SOURCE: Peter Hunter Blair, "The Historical Writings of Bede," in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, edited by M. Lapidge and P. Hunter Blair, Variorum Reprints, 1984, pp. 197-221.

[In the following lecture originally presented in 1969, Blair defends Bede's historical writings against some modern-day critics who impugn the accuracy of his chronologies, accuse him of prejudice against the Celtic and Welsh churches, and suggest that he was fooled by forgeries and suppressed evidence.]

Bede was born c. 671, about 260 years after the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, and about 225 years after what came to be regarded as the year in which the English first came to Britain. He died on 25 May 735, aged about 64. At the end of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum he records that he had spent the whole of his life from the age of seven within the walls of the monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Although the two places were physically separated from one another by a few miles, he regarded them as comprising only one single monastery dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul. He writes that "amid the observance of monastic discipline and the daily charge of singing in the church, my delight has always been in learning, teaching or writing"¹. We do not know the exact date of his earliest piece of writing, but it was about or soon after the year 700, and between that date and his death he wrote in all a total of some 60 volumes. When we read his works we must not forget that he was born, passed his whole life and died close to what had once been the uttermost north-western limit of the Roman Empire. He would have agreed with William of Malmesbury who described his birthplace as lying on the furthest shore of an island which some called alter orbis, because it was so remote that not many geographers had discovered its existence². Many years before Bede's birth, Gregory the Great, in a letter to Eulogius, bishop of Alexandria, described the English as a people who lived in a corner of the world and who until recently had put their trust in sticks and stones³. Bede was well aware himself of his remoteness from the centres of antiquity and in one of his commentaries he asked his readers not to complain because he had written so much about what he had learnt from ancient authors about trees and herbs. He had not done so out of conceit, but there was no other way for those who lived in a remote island of the Ocean far outside the world to learn about what happened in Arabia, India, Judaea and Egypt, except through the writings of those who had been there⁴. When we read Bede's works we must always remember that Bede's birthright was not the birthright of classical antiquity, not even the Romanitas of Gaul, but the birthright of pagan barbarism which he inherited from his father and grandfather.

Those inclined to take a strict view might argue that out of the total of some 60 volumes only one, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, whose narrative runs to midsummer of 731 and which probably received some revision in 732, can be regarded as a work of history. Yet it would be an excessively narrow view which rejected as not being historical works, the Historia Abbatum, the prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti and the chronicles at the end of his two works concerned primarily with chronology—the de Temporibus of 703 and the de Temporum Ratione of 725. There are indeed passages in his exegetical works which are relevant to an appreciation of his historical interests.

Scholars of an earlier age were mostly content to regard Bede as "the father of English learning" and to treat what he tells us about the history of the English in Britain with the veneration which some may think it still deserves. The current fashion is to dissect the completed work in an attempt to evaluate the different materials of which the Historia Ecclesiastica is composed and to determine the way in which these materials reached Jarrow. It is a measure of Bede's originality, in an age when historical writing was at a low ebb, that he foresaw that others with minds as critical as his own would want to know with what authority, and for what purpose, he wrote the Historia. Prompted by his sense of historical foresight and his regard for historical authority he answered both questions in the long Preface to the Historia, showing incidentally a more generous recognition of his debt to others than some modern historians are wont to do. Even on his deathbed his concern was for accuracy. Engaged in translating extracts from the works of Isidore of Seville, he wrote: "I do not want my children to read what is false or to labour at this in vain after my death". This was not a disparaging reference to the unreliability of Isidore, but the expression of a concern lest the pupils of his school at Jarrow might be misled by faulty translations⁵.

Bede is currently enjoying what is called in popular jargon a bad press. His skill and accuracy as a chronologist have been attacked. He has been accused of distorting history by a display of prejudice against the Celtic, and particularly the Welsh, church. He has been represented as the dupe of a forger. He has been regarded as treating northern English folk-tales as though they were a reliable source of information about events occurring in distant Rome. Finally, he has been accused of committing that greatest of crimes in a historian—the suppression of evidence which does not accord with a preconceived historical theory. These several charges amount to an assault on Bede's intellectual honesty.

