share of it. According to St Boniface, Ceolred of Mercia (709-716) and Osred of Northumbria (705-716) were the first kings to violate the 'privilegia ecclesiarum in regno Anglorum'.⁴⁰

The Ecclesiastical History is in part an attempt to demonstrate the role of a Christian king, what the Church did for him and what he ought to do for the Church. Bede repeatedly emphasizes the connection between Christianity and success. His account of the career of Cenwalh, king of Wessex 643-674, is a good example. When Cenwalh succeeded his Christian father he rejected the 'fidem et sacramenta regni caelestis' and not long after 'etiam regni terrestris potentiam perdidit'. While in exile he became converted and then regained his kingdom. But when he expelled his bishop his kingdom became subjected to severe and frequent attacks by his enemies.

tandem ad memoriam reduxit, quod eum pridem perfidia regno pulerit, fides agnita Christi in regnum revocaverit; intellexitque, quod etiam tunc destituta pontifice provincia recte pariter divino fuerit destituta praesidio.⁴¹

When Oswy of Northumbria was hard-pressed by his enemy Penda and was unable to buy him off he turned to God. ' "Si paganus", inquit; "nescit accipere nostra.…"'⁴² And so he won a great battle. This campaign great is one the rare events described by Bede of which we have an account in another source. The Historia Brittonum attributed to Nennius, a compilation made in Wales probably in the early ninth century, tells a rather different story. It too mentions an offer of treasure to Penda, but one which was accepted. Nennius is later than Bede and the value of his work a matter for speculation. But in this instance he seems to have had information which Bede did not have or use and his employment of the apparently archaic Welsh phrase atbret Iudeu, 'the restitution of Iudeu' (? Stirling), to describe the incident suggests that it did take place and was well known in Welsh tradition.⁴³ The whole truth of the matter will never be known. It is conceivable that there were two offers of treasure, one accepted and one rejected. The suspicion remains, however, that Nennius and Bede were describing the same incident and that Bede was retailing an inaccurate version which suited his didactic purpose. Here and constantly he is insistent that the benefits which the Church can confer come in this world as well as in the next.

The king to whom Bede gives most attention is St Oswald and his account of him is an excellent instance of how Christianity could be presented to suit the needs and feelings of the rulers of England. If the Church deprived the kings of Northumbria of the gods whom they had regarded as their ancestors it soon provided their dynasty with a royal saint, a hero of exactly the kind most appreciated by the Anglo-Saxons, a great and famous man who met disaster nobly. It has been said that the greatest of heroic German themes was that of the inevitable death of the great, the theme of Beowulf itself in which 'as in a little circle of light about their halls men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat'.⁴⁴ Oswald was an improved version of this type of hero. He came to greatness through being a Christian:

non solum incognita progenitoribus suis regna caelorum sperare didicit; sed et regna terrarum plus quam ulli maiorum suorum, ab eodem uno Deo, qui fecit caelum et terram consecutus est.⁴⁵

Although he met his inevitable fate and died fighting bravely far from home he lived elsewhere and retained power, which was demonstrated in a concrete way by miracles. As a Christian saint he is a somewhat curious figure. No miracles performed during his lifetime were attributed to him (unless his victory at Heavenfield be counted such); he died fighting an army which, though Bede does not tell us so, may well have included Christians; as he died he was popularly thought to have prayed, not for his enemies, but for the souls of his own men.⁴⁶ As the product of the interaction between Christianity and the needs of a dynasty in a certain climate of thought and belief his cult is perfectly intelligible. Oswald was not the only type of Christian king. A surprising number of others in the seventh and eighth centuries abandoned their kingdoms in order to enter a monastery or to go to Rome. Christianity was by no means always to a king's earthly advantage. Aidan's remark when Oswine of Deira humbled himself before him was a pregnant one. ' "Scio", inquit, "quia non multo tempore victurus est rex; nunquam enim ante haec vidi humilem regem".'⁴⁷ Bede recognized that there was more than one way in which a king could be virtuous. But he makes the duty of a king while reigning clear. It is to protect the Church, to observe its teaching and to defend his people in battle. The happiest times since the English came to Britain were, he says, those 'dum et fortissimos Christianosque habentes reges cunctis barbaris nationibus essent terrori'.⁴⁸ In the period of which he is writing here, the last generation of the seventh century, the 'barbari nationes'—he was probably thinking chiefly of the Picts—were all more or less Christian. There is a point where his admiration for the leader and defender of a Christian people meets a less specifically devout delight in the strenuitas of a warrior king.⁴⁹ It was not that Bede was committed in a simple way to the interests of the kings of Northumbria: he approved of a Mercian rebellion against Oswy and disapproved of a raid made by Ecgfrith on Ireland. It was rather that he was writing for an audience which saw Christianity in heroic terms and which may have believed in a more than rational connection between the virtue of a king and the prosperity of his people.

