[In the following lecture, Chambers presents Bede in historical context and asserts that, in the Ecclesiastical History, Bede captures two traditions: loyalty to Christ and loyalty to the chief.]

Ours is an age in which those who delight in such things delight to take a 'master mind' and to throw him down from his pedestal. My friend and predecessor in this series, Tenney Frank, speaking of Cicero as a master mind, had to vindicate against cavillers his hero's claim to that title. Indeed, said Professor Frank, 'the first poet of Greece is perhaps the only human being who has attained an undisputed place of honour'. Yet even here he was too optimistic. I was brought up on Mahaffy's History of Greek Literature, and Mahaffy and Sayce between them taught me that Homer was not a human being, but a collection of inter-polations, 'fitted together', which is what the name Homêros means, so that 'with a closer insight into the structure of the epic poems' we must depose him from his pedestal and give the first place to Aeschylus.¹ All my lifetime Homer has been slowly climbing back on to his pedestal again. But he has not yet been selected for the 'master mind' lecture. He lacks one important qualification for public recognition as a master mind: a fixed date of death, which will ensure his merits being officially brought under the notice of the Academy at least once every century.

Bede is more fortunate. We can say with fair certainty that he died at the hour of Vespers, on Wednesday, 25 May 735, the eve of Ascension Day. Quite certainly he did not die before that date, so we are on the safe side in keeping his celebration a little late. To-day, the 27th of May, is, of course, his day in the Church's calendar.

In a broader sense, it is to his date that Bede owes his supreme position. His life was preceded, and it was followed, by a period of great darkness. The seventh century, in which Bede was born, has been called 'the nadir of the human mind'; or at least a great historian of to-day, George Sarton, has censured a great historian of a century ago, Henry Hallam, for so calling it.² Sarton has pointed out that though things were bad in Europe, the early seventh century was a golden age in Arabia, in Tibet, in China, and in Japan. Hallam hardly deserves the censure of his critic, for what he really said was that the seventh century was the nadir of the human mind in Europe. Two pages later on, however, Hallam does so far abandon caution as to say that 'the Venerable Bede may perhaps be reckoned superior to any man the world then possessed'. Hallam would have been on safer ground if here also he had said 'Europe'. To-day, as we pass through any great museum, the marvels of the T'ang dynasty warn the most careless of us not to suppose that 'Europe' and 'the world' are synonymous. But of these things Hallam could know nothing; they were hidden in recesses of China and Japan then inaccessible to Westerners.

Amid the European darkness of the seventh and eighth centuries Bede's life 'throws its beams' far; it shines, as Bede's editor, Charles Plummer, has said, like

a good deed in a naughty world.

Or rather, we will say, 'like a good deed in a naughty Europe'.

Bede is the most striking example of the truth which Oderisi of Gubbio³ uttered to Dante, as they paced, crouching together, round the first circle of Purgatory, the circle of the Proud:

Oh vain glory of human powers! How short a time does it remain green upon the top, if it be not followed by ages of darkness. Cimabue thought to hold the field in painting; now Giotto has the cry.… And for thee, if thou livest to be old, how will thy fame be more than if thou hadst died a babe, ere a thousand years be passed; which yet, to eternity, is a shorter space than the twinkling of an eye.

Which shows, incidentally, how much Dante underestimated his own fame. The six hundred years following Dante's death have been no ages of darkness, yet, so far as anything can be predicted, it seems safe to predict that, a thousand years after his birth, Dante's glory will remain undimmed. Dante tells us how he was burdened by thinking of the heavy load of penance which he would have to carry in Purgatory for his pride.⁴ For my part, I find myself amazed at his modesty.

But Bede had a humbler mind than Dante. He was an expert in Chronology, and he knew that he was living in the Sixth, and Last, Age of the World. For the first Five Ages, those before Christ, Bede's reckoning did not differ materially from the results arrived at by Archbishop Usher, which are still in the margins of our bibles. These Ages, according to Bede, together covered 3,952 years, only 52 less than Usher allowed. The last of these five pre-Christian Ages (from the destruction of Solomon's Temple at Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar to the Coming of our Lord in the flesh) was the epoch in which, Bede asserted, the world had grown old. The Sixth Age was to stretch from the Incarnation of Christ to the Day of Doom: it was, according to Bede, the age of complete decrepitude, as befitted the epoch which was to end in the destruction of all.⁵ Bede deprecated inquiry as to how long this last age of decrepitude would continue; but assuredly he would not, like Dante, have thought in terms of thousands of years. Dante's idea of successive painters, poets, scholars, each surpassing and obscuring the fame of his predecessor, shows how much the outlook of the human spirit had grown since the Dark Age of Bede. The Dark Age continued for many centuries after Bede, and so Bede, as generation followed generation, had few rivals to fear in the West. George Sarton, in the first volume of his mighty Introduction to the History of Science, gives the name of one great man to each half-century of his survey, and, with some hesitation, he names the first half of the eighth century after Bede. 'This was my last chance', he says, 'in this volume, of giving a Christian title to a chapter.' Not till the great revival which took place after the year 1100 does the West again begin to take the lead. The two half-centuries before Bede Sarton names after two Chinese travellers. The seven half-centuries after Bede he names from seven sages of the Moslem world. So that, during a period of 500 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1100, Bede is the only master mind of Christendom whom Sarton thinks worthy of a supreme place.

But though Bede lived in what was, so far as Europe was concerned, a dark age, there is nothing dark about him. In the words of W. P. Ker:

He did not, in his reading or writing, go beyond the sources or the models that were commonly accessible. For all that, the impression he leaves is that of something different from his age, an exceptional talent escaping from limitations and hindrances. There is no period in the history of Britain or of the English Church in which Bede is antiquated; in every generation he speaks familiarly. The seventeenth century is less intelligible to the eighteenth, the eighteenth century more in opposition to the nineteenth, than Bede to any one of them; his good sense is everywhere at home.… The reputation of Bede seems always to have been exempt from the common rationalist criticism, and this although his books are full of the things a Voltairian student objects to.⁶

Ker goes on to speak of matters where Bede is intolerant. Yet, he says,

Like Dr. Johnson's refusal to countenance a Presbyterian church in Scotland, the severity of Bede has been taken lightly by the most sensitive, and has failed to make him enemies, even among the fiercest advocates of Christian charity and impartial toleration It appears to be felt that he is a great man. The volume of his book is too much for carpers and cavillers.