It would be a sad reflection on the work of modern historians who have access to material, written as well as archaeological, which was unknown to Bede, if they were unable to point to the probability of error committed by him in some details. Yet if we know a little that Bede did not know, we do well to remember how much he knew that we can never know. It is unquestionably our duty to be no less critical of Bede's writings than he was himself in his attitude towards his own sources. He, too, was charged with heresy in his own day. Yet ought we not to make our critical approach with at least something of the intellectual humility which his writings reveal as one of Bede's endearing characteristics? We can still take to heart the rebuke which he administered to himself and to others in one of the homilies which reflect the mature thought of his later years:

When we notice, while we are talking, that some of the less learned brethren cannot understand those mysteries of the Scriptures which we have not always known, but which we have gradually learnt to know with God's help, we are apt to be immediately puffed up. We despise them and boast about our learning as if it were uniquely profound and as if there were not a great many others much more learned than ourselves. We who do not like to be despised by those more learned than ourselves, delight in despising, or even ridiculing, those who are less learned than us⁶.

In the very first paragraph of the Preface to the Historia, addressed to his king, Bede set forth in plain terms his own view of the purpose which this Historia was intended to serve. He believed that if history related good things of good men, the attentive hearer would be incited to imitate what was good, and that if it recounted evil things of wicked men, the godly hearer or reader would nevertheless shun what was wrong and become the more eager to do what he knew to be good and worthy of God. And at the end of this same Preface he begged his readers that if, in what he had written, they were to find anything set down otherwise than in accordance with truth, they would not impute it to him who, according to the true law of history—quod vera lex historiae est—had laboured sincerely to commit to writing for the instruction of posterity such things as he had been able to gather from common report.

Bede wrote, then, ad instructionem posteritatis, and the instruction which he left for posterity was not in order that it might be better informed about the course of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, but that, reading about the way in which those invaders had abandoned heathenism and embraced the only true faith, they might themselves be moved to a more Godly way of life.

We ought not to view Bede's historical writings in complete isolation from his other writings, since all were devoted to the same end, and we can find the phrase vera lex historiae in his commentary on St. Luke's Gospel. Commenting on Luke 2, 33, et erat pater ejus et mater mirantes super his quae dicebantur de illo, Bede remarks that the evangelist does not call Joseph the father of the Saviour because he was so in very truth, but because it was believed by all that he was so. In calling Joseph the father of Christ, Bede continues, the evangelist was not denying the virginity of Mary but expressing the belief of common people which is the true law of history—opinionem vulgi exprimens, quae vera historiae lex est⁷. There is a distinction here between revealed truth and what was held to be true among common people, but of course the phrase vera historiae lex is not original in Bede. He would find it in a work of Jerome's which we know that he used, the tract Adversus Helvidium. Jerome writes that save for Joseph, Elisabeth and Mary herself, everyone thought that Jesus was the son of Mary, "so much so that even the Evangelists, voicing the opinion of the common people which is the true law of history—opinionem vulgi exprimentes, quae vera historiae lex est—said that he was the father of the Saviour"⁸. Bede had good precedent for adopting the view that it was the function of history to record what ordinary people believed, and we are not bound to suppose that he himself believed everything that he chose to record. When he chose to record a Northumbrian legend about a meeting between Gregory (not yet Pope) and some Northumbrian boys in the market place in Rome, he did so because the story was widely believed by the faithful in Northumbria, not necessarily because he himself believed the event to have happened. He introduced the story with the words nec silentio praetereunda opinio, quae de beato Gregorio traditione maiorum ad nos usque perlata est, and as though to emphasis his belief that the story was no more than a tradition he added at the end of the tale the words haec iuxta opinionem, quam ab antiquis accepimus, historiae nostrae ecclesiasticae inserere oportunum duximus⁹.

The dismemberment of an articulated skeleton may be necessary for the detailed study of its individual bones. It is not difficult to apply this process to Bede's historical writings, particularly to the Historia itself, but if, after the process has been completed we find ourselves with a lot of seemingly unrelated pieces of information, we must remember that all that we have achieved is the dismemberment of what was Bede's creation. Bede did not view history as a series of isolated events unrelated to one another, but as an orderly chronological development extending over several millenia from the first creation of man, and when we argue about whether the year which Bede called 670 was the year which we would have called 671, we should not lose sight of this wider view.

Bede was deeply interested in number, not only as a vehicle of mystical symbolism, but also as a science which had practical application to the problems of daily life, as well as the problems of those who wrote history. In Bede's sight, the central fact of past history whose significance over-rode all other past events, was the Resurrection of Christ. Both his homilies and his biblical commentaries contain passages, some of them sublimely moving, in which he expounds the symbolical significance of darkness and light, and sets out his view that through the Resurrection the whole order of time had been reversed. From the moment of creation, with man fallen from the light of paradise into the tribulations of the world, the light of day had been followed by the darkness of night, but with the Resurrection of Christ during the darkness of the night the whole order of time had been so changed that man moved away from the darkness of night towards the light of the following day¹⁰.