Bede's account of secular affairs is nearly always intended to show how virtue and vice were rewarded in this world as well as hereafter, or to present models of Christian kingship, or is simply incidental. For example, we learn from him of one of Penda's attacks on Northumbria only because it was involved with a miracle of Aidan's. He does not even tell us the names of the British kingdoms against which the kings of Northumbria fought. He says very little indeed about the political events of the early eighth century, which were those about which he must have known most. Indeed, he gives less space to his own times than he does to any other period after 597; of the four books and twelve chapters devoted to the period 596-731 the years from 687 to 731 receive one book only.⁵⁰ The contrast with Gregory devotes six of the ten books of his history to the period of his own greatness, c. 573-591. The more he knew the more he wrote. It seems with Bede the more he knew the less he wrote. A clue to the reason for this may be given by his remark on the reign of Ceolwulf—that it was so troubled that 'quid de his scribi debeat quemve habitura sint finem singula, necdum sciri valeat'.⁵¹ This is partly, no doubt, an expression of his usual discretion, but also an intimation that he was waiting for the pattern of God's judgments on the past to emerge. Until it had done so he would not write.

If much of the Ecclesiastical History is directed towards the laity, more is directed towards the clergy. The English Church in Bede's day enjoyed a status within the universal Church which it was never to reach again. Bede's own work indicates its learning. During his lifetime Englishmen converted much of Germany and they were soon to reform the Church in Gaul. Bede was proud of English achievements and devoted much of his fifth book to describing the work of English missionaries on the Continent, though he strangely says nothing of St Boniface, who was becoming the greatest of them.⁵² But it is not for nothing that much of the rest of the book consists of accounts of visions of hell. Bede felt that much was amiss with the Church and in particular in his own kingdom of Northumbria. We have the letter which he wrote at very nearly the end of his life to Bishop Egbert, of York, lamenting the ills which plagued the church.⁵³ His criticisms were, briefly, these. There were not enough bishops to ensure that pastoral duties (which then fell largely on the bishop in person) were properly discharged. Large dioceses were maintained because bishops were anxious to exact all the dues they could. Some bishops were surrounded by men given to laughter, jokes, tales, feasting and drink. Many priests were ignorant, many monks ill-conducted. Monasteries were often such in name only, being in fact the property of laymen who sought chiefly the rights and exemptions associated with the monastic tenure of land. The kingdom had become so demented with this 'mad error' since the death of Aldfrith that its security was threatened since there was not enough land left to support the young men who should have defended it.…

Thus much of the Ecclesiastical History is by implication a criticism of the Church in Bede's own day and expresses his longing for a return to a primitive simplicity which he thought had existed only a short time before. He may well have realized that if the Church was to survive it had to involve itself more with the world than he would wish. He remarks of Putta, Bishop of Rochester, who after his church and its possessions had been ravaged by Aethelred of Mercia, retired elsewhere,

nihil omnino de restaurando episcopatu suo agens; quia, sicut et supra diximus, magis in ecclesiasticis quam in mundanis rebus erat industrius.⁵⁴

It is a slightly curious but a revealing way of putting it. His sympathies clearly lay with Putta; he thought the world was bad and the Church too much part of it. He wanted a poverty, simplicity and devotion which, if they had ever characterized the English Church, were never to do so again.

