SOURCE: James Campbell, in an introduction to Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Other Selections, edited by James Campbell, Washington Square Press, Inc., 1968, pp. vii-xxxiv.

[In the following excerpt, Campbell provides an overview of Bede's work and concludes that, at least in part, Bede transmuted the past into his own creation which reflected mainly his own values.]

Bede was born about 673 and died in 735. He entered the monastery of Monkwearmouth (Wearmouth), in Northumbria, at the age of seven, and the remainder of his life was spent there and in the sister monastery of Jarrow.¹ Today he is famous chiefly as the historian of the conversion of England. But he also wrote on almost every other branch of Christian learning; in his own day, and for long afterwards, his commentaries on the Bible and his treatises on chronology and other subjects were as much valued as his history.

It is remarkable that the most notable scholar the Western Church produced at that time should have lived in Northumbria, nearly at the extremity of the known world, and that he should have sprung from a people who had very recently been pagan and illiterate. In Bede's day, although most of the churches of Europe were very old, the English church was very new. In Gaul, Italy, and Spain Christianity survived the fall of the Roman Empire and won over the barbarian conquerors. But the English (Anglo-Saxon) people who, after the departure of the Romans in the early fifth century, occupied the southern and eastern parts of Britain, for long remained pagan and little affected by Roman civilization.

Christianity had been quite strongly established in Britain while the Romans ruled there. It survived the Roman evacuation in those areas of the west and north where the native British population remained free from Anglo-Saxon rule. The Christian Britons seem to have made little attempt to convert the invaders. Christianity was brought to the Anglo-Saxons by missionaries from overseas, most of them Italians or Irishmen.

The first mission of which we know is that of Augustine, who arrived from Rome in 597. He established Christianity in Kent, and he and his Italian followers attempted to convert other kingdoms. Their success was limited and insecure. For a generation the fate of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons hung in the balance. Thereafter the faith spread quickly and prospered. By 660 it was established in nearly every kingdom.² This success was due largely to the efforts of Irish missionaries. Christianity had flourished in Ireland from the fifth century, and by the end of the sixth the Irish church was becoming notable both for its learning and for its missionary enterprise. The most important Irish mission to England was that led by Aidan, who came to Northumbria in 635 from the Irish monastery of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. Aidan founded the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria. From this base the Irish evangelized Northumbria and much of the English Midlands. At the same time the Roman missionaries based in Canterbury remained active in the southeast; a few years previously they had even made an attempt to convert Northumbria, though with only temporary success. Meanwhile other missionaries, owing allegiance neither to Canterbury nor to Iona, appeared elsewhere in England.

Thus by 660 Christianity had been very successful in England; but English Christians were not united in recognizing a common ecclesiastical authority. Some acknowledged the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury in England and that of the Pope over the whole church. Others looked to Lindisfarne and to Iona. It may well be that some elements in the church recognized no superior authority at all. Before long, all were to recognize the supremacy of Canterbury and of Rome.

In 664 the Irish church in Northumbria accepted the Roman mode of calculating Easter, and an important cause of disunity was thus removed. Even more significant in the unification of the English church was the influence of the pontificate of Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690. Theodore was a native of Asia Minor and about sixty-seven years old when he arrived in England. Despite these disadvantages he established the authority of Canterbury over all the other English sees. Other great changes came about at the same time. Centers of learning grew up at Canterbury and elsewhere, and many nèw monasteries were founded. The English church, which had been largely directed by foreign missionaries, became a native one, nearly all of whose bishops were English. By the end of the century the English were themselves sending missionaries to western Germany.

Bede's own monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow played an important part in this prosperous and revolutionary period. Founded in 674 by Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian nobleman, it was distinguished by its learning, its close connections with Rome and Canterbury, and its size. Its founder endowed it with a great library. A frequent visitor to Rome, he was closely associated with Theodore and was for a time abbot of the monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul in Canterbury. By 716 his foundation held six hundred or more monks. Monkwearmouth-Jarrow was outstanding among the monasteries of Northumbria, and there were few which could rival it in the whole of England.

Bede's work reflects the exceptional circumstances of his house. Its library enabled him to become very learned. The study of the literature of pagan Greece and Rome was unimportant for him, although he had access to at least a few of the Latin classics. His learning was in Christian Latin literature, whose core was the works of the Latin Fathers: Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory. This literature presented an account of God, of man, and of the universe which was complete, unified, and satisfying. Thanks to its double inheritance from Judaism and from Greece and Rome, Christianity had developed an intricate and sophisticated intellectual system. Centered on the elaborate interpretation of the Bible to reveal many layers of meaning, it established relationships between every kind of knowledge and showed how all proclaimed the same divine truths. By Bede's time few could read this literature with full understanding. Literacy was rare and unbroken traditions of learning much rarer. There were learned men in the seventh century, especially in Spain and Ireland, but they were not numerous—though it is true that we can learn much more easily of the minority of scholars who wrote than of the majority who simply read. During the Dark Ages Christianity might have lost its theology and have become for all what it became for nearly all: a collection of rituals, precepts, and crude arguments. That it survived as more than the barbarized detritus of a religion is thanks to the preservation of the Christian learning of the later Roman Empire and its continued study, however faltering and by however few. The continuance of that tradition was much more important in the intellectual history of Europe than the incidental preservation of the classics. Bede played an important part in continuing it. His wide range of works rested heavily upon, and were intended to transmit, the learning of his predecessors.