Bede accepted the common view which recognised the superiority of the contemplative over the active life within the monastic community¹¹, yet his was indeed the active life, and his own essentially practical view of daily living raised a number of questions which were of the essence of his faith. On what day in each passing year was the Resurrection to be celebrated? The kingdom of Northumbria lay on the frontier of differing theological views. Before his birth the monastery at Whitby, and during his own lifetime, his own monastery at Wearmouth and Jarrow, played a leading part in keeping the Ecclesia Anglicana in conformity with Rome, and in leading at least the more northerly parts of the Celtic church in Ireland and Scotland towards a similar conformity. His interest in chronology, perhaps first acquired from his teacher and abbot, Ceolfrith, would be greatly stimulated by the arguments which he would hear, and in which he would participate, during the later years of the seventh century when he was still a young man. He became sufficiently expert in all the mysteries of Easter Tables to be able himself to compile a double set of the great Paschal cycle of 532 years, one running from the Incarnation to 532, and the other looking ahead as far as 1063.

There were two other questions scarcely less important than the date of the Resurrection—when was Christ himself born and how old when he died? Bede's interest in the first of these questions is reflected in his account of information brought to him by some monks from Wearmouth and Jarrow who had been in Rome in the year 701 of the Incarnation according to Dionysius. The monks had observed the practice of attaching inscribed labels to candles which were lit in the church at Rome at Christmas in honour of the Virgin Mary. The labels which they saw read: "From the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ there are 668 years". Bede remarks how in this way the Roman church professed its belief that Christ had lived in the flesh for a little more than 33 years, because the labels on its Christmas candles recorded a number which was less by 33 years than the number which Dionysius gave from the time of His Incarnation¹².

As a historian and as a member of what he called the Ecclesia Catholica Bede recorded and accepted the belief which his fellow-monks had witnessed in Rome. The Incarnation had been followed 33 years later by the Passion. But now there was a third question. What was the date of Creation itself? The doctrine of the Six Ages of the World, with the beginning of the Sixth Age marked by the Incarnation, was of course a commonplace of Bede's time. He accepted the doctrine itself, but he was not prepared to accept at third or fourth had opinions about the duration of the Five Ages preceding the Incarnation. He challenged the opinion of Isidore whose figures were derived from Jerome through Eusebius and rested ultimately on the Greek Septuagint. Using knowledge won from the years of Biblical study at Wearmouth and Jarrow which had culminated in the production of Abbot Ceolfrith's Bible, now represented by the Codex Amiatinus in the Biblioteca Laurenziano in Florence, he made his own independent calculations from what he regarded as the most authoritative source—what he called the Hebraica Veritas, that is to say Jerome's own translation from the Hebrew which we know as the Vulgate. Using this source, and with some help from Josephus, he challenged the long-established tradition which had given a figure of upwards of 5,000 years from the Creation to the Incarnation, and arrived at a figure of 3953 years as covering the whole of the first Five Ages. It was alleged by those who had not troubled to read carefully what he wrote, that he had stated that Christ was born not at the beginning of the Sixth Age, but in the middle of the Fifth, and, like other historians who have challenged accepted views by returning to primary sources of evidence, he was charged with heresy¹³.

Given the chronology of the first Five Ages derived from the Hebraica Veritas and given the traditional dates for Christ's Incarnation and Passion as they were accepted in Rome, how was it possible to relate the events of the current Sixth Age, as they happened year by year, to events which had occurred at earlier times and in other countries? We must not say that Bede was the first to use the Christian era as an infinitely cumulative method of reckoning the passage of time past and to come. The Annus Incarnationis or Annus Domini had been used by Dionysius Exiguus in his Easter tables in the sixth century. But Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica was the first major historical work in which this era was consistently used as the chronological framework, and it is not the least of his claims to originality that he set a fashion which subsequently became, and still remains, the universal practice of historians in the western world. Moreover, when Bede borrowed a passage from Orosius in which Orosius gives the Annus ab Urbe Condita as marking the consulship of Julius Caesar and Lucius Bibulus, he equated this year with the 60th year ante Incarnationis Dominicae Tempus¹⁴.