Or, if we may translate the classic periods of 'W. P.' into the vulgarisms of to-day, we may say that even Lytton Strachey would have found it difficult to de-bunk the Venerable Bede. True, there is a volume entitled The Venerable Bede expurgated, expounded, and exposed, but the satire of that moderately amusing book is aimed, not at Bede, but at Anglican clergy who dare to claim him as their own.

Therefore, when the Academy did me the honour of asking me to give a lecture on the Master Mind Foundation, and chose Bede as the subject, I could only obey, although with many doubts as to my ability to deal with him. There is something which overawes us, in the contemplation of this unchanging reputation, in a world where everything else seems to be open to challenge and dispute, a challenge of which I, at least, am reminded every time I enter the British Museum Reading Room. All my life, when overcome by the atmosphere of that Reading Room, I have been accustomed to get up and walk along the Roman gallery, where the long line of Roman Emperors stood on their polished pedestals, till I finished opposite the bust of Julius Caesar. There, I said to myself, are the features of the foremost man of all this world, fashioned from the life by some master-craftsman of the first century B.C. And I returned refreshed to my work. In accordance with the spirit of our age, the polished pedestals have all been swept away; a sadly diminished line of Emperors now stands, in the Roman gallery, on a shelf reminiscent of a cocktail bar. Julius Caesar has been expelled. He now faces us, as we enter the Reading Room, with an inscription, Julius Caesar, Ideal portrait of the 18th Century. Rome, bought 1818.

And so he, who insisted that his wife must be above suspicion, now only serves to warn the unsuspicious Englishman against buying sham antiques aborad. There is change and decay in all the galleries of the Museum. No longer does the Etruscan lady deliver, with uplifted finger, an everlasting curtain-lecture to her recumbent spouse. I believe that after the night watchman has done his rounds, from one monument of Antiquity to another there passes

A timid voice, that asks in whispers
'Who next will drop and disappear?'

Yet there are works of art in the Museum which have nothing to fear from any hostile critic; and two supreme ones have a special bearing on the Age of Bede. The Chinese pottery statue of a Buddhist apostle sits in the centre of the King Edward VII Gallery, rather more than life-size. In his grand simplicity, utterly remote from all earthly affairs, the apostle gazes into eternity. If our art-critics are right in their dates, he shows us what the East could do in the Age of Bede. He serves as a symbol to remind us that the darkest period of Western civilization coincides with the glories of the T'ang dynasty in China. Dynasties might have changed, and empires fallen, and the meditations of the Chinese sage, from whom that portrait was modelled (for a portrait it must assuredly be), would have been as little disturbed thereby as have been the features of his porcelain image. Like the sage of Bacon's New Atlantis, he has an aspect as though he pitied men. He belongs, we are told, to an age when inspiration was fresh, and Chinese Buddhist art young and virile.

The other great monument of the Age of Bede in the British Museum we can date exactly. It, again, is a monument of a young and virile art. It is the Lindisfarne Book, made on Holy Island by Bede's friend Eadfirth. The Lindisfarne Book is apparently the first great surviving masterpiece of the school to which it belongs. Its perfection is, at that date, so surprising that at least one eminent Celtic expert⁷ has persuaded himself that the book was really written about 120 years later (and, of course, in Ireland), shortly after which it fell into English hands, 'doubtless by some nefarious means'. But the Celtic expert forgot that the Lindisfarne Book is not only a masterpiece of design. It is a text of the Latin gospels, and, as such, has a very definite textual history; it has a liturgical history likewise, and these make it clear that the inscription which the Lindisfarne Book bears is not to be disputed when it says that the book was written by Eadfirth, Bishop of Lindisfarne, in honour of God and St. Cuthbert. Eadfirth also showed his veneration for St. Cuthbert by causing a Latin life to be made by some anonymous writer. Not satisfied with this, he asked Bede to write a second Life. Bede did so, and revised it carefully, after conference with those who had known the Saint. He then so far departed from his usual custom of seclusion within his own monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, that he took it himself to Lindisfarne, some fifty miles away. There, for two days, it was diligently scrutinized by the brethren. They could find no fault in it, and Bede dedicated it to Eadfirth.

At the time when Bede visited Holy Island, Bishop Eadfirth had probably finished his long task of writing and illuminating the Lindisfarne Book.⁸ It seems unlikely that, when Bede brought to Lindisfarne his tribute to St. Cuthbert, the Bishop in return would have failed to show Bede his tribute. So we may think that Bede and the Bishop bent their tonsured heads over the leaves of the Lindisfarne Book, and followed the intricate subtleties of the ornamentation, so delicate that the eye can scarcely trace them, and that we wonder how any brain devised them.

The figure of the Buddhist apostle and the designs of the Lindisfarne Book are both, in their way, as near perfection as work of man can be. Compared with the Chinese apostle the Lindisfarne Book belongs to a primitive—almost barbaric—culture. But it is the most beautiful thing the West could do in that age, just as Bede is the greatest product of the West in knowledge. When we think of this meeting, in a humble shack on Holy Island, of the greatest scholar and the greatest artist of the West, we may ask, How did it come that one small English district produced both?

Bede, the scholar, following knowledge, Eadfirth, the craftsman, creating beauty, Cuthbert, the saint, seeking God, were all alive together, pursuing their quest in one remote corner of England.

