SOURCE: J. N. Stephens, "Bede's Ecclesiastical History," in History: The Journal of the Historical Association, n. s. Vol. 62, No. 204, February, 1977, pp. 1-14.

[In the following essay, Stephens explains that Bede differed from other historians in that the proper focus of the Ecclesiastical History is the English people, for it was Bede's intent to provide them with a new and fuller history.]

Bede called his History 'The Ecclesiastical History of the English people' (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum.) It is usually said to be a history of the church. According to Levison, Bede takes 'the history of the English Church as a united whole'¹; according to Stenton, it is 'devoted to the growth of the English Church'²; according to Campbell, 'his aim seems to have been to do for the 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'³. Other writers say the same: for Mayr-Harting, 'first of all Bede wanted to write about the way in which the order and unity of the English Church had been achieved', while another aim was to give moral examples⁴. According to Colgrave, Bede's History deals 'with the history of the Christian Church'⁵. The emphasis of Hunter Blair and Wallace-Hadrill is slightly different. For the former, it 'is at bottom a history of the deeds done by individual men and women in the conversion of the English from paganism to Christianity and in the subsequent development of the Church in England'⁶. For the latter, 'Historia Ecclesiastica can be translated 'History of the Church'; and this, at its lowest level, is what it is. Thus we may speak of Bede's 'History of the Church of the English', meaning the story of . . bishoprics and to a lesser extent of monasteries … But there was another level and a subtler sense of ecclesiastical history, familiar since the time of Eusebius: history, that is, as a record of salvation'⁷.

Although much of this may be true, there are certain difficulties, for if Bede's History is a history of the Church, there are the early chapters to be explained since they do not deal with the Church at all, but describe Britain and its Roman history. They are commonly disposed of as a clumsy introduction to the work which properly begins in cap. 23⁸, but this is a very cavalier assumption. Then there is the problem of Bede's models and his peers. We are told that first and foremost Bede's History was modelled on that of Eusebius of Caesarea⁹. We learn that another model was Gildas¹⁰, or that Bede may have drawn his design from Gregory of Tours¹¹ and generally that he may best be compared, not with Roman or Celtic historians, but with Gregory, Cassiodorus and Jordanes, Isidore, Fredegar and Paul the Deacon.¹² Yet if there are difficulties in conceiving of Bede's History as a history of the Church, this may affect our search for his models and we may wonder what these models can explain. C. W. Jones was surely right to say that Bede's History would have been much what it is without any models and that he 'was far more interested in working in a living tradition than in imitating an ancient model'.¹³

Perhaps we may see this by glancing briefly at the surface of such histories. Eusebius, for all his emphasis upon the Empire, writes ecclesiastical history for the Church and from the point of view of the Church. He tells the history of Christianity or the history of churches within the Empire, where Bede is an intermediary between, as we might say, the Church and the State. If anything, Bede's viewpoint lies within the 'State'. He is concerned to explain the Church; to set forth ecclesiastical history not to Christians who were sectaries in a pagan empire or society, but to people who were, or had till recently been, pagans themselves. His is not 'sectarian' history in a sense that Eusebian history is, for Christianity is no longer sectarian in Bede's day, as it was even in the time of Constantine. Bede's emphasis is upon the gens Anglorum, whereas that of Eusebius had been upon the apostolic succession of the churches and upon the nature, the antiquity and the spread of the truth.

Bede's History has more in common with the histories of Gregory of Tours, Fredegar and Paul the Deacon, for all of them concern the story of the barbarian gentes who settled in the Roman provinces of northern and western Europe.¹⁴ It means more to say that he is related to these writers than to say that he is descended from Eusebius, because he is like them in being unlike Eusebius. But this is too low a common denominator to help our understanding, since he can also be unlike them. Gregory's History, like that of Eusebius, begins in the Bible, in his case with the Creation. It is a rambling and disorganized chronicle of happenings in Francia both to churches and to kings and, as he says at the start, of 'the wars of kings with enemy peoples, of the martyr with the pagan and of churches with heretics'.¹⁵ It is, as he implies in the Preface, more a record than a lesson, and certainly it is not, in the way that Bede's History may be, a lesson in the faith. Gregory is one 'who can promulgate the deeds of the present for a remembrance of things past' amongst future generations,¹⁶ not, like Bede, for their 'instruction', or less clearly and consciously so. The proportions of Bede's book might indicate that his History is carefully, purposefully and differently designed. Fredegar's chronicle, or its original parts, continue where Gregory had stopped, to relate the deeds of later times, 'the acts of kings and the wars of peoples'.¹⁷ Paul the Deacon simply writes the history of the Lombards. As with Gregory and Fredegar, his is not an ecclesiastical history.