We cannot tell who it was that equated past events in the history of the English in Britain with the successive Anni Incarnationis, and since there are no surviving Easter tables from Bede's own monastery, we cannot tell whether their margins had been used for this purpose. Surviving continental fragments suggest that this may well have been so but there were other chronological systems in use in Bede's age in Northumbria. The inscription which records the dedication of the church at Jarrow to St. Paul makes no reference to the Annus Incarnationis but dates the event to the 15th year of King Ecgfrith and the 4th year of Abbot Ceolfrith¹⁵. A primitive chronicle found on folio 128b of the Moore Manuscript of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica dates a short series of events by recording the number of years elapsed since the occurrence of each of them, e.g. angli in britanniam ante annos ccxcii¹⁶. While Bede may well have derived some of his dates from marginal entries in Easter Tables, we ought not to suppose that these were his only source of chronological information. When we reflect that Bede had to take account of the regnal years of seven or eight Anglo-Saxon kings who reigned contemporaneously and had succeeded to their several kingdoms at different, and usually unknown, dates of the month within a calendar year which may not have had a uniform beginning even within England itself—to say nothing of episcopal or abbatial years—we can have no cause for surprise if we should find signs of inconsistency or minor error. In such a situation we should turn to Bede's commentary on the First Book of Kings. Bede knew from Scripture that Solomon began to build the temple in the 480th year after the children of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, and he could account for 423 of them from the Book of Judges. There remained 57 years to be distributed between Joshua, Samuel and Saul, but when he turned to Josephus he found the total ascribed to these three was 58. "We are not to worry", he wrote, "that there is one superfluous year beyond the 480, for either Scripture, giving a round number in its usual way did not trouble to add in the extra year, or else, as is much easier to believe, through lack of care over a long period, the Chronicle of Josephus has somewhere added an extra year, as often happens"¹⁷. All of us who have struggled with chronological problems will feel grateful to Bede for allowing us this escape.

We shall never be able to trace the growth of Bede's interest in history, and particularly in English history, in any close detail, but we may fairly surmise that it would be stimulated by reading those historical works which reached the libraries of Jarrow and Wearmouth—for example the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius both in Jerome's translation and in the version made by Rufinus, the De Viris Illustribus of Jerome, with the continuation by Gennadius, as well as some of the writings of Orosius, Eutropius and Isidore of Seville. Touching the history of Britain in particular, he knew the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae written by the British monk Gildas, and he used it extensively for his own Historia Ecclesiastica. Writing in a context of c. 720, and with a backward glance over several years, he remarks how in those times many Englishmen used to go to Rome, noblemen and common people, men and women, officers of government and ordinary citizens¹⁸. Some of these many travellers doubtless brought back books or information—such as the epitaph on the tomb of Gregory the Great in Rome¹⁹—which would ultimately reach Bede at Jarrow.

We can discern a little of Bede's growing knowledge of English history by comparing the chronicles of the Sixth Age which he appended to each of his two works on chronology. Most of the material in these chronicles.²⁰ is of course derived from earlir works. In the chronicle at the end of the De Temporibus written in 703, there is only one entry which is specific to Britain. It reads: Saxones in Britannia fidem Christi suscipiunt. Since this event is assigned by Bede to the reign of the Emperor Phocas 602-10, we may perhaps infer that at this date, i.e. 703, Bede knew nothing about the mission sent by Gregory the Great to Britain under the leadership of Augustine in 596. But when we turn to the corresponding chronicle at the end of the De Temporum Ratione, completed 22 years later in 725, we find a very different situation. Not only did Bede include some quite detailed information about the activities of Augustine and his companions in Kent and of Paulinus in Northumbria, but he also referred to the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian, to St. Audrey, the foundress of the double monastery at Ely, to Willibrord who was preaching to the Frisians, and to St. Cuthbert whose Vita (says Bede) we have recently written in prose, and some years previously in hexameter verse.

Two significant points emerge from the contrast between these two chronicles of the Sixth Age. First, Bede's account of the Gregorian mission in the later of the two shows a knowledge of some of the works of Gregory the Great—the Moralia and the Dialogi, as well as a knowledge of the Liber Pontificalis and of a letter written by Gregory the Great to Augustine on 22 June 601²¹. And we know from his prose Vita Cuthberti that Bede had also received before this date a copy of the Libellus Responsionum²². This newly-acquired knowledge enabled Bede to correct his earlier error about the date of the arrival of Christianity among the English by putting it back to the reign of Maurice, the predecessor of Phocas, but it is not clear whether Bede yet knew the exact date of Augustine's arrival in England or whether he knew that the missioners arrived in two separate groups, one headed by Augustine in 597 and the other by Mellitus in 601. Whether or not Bede had already begun to plan the Historia Ecclesiastica by 725, I think we may infer that some at least of the material which he would use was now being gathered at Jarrow.