How did it come, that just when learning and civilization seemed to be dying out on the continent of Western Europe, they flourished among the Celts of Ireland and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes of England—tribes who had never before known Roman discipline or Greek learning? Whilst Bede as Chronologist was conscious of living in the last, final age of the world, Bede as Geographer was equally conscious of living in the last, uttermost regions. He speaks of Ireland and Britain as the two remotest isles of the ocean.⁹ His abbot, Ceolfrid, addressing the Pope, spoke of himself as living 'in the extreme limits'. How did it come that this monastery on the outskirts was the refuge, not only of the English, but also of the European spirit in the eighth century?

Two centuries before, under the magnanimous rule of Theodoric, Italy had still been the centre of Western culture. It was in Italy that Boethius, Cassiodorus, and St. Benedict had planted, amid the ruins of the Roman world, the beginnings of a new world which was to exceed the old in glory. These Italians were the Founders of the Middle Ages. And even in Britain there had been a temporary rally of Christian and Roman civilization; at Mount Badon the harassed Roman-Britons enjoyed that brief taste of victory, the distant reverberations of which have echoed through the ages in the stories of King Arthur and his knights. But the sixth century, despite its fair beginning, closed in disaster for the Roman world. Gregory the Great had to watch bands of 'unspeakable' Lombards, as he called them, plundering up to the very walls of Rome. Yet Pope Gregory had such pity for the barbarian world outside those walls that he dispatched St. Augustine on his mission to England. Like Columbus later, Gregory little realized what he was doing. Gregory merely hoped to snatch a few more souls from perdition before the Coming of Antichrist and the Day of Doom ended an unfortunate business which, thanks to Adam and Eve, the Serpent and the apple, had gone wrong from the first. For, as he explained in his letter to King Ethelbert of Kent, the end of the world was approaching, and would shortly be upon us.¹⁰

Yet, in reality, Pope Gregory was 'calling in a new world to redress the balance of the old'.

For civilization at the moment had little chance in Romanized Western Europe. The conquering barbarians were quarrelling over the loot of the Roman Empire till they lost whatever barbaric virtues they had formerly possessed, when they lived in the more austere surroundings of their native forests and swamps. A good idea of life in Western Europe can be drawn from the two historians who are nearest in date to Bede, Gregory of Tours for the History of the Franks, and Paul the Deacon for the History of the Lombards.

What the ruling Frankish kings and queens were like we may gather from the way in which Queen Fredegund suppressed her naughty daughter Rigunth. Growing tired of the impertinences of her daughter, Fredegund invited her to share the crown jewels, which were kept in a huge chest. She handed out one after another, and at length, pretending to be tired, she said, 'Take them out for yourself, my dear.' The daughter put her arm into the chest, and the mother brought down the lid with all her might upon the head of her unruly off-spring, and pressed her throat against the edge of the chest, till her daughter's eyes were starting out of her head. The murder was prevented by a handmaid calling for help: 'Her Royal Highness the Queen is suffocating Her Royal Highness the Princess.'¹¹ This is not an unfair example of the manners and morals of the reigning house in Merovingian France, though there were exceptions like the worthy King Guntram, 'whose memory is stained by only one or two murders'.

Paul's History of the Lombards is not as sordid as Gregory's History of the Franks. The Lombards had a certain rough chivalry, but they were utterly barbarous. Alboin, their king, slew the king of a rival Teutonic tribe, the Gepids, and made a drinking-cup of his skull. With typical inconsequence he also wedded Rosamund, the daughter of the king he had slain. The queen managed to avert her eyes from the gruesome table ornament, and all went well for a time. But it befell on a day that Alboin sat at the banquet longer than was proper, and filling the cup with wine, bade his cup-bearer carry it to the queen and tell her to drink with her father.¹² That was more than Queen Rosamund could stand, and Alboin's reign ended suddenly in 572 or 573. He was succeeded by other Lombard rulers, equally barbarous and less picturesque.

Even before the barbarians had gained such complete mastery, the Roman world had been oppressed by a sense of its age. A fifth-century historian tells us that 'Rome is falling more from the weakness of age than from external violence'.¹³ What must the depression have become when Romans had to flatter masters like Alboin and mistresses like Fredegund? The only way of escape was the way of complete renunciation. Gregory of Tours¹⁴ tells of a recluse who ate nothing but bread (upon which he condescended to put a little salt), who drank only water (which, however, he allowed himself to sweeten with a little honey), who never slept, ceasing from prayer only to read or write, and who perpetually wore a hair shirt. Such a man was likely to get the reputation of working miracles. And, miracles or no, he dominated his surroundings: he was respected, and feared, by Roman and barbarian, by good and bad alike. Yet the path of complete renunciation is too difficult for many men and women to follow, and the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire found that most Christians were not like that. Therefore the mixture of barbarian and Roman within the Roman Empire resulted in that degradation which often follows when two different cultures and languages are violently brought together. Each nation finds that the task of learning from the others their irregular manners is easier than that of learning their irregular verbs, and generations pass before either morality or grammar becomes stabilized again.

That accounts for the superiority, both in its grammar and its subject matter, of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People over Gregory's History of the Franks. For when Romanized Christians went forth to convert Irish or English in their own homes, they found conditions very different from those within the decaying Roman world. The missionaries found the barbarians living according to the standards which their ancestors had followed for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. It is true that there were in England some small remains of Roman civilization, and that those remains were useful to the missionaries. But the point is that the Christian evangelists found the native Teutonic culture intact. And on their side the missionaries who came among the heathen English were chosen men, trained in saintliness or obedience. No others would have undertaken so thankless a task. Also, they were often men of learning. Here, then, Roman, Celt, and Teuton, Christian and Heathen, met, each at his best. And there were things in the new Christian teaching which harmonized with the Germanic heroic traditions.

The essential virtue of the Old Germanic system was loyalty. The chieftain surrounded himself with a band of young companions who were pledged to live and die with him. It was a lifelong disgrace, Tacitus tells us, for the companion to return alive from the field on which his lord had fallen. This loyalty to a person was the bond of Germanic civilization; not the Roman or Greek conception of loyalty to a community: not 'The Republic', but 'My Chief.

