[In the following excerpt, Southern examines the significance and impact of Jarrow, the site of Bede's monastery, on Bede 's works.]

One of the first things to recognize about the Middle Ages is that, far from being a period of substantial uniformity in which men thought and fought, prayed and expressed their beliefs in much the same way from beginning to end, the diversity of experience is immense.

All cats are grey in the dark and it was the darkness of the Middle Ages, now largely dispelled, which encouraged the belief that all men were more or less alike. The diversity of experience in the 1,000 years known rather absurdly as the Middle Ages is immense, and some of the revolutions in thought and feeling which took place at different moments in this long period of change are as important as any that have happened in our history. The men I am going to discuss in these talks illustrate some of the most decisive moments of change in the development of our civilization, and none more so than the Northumbrian monk, Bede, who was born about 672 and died in 735. As a personality he is perhaps the least stimulating of our three subjects, but the importance of his work is in inverse ratio to the noise he made in doing it.

Few men can have spent more years or worked more hours on the same spot than Bede did; and to me at least the site of the monastery at Jarrow, where he lived and died, is one of the most moving things in England. It is a small and undistinguished spit of land about ten or fifteen feet above the waters of the Tyne; across the river are the cranes of the modern docks; at one's feet lie the mud-flats of Bede's day, now partly reclaimed to form timber yards; on the site itself the blackened ruins of monastic buildings surround a small, somewhat dingy, church with a thin Anglo-Saxon tower. The dedication stone in the church gives a date which can be referred to the year 685. But the stone marks more than a ceremony of dedication—it marks nothing less than a new beginning in English civilization. It may seem an odd place for such a beginning, and to many visitors it will suggest the grave of civilization rather than the cradle. It has no grace or comeliness, and whatever beauty there may be is distinctly austere. But in fact the setting is not an inappropriate one for the work that was done here in Bede's day. Even in the seventh century there were more interesting places than Jarrow, probably more interesting men than Bede, and certainly more immediately exciting works than his: but no one did work which lasted better, and into the foundations of his work he put an energy and originality of mind which are hidden behind the modest exterior.

It would be wrong to think of him as a lonely worker in a barbarous age. During his lifetime England was going through one of the great creative periods in her history. Indeed it has been rightly said that the age of Bede and the age of Gladstone stand out as the only two periods in our history when the ideas and energy which emanated from England were the dominant force in Europe. The manifestations of that energy which survive are mere fragments, but the variety of excellence they display is astonishing: the stone crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell which stand for all to see; the Lindisfarne Gospels; the books written at Jarrow; the laws, biographies, poems, in Latin and in Anglo-Saxon; the varied expressions of pagan and Christian, of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sentiment which these works contain; the careers of men who transformed not only the face of England but of Europe—all tell the same story of intense activity. It was a time when the traditional stock of pagan Germanic ideas was making its last appearance, and new influences were flooding in from all sides—from Ireland, Gaul, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. As sometimes happens in such circumstances, both the old and the new seem to have inspired enough faith and confidence to produce some of their finest works. There was a struggle for the mind of a people not yet committed to any settled frame of thought or imagination. Some of the protagonists were conscious propagandists for one or other set of ideas; others were artists or ascetics who simply expressed in the most forcible way at their command the ideas and images which had captured their imagination. Whatever the degree of conscious campaigning, the result was a variety of activity which in quality of achievement has never been surpassed.

In all this activity the work of Bede and of the community at Jarrow has a sombre, not to say dull, appearance. If you compare the manuscripts from Jarrow with the famous Gospel book from Lindisfarne you will at once see the difference. The Jarrow books are sober and unadorned, written without frills by craftsmen who have recovered the finest proportions of ancient script. The Lindisfarne book, on the other hand, is an extravagant artistic masterpiece in which the forms of Irish imagination are adapted to a somewhat more restrained, but still luxuriant, pattern of visual images. And there is a similar contrast in the religious life. Bede's life seems to have been one of steady discipline without extravagance. But for the qualities that made Christianity seem a religion of convincing power to Anglo-Saxon minds we must look elsewhere—for instance to Crowland in the Fens, where the hermit Guthlac was living one of those lives of heroic warfare against evil spirits dear to a people who lived for war. The contemporary account of Guthlac's visions and struggles with the forces arrayed against him in his distracted mind and fever-racked body gives us a more vivid insight into the springs of Anglo-Saxon religion than anything in Bede's experience.