Bede's account of the Church in the Ecclesiastical History is distinguished by great discretion. While his commentaries contain numerous references to the shortcomings of the Church and in his letter to Egbert he is open and violent in denunciation he has very little to say directly about the sins of the clergy in his history. A few sinful clerics are mentioned, but, Britons apart, almost always incidentally. His account even of Ceolred and Osred, kings who, so we learn elsewhere, oppressed the Church, is limited to the dates of their respective accessions and deaths. The nearest he comes in the Ecclesiastical History to the long account and denunciation of fictitious monasteries in the letter to Egbert is the cryptic statement that so peaceful are the times that many Northumbrians have preferred to enter monasteries rather than to exercise the arts of war. 'Quae res quem sit habitura finem, posterior aetas videbit.'⁵⁵ Similarly in his Lives of the abbots of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Bede makes no reference to the incident described in the anonymous biography of Ceolfrid—which he used—of Ceolfrid's leaving the abbey partly because of the behaviour of certain nobles, who could not endure his regular discipline.⁵⁶ Had we to rely on the Ecclesiastical History for our knowledge of the Church in the first generation of the eighth century we should know little of it, and still less of Bede's severe judgment on it. There can be little doubt that Bede's failure to describe the conduct of those of his contemporaries of whom he disapproved was deliberate. In his commentary on the Book of Samuel he is explicit that it is wrong publicly to denounce even evil priests.… He clearly did not think it appropriate to enlarge on the deficiencies of the clergy in a work such as the Ecclesiastical History which was intended for a fairly wide audience. A letter to another cleric such as that to Egbert was another matter, though even there he mentions no names. Others of his day were not so backward, like the monk who wrote to a friend describing a vision of hell where many named sinners had appeared in torment, among them 'your abbot'.⁵⁷ …

A theme which stands out above all others in Bede's attempt to instruct and edify through the Ecclesiastical History is that of the struggle for the unity and orthodoxy of the Church. To record the nature and fate of heresy was one of the most important functions of an ecclesiastical historian. Eusebius had given much attention to so doing. As a theologian Bede was concerned to refute many heretics and heresies—Plummer collected references to twenty-nine.⁵⁸ As a historian he was concerned with one heresy, Pelagianism, and one group of errors, those of the Celtic Churches which departed from orthodox custom, especially in the calculation of the date of Easter. Pelagius's heresy of the denial of the necessity of grace for salvation may have originated in the British Isles. Bede thought that it had been imported in the fifth century, and in his first book describes at some length two visits made by St Germanus to extirpate it. Pelagian views seem to have continued to be held in Ireland in the seventh and eighth centuries and it may well have been from Ireland that there came the two works of the Pelagian Julian of Eclana and the one of Pelagius himself to which Bede had access.⁵⁹ The first book of his commentary on the Song of Songs was devoted to the refutation of Julian. His account of Pelagianism and its defeat in the fifth century was then of more than historical significance; the evidence he gives of God's condemnation of it in the past was a useful lesson for his own day.

The errors which received most attention from Bede were those of the Celtic Churches which diverged from Roman customs. The most important difference was that on the calculation of the date of Easter.⁶⁰ It was regarded not as a minor point of discipline, but as a rift in the unity of the Church with serious doctrinal implications. For such a theologian as Bede, always seeking mystical interpretations, the movement of Easter and its proper calculation—and no one knew the proper calculation better than he—was loaded with the weightiest significance. Consider, for example, the words Bede attributes to the dying Cuthbert who warns his companions to have no communion with those who depart from the unity of Catholic peace 'vel pascha non suo tempore celebrando, vel perverse vivendo'.⁶¹ A considerable part of the Ecclesiastical History is devoted to the subject. In the second book we are told how Augustine attempted to induce the Britons to accept the Roman usages or to assist the evangelization of the English. He failed and prophesied that the recalcitrant Britons would perish at the hands of the English. Bede records with some relish the fulfilment of this prophesy when Aethelfrith massacred the monks of Bangor. Here, as in his use of Gildas's account of the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth century, Bede is able to reconcile two loyalties by showing his pagan ancestors to have been the instrument of God's revenge. He goes on to describe later attempts to persuade the Britons to accept the Roman Easter. The climax of the third book is his famous account of the synod of Whitby at which Oswy agreed that Roman usages should prevail in Northumbria, while those who did not accept them left. In the fifth book Bede now explains how Iona, northern Ireland and the king of the Picts were converted to a proper view—southern Ireland had become orthodox long since. The emphasis given to the Easter controversy throughout the Ecclesiastical History is clear. It receives the longest chapter in the third book and the longest in the fifth. The chapter which describes the conversion of Iona is the last in the whole except for that which gives a final survey of the general state of Britain. It must have given particular satisfaction to Bede to record the acceptance of Catholic unity by the house whence had come Aidan and the Irish missionaries whom he so much admired, but whose adherence to unorthodox usages he so much deplored. The battle for Roman uniformity was still not completely won at the time when he wrote. The Britons remained 'inveterati et claudicantes'.⁶² As with Pelagianism, so with the Easter controversy, Bede was writing not only an account of the past, but a tract for his own times.

