(Re-)Reading Bede

The Ecclesiastical History in Context

N.J. Higham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415353670
• eBook ISBN: 9781134260645
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Bede's Ecclesiastical History is the most important single source for early medieval English history. Without it, we would be able to say very little about the conversion of the English to Christianity, or the nature of England before the Viking Age.

Bede wrote for his contemporaries, not for a later audience, and it is only by an examination of the work itself that we can assess how best to approach it as a historical source. N.J. Higham shows, through a close reading of the text, what light the Ecclesiastical History throws on the history of the period and especially on those characters from seventh- and early eighth-century England whom Bede either heroized, such as his own bishop, Acca, and kings Oswald and Edwin, or villainized, most obviously the British king Cædwalla but also Oswiu, Oswald's brother.

In (Re-)Reading Bede, N.J. Higham offers a fresh approach to how we should engage with this great work of history. He focuses particularly on Bede's purposes in writing it, its internal structure, the political and social context in which it was composed and the cultural values it betrays, remembering always that our own approach to Bede has been influenced to a very great extent by the various ways in which he has been both used, as a source, and commemorated, as man and saint, across the last 1,300 years.

1 (Re-)Reading Bede: an author and his audience

The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie?¹

Each year, hundreds – perhaps thousands – read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History for the first time. Others reread it, perhaps after a lengthy break, or turn to another of his numerous works which they had not before opened. For the vast majority, the initial experience will be via a modern translation into English. In the case of the Ecclesiastical History, which is today by far the most widely read of his works, this will almost certainly be in one of the two paperback translations published respectively by Penguin and Oxford University Press.²

Why read Bede? Most present-day readers approach his work as an entrée to investigation of early Anglo-Saxon England, be that primarily in areas historical, literary, archaeological or ecclesiastical. Bede’s writings, taken together, dwarf those of any contemporary or near-contemporary, insular author,³ and his breadth of interests and depth of scholarship are incomparable. It is with good reason that he is commonly termed ‘the Father of English History’, or even ‘Master of the Middle Ages’,⁴ albeit both terms carry connotations that may be less than helpful to our understanding of his work. The Ecclesiastical History is a set text on many university history syllabuses, so a work which is studied both in different ways and at various levels: some passages may be explored in considerable detail, as a ‘source’ for broader discussion of the period and/or in order to cast light on the author’s purposes in writing what and how he did. So too, on occasion, are several of his other works on course reading lists, in a wide variety of disciplinary studies, although some of these are more likely to appear as secondary or optional reading than as set texts, to be consulted in detail in support of a specific issue,⁵ rather than read as a whole. Other modern readers will approach Bede’s works as a consequence of a variety of stimuli received from different media, including magazine articles, television and books, in accordance with their own agendas. In each instance, their purpose will, at least initially, direct the way that the individual chooses to read. Some will find it sufficient to use key words or names and the modern index, so never gain much impression of the overall shape of the work. Others will focus exclusively on particular books or specified chapters, while some will start at the beginning and attempt the whole, using modern commentaries and notes. A comparative few will approach Bede in the original language, which is a very different experience again, although it is worth noting that the Latin of the Ecclesiastical History is far easier to read than that of much of his exegesis – his biblical commentaries.

In what ways can we – even should we – read Bede’s work in the twenty-first century? How can we react to it? What does Bede mean to us, and what did he intend his work to mean? How does the early eighth century address the twenty-first, and how should the twenty-first respond? These questions, and many others in like vein, are important issues that are likely to spring to mind as we begin to turn the pages and (re-)read Bede’s History, or others of his works, and all are better addressed early in the process.

It is important to bear in mind that every reader opening Bede does so with some preconception of the author, which derives, however distantly, from the ways in which he has been commemorated and his work utilised over the following twelve to thirteen centuries. Who has not been exposed to his ‘venerability’, for example, so his reputation as a holy man and truth-teller? The purpose of this book is to help the twenty-first-century reader with an interest in the history of the period at whatever level to interpret Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, by exploring primarily why and in what circumstances he wrote it. In furtherance of this objective, we need first to explore the interface between Bede, as author, and ourselves as the ultimate consumers of his works but following successive generations of consumption and commentary, all of which has impacted on modern traditions of Bedan scholarship.