Abstract conceptions of Theology or Philosophy would have been difficult for the primitive English to grasp. But they were ready to listen to the story of 'the young hero, that was God Almighty, strong and stout of heart'. Let us remember the deep words of St. Augustine in the Confessions, where he tells how he found certain books of the Platonists, 'and therein I read, not indeed in those words, but with that meaning: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." … But that the Word was made Flesh, and dwelt among us, that I read not there.'¹⁵

Whilst all traditions in Western Europe seemed in danger of breaking down, these two traditions of loyalty to Christ and loyalty to the chief fortified each other, whenever the chief became a true Christian convert.

It was the great good fortune of Bede to be born into a society, in the first freshness of its conversion, which understood those two personal loyalties. The glory of it lasted only for a generation—but Bede caught it before it perished, and enshrined it in his Ecclesiastical History, to endure as long as the story of England endures. The Ecclesiastical History is the greatest, but not the only, expression of it. In the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood (which certainly belongs to the age of Bede), we have a perfect fusion of the loyalty of the Germanic companion to his lord, and the loyalty of the Christian to Christ, and the mystery of a creation groaning and travailing in pain at the foot of the Cross: not the historic cross of Calvary, but a marvel beyond man's understanding. And all this in the style, phraseology, and metre of Germanic heathen heroic poetry, familiar to the companions as they drank beer in the lord's hall at night. We know that Bede was skilled in English poetry, and the English verses which he composed on his death-bed have survived. Bede tells in the Ecclesiastical History how Caedmon first combined Christian teaching with the style of the old heathen lays; Bede's elder contemporary and fellow scholar, Aldhelm, was doing the same in the south of England; and Beowulf with many another Old English poem, remains as a monument of the fusion.

It was the same combination of loyalties which had led, some years after Bede's birth, to the foundation of the monastery in which he was to work, and without which he would not have been the man he was. There was among the retinue of King Oswy of Bernicia a certain young noble named Biscop. Biscop must have seen a good deal of hard fighting in the early days of his king. When Biscop was twenty-five, Oswy offered him an estate on which he might marry and settle down—just as Hygelac did to Beowulf after he had slain Grendel. It was the usual reward to a young warrior who had proved his worth, and was entitled to pass from the … young companions, to the … veterans. But, instead, Biscop abandoned the world, went on the pilgrimage to Rome, and set himself to learn all that a monk should know. He sojourned altogether in seventeen monasteries at different times of his life, 'committing to memory whatever he found most profitable in each'. Biscop, who had taken the name Benedict after the founder of the monastic rule which he followed, at length returned to Northumbria, and King Ecgfrid (son of Oswy) gave him a large estate upon which he founded the monastery of Monkwearmouth. The monastery was about five years old when Bede, a boy of seven, entered it. For a dozen years Biscop was Bede's teacher and master. When Ecgfrid gave Biscop a further grant of land, upon which he founded the monastery of Jarrow, the young Bede was transferred there.

Biscop made his monasteries centres of art and learning. He made altogether five journeys from England to Rome, every time bringing back many books and works of art. Biscop brought builders and glaziers from France, but, as any one realizes who examines what is left to-day, his buildings were minute if compared with the great structures of later monasticism. In their simplicity, the remains of Biscop's building remind us of the beginnings of the Franciscan movement. A small church was surrounded by the small huts or cells of the brethren. There were many brethren: by the middle of Bede's life he tells us that there were about six hundred in the two monasteries. The terrible mortality when the plague fell on these communities shows how unhealthy they must have been. But treasures like the Codex Amiatinus and the Lindisfarne Book survive to show that no labour was spared in order to make their equipment beautiful.

All this helps us to understand how, in the seventh century, Christian civilization found a refuge in Northumbria. There was the background of the primitive warrior life, not much altered from what it had been in the days of the Germania of Tacitus. That was the soldierly education which men like Biscop or Eostorwine received till they were twenty-four or twenty-five. To these still uncorrupted barbarians came Celtic missionaries of the type of the saintly Aidan. Most important of all, the Roman missionaries brought the ordered life of the Benedictine rule.

And so the tone of Bede's Ecclesiastical History is altogether different from that of Gregory's History of the Franks or Paul's History of the Lombards. The tale of Oswin of Deira, which I am going to read from Bede, is typical of Bede's History, just as the tales of Fredegund half-strangling her daughter Rigunth, or Rosamund contriving the death of her husband Alboin, are typical of the continental histories.

King Oswin was of countenance beautiful, of stature high, in talk courteous and gentle, in all points civil and amiable: no less honourable and bountiful to the noble, than free and liberal to persons of low degree. Whereby it happened, that for his outward personage, inward heart, and princely port, he had the love of all men. Especially the nobility of all countries frequented his court, and coveted to be received in his service.

Among other his rare virtues, and princely qualities, his humility and passing lowliness excelled. Whereof we will be contented to recite one most worthy example.

He had given to Bishop Aidan a very fair and proper gelding, which that virtuous bishop (though he used most to travel on foot) might use to pass over waters and ditches, or when any other necessity constrained. I fortuned shortly after, a certain poor weak man met the bishop, and craved an alms of him. The bishop, as he was a passing pitiful man, and a very father to needy persons, lighted off, and gave the poor man the gelding, gorgeously trapped as it was.

The king hearing after hereof, talked of it with the bishop, as they were entering the palace to dinner, and said, 'What meant you, my lord, to give away to the beggar that fair gelding, which we gave you for your own use? Have we no other horses of less price, and other kind of rewards to bestow upon the poor, but that you must give away that princely horse, which we gave you for your own riding?' To whom the bishop answered, 'Why talketh your grace thus? Is that son of a mare dearer in your sight than that son of God?'