In this exciting and tumultuous scene Bede is essentially calm. His gifts and habits were those of a scholar: a capacious mind seldom swayed by prejudice, clear in judgment, well fitted to deal with a large mass of disorderly material and to present it systematically and succinctly. Like many men of this stamp, he never obtrudes his own personality, seldom mentions his own experience, keeps his eye steadily on the material before him, and expresses his condemnation more often by silence than by strictures. His piety was exact and unwavering, and his diligence unremitting. His last hours, spent in translating the Bible and abbreviating a learned work, dividing his few belongings among his friends, breaking out unexpectedly at one moment into the poetic idiom of his ancestors, perfectly reflect the range of his activity and the unruffled temper of his life and death.

Throughout the whole range of our history this combination of temperament and talent is not so very uncommon. The University of Oxford produces perhaps one such scholar in a hundred years. But Oxford University has long existed to do this, and it would be surprising if it did not sometimes succeed. Bede was a pioneer: the first Englishman of his type, the first scientific intellect produced by the Germanic peoples of Europe. Some of his English contemporaries were gifted men, but none had gifts like his. Among the artists, statesmen, missionaries, athletes of the spiritual life, who proliferated in England in the late seventh and eighth centuries, he was that most unexpected of all products of a primitive age, a really great scholar, and the circumstances of the time gave him a great opportunity.

To understand the nature of his opportunity we must turn our eyes once more to Jarrow. Physically it lay on the very edge of the old Roman world: the wall's end which marked the boundary was within an afternoon's excursion from the monastery, and Bede had certainly inspected it. But in Bede's lifetime the foresight of one man had made Jarrow the chief centre of Roman civilization in Europe. Rome itself was falling into ruins; the economy of Italy was being stifled by the collapse of Mediterranean trade; the west everywhere had fallen into a deep disorder. But from the ruins of civilization in the south, the founder of Jarrow, Benedict Biscop, had brought a choice collection of books. By modern standards they were not many—perhaps 200 or 300— but they brought together in his Northumbrian outpost most of the best works of Christian scholarship in the later Roman empire. From these books it was possible to get a fairly complete and coherent view of the work of the Latin Fathers of the Church, together with a great deal of ancient history, technical chronology, and miscellaneous biblical scholarship. Benedict Biscop must be reckoned the first collector to use the wealth of a new aristocracy, to which he belonged, to appropriate the fruits of civilization from a people who could no longer afford to preserve them; he is the prototype of the great American collectors of our century.

What England lacked in the seventh century was a tradition. No one could say for certain which of the traditions of Anglo-Saxon, Roman, and Celtic origin, which were struggling for the mastery, would have the power to survive. What Benedict Biscop brought to Jarrow was the learning of the Patristic age, and in doing this he picked the future winner. That is to say he extracted from the welter of conflicting materials the most important element for the growth of a new European civilization. But all he could provide were the tools; it was still necessary to find someone to use them. A library is an act of faith, and no one can tell what will come of it. There were no doubt plenty of other libraries in Europe as well equipped as that at Jarrow, but on most of them the dust was gathering ever more thickly and the damp penetrating ever more deeply. This might easily have happened at Jarrow where dust and damp are in plentiful supply. To utilize a collection of materials which no English mind had yet mastered required a genius and determination of the highest order. A great gulf separated the late Anglo-Saxon heroic age of the seventh century from the sophisticated society of the later Roman empire. The two societies were bound together by the thin thread of a common Christianity, but in every external condition of life and habit of thought the gap was immense.

The greatness of Bede lay in this, that apparently without an effort he bridged the gap between the ancient world and his own day. Perhaps it is wrong to say 'without an effort', for among the few things he tells us about himself is an avowal of ceaseless labour. He was obsessed by the fear that inertia might lead to the loss of that which could, as he says, be ours; and this was the mainspring of his energy. Never did a man work with a more distinct idea of what he was aiming at, which was to make the new nation to which he belonged at home in the past—not the past of pagan genealogies, folk-tales, and heroic legend that he could see all round him, but the past of the Latin learning of the Christian Church.