The second significant point arising from the later Chronicle is the interest which it shows in the lives of saints—of Gregory himself, Paulinus, Theodore, Audrey and particularly Cuthbert. Bede's own Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, to give it its full title, 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. It is concerned with individual monks and nuns, rather than with the Monastic Order, with particular men who were bishops rather than with ecclesiastical government, with individual teachers of singing rather than with the chant and the liturgy in general, with particular kings who won or lost battles rather than with warfare between kingdoms. This is as much as to say that when we look at the Historia as a whole we find that it is in fact precisely what Bede tells us in the Preface that it is going to be—a work telling of the good deeds done by good men, and of the evil deeds done by wicked men. But who, in Bede's sight, were the wicked men?

If we look at Bede's account of the history of Britain between the sack of Rome in 410 and the arrival of St. Augustine at Canterbury in 597, we find that it is based mainly upon two sources—the Vita Germani of Constantius and the de Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae of Gildas who is generally thought to have been writing c. 550. The amount of material which Bede borrowed from Gildas seems to show that he saw the conquest of Britain in much the same light as Gildas had seen it—the vengeance of God upon a people who had fallen from Christian virtues into every kind of corrupt and evil living. To the list of unspeakable crimes attributed to the Britons by their own historian, Gildas, Bede could add the further crime that the Britons never preached the Christian faith to the Angles and Saxons living among them in Britain. He repeated this charge near the end of the Historia²³, remarking that as the British had formerly been unwilling to teach the Christian faith to the heathen English, so now when the English were fully instructed in regula fidei catholicae, the British still stubbornly persisted in their old errors. Bede well knew that the purpose of the visit paid by Germanus to Britain in 429 was to combat the Pelagian heresy and to call the British church back to the orthodox fold. In using the Constantius Vita Germani, representing the victory of Catholicism over Pelagianism, and the work of Gildas which bitterly attacked the British clergy as well as the laity, Bede was certainly influenced by his passionate devotion to the catholic faith. It may also be that he looked upon the continuance of the British church in error as Divine retribution for the failure of their clergy to preach to the English²⁴.

In his attitude towards the British clergy Bede expresses himself with an uncompromising vigour which may seem distasteful to those who prefer that measure of tolerance which is ready to admit that there may be more than one point of view. We must not forget that, when the monastery at Jarrow was founded, only half a century had elapsed from that infaustus annus of apostasy following the death of Edwin, Northumbria's first Christian king, at the hands of Cadwallon, the British, and Christian, king of Gwynedd²⁵. We must not forget that, as Eddius tells us, British clergy had been driven out of their churches and monasteries by the sword of pagan English invaders²⁶. Yet we cannot dismiss Bede's remarks as the mere prejudice of an Englishman against all Celts. Those who incline to do so should first read what he wrote of Aidan of Lindisfarne²⁷, and then take note of one of the most vigorous condemnations in the Historia—the condemnation of the English king Ecgfrith for his attack on the Irish and the representation of Ecgfrith's death in battle against the Picts as Divine punishment for his sin²⁸—and this was the same English king who gave their first endowments to Wearmouth and Jarrow.

Nor must we forget that when Bede wrote the Historia, of all the Christian communities in Britain only the British church had failed to conform to Roman usage in the observance of Easter. We do not need to read very deeply in Bede's Biblical commentaries to realise how much store he set by the maintenance of catholic orthodoxy. Departure from such orthodoxy was in his sight a grave sin upon which there could be no compromise. Our judgment about Bede's attitude towards the British church ought not to be based upon his failure to conform to our prejudices, but upon the extent to which he was true to his own beliefs, and we shall not understand the depth of those beliefs if we confine our reading to his historical works. Yet when we have taken all this into account, we are left with the impression that there may have been other factors operating during Bede's own lifetime of which we know nothing, but which contributed to the hardness of his attitude.

It is in his account of the Gregorian mission, at work first in the south-east of England and later in Northumbria, that Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica has come under heavy attack in recent years, an attack which in total seems to impugn the stature of his intellect and, perhaps even worse, his intellectual honesty. It has been said that he was wrong about the place of St. Augustine's consecration as archbishop, that he accepted as a genuine document a Canterbury forgery foisted upon him by Nothhelm, that he implied a false date for the conversion of King Ethelbert of Kent and that he deliberately suppressed the evidence which he knew would have shown him to be wrong²⁹, and that he was wrong about the date at which the mission extended its activities to Northumbria under Paulinus³⁰.