As a historian Bede found his models and sources in the histories written by Christians in and after the fourth century. Three features of Christian historiography should be noticed First, it owed very little to the great historians of Greece and Rome. As Arnaldo Momigliano has written, "No real Christian historiography founded upon the political experience of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus was transmitted to the Middle Ages." The Christian historians made a fresh start in new genres, and the change was not necessarily for the worse. Second, there was no clear division between history and theology. All knowledge was knowledge of God. Few, if any, learned men specialized in history and certainly Bede did not. Most histories were written by men who also wrote on other aspects of divine learning. Third, there were several kinds of Christian history, and the different genres were kept fairly distinct from one another. One author writing in two different genres can give very different impressions of himself.

Bede wrote in most of the historical genres known to him. The contrast between two of them may be seen by comparing his chronicles with his Life of St. Cuthbert. His work in one genre is terse, packed with facts, and dry; in the other it is discursive, not containing so much as a date, and very readable. Bede wrote two chronicles, a short one which formed part of his book On the Measurements of Time (703) and a longer and better one which was included in On the Computation of Time (725).³ Chronicles were little more than lists of dates and events. Bede's short chronicle is an extreme example. A typical passage is this:

The third age contains 942 years. Abraham came into Canaan at the age of 75. At the age of 100 Abraham begat Isaac. For he first begat Ishmael, from whom the Ishmaelites. Isaac at the age of 60 begat Jacob. The kingdom of the Argives begins. Jacob begat Joseph at the age of 90. Memphis in Egypt is founded. Joseph lived for ninety years. Greece began to have crops under Argos. The captivity of the Hebrews for 147 years. Cecrops founded Athens. Moses ruled Israel for forty years. Sparta is founded.…⁴

Such works seem neither enlightening nor agreeable to the modern reader. Nevertheless they were very important in Christian historiography. The genre was established by Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea (c.260-c.340), and thereafter numerous chronicles were compiled. They indicate one of the consequences of the spread of Christianity in the Roman world. Educated Christians knew two traditions of world history, one pagan and the other Christian and Jewish. Chronicles correlated the two so that the reader might learn, for example, what was happening to the Jews at the time of the foundation of Rome. One of the great distinctions between pagan and Christian scholars in history, as in much else, was that the Christians knew more, or thought they did; and they had a philosophy which enabled them to interpret all they knew. For example, the Bible afforded data which made it possible to calculate the date of the Creation.

More important, a chronicle, in summarizing the whole history of the world, made it possible to display it as a Providential design. This could be done in various ways, but Bede was chiefly attracted by the doctrine of the Ages of the World. Each of his two chronicles was written as part of the chapter on Ages in a treatise on chronology. The history of the world so far was divided into six ages. Each corresponded to one of the six ages of a man's life and also to one of the days of Creation as described in Genesis. The sixth age had begun with the birth of Christ, and its termination would mark the end of the world. Bizarre though this theory now sounds, its comprehensiveness in establishing connections between the life of man, the course of history, creation, and judgment made it a very powerful one. Bede's concern with the exact length of each of the ages made him very careful about dates, and he was the first to correct the biblical chronology of Eusebius. The purpose of such a chronicle as Bede's first one was simply to sketch the history of the world in accordance with a Providential interpretation. His much fuller second chronicle shows how easily such a work could do more than this by serving as a vehicle for almost any kind of historical information.

The Life of St. Cuthbert, which Bede wrote in about 720, is in a very different genre, that of hagiography. It consists almost entirely of beautifully told miracle stories and does not reveal even when its hero was born or when he died. Books of this kind were numerous and more influential than any other kind of history, if they can be called history. They derive from great changes which came about in the Christian church in and after the fourth century. In the third century, belief in contemporary, as opposed to biblical, miracles was not widespread, at least among the sophisticated. Belief in the frequent intervention of God to produce physical miracles and in the omnipresence of devils and angels became much more common from the fourth century. It seems to have been associated with the spread of monasticism from the east. Monks and miracles (which together may have changed the Church as much as the Reformation did when it sought to expel them) came in together. One book, The Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius, was of great importance in their proliferation. Written in about 360 (in Greek, but soon translated into Latin), it described the life of Anthony, who lived as a hermit in Egypt until his death in 356. It is simply an account of virtues and marvels, vividly told. As the kind of Christianity which Athanasius described spread, so did imitations of his book. Such lives of the saints differed from one another in various respects but in general conformed to type. They record in some detail the circumstances of their subject's early life, his conversion to religion, his godly conduct, and the manner in which he died. Their main concern is not mundane details, but spiritual triumphs: the cures the saint wrought, the devils he put to flight. Hagiographers were often careful to state their evidence, as Bede does. The more remarkable the story, the more desirable it was that it should be supported. Such statements are not necessarily evidence of scholarly care, but went with this genre of writing. Saints' lives were for edification rather than for record (they were often read out, in whole or in part, on the saint's day), and their authors looked more to the effect they would have in the future than to what had actually happened in the past. Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert is a typical and very skillful piece of hagiography. He took a previous "Life of Cuthbert" by an anonymous monk, rewrote it, and modified it in certain respects, inserting additional miracles and giving a much longer account of Cuthbert's death. When he wrote in other genres he displayed great interest in facts and in detailed information. In writing this life he gave fewer facts, particularly topographical facts, than did his source.