Like Eusebius then, Bede writes about the spread of the faith. He writes, but not in the same way, about conversion and salvation. Like Gregory and Paul the Deacon, he makes his History a 'national' history. But these similarities do not reach the heart of the matter. Bede is interesting for what he does not owe to Eusebius and what he does not share in common with his barbarian peers. It is very drastic summarily to condemn the early chapters as a clumsy introduction, or to assume that Bede's intentions are fully explained by mentioning earlier models. Are there not, according to the usual idea of the work, disproportions in its dimensions? The space given to miracles and to the Easter question is often noticed, classified as a minor imperfection or explained away. But this space may have a bearing on Bede's intentions and upon whether, or in what sense, his work is a history of the Church, that is, in what sense Bede's understanding of 'an ecclesiastical history' is what we mean by a history of the Church.

Bede's work is not just a history of the Church; it is a history of the gens Anglorum. What relationship do the things ecclesiastical have to the gens Anglorum? It may seem that this is easily answered: Bede's book is simply a history of the English Church—or, the ecclesiastical history of the English people, for what is the difference? I would like to suggest that there lies a great difference and that only by grasping it may we fully understand what Bede's History is: what he sought to do and what he achieved; how he went about it and what his work may have meant to his contemporaries. In antiquity there was the ecclesiastical history (as with Eusebius) and there was the history of a people (as with Livy). The originality of Bede was to write the ecclesiastical history of a people. An original title may reveal an original purpose.¹⁸

Like a new reader, having examined the title-page, let us turn to the table of contents and describe them so far as possible in Bede's own words. We may take the contents of Book III and let them stand for the whole. These contents are fairly easily described. We find advances and retreats from the faith: gesta erga fidem Christi.¹⁹ We see the defenders of the faith and the apostates. We hear of saints and the 'signs' of Almighty God; ostensio caelestium signorum.²⁰ We are instructed in the succession of bishops (successio sacerdotalis)²¹ and in the custom of the universal Church: mos uniuersalis ecclesiae.²² Already we have materials by means of which we may determine something of the nature of Bede's History—and that something is, more or less, what he draws, even literally, from Eusebius.²³

We can find many things that concern, as we would say, the history of the Church. We can find the history of the faith: of conversion and relapse, of vice and virtue. We have eminent Christians and apostates. We have the dignitaries of the Church, or more especially, the apostolic succession of the bishops. We have human merit, the judgement of God and orthodoxy on earth. Here perhaps is the history of the Church. However Bede does not tell us much about the clergy, unless about bishops and saints and usually saintly bishops. He does not tell us about the relations, as we would say, of Church and State, except in the story of kings and bishops. Nor does he tell us about ecclesiastical institutions. All these things would bulk very large in a modern work on the history of the 'Church'.

There would be one more large part of such a modern work, which might be called 'popular' piety: the system of religious practices and beliefs (as distinct from theories and doctrines, laws and institutions), which are accepted by a people. Is this not more nearly the stuff of Bede's History? Do we not approach nearer to the mark in calling it a history of the faith: of its beginnings, its successes, its setbacks and its present position?²⁴ It tells the story of the men who kindled it and those who kept it alight. We hear of its defenders and its enemies and we are constantly reminded that it all takes place under the watchful arbitration of God.²⁵ More than all this, it tells the story of what the faith should be: of fideles catholici against perfidi and pagani; of the rex christianissimus against the rex iniustus²⁶; of the Roman against the Irish church; of Oswald against Penda; of Aidan (as we may assume) versus Wilfrid: 'on the one hand divine faith, on the other, human presumption; here piety, there pride'.²⁷

This is certainly an important part of what Bede's History is, but surely it does not fully explain what Bede was trying to do or how significant it may have seemed to his first readers? It does not explain the early chapters, nor the number of miracles, nor the weight that attaches to the gens Anglorum in the title and throughout the book. Perhaps if we turn back to the Preface we may find a clue from what Bede tells us there about the interests of King Ceolwulf, to whom the history is dedicated.

Does this Preface not suggest that Bede's History was an attempt to provide for King Ceolwulf, not just a Christian history or a Latin history or a universal history, but a Christian replacement for the epic; the heroic saga of pagan ancestry he loved so well—the gestis sine dictis priorum, et maxime nostrae gentis uirorum inlustrium?²⁸ Perhaps we may say that Bede sought to show the gens Anglorum that they had a new history; to endow them with a new history. He showed them that they belonged first to the history of Britain, or rather to Roman history, and then to the catholic history of the Church. He showed them that their history began not with the annals of Saxon settlement or with Hengest and Horsa, but with the British landscape and Roman Britain. He showed them that they belonged to Britain as much as Britain belonged to them, so that Bede's History properly ends, as it was begun, with Britain and the status uniuersae Brittaniae.²⁹ Surely Bede did not describe the periods relatively remote from his own in greater detail than those nearer to him because he was waiting for the 'pattern of God's judgement on the past to emerge',³⁰ but because he was instructing the gens Anglorum in its past—and that meant the relatively distant past.