Bede's account of the Augustinian mission in Kent comprises eleven consecutive chapters in the first Book of the Historia Ecclesiastica³¹. A little more than two-thirds of the content of those eleven chapters consists of the direct reproduction of letters written by Gregory the Great. The remainder derives from Canterbury tradition which reached Bede from Albinus, abbot of what we now know as St. Augustine's monastery. Albinus himself had been educated in the school established by Theodore and Hadrian, and Bede says of him that he knew not a little Greek, and was as familiar with Latin as he was with English. Both Gregory the Great and Augustine were still alive when Theodore was born. With this background we may suppose that unwritten traditional information coming to Jarrow from Canterbury would be well-founded. And we know from Bede himself of two separate occasions when material was conveyed to him from Canterbury. The account which Bede gives of the church dedicated to St. Martin in which Bertha worshipped, and of the monastery founded by St. Augustine in which there were churches dedicated the one to SS Peter and Paul, and the other to St. Mary, is abundantly confirmed by surviving architectural remains, as well as by the discoveries made in the detailed excavation of the churches of St. Augustine's monastery³². We have found the burial places of the early archbishops of Canterbury precisely where Bede, on the strength of his Canterbury informants, describes them as lying. But the reason why Bede could be both detailed and accurate on this heading was because the churches themselves were still in use and the archbishops' tombs could still be seen.

What was the strength of Canterbury tradition touching matters of which no visible evidence remained when Bede was writing? So far as we can tell no documents relating to the mission survived in Canterbury itself. Bede would naturally want to know the answer to a number of questions—when exactly did Augustine land in Kent?—when and where was he consecrated bishop?—when was King Ethelbert of Kent converted to Christianity? It looks very much as if the answers to these questions were not to be found in Canterbury tradition as it reached Bede, and that he was dependent for his knowledge of the mission's chronology on the dating clauses of Gregory the Great's letters, copies of which were brought to him by Nothhelm who had travelled to Rome for the particular purpose of examining the papal register and bringing back copies of such documents as he thought would be of interest to Bede.

Bede knew that when Augustine set out from Rome for the second time, in or after July 596, he did so as an abbot. He also knew that when Gregory wrote to Brunhild in September 597 he referred to Augustine as co-episcopus. He derived these facts from Gregory's letters. What then was the source of Bede's statement that at some unspecified date after his arrival in Britain Augustine went to Gaul and was consecrated bishop by Aetherius, archbishop of Arles³³? We know that in one detail, Bede here fell into error, since the archbishop of Arles was Vergilius, and not Aetherius who was bishop of Lyons. One of our great difficulties is that we do not know for certain how many of Gregory's letters Bede did in fact see. He knew that Gregory had told the archbishop of Arles to give Augustine any help that he might need. We know that Gregory had written to Vergilius of Aries to the effect that if Augustine should come to visit him about the delinquencies of priests or others, the two were to discuss the cases together³⁴. Yet there was one particular letter of Gregory's which we can feel certain that Bede did not see. It was written on 29 July 598 to Eulogius patriarch of Alexandria³⁵. In this letter Gregory tells how Augustine, who was with his permission made a bishop of the Germanies, has reached England and how 10,000 Englishmen are reported to have been baptised on Christmas Day in 597. If we read Gregory's letter objectively, it is difficult not to infer that Augustine's consecration as bishop had preceded his arrival in England. If this letter had been known either in Canterbury or to Bede, it seems scarcely credible that the scene of the mass baptisms on Christmas Day, authenticated by none other than Gregory the Great himself, would not have had its dramatic potentialities exploited to the full. The failure of any memory of this incident to have become enshrined in Canterbury tradition is most remarkable, as also is the seeming fact that Canterbury tradition did not even know the date of Augustine's death. It remains possible that Bede was right in saying that Augustine was consecrated bishop in Arles, but even if he was wrong, it is not difficult to see how either he or his Canterbury informant may have made a faulty inference from inadequate evidence³⁶.

Gregory's correspondence, our only contemporary source for Augustine's mission to the English, does not give the date of King Ethelbert's conversion. Bede himself makes no explicit statement about it either in the body of the Historia or in the chronological summary, but he implies that it occurred in 597 soon after the arrival of the missioners. It has been alleged that Ethelbert was still pagan in 601, that Bede became aware of this alleged fact c. 731 when he had already written his account of the mission and that he deliberately suppressed the inconvenient evidence which did not accord with the opinion which he had previously reached³⁷. The charge has, to my mind, been effectively refuted by Dr. Markus³⁸, but its nature is so serious, and the refutation perhaps not so widely known, that no apology is needed for presenting a summary of the arguments first advanced by Dr. Markus.

The case against Bede's integrity rests on three legs. The first argument is that if Ethelbert had been converted by 598 Gregory would have mentioned the fact in the letter to Eulogius in July of that year. But why should the Pope in Rome writing to a patriarch in Alexandria have mentioned the name of an obscure king ruling a minute area of land lying on the very edge of the world? The purpose of the letter was to give Eulogius the joyful news that a mission had set out from Rome, that it had reached England and that it had met with success. The second argument rests on a letter which Gregory wrote to King Ethelbert himself on 22 June 601. The relevant passage reads:

… and therefore illustrious son give earnest heed to keep the grace which has been given you by God; be eager to spread the Christian faith among the peoples whom you rule; redouble your upright zeal in their conversion; drive out the worship of the idols; overthrow the temple buildings³⁹.