Bede's greatest work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731 or 732, represents yet another genre of Christian historiography. Its title recalls that of its model, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. In this work Eusebius described the history of the Church from apostolic times until about 325. He sought to relate all the main events in the life of the Church, saying something of the outstanding Christians of each generation. Particular care was taken to record the succession of bishops in the principal sees, the details of heretics and heresies, persecutions and the passions of martyrs. As in his Chronicle so in his History, Eusebius was the father of a new kind of historiography. His work was distinguished from those of pagan historians not only by its content but also by its methods, in particular by his extensive citation of sources and his inclusion of many original documents. Here, too, Christian scholarship broke new ground. Bede sought to do for the church of England what Eusebius had done for the whole, and his Ecclesiastical History much resembles his predecessor's in content and in method.

Bede knew at least two other Christian histories of importance—The Seven Books Against the Pagans by Orosius and The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. They have to be considered beside his Ecclesiastical History not so much because of their contribution to it as because of their contrast with it. Orosius wrote his book in 417 to 418; it described and interpreted the history of mankind from the Creation to his own day and was intended as a riposte to those who accounted for the fall of Rome by pointing to the rise of Christianity. Orosius collected catastrophes and misfortunes to show that God had smitten the pagans hard, often, and deservedly.⁵ His own times he argued to be better. For him, history fell into a pattern, that of the Four Empires: Babylon, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome. The history of each of them had followed a similar course; Rome and Babylon were especially alike, and "the number seven by which all things are decided" was demonstrated to have been very important for both. The last empire, that of Rome, was shown to have been established by God in preparation for the advent of Christ. Orosius's scheme of explanation was crude, if elaborate. But his work was orthodox and popular, and his large store of information was drawn on by many, including Bede. Bede also followed him in beginning his work with a geographical introduction. He did not follow him in imposing a pattern upon history. For Orosius, Providence worked like a machine. Bede shows God's purpose and judgment always at work, but makes little attempt to schematize them.

Bede was not the first Christian historian to write on the history of one people. The only such national historian whose work was certainly known to him was Gregory of Tours (c. 540-594). Gregory's history was in a sense an ecclesiastical history and has resemblances to Bede's. But it is his contrast with Bede which impresses. Gregory's work is very much that of a bishop of Tours, a great man who participated in great events. He provides a detailed, scandalous, and vivid account of affairs in his own lifetime. He recounts many miracles, often to indicate the power of St. Martin and how he watched over his own see of Tours. Bede was very much more detached. His concern was to omit secular affairs and any kind of scandal. His descriptions of the miraculous are not intended to exalt his own monastery, and he makes no attempt to demonstrate that saints protect their shrines and followers in secular affairs. The temper of his work is entirely different from Gregory's, and the comparison brings home to us that one of the most remarkable things about The Ecclesiastical History is the number of things which one would expect an eighth century historian to say which Bede does not say.

In writing The Ecclesiastical History Bede looked back then to Eusebius and to the beginnings of Christian historiography. There are, indeed, important differences between his work and that of his predecessor. There is nothing in Eusebius to correspond with the geographical and historical introduction to his subject which Bede provides in the first book of The Ecclesiastical History. Bede's continual concern with the miraculous reflects a religious climate unlike that in which Eusebius wrote. Bede had to pay more attention to secular affairs, partly because the fortunes of Christianity were more closely involved with those of secular powers than they had been in the early days of the Church, and partly because Bede, and his sources, were more concerned than was Eusebius to emphasize the judgments of God on good and bad rulers. Furthermore, Bede is more concerned to be directly edifying, to use history to teach particular moral lessons. Nevertheless, Bede's history is, as its title implies, modeled on that of Eusebius. Its dominant concern is the same: to describe the principal events in the history of the Church, the succession of its bishops, its heresies, and its saints. His technique, in particular his extensive use of documents, often cited verbatim, also derives from Eusebius. Many of his virtues are those of his model.

Bede's account of the history of his church often leaves the reader admiring, but baffled. It is not hard to understand why The Ecclesiastical History should have become famous. Important and interesting events are described, and often made moving, by an extremely accomplished storyteller. Bede's citation of sources, his care with dates, and his inclusion of many documents argue his reliability. The impression is reinforced by his calm and moderate tone. Bede seems both pious and sound and has to a high degree the power of conviction. Nevertheless, The Ecclesiastical History seems oddly diverse and incomplete. The narrative of events is constantly broken by accounts of miracles and visions. Sometimes Bede rambles, as in the fifth book where, having mentioned Adamnan, abbot of Iona, he proceeds to devote two chapters to extracts from Adamnan's book on the Holy Places. Disproportionate space seems to be given to controversy over the date of Easter. Surprisingly little is said about Bede's own time, about which one would suppose him to have known most. His book seems a disjointed series of stories and documents held together by an accomplished style.

The unevenness of Bede's narrative is partly to be explained by the nature of his sources and by the way in which he used them. He was able to use the work of earlier historians for the first book, which describes the history of Britain from the time of Julius Cæsar until the coming of Augustine. In spite of the active search for materials, which he describes in his Preface, it was not easy for him to find them for more recent times. It was not normal in the seventh century for churches, let alone kingdoms, to keep records of their doings. Bede probably had some scanty annals from Kent and Northumbria, and a few royal genealogies and lists recording the lengths of the reigns of kings. For the most part, he was dependent on letters, chiefly from Rome, on a handful of saints' lives, and on numerous but doubtfully reliable oral traditions. He did not feel it to be his duty to criticize his sources as a modern historian would (although his theological work shows that he could have been acute in such criticism). The true law of history is, he says, simply to gather and record for the benefit of posterity such stories as are in circulation. It was a new experience for Bede to write a book on a subject about which no one had written before. His inclination was to follow what others had written, and the result was patchwork. Where we know what his sources were, and they have survived, he can be seen often to have followed them word for word, or very nearly so. This is the case in, for example, I, xvii-xx, which comes from a life of St. Germanus by Constantius, and in III, xix, which comes from an anonymous life of Fursey. One wonders how far Bede treated in the same way those of his sources which are unknown to us, and whether The Ecclesiastical History was not written by first establishing a chronological framework and then hanging to it by such verbal hooks as "At that time," "In the meantime," such materials as came to hand, frequently in the form in which they came to hand.