The early chapters of Bede (however conventional their information or approach) are not an awkward introduction to his History 'proper', which begins in chapter 23. Britain is the essential beginning, as it is the essential ending of the book. Bede is introducing the English, and especially English kings, to a larger world. He is showing his race (nostra gens) that their history, like their genealogy, is longer than they thought. He is saying that their history is a part of British history, just as their pagan descents from Woden³¹ were not the whole story—that they were descended, like all mankind, through innumerable progeny from God.

Almighty God has established your kin to spring up from the first man whom he formed, after numberless generations had been drawn out through the ages.³²

Then he wished, more particularly, to show or reveal the Christian history of the gens Anglorum. We may suggest that this, rather than the desire for 'chronological unity', was why it was so important to show how the times of English kings might be counted as years of, or even from, the Lord. Thereby the Anglo-Saxons might understand how they did not live only under the reign of a pagan king, but in the reign of Christ and grasp how the two reigns were related. As pagan history and pagan genealogy is not abandoned, but absorbed by the Christian; so likewise the new virtue does not exclude the old.

Oswald was at once an old and a new sort of hero³³ and while the greatest of Oswine's many virtues was humility, those virtues included the 'royal dignity' which attracted nobles to his thegnage from every province of the gens Anglorum³⁴ Nevertheless the emphasis is upon the new virtues and their glorious prospect. Did they not open up a new history of glory and fame? To set against the deeds framed by the pagan brave in a world where 'for earl whosoever, it is afterword, the praise of livers-on, that, lasting, is best'³⁵, he offered the miracles of saintly heroes, which brought them greater fame. Those who fought for their earthly kingdoms like Æthelfrith, might 'strongly yearn for glory'³⁶, but the old religion lacked uirtus³⁷, whereas the 'virtues' of the new might bring glory:

This was in the likeness of the Apostles: with both glory and authority from conscience, doctrine through scripture, divine powers (uirtutes) from merit.³⁸

Bede's History is itself the proof (or as a History it offers the proof) that Christian fame is greater than pagan fame. This must have had a powerful appeal for how could northern earls resist a religion that brought fame even across the seas? In the case of Oswald, not only did his fame

encircle all the confines of Britain, but the rays of his healing light were also strewn far across the Ocean and reached at once to Germany and Ireland.³⁹

'Divine dispensation' exerted itself to show that Cuthbert lived in glory after death,⁴⁰ while the name of the archbishops of Canterbury 'liveth to all generations'.⁴¹

Bede's great purpose and perhaps his achievement was to give the English a longer and a larger history than they thought. This may be easily overlooked. It is because Bede succeeded that we take Britain for granted and make it the backbone of Anglo-Saxon England. Bede's contemporaries did not do so—and for him to convert the barbarian and the pagan meant not just a plunging in the river, but baptism into the secrets, the traditions and the learning,—Romano-Christian history whole.⁴²

Bede made the English belong to Britain and to Rome. They could count the years of their lives not from the accession of their kings but from Christ and count their regnal years as Christian years. There were also consequences that followed from this larger history. Christian history and Roman history might include 'English' history and equally they altered its interpretation. In order to see how great the consequences of this might be, we must remember what it was that in those days the historian and the singer of song did, and how different it is from what historians do now. In Dark-Age England what they sang and what they wrote was history and there was none other. An individual history is now merely a point of view, which may be checked, confirmed and corrected from a dozen other histories and a thousand other sources that record the past. Then, what the singer sang was history. To be forgotten or remembered in the song was nearly to be forgotten or remembered forever. This was true not so much because of the paucity of 'histories', but because there was only one sort of history or one view of history, until Bede showed that there was room for two, or redefined the first.

This gave the singer power and it gave Bede even greater power to decide who might afterwards be remembered—'quae memoratu digna' and what was more dreadful in the North than to be forgotten after death? Bede, like other monastic annalists, did not hesitate to use that power, but unlike them he did not write only for monks. With a clear voice, he told the others that there was more than one sort of history and more than one view of who might be remembered in after-time; more than one list of kings:

Hence it has pleased all who compute the chronology of kings, that having destroyed the intervening memory of those perfidious kings, the same year might be assigned to the reign of the following king, that is to Oswald, a man beloved of God.⁴³

By a new and frightening standard, the memory of kings might be abolished, or else preserved, as by God, more glorious than ever:

He may also repay your glorious name more gloriously still among posterity.⁴⁴

We have seen that Bede lengthened and widened the Anglo-Saxon conception of history. He showed that Anglo-Saxon history was a part of British history and that both were Roman. He altered its interpretation and its very character. This he did less by replacing pagan history by christian history, but by doing what is to use a more subtle, and to his contemporaries a more controversial thing: by writing about good and not about evil.