Which being said, they entered for to dine. The bishop took his place appointed, but the king, coming then from hunting, would stand a while by the fire to warm him. Where standing, and musing with himself upon the words which the bishop had spoken unto him, suddenly he put off his sword, giving it to his servant, and came in great haste to the bishop: falling down at his feet, and beseeching him not to be displeased with him for the words he had spoken unto him, saying he would never more speak of it, nor measure any more hereafter what or how much the bishop should bestow of his goods upon the sons of God.

At which sight the bishop, being much astonied, arose suddenly and lifted up the king, telling him that he should quickly be pleased, if it would please him to sit down, and cast away all heaviness.

Afterward, the king being at the bishop's request merry, the bishop contrariwise began to be heavy and sorry; in such sort, that the tears trickled down by his cheeks. Of whom, when his chaplain in his mother tongue¹⁶ (which the king and his court understood not) had demanded why he wept: 'I know,' said he, 'that the king shall not live long. For never before this time have I seen an humble king. Whereby I perceive, that he shall speedily be taken out of this life: for this people is not worthy to have such a prince and governor.'

Shortly after, the bishop's dreadful abodement was fulfilled, with the king's cruel death, as we have before declared. Bishop Aidan himself also was taken away out of this world, and received of God the everlasting rewards of his labours, even on the twelfth day after the king, whom he so much loved, was slain.¹⁷

Bede's life shows what a fine thing Benedictine monasticism could be in early eighth-century England. But the words which Dante puts into the mouth of St. Benedict in Paradise were to prove true: 'So easily seduced is mortal flesh, that a good beginning on earth lasts not so long, as the time between the first springing up of an oak, and its bearing an acorn.'¹⁸ When Bede was a boy of twelve or thirteen the reckless aggression of King Ecgfrid ruined the Northumbrian kingdom. The anonymous Life of St. Cuthbert tells how Ecgfrid was ravaging the land of the Picts in the far north, and his queen, attended by St. Cuthbert, was awaiting the issue of the war in the city of Carlisle. The governor of the city was showing them an old Roman fountain constructed in wondrous wise, when Cuthbert exclaimed, 'Oh, Oh, Oh, I deem that the war is finished, and that judgement has been pronounced against our soliders in their warfare. Oh my children, consider how beyond scrutiny are the judgements of God.' In a few days came the news of the death of Ecgfrid and all his army at Nechtansmere. From this defeat Bede at a later period dated Northumbrian decay: 'The prowess of the dominion of the English began to decay and go backwards.' The year after the death of Ecgfrid came the visitation of plague, which carried away from the monastery of Jarrow all who could read, or preach, or recite the antiphons, except Ceolfrid the abbot, and one small lad, nourished and taught by him. In the anonymous History of the Abbots the moving story is told of how the abbot and the lad carried on the services unaided. The small lad was certainly¹⁹ Bede himself. I mention these anonymous historical works because, with Eddi's Life of Wilfrid, they show us that there was already a school of historical writing in Northumbria before Bede produced his masterpiece.

It has been said that, 'some day, scandal mongers and disintegrating critics may become aware that they have produced most accurate autobiographies'.²⁰ In his History and in his Lives of the Abbots Bede has, unconsciously, written his own autobiography. But it adds to our understanding of his character when we realize that Bede's world had already begun to decay when he was a boy of thirteen. Although for another twenty years King Aldfrid ruled the defeated Northumbrian realm competently within its narrower boundaries, after his death, which took place when Bede was about thirty-three, the state of Northumbria became deplorable. Bede's enormous labours were carried on amid a general decline of Northumbrian civilization. Yet Bede only occasionally refers to the decadence of his age. It was not till the last year of his life that Bede spoke out. A young man of royal birth, probably a pupil of his own, Egbert, had just been appointed Archbishop of York. In a letter of advice to him, Bede deals fully with the abuses which had grown in the thirty troubled years since the death of Aldfrid. He is particularly shocked at the bogus monasteries which were everywhere springing up, filled by pseudo-monks whose only object was to avoid military duties and to live in idleness. Bede is for drastic remedies. Even monasteries of professed monks ought to be dissolved or converted if the monks do not live according to their vows:

And because there are very many places of this kind which, as the common saying is, are useful to neither God nor man, because neither is the religious life observed in them, according to the law of God, nor do they have in them soldiers or thanes of the secular powers to defend our people from the barbarians; if any one were to turn such monasteries into bishoprics, he would be doing a virtuous act. Your Holiness, with the help of the devout king of our nation, ought to tear in pieces the unrighteous charters of former princes, and to provide things useful to our country, lest either religion die out in our day, or else the number of our armed men diminishes, so that there are none left to defend our borders from barbarian invasion.

Bede complains that monasteries have grown so numerous that there are no lands upon which time-expired soldiers can be settled. Such soldiers are compelled either to emigrate oversea, leaving their native land unprotected, or else to live idle and unmarried, growing more and more demoralized.

But, even worse than these many monasteries of unworthy monks, says Bede, are the sham monasteries of laymen, who escape their secular duties without even making any attempt to live the monastic life.²¹ The young archbishop was not able to carry through all reforms which Bede desired; but he founded the Cathedral school at York and taught in it. It was an epoch-making act—for thereby he passed on the learning of his friend and master, Bede, to his friend and scholar, Alcuin, and through him to the Carolingians and the Middle Ages.

Bede was already ill when he wrote the letter to Egbert—it has been called his swan-song. But, as we know, he went on labouring to the day of his death. 'I do not want my boys to read a lie, or to labour in vain after I am gone,' he said on his death-bed.

If the lifetime of Bede was one of downfall and decay throughout his own Northumbria, it was even more so throughout Christendom. At the time of Bede's birth, although the Mohammedan power had established itself in Syria and Egypt, nevertheless the Mediterranean was still the central sea of the Christian world. But during Bede's lifetime the whole of Africa, and almost all Spain, was lost to Christendom. When Bede was writing his History, the Saracens had reached the centre of France. Then came the turn of the tide. The year after Bede finished his History Charles Martel won the great victory over the Saracens which saved France from utter devastation. Bede slipped a reference to it into his History. He could not know how epoch-making the victory was to be. Yet we can imagine his satisfaction as he told how, after their terrible devastation of Gaul, the Saracens had incurred the just judgement of God.