Nevertheless, it will not do to dismiss The Ecclesiastical History as no more than a collection of materials. Bede was both selective and subtle. His principles of selection were largely those of Eusebius. For example, like Eusebius he gave particular attention to heresy. But while Eusebius had had numerous heresies to record, Bede had to deal with only one heresy, Pelagianism, and one error, the adherence of some of the Celtic churches to the wrong mode of calculating the date of Easter.

Bede has a long account of the Easter controversy in each of the last four books of his history. It is at first sight not easy to understand why he should have given so much attention to what appears to us as a merely technical issue; for the practice of the Celts seems to have been simply that which had been used elsewhere in the past but which had become superseded. But Bede makes it very clear that the calculation of the date of Easter was not a merely technical or isolated issue. The movement of Easter was one of many things which argument in terms of symbols (as we would say, but symbol is for us a limiting word, mysteries they would say) showed to be loaded with significance. Easter had to be just at the equinox, for the lengthening days represented Christ's triumph over the powers of darkness. It had to be in the first month of the lunar year, for this was the month in which the world had been created and in which it ought to be newly created. It had to be as the moon was about to wane, for the moon turns from earth toward the sun as it wanes, just as we should turn from earthly to heavenly things. It was appropriate that Easter should always fall within a space of seven days, for seven was a number of divine significance. Considered from another point of view, Easter was to be calculated in such a way as to fulfill both the Old Law of the Jews and the New Law of Christ. If it was celebrated at exactly the right time, then all was in harmony. Nothing can illustrate the gulf between Bede's thought-world and ours more vividly than his views on Easter. Such views were not simple popular piety. They formed part of an elaborate and not unsophisticated system of thought, which brought all knowledge into unity and to divine ends, and whose power depended on the capacity to see an allegory as a mysterious truth rather than as an illustration or a coincidence. Divergence between churches on such a matter as Easter was not a trivial matter. It was a rent in the seamless garment, and it is not surprising that Bede, who was by far the most learned man of his day on computation, should have devoted much of his history to this issue.

Bede's concern was not just to record certain kinds of information and to refute certain kinds of error. His Preface emphasizes that his concern is to edify, to describe the good so that it may be followed and the bad so that it may be shunned. The Ecclesiastical History was probably intended for a wider audience than were most of Bede's works, and is dedicated to a king. In his account of good kings (and no laymen other than kings have more than an incidental role), Bede shows how virtue was rewarded here and now as well as hereafter. It was not only heavenly but also earthly kingdoms which Oswald and Edwin gained. There are passages in which he makes his point in a way that is forceful to the point of crudity. He shows that just as those who adhered to the faith did well, so did those who abandoned it fail. Edwin, who brought Christianity to Northumbria, lived in unexampled peace and prosperity. His apostate successors perished miserably and soon. Nevertheless, Bede prefers to dwell upon the rewards of the good rather than on the punishments of the bad. Cadwallon, king of the Britons, is condemned in strong language, but briefly, and his violent and merited death is not dwelt upon. Even Penda, the pagan terror of England in the middle of the seventh century, is treated only incidentally, and Bede attributes worthy sentiments to him. There is no long account of any bad Christian king; indeed, no Christian English kings are said to have been bad, though one or two royal crimes are mentioned.

It is remarkable of Bede's picture of Providence at work in politics that, while he is clear that a causal connection between virtue and success was easy to observe, he makes little effort to explain the whole course of English history in Providential terms and to show God's rewards and punishments to whole peoples. He might, in the manner of Orosius, have chosen to show the pagan Saxon period as one of disaster and misery. In fact, he has almost nothing to say about it—though perhaps he did not know enough to say more. On only two occasions does he elaborate on the punishment visited in this world upon a sinful nation: in his account of Britain after the departure of the Romans and in the story of how the Britons were punished for not yielding to Augustine. In the first instance, his account and its emphasis came straight from the sixth century British historian Gildas, in the second, from some lost source.⁶ Although he adopted such views when they occurred in his sources, he makes almost no independent attempt to show that the Britons suffered for their persistence in the errors he detested. The opportunity was there. He could have described the great conquests made in the late seventh century by the West Saxons at the expense of the Britons, and have presented them as those of God's chosen people, accurate in their Easter reckonings. Instead, he merely mentions the subjugation of some of the Britons and associates it with their errors, very briefly, in V, xxiii. Similarly, although, as we know from his Letter to Egbert, he disapproved of much that went on in the Church in his own day, he does not elaborate on this in his history and draw the moral that punishment was at hand, as some historians would have done. Instead, Bede says nothing at all in his history about the sins of the Church, but emphasizes the peacefulness of his own times in England. Even so, he does not say that the acceptance of Christianity and orthodoxy have brought peace and prosperity. If the connection is made it is by implication, and there are undertones of disquiet. Unlike many of his predecessors, he found it hard to see a clear pattern in God's judgments except where individuals were concerned. He is more reserved, less vehement, perhaps more troubled.