Bede's History does not tell the story of a struggle against evil in England. It tells us about the correction of error—about a gens correcta (as Bede says of the Picts).⁴⁵ It celebrates and it demonstrates the power of 'Almighty' God and the powerful effects of a faith in a powerful God:

Now let us praise the maker of the Heavenly kingdom, [as Bede paraphrased the song of Caedmon], the power of the Creator and his counsel, the deeds of the Father of glory: and how he, since he is the eternal God, is the author of all miracles.⁴⁶

This may seem obvious. But is this very obviousness not something to be explained? Would it not have been still more striking and peculiar to Bede's contemporaries? We know from Beowulf,⁴⁷ and from what must have been its audience, something of the beliefs of kings and thegns, in and out of monasteries in 8th century England. They conceived of history as an heroic struggle against evil, perhaps on behalf of the Christian God, or with his help, but it was still a struggle and not a miracle hand-made by God. Did Bede seek to show them that they had another history commanded by God, and one where fame might be won not by struggling heroically against evil, but by humbly entrusting their 'faith' to God?

Once again did not the breadth of Bede's vision encompass an older or a narrower view? Pope gregory rescued 'our people' (gens) 'from the teeth of the old enemy'⁴⁸ while James the Deacon 'saved much prey from the old enemy'.⁴⁹ Sigeberht of Essex was murdered, 'at the instigation of the enemy of all good men'⁵⁰ and one afflicted man, after he had received a portion of the soil soaked by the water which had washed Oswald's bones, suffered no terrors or vexations by night 'from the old enemy'.⁵¹ Let us recall Beowulf:

with the coming of Grendel; grief sprang from joy when the old enemy entered our hall!⁵²

Beowulf is all about the Old Enemy, while Bede's History is all about the True God.

This slight welcoming of evil within Bede's larger vision would perhaps have helped all the more forcefully to direct his readers' attentions from the old conceptions to the new: from the Old Enemy to Almighty God; from heroic evil to trust; from loftiness to lowliness;⁵³ from the 'presumption' of man to 'faith' in God, so that (as by Caedmon's songs):

the minds of many were frequently inflamed to despisement of the world and to an appetite for heavenly life.⁵⁴

Bede may have been seeking to pass on to the gens Anglorum, and especially to their kings and thegns, a new conception of 'divine knowledge'—a less heroic and a more apostolic notion. It is perhaps this purpose which explains the large number of miracles that Bede reports in his History. They were not 'crudities' designed by a higher mind for a lower audience.⁵⁵ They were the proofs of God's might and proofs that man might only partake of the almightiness and the glory of God through humble submission to His grace, as opposed to proud strife on His behalf. This conception is conveyed even by the use of the word virtus which meant both a virtue and a miracle. In the Gospel sense it meant divine virtue, hence divine power. It could be used both of divinity and its 'sign'; both of virtue and the 'works' of virtue. It reveals and it allows man's access to God.

In the miraculous parts of his History, Bede may have been imitating and adapting the work of Augustine and Gregory the Great. Those parts may be seen as a sort of libellus miraculorum designed (if we may bend Augustine's words to Bede's task) to establish the faith and by the faith to make them better known—to show that miracles are still done and by the same God who had done them in the past.⁵⁶ The Acts had preserved the 'glorious' miracles of the Apostles in the East; Augustine had done his bit for Africa in cap. 8 of the twenty-second book of the City of God. Gregory the Great had spoken for Italy in his Dialogues; now Bede, not perhaps without some pride, would do the same for England.

Bede's wide use of miracles has been explained by reference to a great increase of belief in them in the preceding centuries,⁵⁷ but there is no evidence that belief in the miraculous was less widespread in the 4th century than in the 8th century—unless amongst the halfpagan aristocracy of Rome. For Augustine, Gregory and Bede alike it was not widespread enough. What may have changed is the exegetical purpose and its effect. Pope Gregory began his Dialogues in order to tell his Deacon Peter about the Italian saints after he had denied knowing the life of anyone in Italy with divine powers (virtutibus). The Deacon did not doubt that there had been good men in Italy, but no signa atque virtutes had been done by them.⁵⁸ Bede glosses Gregory's task by saying that he recorded his miracles ad exemplum uiuendi posteris.⁵⁹

As Gregory had written to supply the wishes of his Deacon for information about the Italian saints and (as Bede would have it) as an example to posterity, Bede himself writes to supply the liking of King Ceolwulf for the deeds of his ancestors. The miracles of Bede's History form a substantial part of the record of those deeds that he will offer. As such, they become a very new history of glory and fame. Where Ceolwulf would doubtless have liked the heroic deed, Bede will offer him the apostolic ad instructionem posteritatis.⁶⁰

Bede imitates the purposes of Augustine and Gregory (and the Acts) and he adapts them. Augustine and Gregory seem more concerned with miracles as works of God—works of the living God. Bede may have been not only concerned to emphasize that God was alive (and alive to the English), but that he was of a particular sort. He wishes to reinterpret the sayings and deeds of the forbears of the Anglo-Saxons 'as an example of life to posterity' (as Bede revealingly describes and subtly alters Gregory's purpose). This may be the profile of Bede's History as he once carved it himself, though the head has long been buried and forgotten. There are also particular embellishments to uncover.