There is something very appropriate in this final reference. Bede instructed Egbert, and Egbert taught Alcuin, so we may regard Alcuin as Bede's spiritual grandson. Bede's spiritual grandson was destined to serve Charles the Great, the grandson of Charles Martel, in the reestablishment of learning in Europe. For, contemporary with all this decay within the borders of Christendom had been the amazing missionary efforts of the Englishmen, Willibrord and Boniface and their companions, among the heathen German tribes of the Continent, which first changed the face of Germany, and then had such repercussions upon Gaul as to make possible the Carolingian Renaissance. It is remarkable how constantly the missionaries write back to England for the works of Bede:

We, labouring to plant the seeds of the Gospel among the wild and ignorant Germans, beg you to send us something of the writings of Bede the monk, who of late was shining among you like a lantern, with knowledge of the Scriptures. And if you could send us a bell also, it would be a great comfort to us in our exile.²²

Or

We beg that you will comfort us by doing as you have done before, by sending us some ray from that lantern of the Church enlightened by the Holy Spirit in your land—Bede. And we are sending by the bearer two small vats of wine, that you may have a day of joy with your monks.²³

Or

I beg that you will send us, for a comfort in our exile, any one of these works, which Bede the priest of blessed memory wrote. [A list follows.] I am asking much, but it will not seem much to your charity.²⁴

Or

I am sick, and like to leave this vale of tears. I beg, as a consolation both of my exile and my illness, for the books of Bede of blessed memory on the building of the Temple, or on the Song of Songs, or his epigrams in heroic or elegiac verse— all, if possible, but, if not, the three books on the building of the Temple. Perhaps what I ask is difficult, but I think nothing will be difficult to your charity.²⁵

Such is the constant appeal of the missionaries, Boniface, Lull, and the rest, writing home to the abbots of Monkwearmouth and to Egbert at York. The English ecclesiastics do what they can to supply the need—the abbot of Monkwearmouth laments that he cannot send more of Bede's writings: he has put his boys to work, but it has been a horrible winter, with cold and frost and storms, which have numbed the hand of the writer.²⁶

It is thanks to the labours of Boniface and Alcuin, and the inspiration of Bede, that discipline and learning were re-established on the Continent. In England the worst time had still to come, when the whole country was harried by the Vikings, but on the Continent learning, however depressed, never sank again as low as it had done before Bede and those whom he inspired began their labours.

When, at the end of the ninth century, King Alfred had at last checked the Viking raids in England, one of the works he promoted was the translation of Bede's History into English. England, therefore, was the first of the nations of Western Europe to have a great history written in the vernacular. But the book was multiplied much more frequently in Latin, and William of Malmesbury looked back to the Ecclesiastical History as a model when, four centuries after Bede's time, he re-established in England Bede's tradition of Latin historiography.

How great had been the popularity of Bede's History, during the period which intervenes between Bede and William of Malmesbury, is proved by the large number of early manuscripts which have survived, despite all the destruction wrought by Vikings and others. Two of these earliest manuscripts contain chronological notes, which enable us to date them. The oldest, which was written on the Continent, though it is now at Cambridge, was made within some two years of Bede's death. The second oldest, written within eleven years of Bede's death, was once at Corbie, and is now in Leningrad.²⁷ It has been generally overlooked, and is not mentioned either by Plummer or by Dr. James. Yet it would seem to be of great importance.

Nowadays the medieval veneration of saints' relics is being revived, and the uncorrupted body of Lenin is worshipped by crowds of pilgrims in Moscow, just as that of Cuthbert was of old revered in Lindisfarne and Durham. Could not the trade in relics also be resuscitated? Our Government might then acquire the Leningrad manuscript for the British Museum, in exchange for the bones of Karl Marx, now resting in Highgate Cemetery.

The Durham library claimed, in the Middle Ages, to have four manuscripts written by the hand of Bede. Three of these are still extant, in whole or in part. They are early, but the writing shows too much variation to permit of their being all from the same hand.²⁸

In time, Bede's reputation grew mythical. He was supposed to have visited Rome in order to give the Curia the benefit of his scholarship. The University of Paris was convulsed by a dispute between Picard and English students, the Englishmen claiming priority on the ground that Bede had founded the University. Pope Martin V is alleged to have sent a legate to allay the quarrel. The legate is alleged to have allowed the English claim, agreeing that Bede, on his way to Rome, had The stopped at Paris and founded the University there.²⁹ The University of Cambridge also claimed Bede, and Fuller, though he obviously did not believe the claim, did not like to contradict it.

Some report [he says] that Bede never went out of his cell, but lived and died therein. If so, the scholars of Cambridge will be very sorry, because thereby deprived of their honour, by Bede's living once in their University, whose house they still show, between St. John's College and the Round Church or St. Sepulchre's. Surely Bede was not fixed to his cell, as the cockle to his shell.³⁰

Dante saw Bede in Heaven;³¹ he also reproached the Cardinals for not studying their Bede as they should. When printing was introduced, the rapidity with which Bede's History was printed testifies to its continued popularity. At the Reformation Bede continued in favour with both sides. As an early translator of the Bible, he was applauded by the Wycliffites: and his knowledge of the Scriptures won him the praise of John Foxe, the martyrologist. Bede's characteristic apology for his writings, that at least they had kept him from doing worse things, is reproduced by Foxe:

As touching the holiness and integrity of his life, it is not to be doubted: for how could it be, that he should attend to any vicious idleness, or had any leisure to the same, who, in reading and digesting so many volumes, consumed all his whole cogitations in writing upon the Scriptures? For so he testifieth of himself in the third book of Samuel, saying in these words: 'If my treatises and expositions', saith he, 'bring with them no other utility to the readers thereof, yet to myself they conduce not a little thus: that while all my study and cogitation was set upon them, in the meanwhile, of slippery enticements and vain cogitations of this world I had little mind.'³²

