Bede

Almost everything known about Bede's origins comes from a short autobiographical note he attached to the final book of his Ecclesiastical History. He wrote there that he was born on the lands of the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, in the Kingdom of Northumbria in what is now northeastern England, around the year 672 or 673 ^[1]. His parents' names are not recorded, and historians can only guess at his family's status, though the ease with which he entered monastic life suggests kin with some standing in the region ^[2].

At the age of seven he was placed in the care of Benedict Biscop, the aristocratic founder of the monastery of Saint Peter at Wearmouth. Giving a child to a monastery as an oblate was a recognized custom in seventh century England, and for Bede it determined the entire shape of his life ^[1]. When Benedict founded a sister house dedicated to Saint Paul at Jarrow in 681 or 682, the boy transferred there under the abbot Ceolfrith, and Jarrow remained his home until his death ^[3].

A near catastrophe marked his childhood. An outbreak of plague around 686 devastated the community at Jarrow, and a later anonymous life of Ceolfrith records that only the abbot and one small boy were left able to sing the full monastic office. Many scholars believe that boy was Bede, then about fourteen years old ^[3]. The story, whatever its precise accuracy, captures the fragility of the world in which he grew up and the discipline of continual prayer that framed his days.

Wearmouth and Jarrow gave Bede advantages that almost no other scholar in western Europe then enjoyed. Benedict Biscop had traveled to Rome repeatedly and returned with books, paintings, relics, and even a Roman archcantor to teach chant, so the twin monastery held one of the finest libraries north of the Alps, perhaps two hundred volumes or more ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Bede and how a monk in a remote northern kingdom became the leading intellect of his age must begin with that library.

He advanced through the church's orders unusually early. He was ordained deacon at nineteen, six years younger than canon law normally allowed, and priest at thirty, both times by John of Beverley, bishop of Hexham ^[1]. From then on his routine, by his own account, was to observe the monastic rule, sing the daily office in church, and otherwise take delight in learning, teaching, and writing ^[1].

His first known works were practical classroom texts: treatises on grammar, spelling, and poetic meter written for the monks and boys he taught. Around 703 he produced On Times, a short handbook of chronology and the calculation of Easter, a subject that then divided churches across Britain and Ireland ^[4]. The little book drew an accusation of heresy from critics at the table of Bishop Wilfrid in 708, because Bede's figures for the age of the world differed from the commonly accepted total. He answered with a firm letter defending his arithmetic, an early sign of the confidence he placed in careful calculation over inherited habit ^[4].

Bede's reputation rests above all on the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 when he was about fifty nine. In five books it traces the story of Britain from Julius Caesar's raids to Bede's own day, centering on the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity ^[5]. Without it, the two centuries after the end of Roman rule in Britain would be close to a blank. Kings such as Edwin and Oswald of Northumbria, the mission of Augustine to Kent in 597, the Synod of Whitby in 664, and the poet Caedmon, the first named English poet, are all known chiefly or entirely through its pages ^[5].

What sets the History apart among Bede achievements is its method. He named his informants, cited documents, and arranged for a priest named Nothelm to search the papal archives in Rome for letters bearing on the English mission ^[2]. He distinguished between what he had verified and what he reported on the faith of others. No early medieval writer applied such standards so consistently, and modern historians still treat the work as the foundation of English historical writing ^[6].

The History also spread a way of counting time. Bede dated events from the incarnation of Christ, the anno Domini system devised by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century, and the enormous popularity of his book did more than any other single work to establish that convention across Europe ^[4]. His larger chronological treatise of 725, The Reckoning of Time, taught generations of medieval students how to compute the date of Easter, explained the relationship between the moon and the tides, and stated plainly that the earth is a sphere ^[4].

History and science formed only part of his output. Bede regarded his commentaries on scripture as his most important work, and they account for the majority of the roughly forty titles he listed in 731 ^[1]. He also wrote saints' lives, including a prose and a verse life of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, a martyrology, hymns, and a history of the abbots of his own monastery ^[3].

Bede's personal life was, by design, almost without incident. He entered the cloister as a small child and, so far as the record shows, left the neighborhood of Wearmouth and Jarrow only twice: once to visit Lindisfarne and once to see his former pupil Ecgbert at York ^[2]. He never held high office, remaining a simple priest and monk while men of lesser learning became abbots and bishops.

His correspondence and asides reveal a warm and occasionally sharp personality behind the discipline. He grieved openly in the History for lapses among the clergy of his day, and in 734, near the end of his life, he sent Ecgbert of York a blunt letter urging reform of negligent bishops and of monasteries founded as tax dodges by noble families ^[6]. He loved English song as well as Latin learning; his student Cuthbert recorded that he was learned in native poetry and quoted a short English verse he recited on his deathbed ^[7].

The affectionate title by which he is still known arose after his death. Within a century or so he was being called Bede the Venerable, an honorific that stuck so firmly that later legend invented charming explanations for it, including a tale of an angel completing the epitaph on his tomb ^[2].

The last years of Bede's life were among his most productive. After completing the Ecclesiastical History in 731 he continued to revise, teach, and write, and his letter to Ecgbert of November 734 shows his mind fully engaged with the problems of the Northumbrian church ^[6]. Even as illness took hold in the spring of 735 he pressed on with two projects: an English translation of the opening of the Gospel of John and a set of extracts from Isidore of Seville, saying he did not want his students left with untruths after he was gone ^[7].

The most detailed account of any death in early medieval England describes his final days. His pupil Cuthbert, later abbot of the monastery, wrote to a friend named Cuthwin telling how the old scholar spent his last weeks cheerful in spirit despite labored breathing, singing psalms and antiphons, teaching daily, and dictating his translation to a boy named Wilberht ^[7]. On the evening of 25 May 735, the eve of the feast of the Ascension, he dictated the last sentence, distributed a few small treasures of pepper and incense among his brethren, and died on the floor of his cell singing the Gloria Patri ^[7].

He was buried at Jarrow. In the eleventh century his remains were moved, reportedly by a relic collecting monk named Alfred Westou, to Durham, and since 1370 they have rested in the Galilee Chapel at the west end of Durham Cathedral, where his tomb can still be visited ^[8].

Few writers of any age have shaped how a nation remembers itself as thoroughly as Bede. The Ecclesiastical History was copied across medieval Europe, translated into Old English during the reign of Alfred the Great, and printed as early as about 1475 ^[5]. Its framing of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes as one gens Anglorum, a single English people under God, gave later generations a shared story long before England was a single kingdom ^[6]. Historians still mine it, question it, and admire it, and any modern Bede biography must reckon with the fact that he largely created the field it belongs to.

His scientific and chronological work had a comparably long reach. The Reckoning of Time remained a standard school text for centuries, and the anno Domini dating he popularized became, with the later addition of BC dating that his work anticipated, the framework in which most of the world now writes history ^[4]. His observations on tides, based partly on reports gathered from along the Northumbrian coast, have been called some of the earliest careful tidal science in Europe ^[4].

The church honored him in step with the scholars. He was venerated as a saint from soon after his death, and in 1899 Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church, the only person born in Britain ever to receive that title ^[8]. His feast day is kept on 25 May. Among the plainest Bede facts is this: Jarrow, his lifelong home, is now part of a museum landscape at Jarrow Hall that presents Anglo-Saxon life to visitors, while the world's universities still print editions of the monk who rarely traveled more than a few miles from the cell where he wrote ^[8].