Bede wrote many works with this general aim. His most famous, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People is in one way the least typical in that it told a story which for the most part lay not in books but in the memories of men who were Bede's contemporaries. But in a larger sense the great history grew out of his task of restoring ancient learning. It linked the earliest history of the Romans in Britain with the present, and applied the rules of ancient historical writing and the methods of historical inquiry of an earlier age to a new field, which was the field of Bede's own day and people. No doubt it was the greatest, as it was also the last, of his works. But if we want to see his plan more clearly, to appreciate the extent of his labours, and to see where his main influence lay, we shall look not to his History but to his biblical commentaries.

Bede's commentaries have not had many readers for the last 400 years, and they are not likely to whet many appetites today. They are books which we should be glad to read if we had nothing else; they would provide plenty of subjects for reflection, a stream of good sense, and (through their quotations) a daily contact with some of the greatest minds of the past. The fact remains that anyone who has other books will probably read these other books. But it was precisely for men who had few other books that Bede wrote, and no author of the early Middle Ages had a greater success. His books were the handbooks of the English missionaries who converted Germany in the eighth century; they were among the foundation works of the Carolingian renaissance; and they continued as a main source of monastic learning until the twelfth century.

It is often said that Bede lacked originality, and he would doubtless have agreed. It was his task to make the past accessible to the barbarian present, and this required not primarily originality but judgment and patience. No one would deny that he possessed these qualities in a high degree, but we may also think that to conceive such a plan, to see how it could be carried out, and to carry it out just in the way he did, required a powerful imagination and independence of mind. The Christian learning of the past lay scattered in many volumes by many hands. Even to those who had access to these volumes, they were not easily usable or even intelligible. Bede reduced a great mass of material to the single, simple, and usable form of continuous biblical exposition. Even today a preacher might well do worse than take his material from Bede's rational and lucid summary.

But though his main aim was to digest for others what they could not digest for themselves, he also aimed at adding to the learning of the past. He chose to explain those books of the Bible which had not been expounded before, or which offered scope for his own special interests in history and allegory. At first we are rather surprised to find that, among so many commentaries, he omitted the Gospels of Matthew and John, but chose those of Mark and Luke; that he devoted much attention to the Acts of the Apostles and little to the Pauline Epistles; much to the books of Exodus and Kings and little to the Psalms; much to the minor prophets, and little or nothing to Ezekiel or Job. Beneath the surface appearance of plodding compilation there was in fact a highly selective and sensitive scholar who aimed not only at bringing the past to the notice of the present, but also at showing that the present—even in the shape of an obscure writer in an obscure monastery in a far corner of Europe—could make an original contribution to the body of ancient learning.

It is astonishing when we think of it that a man of the newest of the new nations of Europe could move with such confidence among ancient learning. As a master of technical chronology and as a historical writer he is among the greatest; as a theologian and exegete he had, if not the highest qualities—he is no Augustine or Jerome—at least the qualities most necessary for his plan. He had no known master. He was the first Englishman who understood the past and could view it as a whole. In the exciting England of his day, which was neither fully pagan nor fully Christian, neither Roman nor Celtic nor Teutonic but something of all of them, a country of dead ends and new beginnings, Bede stood for sobriety and order in thought, common sense in politics, and moderation in the religious life. He was the first Englishman who could look back over the chasm which the collapse of the Roman empire had opened in the history of thought, and see clearly the landscape on the other side; the first, therefore, whose religion was wholly articulate and whose thoughts are entirely intelligible to us today.

In the main square of Jarrow there is a recent monument on which two large figures are prominently displayed. They are not as a matter of fact the figures of the two greatest men of Jarrow. Benedict Biscop and Bede, preservers of the old and chief builders of a new civilization, but of two Vikings, the destroyers who in 796 erased Jarrow from the map of Europe for 1,000 years. It is a strange perspective which gives these destroyers the chief monument in modern Jarrow; but perhaps like everything else in this strange story it has a certain appropriateness. Whatever happened to Jarrow after Bede's death was irrelevant to the spread of his influence throughout Europe, and with it the influence of the community to which he belonged. Like the ships from the yards up the river, Bede's works were not made to stay in port, but for a long future in distant parts.