If The Ecclesiastical History has many lessons for the laity, it has more for the clergy. One of its principal functions is to set them good examples. Bede's account of what the church of England had been in the past is affected by his judgment of what it was and what it ought to have been in his own day. In The Ecclesiastical History Bede has very little to say about events in England after 690, and he does not make his views on the contemporary church explicit. But, thanks to the preservation of his Letter to Egbert, written to the bishop of York in 734, we know that some of them were unfavorable. The conduct of bishops, monks, priests, and laity all left much to be desired. Avarice, neglect, and ignorance were all too prevalent. His biblical commentaries shed further light on his attitudes. They showed him to have held strict views on the proper conduct of the clergy, and in particular on clerical poverty. How rich the clergy may properly be was, and remains, a subject for argument. Bede was adamant that they ought to be poor. Granted Bede's preference for praising the good rather than denouncing the bad, and his belief, made quite clear in his commentaries, that it is wrong publicly to denounce the clergy, be they never so wicked, it seems that his reticence in his history on the recent past of his church is largely to be explained by his disapproval of some of its members and their acts.

Modern knowledge of the early eighth century church is very incomplete, but the sources suffice to give some idea of those aspects of its life to which Bede objected. Some bishops had become powerful in the things of this world. Such a bishop as Wilfrid was wealthy in land, in treasure, and in followers. Bede says bishops levied dues from every village in their dioceses, and there is other evidence indicating that the church had significant power to tax. There is some reason to suppose that bishops exercised considerable jurisdiction over laymen. When Bede says that Wine bought the see of London in about 666 (III, vii) it is a fair deduction that episcopal office was already remunerative. Such examples of clerical power can easily be paralleled on the Continent. But there bishops had been established for centuries, had inherited power from the days of the Empire, and had added to it as the Empire collapsed. In England some bishops seemed to have gained a comparable position for themselves, having started with nothing. From Bede's point of view much was amiss with monasteries also. Monasteries were numerous, but were often treated as the hereditary property of the founder's family, and the fiscal advantages of monastic tenure seem to have led to the foundation of monasteries which were such in name only. This is not to say that Bede disapproved of all that went on in the church in his day, and we can see that if some elements in it were worldly others were rigidly pious, as he was. The codes of penances and secular laws of the period indicate a desire (there is no means of telling how far it was fulfilled) to make the Christian English observe the letter of a strict law. For example, "If a freeman works on Sunday without his lord's command he is to lose his freedom." Piety is not inconsistent with wealth, nor indeed are strict laws inconsistent with avarice, but it is likely that there were many like Bede who were both pious and unworldly. The English church was not only prosperous but diverse, containing Christians at very different levels of sophistication and, one may guess, sophisticated Christians whose views varied widely. It was faced with the opportunities and problems which occur when an erstwhile missionary church becomes part of society and changes its nature as it changes that of society.

If The Ecclesiastical History is read in the light of Bede's views on the church in his own day, it can be seen to be (among other things) an implicit commentary on it. In setting good examples from the past, Bede is especially concerned with bishops. Monks and monasteries are not neglected, but his long accounts are nearly all of bishops, and he has surprisingly little to say even of his own monastery. Bede's first account of a model bishop is that of Augustine in I, xxvi. Augustine is said to have lived in accordance with the mode of the Primitive Church in devotion, in poverty, in steadfastness, in practicing what he preached. Emphasis on the same virtues recurs in Bede's accounts of later bishops such as Aidan, Chad, and Cuthbert. He lays particular stress on poverty. Pope Gregory⁷ told Augustine that he ought to live with his followers with all things in common as in the Primitive Church, and Bede later adopts this statement in describing Hilda. He admired a humble way of life, and points out that the bishops of the Celtic church preferred to walk rather than to ride—though Theodore made Chad ride in order to get about his diocese. The virtues of such men were in obvious contrast to the grasping bishops of his own day, to whose jolly parties he refers in The Letter to Egbert. Aidan's way of life was, he says, very different from the idleness of our days. In describing Cuthbert's reception when he went about preaching, he says that in those days people flocked to the preacher. The implication is that in his own day they did not.

Bede treats different bishops in different ways. For Aidan we have some account of the events of his life, a eulogy of the way in which he lived it, and a collection of miracles; for John of Hexham, miracles and almost nothing else; for Theodore a long account of his deeds, nothing of his way of life, and no miracles at all. It is possible to explain these striking differences as the reflection of the differences between Bede's sources and of Bede's deference to his sources. Bede was not concerned, one may think, to give a methodical account of the lives of each of these men, but simply inserted such useful and edifying material as he could find. Such an explanation is valid but not complete. Bede compiled where a modern historian would have edited, but he edited where a modern historian would have compiled.