Bede's preoccupation with the defence of orthodoxy and his distrust of the Britons who had erred, and in his own day still and alone continued to err, may have influenced his selection of subject-matter and coloured his account of what he selected. As always the lack of other sources prevents reasonable certainty as to how far this was so. Thus Nennius gives an account of the conversion of Northumbria quite at variance with that of Bede; it was accomplished, he says, by the British Church, Edwin being baptized by Rhun, son of Urien, a member of the royal dynasty of the northern British kingdom of Rheged. Until recently most scholars have rejected this story. Nennius is later than Bede, less scholarly, and recounts much that is fabulous. A considerable part of Bede's account of the conversion of Northumbria must be broadly true; he can hardly have fabricated the letters of Pope Honorius to Edwin and his queen which help to confirm his account. But Professor Jackson and Mrs Chadwick have recently argued that Nennius's tale should be taken more seriously.⁶³ It is consistent with the fragments of knowledge which we have about the rulers of Rheged and about Edwin's relations with the Britons. Much of this information inspires more interest than confidence, but it is not negligible. In particular Nennius gives another piece of information about the relations between the royal houses of Rheged and Northumbria, namely that King Oswy had two wives, Riemmelth, whose descent is given and who seems to have been a member of the royal house of Rheged, and Eanfled, daughter of Edwin. Bede mentions the second, but not the first. That Nennius's information on this was accurate is suggested by the occurrence of what seems to be an Anglo-Saxon version of the first wife's name at about the right place in the 'list of the names of the queens and abbesses of Northumbria' in the, presumably independent, Liber Vitae of Durham.⁶⁴ This fragment of evidence by no means proves Nennius's account of the conversion of Northumbria to have been true. But it does suggest relationships between Northumbria and its British neighbours of which Bede tells us, through ignorance or design, nothing; and it raises the suspicion that the British Church did play a more important part in the conversion of Northumbria than his account, which allows it none, indicates.

The problems involved in assessing Bede's account of the conversion of Northumbria are characteristic of those which arise in connection with the Ecclesiastical History. Bede was very learned and very intelligent. His aim was partly simply to describe the history of the Church in England and his care in collecting evidence and the methods, derived from those of Eusebius, with which he handled it enabled him to perform this task in a manner which makes this work more scholarly, in the modern sense, than that of any other Dark Age historian. This aspect of his work has always and rightly attracted attention and praise. But his principal intention was not just to record the past, but to use it to teach lessons to the present, mainly by treating seventh-century England as a gallery of good examples. Excellent instances of the reaction he sought are to be found in the work of Victorian historians, for example W. Bright—'We think not only of the noble earnestness of Ethelbert, of the heroic sanctity of Oswald, of the sweet humility of Oswin but of the genuine conversions of Eadbald and Kenwalch …', etc.⁶⁵ The differences in the historiographical fortunes of seventh-century England and seventh-century Gaul, the one often being regarded as moving and edifying, the other as repellent and vicious, are attributable not so much to one society's being nobler, or nicer, than the other as to Bede's aims and tastes being different from those of Frankish historians.⁶⁶