On the other hand, Bede, as a strenuous defender of the Roman allegiance and practice, was applauded by the Catholics. Thomas Stapleton, the Roman Catholic controversialist, translated the Ecclesiastical History into English, and dedicated it to Elizabeth, in the pathetic hope that it might convert her. Stapleton's translation, revised, is the one I have used in this lecture. It needs revision. Bede, for example, had recorded how Edwin of Northumbria provided for the needs of his subjects: where there were springs by the highway, he planted wooden stakes with metal cups attached to them, for the refreshing of wayfarers. In Stapleton the cups become great brazen basons to bathe in, and the stakes become quick-set bowers, planted around in the interests of propriety.³³

To be simultaneously applauded by Foxe and Stapleton was a triumph, and is characteristic of Bede's wide appeal. We are driven back to the judgement of W. P. Ker: Bede's good sense is everywhere at home.

Bede is an ascetic, but with good sense: his asceticism was unlike that of the Egyptian hermit of whom St. Jerome tells us, who lived in an old cistern upon five rush-stalks a day.³⁴ Bede's life of self-denial allowed him to keep a few treasures in his casket—some pepper, some napkins, and some incense. That was all which the greatest scholar of his age had been able to accumulate in a lifetime. But still, he could distribute these things to his friends on his death-bed: 'such gifts as God has given me', in his own words.

Self-denial and heroism are sacred things to Bede—whether in a King Oswald fighting for justice and righteousness, or in a soldier like Lilla throwing his body between his king and the sword of the enemy, or in monks like Cuthbert or Chad.

But it is characteristic of Bede that he, the historian of the earliest English monasticism and its great example, is also the earliest great advocate of the dissolution of monasteries. For those who entered monasteries in order to escape their civil or military duties, yet without submitting to the even more rigorous discipline incumbent upon the good monk, Bede, as we have seen, has complete contempt. 'The result of this', he wrote, 'the next age will see.'³⁵ The next age did see it, amid the complete downfall of Northumbrian civilization. Bede's influence continued, a link between ancient and modern times. But it continued outside the limits of his beloved Northumbria, which lay in ruins.

Yet although Bede's main function was to connect Classical times with the Middle Ages, to help to bridge the gap between the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the twelfth, we must remember that what he passed on was not information, but the spirit of freshness in worship, in learning, and in teaching. 'Spending all my life in my monastery,' he says, 'and observing the regular discipline and the daily singing of God's service in the church, the rest of my time I was delighted always to learn, to teach, or to write.' Bede placed the opus Dei first, as every true monk must; he would not allow either study or sickness to keep him from it. Alcuin, in a letter to the monks of Wearmouth, records the tradition that Bede believed that the angels were present at the canonical hours: 'Will they not say, Where is Bede? Why comes he not to the services with his brethern?' Only the residue of his time was given to learning and teaching, but he did that with gusto and originality. A few examples will suffice.

In the sixth century a certain Scythian monk at Rome, known as Dionysius Exiguus, in compiling his Easter Tables, had reckoned from the Incarnation.³⁶ The exact measure of Bede's originality here we shall never know: but Bede was certainly the first scholar and historian to make the reckoning by the year of our Lord the standard reckoning. Every time we date a letter we should render homage to the Venerable Bede.

His Ecclesiastical History was not only a pattern for all future historians; not only has it been praised by Mommsen for its accuracy, but in many ways it spread through Western Europe a new conception of history, and of other things. I may mention one detail. Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People before there was any English nation in existence. He might have adopted the political unit and have written an Ecclesiastical History of Northumbria; he might have taken the geographical unit and have written an Ecclesiastical History of the British Isles. He did neither. He preferred to consider all the Germanic-speaking inhabitants of the British Isles, despite their different origins, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, as one nation—English. It was not an individual conception of Bede's: the correspondence of Boniface and his fellow missionaries shows that they think of themselves, and of the people they have left at home, not as Northumbrians, West Saxons, or Mercians, but as English. Yet it was Bede who gave world-wide currency to this conception. It is time we abandoned the fallacy that the Norman Conquest first hammered Englishmen into unity. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People was one of the many forces which had made England into a nation, long before Normans and Angevins formed the impossible idea of creating one nation out of England and so much of France as they could hold: an idea which led to the Hundred Years' War, that 'tissue of calamitous follies' which put back the clock in Western Europe for generations.

Yet Bede's title to our gratitude is not that he spread this or that idea, but that he made it his business 'to maintain a standard of learning, and to preserve the continuity of civilization'. The words are those which our President used, in his address last year,³⁷ to define the objects of this Academy, and of its members, individually or conjointly.

I suppose that it would be possible to demonstrate an apostolic succession, from teacher to pupil, from Bede in his cell at Jarrow to our President in his chair this evening.³⁸ Don't be alarmed; at this hour I am not going to attempt it. I have pointed out how Bede instructed Egbert, Egbert Alcuin. Alcuin was not so great a master as Bede, but he was master of a greater school. All Europe was his school, and his influence stretched to Fulda, to Tours, to Rheims, to many other places, till the streams came together in the University of Paris, and so flowed on to the University of Oxford.

Omitting intermediate stages, I will pass to three Oxford men of our own day who knew intimately their Dark Ages and their Bede. W. P. Ker, S. J. Crawford, and Charles Plummer all possessed that 'plain heroic magnitude of mind' which marked Bede himself. If you have followed this lecture carefully, you will have realized that anything of value in it I have learnt from those three men, through whom alone, if at all, I must claim to be in touch with the Venerable Bede.

S. J. Crawford, cut off before his time ('Alas, too little and too lately known'), was a man whose scholarship Ker would have deeply admired. A colleague wrote Crawford's epitaph:

For him books were no dead things; through
    their pages
 He passed into a happy country, where
He held communion with saints and sages,
 Heroes and prophets, spirits wise and rare.