The extent to which Bede was capable of editing his material in such a way as to exclude the unedifying may be seen from his treatment of Wilfrid. Most of what Bede says in The Ecclesiastical History is beyond criticism insofar as we have no other source describing the same events. But a contemporary biography of Wilfrid, probably by his follower Eddius, has survived, and it affords a rare opportunity of comparing Bede's treatment of a subject with that of another man, less able but also less discreet. An early supporter of Roman orthodoxy in Northumbria, Wilfrid was an active founder of monasteries, a successful missionary and, from 669, a bishop in Northumbria. His career was stormy. He seems to have hoped to make himself supreme over the church in the north, and so fell out with successive kings of Northumbria and archbishops of Canterbury. In spite of several periods of exile and one of imprisonment, he survived and prospered. Eddius was a very dutiful biographer and shows the great bishop in all his glory: ascetic, brave, and always right. His holiness was made evident by miracles. At the same time it is made clear that Wilfrid was rich and determined to preserve his riches, and his style of life seems to have been much like that of a great secular lord. His deathbed as described by Eddius is extremely instructive and very different from anything Bede tells us of a bishop. He divided his property into several shares. One of these was to reward the men who had followed him into exile and to whom he had not given land; they sound very like a comitatus, a band of warriors who followed a great lord. Part of his treasure was to go to his monasteries to purchase the favor of kings and bishops. Never in his history does Bede give us to understand that a bishop might have a comitatus or a treasure, still less that there were bishops whose favor might be bought. His Letter to Egbert suggests that he knew perfectly well that such things happened, and two passages in the Life of St. Cuthbert associate being made a bishop with becoming wealthy.⁸ But he did not regard such matters as a subject for history. It is nearly certain that Bede had Eddius's Life of Wilfrid, at least by the time he came to write V, xix; but he uses Eddius with discretion, and his survey of Wilfrid's career is very carefully edited. Nothing is said of Wilfrid's wealth and style of life. His quarrels are treated very discreetly; his imprisonment is not mentioned; his conflicts with other bishops are barely touched upon; a whole council is omitted. In describing such an edifying episode as the conversion of Sussex, Bede attributes near-miraculous powers to Wilfrid, but he relates none of the miracles which Eddius describes to show how God fought on Wilfrid's side in his struggle for episcopal power.

In the light of Bede's treatment of Wilfrid one begins to wonder about his account of Archbishop Theodore. He gives just a hint that he may not have approved of all Theodore's doings when he praises a bishop whom Theodore deposed (IV, vi). Although he usually refers to Theodore as "of blessed memory," he has nothing to say of his personal holiness or of his way of life. No miracles are attributed to him. It is slightly surprising that Bede, who is willing to supply fifty-four lines of verse on an abbess about whom he has already had a good deal to say (IV, xx), should abbreviate the epitaph of so important a man as Theodore (V, viii). Can it be that he did not think well of all that Theodore did, and did the middle of the epitaph describe something of which he disapproved? The problem is typical of those which arise when Bede's history is analyzed. Three kinds of answer are possible. First, it may be that the contrast between his treatment of Theodore and that of some other bishops simply reflects differences between his sources. In particular, the absence of miracles seems characteristic of Bede's Canterbury sources. He describes very few miracles performed by the archbishops or by other members of the Roman church in Kent. Second, it may be that the selection of material for his book was partly determined by incidental reasons of space, time, or chance. Either of these explanations could account for the nature of his treatment of Theodore. But they do not exclude the third, which is that he may have edited his sources, suppressing or abbreviating that which he found unedifying.

For all the superficial simplicity of The Ecclesiastical History it is not a simple book. Bede was a very intelligent, learned, and devout man, dealing with subjects which were very difficult (difficult not only because of deficiency of information, but because of the religious problems involved) and according to strongly held principles which were not always quite consistent with one another. The nature of his difficulties and some of the explanation of his power to move may be seen in his treatment of miracles. The Ecclesiastical History is full of miracles and visions. Their number may surprise the modern reader, but it is not hard to explain. They may be considered as the equivalent of Eusebius's account of the passions of martyrs. Bede sometimes tells us why he puts a particular story in; it will, he says, be useful (meaning spiritually useful) to his readers. A large part of what sources he had consisted of miracle stories. For all these reasons much of The Ecclesiastical History is hagiographical in style, content, and method. Wonder follows wonder. Now recent and contemporary (as opposed to biblical) miracles had for long raised severe difficulties for the thinking Christian. In sophisticated milieux there was the problem of incredulity. On the other side there was the danger (perhaps a worse one) of an endless hunger for the miraculous. Pope Gregory the Great warned more than once (for example, in the letter copied out in I, xxi) that not all saints performed miracles, that miracles could be performed by the wicked, that virtues were more important than wonders. Bede repeats his warnings. Yet both Gregory and Bede retail endless miracles. "They seem to speak with two voices." The difficulty may have been greater for Bede than it was for Gregory, for Bede lived among barbarian Christians and barbarized Christianity was largely a matter of wonders.

Although Bede was a devout believer in miracles and an assiduous collector of miracle stories, nevertheless he seems to have been selective in what he included in The Ecclesiastical History. A high proportion of the miracles recorded there are the kind which are susceptible of a natural explanation, particularly miracles of healing. Clearly, he was not at all concerned to explain miracles away; but he does seem to have preferred to avoid the more flabbergasting of them. There are several analogues of scriptural miracles, but he never gives an instance of the raising of the dead. His miracles are usually to demonstrate the saintliness of a particular person or to reinforce some teaching. They are not random wonders. None have any political force; they do not demonstrate how God defended the rights of a particular shrine or of a particular man in a worldly struggle. In all these respects Bede is in sharp contrast to most of those who described miracles.

Perhaps the most influential collection of miracle stories was Gregory the Great's Dialogues. Bede knew this book and his style of narration may well owe something to it. But the differences between Bede and Gregory are more instructive than the similarities. Some of Gregory's miracles are brutal. For example, he tells of an unfortunate man who was struck dead because his playing on the cymbals disturbed a bishop at prayer. Others are trumpery, as in the case of Bishop Boniface's clearing his garden, by Divine aid, of caterpillars: "I adjure you in the name of Our Lord Christ, depart and stop eating those vegetables." It is fair to say that some of the animal miracles which Bede relates of Cuthbert, but only of Cuthbert, are not very different from this tale, though much more impressively told. But his miracles are never brutal and rarely have the anecdotal triviality of many of Gregory's.