Bede wrote then not only in the Eusebian tradition but also in that of hagiography. The principles of hagiographers were largely contrary to those of scholarship, though they sometimes adopted a misleadingly scholarly air, setting store by citing evidence for things which did not happen or which did not happen at the time or to the persons they alleged. They wrote in the attitude of mind with which the Bible is now often interpreted. Moral truth, not literal truth was that mattered.⁶⁷ Emphasis was placed on the need for belief, not on the advantages of doubt. 'Vera lex historiae' is, says Bede, 'simpliciter ea quae fama vulgante collegimus ad instructionem posteritatis litteris mandare.' He prides himself that he has used an earlier life of Cuthbert 'simpliciter fidem historiae quam legebam accomodans'.⁶⁸ Hagiographers tended to turn the men and events they described into types. 'Vous lui demandez un portrait', says Fr. Delehaye of the hagiographer, 'il vous répond par un programme'.⁶⁹ Bede's acount in the Ecclesiastical History of such saints as Aidan and Cuthbert is almost purely hagiographical and contrasts with the more factual and sober treatment of other biographies in his Lives of the Abbots.⁷⁰ It is a question how far what appear to be the more purely historical parts of the Ecclesiastical History are affected by his didactic purposes. These purposes certainly determined his selection of subject-matter; it can hardly be doubted that he was very discreet and sometimes suppressed that which could not edify. But one must wonder how far his account of the course of events is affected by his believing that he ought to give the version which best demonstrated the truth of his faith rather than that which best corresponded with the truth, and how far his judgment of what was likely was affected by his conviction of what was appropriate. He is so far our only source for so much of what he describes that no firm judgment on these matters is possible. But a comparison of Bede with such other sources as Eddius and Nennius, questionable though they are, suggests that the veneration which he has so long and so rightly been accorded ought to be tempered by some mistrust. Historians have sometimes been too ready to assume Bede's reliability as axiomatic when it is the point at issue. It is not even safe to assume that the attitudes and emphases of the Ecclesiastical History fully reflect Bede's personal views. He thought it the duty of a teacher to suit his teaching to his audience.⁷¹ Some of the apparent crudities in his approach to Christianity, for example the repeated emphasis on its connection with worldly success and on the importance of miracles, may indicate not so much his own view of his faith as his judgment of the limitations of his audience.⁷²

Clear, almost simple, though the Ecclesiastical History is it is the product of a complex mind working under difficult circumstances. On the one hand Bede was concerned for the truth, interested in hard facts, excellently equipped technically and writing with the good model of Eusebius before him. On the other hand he was using history to teach lessons which he felt to be badly needed; he was writing partly not as a historian but as a hagiographer; he had to suit his work to his audience and present it in such a way that it moved men less learned and less subtle than he. He was a barbarian, one of the first handful of his people to have become literate, yet very learned in a tradition which sprang from the remote world of the Roman empire. He was very devoutly, indeed sternly, Christian and writing in and for a Church which had accommodated itself to the ways of its world. He sought to recall it to what he thought to have been its primitive simplicity while treating it with the respect and discretion which any Church deserved. Many of the difficulties in assessing the Ecclesiastical History derive from those inherent in Bede's intellectual position and in the nature of his task.

Whatever the difficulties, few of those who read his book and even fewer of those who work on it fail to come to admire it. Bede had and has the power to seize the imagination of his reader and to transport him to a strange world; strange because it is so distant in time and circumstances, even stranger because it is a world so directly dominated by God, where ordinary historical causality hardly applies. Most Dark Age historians provoke a sense, usually an overwhelming sense, of superiority. We know better, we are cleverer than they. Bede defies patronage. Remote, almost bizarre, though his view of history is he expounds it in the manner, and it is more than just the manner, of an educated, rational and moderate man. The Ecclesiastical History is not only the record of most of what we shall ever know of a century or more of English history, but a monument to the extraordinary skill and power of Bede.