Bede’s persona

We know very little about any individual living around 700. Bede is arguably among the better known, but it is important to recognise just how limited our knowledge actually is. Excepting only Acca’s letter to Bede which has survived as a preface to On Luke, his life passed unnoticed, by name at least, in any surviving text written by anyone other than himself until after his death. Although we can safely assume that he was male, was born c.672–3 and almost certainly died in 735, having only quite recently finished his Ecclesiastical History, we have little further information about his person. He was a monk at an eccentrically double-sited monastery dedicated to SS Peter and Paul, at Wearmouth/Jarrow,⁶ but we cannot reconstruct the Rule under which he lived in any detail,⁷ and so the precise pattern of his life and the daily round of the monastic office to which he submitted himself. He claimed to have joined that community at the age of seven, to have been ordained deacon at what we might think the precocious age of nineteen,⁸ and priest at the canonical age of thirty, but we have no independent means of verification of the dates of any of these milestones in his life. We have no idea of his appearance, other than the assumption that his hair was cut according to the Petrine tonsure – he may have been fair or dark, short or tall, we just do not know. We have no knowledge of his family or wider kin, other than the presumption that they were neither royal, at one end of the spectrum, nor members of the rural proletariat at the other.⁹ He claimed to have been born on lands which were later granted to the monastery, so most probably in the Tyne–Wear lowlands (but that is an assumption), and seems always to have identified himself as ‘English’, so from that part of the community which believed itself, at least, to be descended from fifth/sixth-century immigrants, primarily from north-west Germany. But this is hardly a very rounded portrait.

Archaeological excavations have done much to provide a picture of Wearmouth and Jarrow at this date,¹⁰ through which to contextualise Bede as author in a particular and most unusual space. St Peter’s at Wearmouth (now Monkwearmouth: the place-name is self-explanatory) was constructed close to the estuary on or adjacent to a pre-existing burial ground on sloping ground close to a natural harbour. The work was undertaken by Gaulish/ Frankish craftsmen and was sufficiently far advanced for consecration to occur in 674. They erected a church of a kind with which they were familiar in Merovingian Gaul, of coarsely shaped stone rubble rendered externally by yellow and internally with pink mortar and with coloured glass in the windows.¹¹ The associated cemetery contained exclusively male burials, suggesting that women were not normally resident here.

The name ‘Jarrow’ refers to ‘fen’ or ‘bog’, which had been used to construct the name of a local group or tribe, ‘the Gyrwe’, comparable to the similarly named community around Peterborough whom Bede mentioned on occasion (EH III, 20; IV, 6, 19). Jarrow was likewise adjacent to good harbourage but built on a more restricted site, on the north bank of the River Don, a tributary of the Tyne, on the lesser of two slight rises (the other was later occupied by Jarrow Hall): whether the lesser elevation was preferred ab initio, or the higher one unavailable for some reason, is not clear. Construction was apparently undertaken without assistance from overseas, using coursed blocks of stone apparently robbed from so far unlocated Roman buildings and constructed on foundations of cobblestones and clay laid in trenches – a technique not present at Wearmouth but known on some Roman sites in the region, so perhaps copied from the buildings which this spoliation had demolished.

Architectural remains on both sites include numerous lathe-turned shafts, which reflect continental architectural influences. That they were already present by the early eighth century finds a somewhat surprising confirmation in Bede’s reference to them in his commentary on the Song of Songs.¹² As a youth, he would presumably have witnessed Jarrow church’s construction and consecration in the early 680s,¹³ and also the building of two related buildings of similar construction and on the same alignment some 16.7m to the south, the larger of which was over 29m long and probably of two storeys, with an opus signinum floor derivative of Roman practice (of cement coloured by broken brick), plus window glass and a stone slate roof. It has been suggested that this building was the monastic refectory, and the rather smaller but similarly equipped, subdivided building to the east on the same alignment may have served both as a hall and for more private functions. Another large stone building on the terracing to the south, with wall-plaster and coloured window glass, was an elaborate hall which has been interpreted as a late seventh-century guest-house. Both sites were clearly very different in conception and execution from the Irish-inspired monastic sites of the period in this region, as exemplified by the timber building tradition at Lindisfarne reported by Bede himself, but similarities existed with Wilfrid’s foundations in stone at Ripon and Hexham.

This ‘man-made environment’ has been interpreted as ‘the visible expression of an ideal’ – and a particularly ‘Roman’ ideal at that – to which Bede himself is assumed to have been party, and the central part played in both foundations by King Ecgfrith as patron highlights the extent to which ‘imperial’ aspirations may have underlined allusions to Rome.¹⁴ The virtual absence in the excavations of finds reminiscent of personal items contrasts with their profusion at Whitby, for example, suggesting that the monks were discouraged from having personal possessions, although Cuthbert’s letter on the death of Bede may require us to reconsider this impression (see below).