Bede's stories contrast even more strongly with those of Gregory of Tours and other Frankish writers. A recurrent theme in Gregory of Tours is the defense of the interests of Tours by God and St. Martin. There is nothing of this kind in Bede. In The Ecclesiastical History we never meet such common incidents of life in the Dark Ages as the alleged intervention of saints to protect their shrines and followers against all comers, or violent struggles for the possession of the body of a saint and the useful protection which was thought to come with it. It could be that such things did not happen in England. But this is unlikely and there is some evidence to the contrary. It is much more likely that Bede belonged to a school of thought which was uneasy about such aspects of Christianity among the barbarians and did not think it appropriate to record them. He tended to omit just the kinds of miracle and just the kinds of incident which most jar modern taste. There are exceptions to this. In particular, his accounts of visions of the next world indicate a harshness in his religion, which his preference for describing the good rather than the base generally conceals.

Selective though Bede was, his deference to his sources sometimes led him to introduce material which differs considerably in tone and emphasis from anything he himself wrote. This is most obvious in a comparison of the doctrinal disputes which he records in The Ecclesiastical History. His description of the repulse of Pelagianism by Germanus comes almost verbatim from Constantius's Life of Germanus.⁹ This is a fine example of a hagiographer's view of a theological dispute. Nothing is said of the arguments on either side. We are informed simply that the heretics filled the air with empty words, whereupon the venerable prelates poured forth the flood of their apostolical and evengelical discourse and made them confess their errors to the cheers of the audience. Reasoning was of little significance to Constantius. What mattered most was divine demonstrations that Germanus was right: he could vanquish demons, work cures, and win victories. The account in Bede of Augustine's meeting with the Britons (II, ii) is in a similar vein. The power to cure is used as the touchstone of orthodoxy—"Let some sick man be brought." This account probably came straight to Bede from a source lost to us. Very different indeed is Bede's account of the later progress of the Easter controversy, which is almost certainly much more his own work, and where we do not find miracles, devils, and cures, but solid and lucid arguments.

Thus Germanus, as described by Constantius, appears as a thaumaturge, not much above the level of a witch doctor; while Wilfrid, in his defense, as Bede describes it, of the Roman Easter, and Ceolfrith, in his letter to Nechtan, appear as the intellectual heirs of the Fathers and ultimately of the civilized learning of Greece and Rome. Germanus was debating subjects which are still thought important and probably always will be: the problems of sin and grace. Constantius's account disregards the issues and debases the subject. The protagonists of the Roman Easter were fighting for a cause which not even Rome now cares about. Bede's account of the case is so skillful that he exalts it to a point where one can almost believe it matters. Bede could, had he wished to do so, have put able arguments against Pelagianism into Germanus's mouth. He chose simply to take over Constantius's account: it was edifying, unexceptionable, and he was bound to give it simple faith. The unevenness of The Ecclesiastical History is partly due to Bede's devout acceptance of Christianity as it was expressed at different levels of sophistication.

If The Ecclesiastical History is much affected by the nature of Bede's sources it should be possible to see him more by himself in his account of the abbots of his own monastery, The Lives of the Abbots. This did not belong, as did most of his other works, to a more or less established genre, though another monk of Bede's monastery had written a Life of Ceolfrith which Bede used and which much resembles his own work in style and in content. It is the style of The Lives of the Abbots which first impresses the reader. Bede's extreme skill in emotive description can nowhere be better seen than in his accounts of the deaths of Benedict and Eosterwine, and of the departure of Ceolfrith. In using the work of his anonymous predecessor, he sometimes made an addition to heighten the pathos as, for example, when in saying that some of Ceolfrith's followers stayed beside his tomb at Langres, he adds that they were among a people not even whose language they knew. The book is in strong contrast with the Life of St. Cuthbert in including numerous facts and no miracles. Bede supplies a remarkable amount of information about the property and buildings of the abbey, and much chronological detail. There are many edifying stories, but not a single miracle. What little there is of the miraculous in the anonymous life of Ceolfrith is excluded. Bede does not say, as the Anonymous does, that his body remained uncorrupted and a light shone above it, and that miracles were reported at his tomb.

It may be that Bede did not regard this as the kind of book in which miracles were to be recorded. But no abbot or monk of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow is credited with miraculous powers in The Ecclesiastical History either; perhaps the religious atmosphere there was different from that at Lindisfarne or at Barking. As in The Ecclesiastical History Bede's purpose in The Lives of the Abbots is continuously didactic: only here he is showing the way to monks and abbots rather than to bishops and kings. Humbleness and simplicity are again emphasized. He is very concerned that it should be understood that the abbacy was not to descend by hereditary succession (as was common in other abbeys). There is just enough evidence to suggest that, for all the lavish detail of The Lives of the Abbots, it is edited to give the right impression. The anonymous life of Ceolfrith says that he once left Jarrow "because of the jealousies and most violent attacks of certain nobles, who could not endure his regular discipline." Bede says nothing of this, but it is to be observed that in his account of Eosterwine he is careful to emphasize that he did not expect unusual privileges because he was noble. The Lives of the Abbots is unlike The Ecclesiastical History in its consistency in style and content and in its exclusion of the miraculous. It is very like it insofar as its purpose is to teach lessons and to do so by dwelling upon the good and saying nothing of the bad.