Bede is not only concerned with British history and Christian history, but with Roman history and 'catholic' history and with the role played in them by the gens Anglorum. We have been told that Bede adopted Gildas's emphasis upon the sinfulness of the Britons and was able to develop this into a theme of his History. He could show that the fate of the British was deserved by sin and imposed by God as vengeance, so that the Anglo-Saxons could emerge as a chosen people: as a new Israel.⁶¹ But may this not have been only a shattered fragment of a larger or abandoned theme which decorates or litters Bede's History? We have seen that the History ends, as it was begun, with Britain. May we not suppose that Bede would also have wished for it to end with the gens Anglorum triumphant in all Britain, perhaps by arms and certainly by religion? He might then have been able simply to describe the work at its close as an Historia ecclesiastica Brittaniarum and not, as he was forced, perhaps reluctantly, to add, et maxime gentis Anglorum.⁶²

He might then have been able to draw his work to a nice conclusion of matchng proportions. He had begun with Britain. He continued with the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Anglorum siue Saxonum gens.⁶³ He proceeded thereafter in two ways: with the return of the Romans 'to preach the word of God to the gens Anglorum'⁶⁴ and with the Irish bringing that grace to the 'whole' English people.⁶⁵ He brought it to completion with the successive pilgrimages of English kings to Rome (balancing perhaps the visits of Roman bishops to English kings) and 'with a wonderful dispensation of divine compassion, since that gens, which had willingly and without envy taken care to communicate to the English peoples the grasp of divine knowledge which it had possessed, was itself presently brought by the gens Anglorum to a perfect way of life, which it had lacked'.⁶⁶

It would have been more perfect still if the 'English' people had succeeded to the whole of the Roman Britannia so as to hand it back intact to Rome as a complete member of the Roman faith—that faith, 'which all the churches throughout the world' (i.e. throughout the Roman world) 'agree in Christ'.⁶⁷ Thus was Bede anxious to bear testimony to the adhesion of the English to the universal church: exemplum catholicae fidei Anglorum⁶⁸ and, as he says of the Picts, to the subjection of a 'corrected' people to the guardianship of St. Peter.⁶⁹ His History is nearly brought to an end with the proud boast:

The English peoples are now believing and instructed in every way in the rule of the catholic faith.⁷⁰

It is surely this—and not the traditional preoccupation of the ecclesiastical historian with error⁷¹—which explains Bede's emphasis on the Paschal controversy.⁷² His preoccupation is not with error as such, but with the 'catholicism' of the orbis Romanus, of which Britannia was one part.

At moments in writing his History Bede seems to have felt that he might yet write that full story. May not such momentary feelings explain those Bedan 'prejudices', which historians have, according to inclination, been fond of noticing or blushing to admit? Might this not dispose at once (or dispose in terms of a larger or less meaningless prejudice) of Bede's so-called approval of strenuitas in kings, his account of Æthelfrith, his prejudice against the British monks at Chester, his 'incomplete' list of kings holding imperium over the southern English peoples and his appetite for 'brave christian kings terrorizing barbarian nations'?

Is it not odd that Bede found apparent relish for Æthelfrith, who 'wasted the British more than any other English leader'; making 'more land habitable or tributary to the English', than any other king or tribune, having first 'exterminated or subjected the inhabitants'? Why does Bede compare him to Saul 'with this only excepted, that he was ignorant of divine religion'? What are we to make of Bede's proud announcement, that after Æthelfrith no 'king of the Scots in Britain has dared until this day to come in battle against the gens Anglorum"?⁷³ Although this may seem odd, do we need to introduce Bernician sympathies or inadequately assimilated heroic poems in order to explain it? Although Bede may have drawn on local Bernician sources, (including perhaps such poems) was not Æthelfrith merely a convenient example of the Old Testament of the gens Anglorum? This was their age of kings—Hebrew kings, when they were 'foreknown' to God.⁷⁴ It was one stage in their conquest of the promised land, and perhaps one stage in their conquest of Britannia.⁷⁵

As for Bede's list of kings, those who held imperium over the southern English peoples were followed by kings who ruled the Britons too.⁷⁶ Perhaps Bede may have hoped that they would become, or would be succeeded by, kings who would be truly reges Britanniae. Hence the often mentioned exclusion of later Mercian kings from this list, not from Northumbrian prejudice, but since they ruled again only the English peoples south of the Humber. Hence also, it may be, Bede's habit of calling the English kingdoms, not 'kingdoms', but 'provinces': a Roman name for a Roman conception, for were these not dismembered parts of the Roman 'province' of Britain? Reassembled, the provincia Anglorum might become again Britannia. English kings, now catholic and Roman, might become the hammer of barbarian kings. It was not to be.