He has left his books now; those great souls
   he knew
 Called him from this small world of time
   and space:
This is not death; he has gone to share the
    true,
 The glorious life of that immortal race.³⁹

Charles Plummer seemed the reincarnation of Bede, if ever one man seemed the reincarnation of another—in his vast learning, his humility, his piety, his care for the young. Elected a Fellow of Corpus at a time when celibacy was still imposed, Plummer never broke his monastic vow, remaining single during the fifty-eight years of his Fellowship. Gibbon spoke scornfully of the 'monks of Magdalen' and their unproductiveness. I wish he had lived to see the production of the monks of Corpus, and above all, Plummer's edition of Bede's Historical Works.

Plummer was born within a few miles of the spot where Bede was born, lived, and died; and Plummer was not altogether satisfied with the way in which collieries and furnaces had transformed what in Bede's day had been the wooded banks of the Tyne. I myself remember standing on the roof of the North Eastern Hotel at Newcastle, and thinking that, if Bede could have seen the circles of smoke with which I was surrounded, he would have had no doubt where he was, though he might have wondered what he had done to be put there. When Plummer wrote, forty years ago, it was less common than it is in these days to doubt the value of such industrial over-development; and it is with the words of Charles Plummer, rather than any of my own, that I wish to close this lecture. 'Even rating these things at the very highest value that has ever been put upon them by the most zealous votary of material progress, we have not, it seems to me, amid all our discoveries, invented as yet anything better than the Christian life which Bede lived, and the Christian death which he died.'

Notes

1. History of Classical Greek Literature, 3rd edit., 1891, I. i. 284, I. ii. 51.
2. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, i, p. 460, 1927. Compare Hallam, Literature of Europe, i, p. 5, footnote, 1837.
3. Purgatorio, xi.
4. Purgatorio, xiii. 136-8.
5. Mon. Germ. Hist., Chronica Minora, ed. Th. Mommsen, iii, p. 248, Berlin, 1898.
6. W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, 1904, p. 141.
7. Prof. R. A. S. Macalister, in Essays and Studies presented to William Ridgeway, Cambridge, 1913.
8. In the De temporum ratione (725) Bede speaks of having written the prose Life of St. Cuthbert recently (nuper). This seems to preclude a date much earlier than 720 for Bede's visit to Holy Island. And Eadfirth died in 721.
9. Ecclesiastical History, iii. 25. (A speech placed in the mouth of Wilfrid, at the Council of Whitby.)
10. Ecclesiastical History, i. 32.
11. History of the Franks, ix. 34.
12. History of the Lombards, ii. 28.
13. Orosius, ed. Zangemeister, II. vi. 14.
14. History of the Franks, v. 5 (10).
15. vii. 9.
16. They were both, of course, of Irish stock.
17. From the translation of the Ecclesiastical History, by Thomas Stapleton, 1565, Book III, cap. 14, revised.
18. Paradiso, xxii. 85-7.
19. Bede was nourished and taught at Jarrow by Ceolfrid. If only one trained lad was left there, it can only have been Bede.
20. Rand, Founders of the Middle Ages, p. 73. Prof. Rand's book places under a great debt all who are interested in the continuity of civilization, and more particularly the transition from Classical times to the Dark Ages.
21. Epistle to Egbert, 11, 12.
22. Boniface to Huetberht, Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow; Jaffé, Monumenta Moguntina, 180.
23. Boniface to Egbert, Archbishop of York; Jaffé, Mon. Mog, 250.
24. Lull to the Archbishop of York; Jaffé, Mon. Mog., 288.
25. Lull to Cuthbert, Abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow; Jaffé, Mon. Mog., 289.
26. Cuthbert to Lull, Jaffé, Mon. Mog, 300. Cuthbert is, of course, the man who, at an earlier date, had been present at Bede's death, and has left us an account of it.
27. See O. D. Rojdestvensky in Speculum, iii. 314-21; E. A. Lowe, English Historical Review, xli. 244-6.
28. See article by Dr. Montague R. James in Bede: Essays in Commemoration, edited by A. Hamilton Thompson, 1935, p. 235. Dr. James enumerates the following as extant in whole or in part:
    1. The Gospels; Durham, A. ii. 16: there is also a small slip in the Pepysian library, Magdalene College, Camb.
    2. Epistles of Paul, glossed; Trin. Coll., Camb., B. 10. 5: there is also a fragment in the British Museum, Cotton Vitellius C. viii.
    3. Cassiodorus On the Psalter; Durham, B. ii. 33. Dr. James thinks (2) and (3) better claimants than (1).
29. César Égasse du Boulay, Historia Universitatis Parisiensis, Parisiis, 1665, i. 113. Rashdall has described Du Boulay as 'perhaps the stupidest man who ever wrote a valuable book' (Universities of Europe, 1895, i, p. 271).
30. Church History, 1655, Cent. viii, p. 98.
31. Paradiso, xxii. 85.
32. Act and Monuments, ed. Townsend and Cattley, i. 364-5.
33. ii. 16.
34. Rand, Founders of the Middle Ages, p. 122. But was it rush-stalks? The text in Migne's Patrologia, xxiii. 5, runs quinque caricis per singulos dies sustentabatur. This would make it five dried figs per day—a meagre diet, to be sure, but, considering the rations of Egyptian hermits, too nutritious, one would think, to justify Jerome's expressions of extreme amazement. So I think Jerome may have written (or at any rate meant to write) quinque caricis stipulis, or something of that sort.
35. Ecclesiastical History, v. 23.
36. Poole, Chronicles and Annals, 1926, p. 22.
37. Mackail, Presidential Address, July 1935, p. 9.
38. Some earlier stages are given in the History of Ademar (Pertz, iv. 119).
39. In Memoriam S. J. Crawford in The Invisible Sun, by V. de S. Pinto.