I can see no force in the argument that in this passage "grace" need not here refer to the grace of baptism, but may only refer to the grace of faith which the missioners themselves have brought to England. Hitherto successive generations of historians have thought that a letter written in such terms as these could only have been written to one who had already been converted, and I can see no ground for departing from this view.

The third leg of the argument rests upon a letter which Gregory wrote to Bertha, Ethelbert's queen, also in June 601, or rests rather upon a part of the letter which reads thus:

And indeed it was your duty this long time past by the excellence of your prudence like a true Christian to have predisposed the mind of our illustrious son, your consort, to follow the faith which you cherish⁴⁰.

I think we must all agree that in this passage Gregory was blaming Bertha for not having secured Ethelbert's conversion, but let us note the words "this long time past", and consider how the letter goes on:

And now that by God's good pleasure a fitting moment is come, be sure that you repair past neglect with interest by the help of divine grace. Confirm therefore the mind of your illustrious consort in his attachment to the Christian faith by constant exhortation; let your care pour into him an increased love of God, and inflame his soul for the complete conversion of the race of his subjects.

Bertha was a Christian Frankish princess who brought a bishop with her from Gaul and who attended services in St. Martin's church in Canterbury—all this before the Gregorian mission reached Kent. We do not know how how long Bertha had been in Kent before Augustine arrived, but surely we can only interpret the letter—if we read all of it—as a rebuke to Bertha for not having used her past opportunities to convert her husband, and as an exhortation to confirm him in his attachment to the Christian faith. We have no proof that Bede ever saw this letter to Bertha and even if he did, would he not have interpreted it precisely in this way? How can it be said that Bede suppressed the letter because it showed that Ethelbert was still pagan in 601, whilst he had already written his Historia with its implication that Ethelbert was converted in 597?

The charge that Bede was deceived by a forgery foisted upon him by Nothhelm concerns the authenticity of the Libellus Responsionum which was reproduced by Bede as Book I, chapter 27 of the Historia. It springs in part from a letter which Boniface wrote to Nothhelm⁴¹, then archbishop of Canterbury, in 736, asking for an assurance that what we now call the Libellus was a genuine Gregorian work since, when the archives of the Roman church were searched, no copy of it could be found among the other writings of Gregory. In its most extreme form the charge represents this document as a forgery perpetrated by Nothhelm himself and first taken to Bede in 731. Part at least of the charge can be easily refuted, since Bede quotes a passage from the Libellus in his Vita Cuthberti which was written not later than 721, ten years or more before its inclusion in the Historia Ecclesiastica. This was time enough for Bede to be able to consider the document and to satisfy himself of its authenticity. Moreover such a forgery could scarcely have been perpetrated in Canterbury without the knowledge of Albinus, abbot of St. Augustine's monastery. From what we know of their personal relationships it is not easy to envisage Albinus and Nothhelm deliberately setting out to deceive Bede in this way, nor is it any easier to envisage Bede being deceived so readily. That the Libellus could not then, and cannot now, be found in the Register of Gregory's letters is not a decisive argument since the Libellus is not in fact a letter. The Libellus enjoyed a very wide circulation as a complete document in itself apart from its inclusion in the Historia Ecclesiastica. It survives in a large number of manuscripts and much further work remains to be done on it before any final decision can be reached, but such as has been done lends no support to the belief that it was a Canterbury forgery first taken to Bede c. 731⁴³.

The Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum has now been read for more than twelve centuries and therein perhaps we may see adequate proof of its qualities. Although we cannot prove that any of the surviving manuscripts were written before Bede's death, there are several eighth-century copies and there is abundant evidence of the great interest which it aroused in France and Germany. It was prized by two famous English kings, Offa of Mercia and Alfred the Great. Alcuin had a copy and it was used also by Paul the Lombard. By the ninth century it was known at Würzburg, St. Gall, Lorsch and Murbach⁴⁴. In all, more than 150 complete manuscripts of the work still survive and it was still being copied by hand in the 15th century when the first printed edition appeared at Strasbourg in about 1475. Some may read it as professional historians, finding in it the prime source of information about the early history of Christianity among the English. Others may be attracted by the lucid style of its Latin which formed an excellent vehicle for the remarkable narrative powers of its author, so little removed in time from his pagan forebears. Others may remember Bede's hope that his account of the past might encourage men to imitate the good and shun the evil. However much we may criticise in detail, we are left in the end with a sense of wonder and admiration that a man who lived in that alter orbis so far removed from the ancient centres of civilisation, was yet able to acquire a sense of historical vision which enabled him to see how much was to be gained ad instructionem posteritatis from a book which told of the conversion of a people from paganism to Christianity.