'From that time', says Bede of Ecgfrith's reign, 'the hope and valour of the regnum Anglorum began to ebb and fall away. For the Picts recovered possession of their land which the English had held, and the Irish who lived in Britain and some part of the British nation recovered their liberty'.⁷⁷ In the end, Bede had to be content with a lesser symmetry: that the English brought the Picts to the customs of the universal church⁷⁸ (perhaps thereby continuing to repay the English debt to the Irish, since it was the Irish who had once converted the Picts) and the British were left in error, just as they themselves had failed to bring knowledge of the Christian faith to the English.⁷⁹

Whether or not Bede would have wished (even haltingly, confusedly and with some contrary feeling) for English kings to become the kings of Britain or for the gens Anglorum to triumph over Britain by force or by religion, he may certainly have prepared them as its heirs. He may have done this by telling them their British, Roman history and in doing so by creating them as one gens with the traditions to succeed to it. Is it not Bede more than anyone else, who was responsible for creating or at least for propagating, the notion that the various Anglo-Saxon peoples were one 'English' gens, the gens Anglorum⁸⁰? To what purpose or effect, did he do it, but to make them capable, like a Roman gens, of succeeding at least in spirit to the Roman province?

So much for the themes. Let us now try to draw the threads together and see how far light may have been cast on Bede's intentions and on the disproportions of his History: the early chapters, the space devoted to miracles and to the Easter question. Bede's History is not a history of the Church in our sense of the term. Nor does it merely follow classical or more nearly contemporary Latin 'models'. Bede was not doing what Eusebius or Gregory of Tours did, as the contents and even the title of his work may show. He should be compared not to the Greek history but to the German. His History, if we can grasp what it is by calling it any one thing is, as Bede himself also called it in the Preface, a 'history of our nation' (historia nostrae nationis), in the sense that an epic like Beowulf is such a history. However much Bede was influenced by his reading of the Church Fathers and Latin histories and synodalia, a similar spirit animates and unifies both his work and Beowulf. That is why there is a great difference between calling Bede's History a history of the Church and calling it the Ecclesiastical history of the English people and why we may only understand what he was doing by grasping what it is.

Bede's History does not concern the English 'Church', but the gens Anglorum. Nor is it an ecclesiastical history, if we understand thereby that it concerns only one part of the life of the gens—its ecclesiastical part. It is a history of that life itself, interpreted from a particular point of view, which was not so much 'ecclesiastical' as based upon a particular conception of God. In the same way Beowulf is such a history informed by another conception of God. Bede's History is a Christian replacement for the epic. It is a saga of the doings of the gens Anglorum under the power of God.

It may be harder for us to think of Bede's History as an epic (except as a metaphor) than it is to recall the proximity of Greek history and Greek epic. They are in the same language. Yet language can mislead and, stark as they may have been, we may exaggerate the cultural differences between Bede's monastery and the native world outside. We may make them so stark that we cannot explain at all the sudden flowering of the so-called Northumbrian Renaissance or the writing of Bede's History, its greatest work.

A consideration of Bede's 'models' may help us to understand that Renaissance. At the same time, will not his purpose do as much for the Carolingian revival? Bede is usually said to have been the father of its literature or scholarship, but may he not have been also behind its method and its purpose? Was his History not designed to transmit, interpret and refashion the classical tradition (in its loosest sense) for the conversion of his own kind, and was not that also the essential purpose of the Carolingian revival? Did not Bede, more than anyone else, directly pass on that conception through Alcuin and the school of York to the 'intellectuals' of Carolingian Francia? Similar circumstances certainly helped to define the purpose, but Bede had already been there to express and hence to form it.

Bede's History, as an apostolic saga or a Germanic Acts, may have been his greatest piece of teaching. He gave the Anglo-Saxons a new name, or gave it currency: that they were one 'English' gens. He gave them a new history and a much longer and larger one than they knew. He gave them a British history and a Roman history. He showed them that they belonged to Britain and to Rome. To adapt Bury's old remark, he showed them that their minds need no longer linger 'in the forests of Germany'. He showed them a new home. That was one ancestry. Another was Christian. He showed the Anglo-Saxons that their history began earlier than Hengest and Horsa, and differently. He showed that they were descended from God and not from Woden. This new ancestry opened up a new history of glory and fame, with new things to look for in the history of the gens Anglorum and new things to find. Above all, there were the deeds of the English saints or deeds done by their relics, and the fame they won.