Notes

1. The chronicles are best edited by T. Mommsen, M.G.H. Scriptores Antiquissimi, XIII (1898), 223-354, and the other historical works by C. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica (2 vols., Oxford, 1896); references below are to Plummer's edition unless otherwise stated. For editions of Bede's other works see M. L. W. Laistner and H. H. King, Handlist of Bede Manuscripts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1943) and M. T. A. Carroll, The Venerable Bede: his Spiritual Teachings (Catholic University of America, Studies in Mediaeval History, new ser., IX (Washington, 1946)). The poems, homilies and some of the commentaries have been re-edited in Corpus Christianorum Series Latine, CXIX and CXX, ed. D. Hurst, and CXXII, ed. D. Hurst and J. Fraipont (Turnhout, 1962, 1960 and 1955 respectively). For general accounts of Bede see Bede, his Life, Times and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Oxford, 1935), E. S. Duckett, Anglo-Saxon Saints and Scholars (New York, 1947), pp. 217-338, W. F. Bolton, 'A Bede Bibliography: 1935-60' Traditio, xviii (1962), 436-45.
2. Venerabilis Bedae Opera, ed. J. A. Giles, XII (1844), 341.
3. For Bede as a historian see e.g. W. Levison, 'Bede as Historian', in Bede, his Life, Times and Writings, op. cit., pp. 111-51; C. W. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1947) and 'Bede as Early Medieval Historian', Medievalia et Humanistica, fasc. IV (1946), 26-36; P. Hunter Blair, Bede's Ecclesiastical History … and its Importance Today (Jarrow Lecture 1959, Jarrow-on-Tyne, n.d.).
4. For the history of the church see e.g. M. Deanesly, The Pre-Conquest Church in England (1961).
5. Ed. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica I, clx-clxiv.
6. Carroll, The Venerable Bede …, op. cit., pp. 43-6; M. L. W. Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and Patristic Scholar', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., XVI (1933), 83.
7. The anonymous life of Ceolfrith and Eddius Stephanus's life of Wilfred survive in only two manuscripts each, the Whitby life of Gregory the Great in only one (Baedae Opera Historica, ed. Plummer, I, cxl-cxli; The Life of Bishop Wilfred by Eddius Stephanus, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1927), pp. xiii-xvi; B. Colgrave, 'The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great', in K. Jackson, N. K. Chadwick and others, Celt and Saxon: Studies in the Early British Border (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 119-21). So much damage seems to have been done by the Scandinavian invasions to English libraries that works which were not popular, and in particular not popular on the Continent, must have had only a limited chance of survival.
8. For this paragraph, W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946); K. C. King, The Earliest German Monasteries (Nottingham, 1961); J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, 'Rome and the Early English Church', Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo, VII (Spoleto, 1960), 519-48; Bede's Europe (Jarrow Lecture 1962, Jarrow-on-Tyne, n.d.); K. Hughes, 'Irish Monks and Learning', Los monjes y los estudios (Abadia de Poblet, 1963), pp. 61-86, and H. Farmer, 'The Studies of Anglo-Saxon Monks A.D. 600-800', ibid., pp. 87-103; J. N. Hillgarth, 'Visigothic Spain and Early Christian Ireland', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy LXII, C (1961-3), 167-94.
9. Levison, England and the Continent, p. 40; C. E. Blunt, Four Italian Coins Imitating Anglo-Saxon Types', British Numismatic Journal, 3rd ser., V (1945-8), 285.
10. M. L. W. Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and Patristic Scholar', op. cit.; 'The Library of the Venerable Bede', Bede, his Life, Times and Writings, op. cit., pp. 237-266; both articles are reprinted in The Intellectual Heritage of the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957).
11. A. Momigliano, 'Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.', The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963), pp. 79-99.
12. J. M. Wallace-hadrill, 'The Work of Gregory of Tours in the Light of Modern Research', The Long-Haired Kings (1962), pp. 49-70.
13. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, op. cit., pp. 82-5.