Notes

1. Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. C. Plummer, 1896, V. 24.
2. Gesta Regum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series 1887-9, I, 62-3.
3. Ep., ed. P. Ewald and L. Hartmann, Mon. Ger. Hist., VIII, 29.
4. In Cant. Cant., ed. Migne, Pat. Lat., 91, 1077.
5. I agree with J. Fontaine, Isidore de Seville, Traité de la Nature, 79, n. 1, in interpreting the passage in this way, rather than with C. W. Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus, p. 131, who thought that Bede's concern was lest his pupils might find mendacium in Isidore's works.
6. Bedae Opera Homiletica, I, 19, ed. D. Hurst, C.C.S.L CXXII, 138.
7. In Lucam, ed. D. Hurst, C.S.S.L. CXX, 67.
8. Ed. Migne, Pat. Lat., 23, 197.
9. Hist Ecc., II, 1.
10. See, for example, Opera Homiletica, II, 7, ed. Hurst, 226-7.
11. See Op. Hom., I, 9, ed. Hurst, 64-5.
12. De Temporum Ratione, c. xlvii, ed. C. W. Jones, Bedae Opera de Temporibus, 266-7.
13. C. W. Jones, op. cit. 132-3. For the Epistola ad Pleguinam in which Bede replied to the charge, see ibid. 307-15.
14. Hist. Ecc. I, 2 and V, 24.
15. P. Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, 156 and Pl. VI.
16. P. Hunter Blair, "The Moore Memoranda on Northumbrian History", in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, ed. C. Fox and B. Dickins, 245-57.
17. Bedae Opera Exegetica, In I Samuelem, ed. D. Hurst, C.C.S.L., CXIX, 69.
18. Chron. Majora, ed. Mommsen, Mon. Ger. Hist., Auct. Ant., XIII, 320.
19. Recorded by Bede in the Hist Ecc. II, 1.
20. Ed. Mommsen, Mon. Ger. Hist., Auct Ant., XIII, 247-327.
21. Ep. XI, 39, reproduced by Bede in Hist. Ecc. I, 29.
22. C. xvi, ed. B. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, 208.
23. Hist. Ecc. V, 22.
24. I am indebted to Professor Whitelock for this point.
25. Hist. Ecc. II, 20, III, 1.
26. The Life of Bishop Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus, ed. B. Colgrave, c. XVII, 36.
27. Hist. Ecc. III, 5.
28. Hist. Ecc. IV, 26.
29. On these points see the detailed arguments expressed by S. Brechter, Die Quellen zur Angelsachsenmission Gregors des Grossen. See also Brechter's "Zur Bekehrungsgeschichte der Angelsachsen", Settimane XIV, Spoleto 1967, 191-215.
30. See D. P. Kirby, "Bede's Northumbrian Chronology", English Historical Review, LXXVIII (1963), 514-27. I hope to discuss this problem more fully elsewhere.
31. Hist. Ecc. V, 20.
32. H. M. and J. Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, I, 134-45.
33. Hist. Ecc. I, 27.
34. Ep. XI, 45.
35. Ep. VIII, 29.
36. See P. Meyvaert, Bede and Gregory the Great, Jarrow Lecture 1964, 12-13.
37. S. Brechter, op. cit. 240-48.
38. R. A. Markus, "The Chronology of the Gregorian Mission to England: Bede's Narrative and Gregory's Correspondence", Journal of Ecclesiastical History XIV (1963), 16-30. I have used Markus's translations of the relevant documents.
39. Ep., XI, 37.
40. Ep., XI, 35.
41. Ed. M. Tangl, Mon. Ger. Hist., Ep. Sel. I, No. 33.
42. C. XVI.
43. See further M. Deanesly and P. Grosjean, "The Canterbury Edition of the Answers of Pope Gregory I to St. Augustine", Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 10 (1959), 1-49; P. Meyvaert, "Les Responsiones de S. Grégoire le Grand le Grand à S. Augustin de Cantorbery", Revue d'Histoire ecclésiastique, 54 (1959), 879-94; M. Deanesly, "The Capitular Text of the Responsiones of Pope Gregory I to St. Augustine", Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12 (1961), 231-4.
44. See D. Whitelock, After Bede, Jarrow Lecture 1960.