In all these ways may Bede not have been anxious to reveal the 'allegorical' meaning of English history, as he had already done for Scripture? In his Commentary on the Book of Samuel he had referred to drawing out the allegorical meaning of Biblical sayings 'which revives us inwardly, correcting, teaching, consoling', and such commentaries were what St. Boniface sent for to help him in his missions to the Germans.⁸¹ Was Bede perhaps not similarly concerned, as a lesson in conversion, to draw out the allegorical meaning of 'English' history, that is, to draw out its Christian meaning as a story of conversion, so that for him, as one recent writer has said, the divine becomes 'the dynamic element of history'?⁸²

This, like some of the other things that we may glimpse in Bede,⁸³ is a forgotten theme and justly so, for it was without a future. But what Bede says about the gens Anglorum; what he did for it; the history he created for it and the emphasis which he placed upon it is more important, for its consequences endured. If we wish to play the games that literary critics play, and call things 'good' and 'bad' (though if that should be anyone's task at all, it is not the historian's), Bede may be called a great historian, or at least a great English historian. It is not that he is the first English historian or the first great English historian. He is not great for his moderation (Campbell), for his co-ordination of information (Stenton) or because he so nearly fails to be one of the moderns. He is great by comparison with those who came after. We could say that he is greater than Matthew Paris, Clarendon, Hume or Macaulay and greater than all those who have written the history of the gens Anglorum until historians gave up writing that history altogether. He succeeded in doing what none of them were able even to attempt: he gave his audience a new history. He gave the Anglo-Saxons first a British history; then by turns a Roman, a Catholic and a Christian history. Finally he showed them that all this meant that they had a new history of their own, English history. Thereby he created it.