Any judgment on Bede as a historian must be tempered. We do not know enough about his sources to be able to say even how much of The Ecclesiastical History is his in the sense of being more than a selection of stories incorporated much as they came to him. It is impossible to be certain how far there is an element of randomness in its composition. Above all, there are too few other authorities with which to compare him. There is no means of telling whether most of what he says about English history is right or wrong. Our relative ignorance of what the church was like in his own day makes it difficult to assess his attitude and purposes.

Despite the reservations which such difficulties impose, Bede can be seen to be a great historian. Modern historians often praise him because he seems much as they themselves are. Interested in his work mainly as a source, they value those qualities which are thought to vouch for his reliability. Such praise is justified only in part. Bede's greatness comes not only from qualities which would have made him a good historian by modern professional standards, but also from others which would have made him an extremely bad one. Certainly his extensive collection of material and his care for documents and dates make him more reliable than most Dark Age historians. Few, if any, brought such ability and expertise to their task. But to ability and expertise was added high moral purpose and the task Bede set himself was not to describe the history of the English church just as it had happened. It was to describe it in such a way as to illustrate and support the principles of faith and conduct in which he believed. As a consequence The Ecclesiastical History is in part an ably constructed record and in part a history idealized to the point of becoming visionary.

Bede was the first important Christian historian to have been a monk. Most of his predecessors had been great men in the secular church. Bede considered events with more detachment or with a different commitment than theirs. His demand for humbleness and poverty among the clergy stands in a tradition which, although always present in the church, had gained new strength with the advent of monasticism from the fourth century. Eusebius had not placed so strong an emphasis on the simple way of life of model bishops. A bishop himself, and basking in the favor of the Emperor Constantine, he had not, perhaps, seen the need so clearly. Bede's views on episcopacy are much more like those of the monk-bishop St. Martin of Tours, who, ascetic, devoted, and disheveled, was until his death in 397 an example and something of a threat to the prelates of Gaul. Bede's views on the proper conduct of the clergy made him opposed to much that went on around him. He stood for episcopal poverty and elected abbots at a time when at least some bishops were rich and powerful and some, perhaps many, abbots had inherited their offices. Soaked in the learning of the Fathers, who were very civilized, he lived among barbarian Christians whose beliefs and practices were often crude. Like Gregory the Great, he was both a devout believer in the frequent manifestation of miracles and mistrusted the consequences of that belief in others.

His history of his own church reflects the complications of his position. Characteristically, he looked a long way back for his model. Just as he had written a chronicle when that genre had been disused for nearly a century, so he wrote a history, not in the manner of his more immediate predecessors, but in that of Eusebius. He was too judicious to impose a simple Providential scheme as Orosius had done, and too reserved and discreet to make his work like that of Gregory of Tours, largely an account of recent events with moralizing commentary. He chose to infuse his record with his beliefs not in these obvious ways, but by emphasis and selection. He dwelt upon the good and passed lightly over the bad, in particular omitting almost everything that might be to the discredit of the church. Bede's views on the miracles, their importance and their dangers, appear by his insertion of numerous miracle stories and also, I think it fair to assume, by his omission of others of kinds popular with other believers and writers, but distasteful to him. His work is so full of awareness of God that it gives a very strange picture of man. Bede seems to lack almost all interest in human character except insofar as it could be represented in religious stereotypes. He had no taste for idiosyncrasy. While The Ecclesiastical History is full of very memorable incidents, there is hardly a character in it who appears in any degree individual. Events are typified in much the same way. Bede's principles and his caution led him to sheer away from his own times and from the complications and ambiguities of men and events as they really were and are.

These qualities are not those of a good historian in the modern sense. His history reflects not so much the nature of the past he described as his own nature. The impression which his work gives of calm, moderation, and judiciousness is justified. But, while these virtues led him to write history which was more accurate and technically more sophisticated than that of lesser men, they also made it less real and less revealing than theirs. Bede's power of mind, his narrative skill and, one might almost say, his good taste are employed to transmute the past and to carry the reader into a world which was partly of his own creation. Bede's greatness derives partly from the competence and usefulness of his history as record. Even more impressive is the learning, power of mind, and skill with which he made his account of the past a testament to his beliefs and a lesson to his church.…

Notes

1. Almost nothing is known of Bede's life apart from what he himself tells us in The Ecclesiastical History, p. 3. For his monastery see The Lives of the Abbots.
2. For the political geography of Britain see the note on pp. xxxii-xxxiv.
3. De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione.
4. Ed. Mommsen, p. 255.
5. Considerable passages of the first book of Bede's Ecclesiastical History are taken directly from Orosius. For example, the second and sixth chapters are almost entirely in Orosius's words and give a fair impression of his terse style and of his gloomy view of the pagan past.…
6. Gildas, c. 500-c. 570, was a British monk whose rhetorical account of the overthrow of the Britons by the Anglo-Saxons, On the Downfall of Britain, was used by Bede, often extensively and verbatim, in The Ecclesiastical History, I, xii-xvi and xxii.
7. Gregory I, c. 540-604, Pope from 590. For an account of his life see The Ecclesiastical History, I, xxiii-xxxii and especially II, i.
8. Chapters viii and xxiv.
9. Germanus, c. 376-448, bishop of Auxerre. His biography was written by Constantius, c. 480. Chapters xvii-xxi of the first book of The Ecclesiastical History derive from this work and are, for the most part, in Constantius's words.