14. Bede thought wonder-working shrines could diminish rather than increase faith when the unworthy were not healed (Carroll, p. 197) and he attributes to Cuthbert the view that when such a shrine became a sanctuary for evildoers it also became a nuisance to its keepers, Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), p. 278.
15. The best accounts of Bede's sources are those of Plummer, Levison and Laistner in the works cited in notes 1, 3 and 10 above.
16. For the Passio Sancti Albani, W. Levison, 'St. Alban and St. Alban's', Antiquity, XV (1941), 337-59. Discussion of the possibility of at least part of the De Excidio being of a date later than the mid-sixth century one usually accepted has recently been revived: P. Grosjean, 'Remarques sur le De Excidio attribué a Gildas', Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, XXV (1955), 155-87; 'Notes de hagiographie celtique', Analecta Bollandia, LXXV (1957), 185-226.
17. English sources of an annalistic nature possibly used by Bede are discussed by Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, op. cit.; P. Hunter Blair, 'The Moore Memoranda on Northumbrian History', The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, ed. C. Fox and B. Dickins (Cambridge, 1950),pp.245-57; 'The Northumbrians and their Southern Frontier', Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser., XXVI (1948), 98-126; and P. Grosjean 'La date du Colloque de Whitby', Analecta Bollandia, LXXVIII (1960), 255-60. Some information may have come to him from inscriptions, C. Peers and C. A. Ralegh Radford, 'The Saxon Monastery at Whitby', Archaeologia, LXXXIX (1943), 40-6.
18. H.E. pp. 6-7.
19. N. K. Chadwick, in Celt and Saxon, op. cit., pp. 138-85, esp. pp. 169, 177.
20. Jones is equally confident that Bede's account of the synod is in a different genre, modelled on Acta Synodi Caesareae, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, op. cit., 181.
21. H.E. II, 16, 117.
22. Levison, 'Bede as Historian', op. cit., p. 117.
23. C. Jenkins, 'Bede as Exegete and Theologian', Bede, his Life, Times and Writings, op. cit., pp. 196-9.
24. Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and Patristic Scholar', op. cit., pp. 84-5; cf. Jenkins, op. cit., pp. 160-1.
25. For the literature on Bede's chronology, D. P. Kirby, 'Bede and Northumbrian Chronology', English Historical Review, LXXVIII (1963), 514-27.
26. Kirby, 518, 522-3.
27. (H.)S. Brechter, Die Quellen zur Angelsachsenmission Gregors des Grossen (Beitr. zur Gesch. d. Alten Mönchtums u.d. Benediktinerordens, Heft 22), Münster i. W., 1941, pp. 228-52, critically discussed by F. A. Markus, 'The Chronology of the Gregorian Mission: Bede's Narrative and Gregory's Correspondence', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XIV (1963), 16-30.
28. It is likely that Bede did not know when Ethelbert was baptised. The use of interea with the perfect tense to introduce his account of Augustine's journey to be consecrated abroad suggests that when he wrote I, 26 and 27, he was uncertain of the relationship of this event to the baptism of Ethelbert (cf. III, 20, 169; III, 28, 194; IV, 4, 213). The absence of a date for the baptism from the chronological summary in V, 24, strongly suggests that his sources did not give him one. The phrase 'post XX et unum annos acceptae fidei' in II, 5 (p. 90), is not entirely unambiguous. It probably refers to the baptism or conversion of Ethelbert which Bede would therefore here place in 597. If so this may well be a slip on his part. There is other evidence that II, 5, was carelessly written (Kirby, op. cit., p. 521).
29. The dating of this journey is connected with the vexed question of the authenticity of the Responsiones to Augustine attributed to Gregory, for which see M. Deanesly and P. Grosjean 'The Canterbury Edition of the Answers of Pope Gregory I to St. Augustine', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, X (1959), 1-49; P. Meyvaert, 'Les "responsiones" de S. Grégoire le Grand a S. Augustin de Cantorbery', Revue d'Histoire Ecclesiastique, LIV (1959), 879-94; 'Bede and the Libellus Synodicus of Gregory the Great', Journal of Theological Studies, new ser., XII (1961), 298 n.; M. Deanesly, 'The Capitular Text of the Responsiones of Pope Gregory I to St. Augustine', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XLI (1961), 231-4.