Notes

1. W. Levison, 'Bede as historian', in Bede: his life, times and writings ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Oxford, 1935), 143.
2. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943; 1971), 187.
3. J. Campbell, 'Bede' in Latin Historians ed. T. A. Dorey (London, 1966), 162-3.
4. H. Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1972), 42-3.
5. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave, R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969), xix.
6. P. Hunter Blair, 'The Historical writings of Bede', in La Storiografia altomedievale (Settimane di studio del centro ital. di studi sull'alto Medioevo, xvii, 1970), 210-11.
7. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval History (Oxford, 1975), 79.
8. Venerabilis Baedae Opera Historica ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1896), ii, 36; M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in western Europe AD. 500-900 (London, 1957), 165; W. Levison, ubi supra, p. 141; G. Musca, Il Venerabile Beda, storico dell'alto Medioevo (Bari, 1973), 171.
9. e.g. W. Levison, ubi supra, p. 133 (but recognizing later on that page that he may not have needed one); cf. the view of J. Campbell, quoted above.
10. see below, p. 9 & references there.
11. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, 'The work of Gregory of Tours in the light of modern research', Trans. roy. hist. soc., 5th ser., i (1951), 45.
12. idem, 'Gregory of Tours and Bede: their views on the personal qualities of kings', Frühmittelaterliche studien, ii (1968), 31.
13. Saints' Lives and chronicles in early England (Ithaca, 1947), 89-90; cf. G. Musca, ubi supra, pp. 146-7, 180.
14. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, 'Gregory of Tours and Bede', p. 31; cf. G. Musca, ubi supra, pp. 145-6.
15. Gregory of Tours, Opera ed. W. Arndt (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, scriptorum rerum Merovingicarum, i, 1884), 33.
16. ibid., p. 31.
17. Fredegar, Chronica ed. B. Krusch (M.G.H., script, rer. Mer., ii, 1889), 123.
18. I owe this point to Mr. C. W. Macleod.
19. H E., Praef. (ed. Colgrave & Mynors, p. 6: all page references are to this edition).
20. ibid., ii, 1 (p. 130).
21. ibid., Praef. (p. 6).
22. ibid., iii, 25 (p. 294).
23. W. Levison, ubi supra, p. 143 & n.
24. cf. G. Musca, Il Venerabile Beda, pp. 128-9, 176, 179-80.
25. H. E., iii, 15 (p. 260): 'Qui cuius meriti fuerit, etiam miraculorum signis internus arbiter edocuit.'
26. to use a phrase other than Bede's own.
27. H. E., i, 17 (pp. 56-8), based on Constantius' Life of St. Germanus.
28. ibid., Praef. (p. 2).
29. ibid., v, 23 (p. 560)
30. J. Campbell, ubi supra, p. 172.
31. H. E., i, 15 (p. 50).
32. ibid., ii, 10 (p. 170), quoting Pope Boniface.
33. J. Campbell, ubi supra, pp. 170-1.
34. H. E., iii, 14 (pp. 256-8).
35. The Seafarer (tr. of M. Alexander).
36. H. E., i, 34 (p. 116).
37. ibid., ii, 13 (p. 182).
38. ibid., i, 17 (p. 56), quoting Constantius' Life of St. Germanus.
39. ibid., iii, 13 (p. 252).
40. ibid., iv, 30 (p. 442): 'volens autem latius demonstrare diuina dispensatio, quanta in gloria uir Domini Cudberct post mortem uiueret.'
41. ibid., v, 8 (pp. 472-4), quoting Ecclesiasticus 44. 14.
42. cf. R. W. Southern, 'Bede' in his Medieval humanism and other studies (Oxford, 1970), 5.
43. H.E., iii, 1 (p. 214); cf. iii, 9 (p. 240).
44. ibid., i, 32 (p. 112), quoting Gregory the Great.
45. ibid., v, 21 (p. 552).
46. ibid., iv, 24 (p. 416).
47. or, for that matter, from Felix's Life of Guthlac: cf. R. W. Southern, ubi supra, pp. 2-3.
48. H.E., ii, 1 (p. 130).
49. ibid., ii, 20 (p. 206).
50. ibid., iii, 22 (p. 284).
51. ibid., iii, 11 (p. 250).
52. Beowulf, 1775-6 (tr. of M. Alexander): this is a loose translation, but 'old enemy' itself is literally translated from eald-gewinna, which in turn may have been a literal translation of antiquus hostis.
53. cf. H.E., ii. 12 (p. 176).
54. ibid., iv, 24 (p. 414).
55. J. Campbell, ubi supra, p. 183.
56. De Civitate Dei, Bk. xxii, cap. 8 (ed. Welldon, ii, 589, 599); cf. H. Delehaye, 'Les Premiers "Libelli Miraculorum"', Analecta Bollandiana, xxix (1910) pp. 427-34.
57. J. Campbell, ubi supra, p. 163.
58. Gregory the Great, Dialogi ed. U. Moricca (Fonti per la storia d'Italia, 1924), 15.
59. H.E., ii, 1 (p. 128).
60. ibid., Praef. (p. 6).
61. E. Faral, La Légende Arthurienne (Bibl. de l'Éc. des hautes études, 255-7, 1929), i, esp. 50-5; followed in various ways and degrees by R. W. Hanning, The Vision of history in early Britain (New York-London, 1966), 69-70; P. Hunter Blair, 'The Historical writings of Bede', pp. 211-12; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), 74, 97; H. Mayr-Harting, ubi supra, p. 44; C. Leonardi, 'Il Venerabile Beda e la cultra del secolo viii', in I Problemi dell ' Occidente nel secolo viii (Settimane di studi del centro italiano di studi sull' alto Medioevo, xx, 1973), 636-8.
62. H.E., v, 24 (p. 566).
63. ibid., i, 15 (p. 50).
64. ibid., i, 23 (p. 68).
65. ibid., iii, 3: here, when Bede refers to Oswald's anxiety to convert the tota gens over which he ruled, it might be thought that he is referring simply to the conversion of Bernicia as well as Deira—the tota gens Nordanhymbrorum (cf. iii, 2—p. 216). But shortly afterwards Bede refers to Oswald ruling over the gens Anglorum and over provinciae Anglorum, so it seems as reasonable to conclude that the 'tota gens ' is the gens Anglorum.
66. ibid., v, 22 (p. 554).
67. ibid., ii, 2 (p. 136).
68. ibid, iv, 18 (p. 390). On this theme, cf. L. Torretta, 'Coscienza nazionale e ideale d'universalita nella "Historia Ecclesiastica" del Venerabile Beda', Atti del v congresso nazionale di studi Romani, iii (1942).
69. H.E., v, 21 (p. 552).
70. ibid., v, 22 (p. 554).
71. J. Campbell, ubi supra, p. 179.
72. cf. M.T.A. Carroll, The Venerable Bede: his spiritual teachings (The Catholic University of America, studies in med. hist., n.s., ix, 1946), 79.
73. H.E., i, 34 (p. 116).
74. ibid., i, 22 (p. 68).
75. Alternatively it has been suggested that Æthelfrith was called Saul because he would soon be replaced by a 'David' more pleasing to God. One might further elaborate that he was a Bernician Saul to Edwin's Deiran David or that Æthelfrith and Oswald were two chapters in the Bernician Book of Kings. The story of Æthelfrith also helps to introduce Northumbrian affairs to the reader.
76. H.E., ii, 5 (pp. 148-50).
77. ibid., iv, 26 (p. 428).
78. ibid., v, 21.
79. ibid., v, 22 (p. 554).
80. R. W. Chambers, 'Bede', Proc. Brit Acad., (1936), 153-4.
81. B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1952), 36.
82. C. Leonardi, 'Il Venerabile Beda e la cultura del secolo viii', pp. 636-7.
83. It is noticeable that the emphasis on Britain tends to be suppressed in the Old English Bede: cf. D. Whitelock, 'The Old English Bede', Proc. Brit. Acad., (1962), 62.