30. It is not altogether clear that Bede's well-known account of the co-operation of Oswy of Northumbria and Egbert of Kent in choosing an archbishop of Canterbury is not a mere deduction based on the conflation of a letter from Pope Vitalian to Oswy and some account of Egbert's sending a candidate for the see to Rome, H.E. III, 29, 196-9; IV, 1, 201; Hist. Abb., ed. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica, I, 366; cf. Plummer's note, II, 200-1.
31. For textual questions see Plummer, pp. lxxx-cxliv, The Leningrad Bede, ed. O. Arngart (Copenhagen, 1952), pp. 13-35; The Moore Bede, ed. P. Hunter Blair and R. A. B. Mynors (Copenhagen, 1959), pp. 11-37.
32. H.E., p. 5.
33. H.E. IV, 23 (25), 264; Caroll, The Venerable Bede …, op. cit., pp. 162-3, 234.
34. Ibid., chapter IV; H.E. V, 12-14.
35. Aldfrith, Ceolwulf's predecessor, was literate; laymen brought up in such a household as Wilfred's might have become so, Eddius, ed. Colgrave, op. cit., p. 44. Wilfred himself was literate well before he was ordained priest and could have gone on to a secular career, as others perhaps did after a similar beginning, Eddius, pp. 8, 10, 18.
36. E.g. H.E., p. 6; V, 13, 313.
37. D. Whitelock, After Bede (Jarrow Lecture 1960, n.p., n.d.), p. 11.
38. A. G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley, 1959), pp. 76-85, 103, 116, 119.
39. S. Bonifatii et Lulli Epistolae (M.G.H. Epistolae Selectae I), ed. M. Tangl (Berlin, 1916), no. 14.
40. Ibid., nos. 73, 78, 115; cf. E. John, Land Tenure in Early England (Leicester, 1960), pp. 70-3.
41. H.E. III, 7.
42. H.E. III, 24, 177.
43. K. Jackson, 'On the Northern British Section in Nennius', Celt and Saxon, op. cit., pp. 35-9. Jackson argues convincingly that the Historia is partly derived from written sources embodying annals recorded during the seventh century.
44. J. R. R. Tolkien, 'Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics', Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII (1936), p. 18 of the offprint.
45. H.E. III, 6, 137-8.
46. H.E. III, 12, 151.
47. H.E. III, 14, 157; cf. Sigbert, king of Essex, said to have been murdered because he would forgive his enemies, III, 22, 173.
48. H.E. IV, 2, 205.
49. Wallace-Hadrill, 'The Work of Gregory of Tours in the Light of Modern Research', op. cit., pp. 60-2.
50. The period 596-687 occupies 239 pages of Plummer's edition, that after 687, 71.
51. H.E. V, 23, 349.
52. Wallace-Hadrill, Bede's Europe, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
53. Ed. Plummer, Baedae Opera Historica I, 405-23.…
54. H.E. IV, 12, 228.
55. H.E. V, 23, 351.
56. Baedae Opera Historica, ed. Plummer, I, 390.…
57. S. Bonifatii et Lulli Epistolae, op. cit., no. 115.…
58. Plummer, pp. lxii-lxiii n.
59. Hughes, 'Irish Monks and Learning', op. cit., pp. 62, 72; H.E. II, 19, 122-4; Laistner, 'The Library of the Venerable Bede', op. cit., pp. 252, 265.
60. For what was at issue see e.g. J. K. Kenney, Sources for the Early History of Ireland I (New York, 1929), pp. 210-17.
61. Two Lives of St. Cuthbert, op. cit., p. 284.
62. H.E. V, 22, 347.
63. K. Jackson, 'On the Northern British Section of Nennius', N. K. Chadwick, 'The Conversion of Northumbria: a Comparison of Sources' in Celt and Saxon, op. cit., pp. 20-62, 138-66.
64. Jackson, pp. 41-2.
65. Chapters of Early English Church History (Oxford, 1878), p. 435.
66. If Grosjean is right in identifying Agilbert, bishop of Dorchester 650-60, with the Agilbert who helped to lure an enemy of Ebroin's to his death by swearing an oath on an empty reliqary ('La date du Colloque de Whitby,' op. cit., p. 251) a Frankish historian could reveal other qualities in this man than the eruditio and the industria to which Bede refers (H.E. III, 7, 140).
67. E.g. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, op. cit., chapter 4; B. Colgrave, 'The Earliest Saints' Lives Written in England', Proceedings of the British Academy XLIV (1958), 35-60; and in general H. Delehaye, Les légendes bagiographiques, 4th ed. (Brussels, 1955).
68. H.E., pp. 7-8; Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, pp. 82-3.
69. Delehaye, p. 24.
70. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, pp. 29, 54.
71. Carroll, p. 245; H.E. III, 5, 137.
72. The attitude towards physical miracles of some of the Fathers, including even Gregory the Great, who records so many of them, was one of some reserve, e.g. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles, pp. 76-7, Carroll , pp. 196 ff.…