Archaeology can tell us something of Bede’s physical environs, therefore, but what of his person? To what extent might he have been infirm by the time he wrote the EH? Cuthbert’s description of his final days has Bede dictating rather than writing, and modern experience would suggest that his eyesight may well already have deteriorated to the point that he could neither read nor write at latest by around 720, when he would have been in his late forties, so it is quite likely that his later works were dictated, and even composed with assistants – perhaps even a close team of helpers. On this reading, the revision (Retractatio) of his earlier Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles on the basis of improved access to a Greek text of the Bible perhaps required at least one other of his brethren to have had a reading knowledge of Greek. Bede was certainly later considered to be virtually blind at the end of his life, hence the apocryphal story of his being tricked by his brethren into delivering a sermon to an audience of stones, only for the angels to reply, ‘Amen, very venerable Bede’,¹⁵ but this story derives from the thirteenth century and is clearly of a type which we experience elsewhere, designed to reinforce the holiness of the individual by rebutting the scepticism of putative companions. Otherwise, there is no real evidence of ill health and, on balance, we should probably think of Bede as comparatively fit throughout the bulk of his life.

To my knowledge, Bede’s sexuality has not been discussed in the modern period, but it is a legitimate issue if we are interested in his person, even if we can make virtually no progress here, for there is very little evidence. As already noted, the cemetery evidence implies a single-sex community and, as a priest, we might assume that Bede had relatively little personal contact with women, yet in his Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles he wrote as if he were married.¹⁶ There is otherwise virtually no means of exploring his own perception of his sexuality, other than to note that his addresses to male correspondents were far less effusive than those of his fellow Northumbrian, Alcuin, two generations later,¹⁷ and there is even less cause to postulate a queer personal history in Bede’s case than in that of his contemporary in the Fen country, St Guthlac.¹⁸ It may be worth noting in addition that, even where Scripture offered respectable female personae capable of a gendered interpretation, Bede generally presented them to his audience typologically in a fashion far removed from their literal selves; so, for example, in On Tobias, Sara, Tobias’s bride, became the type of the Gentiles as a counterweight to his father Tobit, who was presented as the type of the Jews.¹⁹ In his exegesis, he followed the prevailing tradition of presenting Christ on occasion in feminine terms and the Wisdom of God via maternal rhetoric,²⁰ but this does not really get us very far. Bede may be best represented as either effectively asexual or to have been so preoccupied with other matters that issues regarding his own sexuality were excluded or suppressed, but this can only be an interim position on our part.

Even Bede’s name is problematic: there are two entries in the list of priests in the Liber Vitae of Durham, one of which is presumably not our Bede;²¹ it occurs as a marginal addition to some manuscripts of Bede’s prose Life of Cuthbert, as the name of Cuthbert’s priest,²² who may perhaps, but need not, be the other Bede in the Liber Vitae. There is in addition a certain Bede son of Bubba in the genealogy of the kings of Lindsey in the Anglian collection, and a Bieda in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,²³ but that is all. The name almost certainly derives from the OE bēd, meaning ‘prayer’ or ‘supplication’, and is connected also with bēodan, ‘to bid, command’.²⁴ If this was his birth-name, then it may imply that it was always his family’s intention that this offspring should follow a monastic or clerical career, so contextualising his kinsmen’s surrender of the young boy to monastic care, which he later described as if both responsible and purposeful.²⁵ Otherwise, it is conceivable that the name was given him at the point of entry to Wearmouth by Benedict Biscop, whose own name is presumably other than that which he received at birth.²⁶

The name by which he is now often known is equally problematic: ‘the Venerable Bede’. Use of the definite article threatens to convert Bede into a common noun. We do not normally speak of ‘the prolific Margaret Drabble’, for example, or ‘the telegenic David Attenborough’, although the construction is not unique in modern vernacular. It reflects somewhat clumsy efforts in English to retain the sense of Latin venerabilis, which frequently accompanied reference to Bede from the central Middle Ages onwards, when it was eventually attributed to angelic authority (as above). This first appears in the ninth century, when Bede was among several figures described as ‘venerable’ in the records of the Church Councils held at Aix/Aachen in 816 and 836,²⁷ and the term was applied to him shortly thereafter by Paul the Deacon in a homily.²⁸ The connection eventually became commonplace, then virtually obligatory. A concluding sentence appears to have been added at an unknown but comparatively early date to copies of the letter by his protégé Cuthbert: ‘Here ends Cuthbert’s letter on the death of the venerable priest, Bede’ – which cannot have been part of the original. It recurs in the earliest versions of his life (see below, p. 28) and also in Simeon’s early twelfth-century History of the Church of Durham,²⁹ and then in much later transcriptions of his epitaph at Durham, but there is neither contemporary nor near-contemporary evidence for Bede’s ‘venerability’. The word is not used in the early epitaphs.³⁰ Alcuin similarly did not use the term of Bede in his poem, On the Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, although he did of Gregory the Great, Archbishop Egbert of York and the hermit Echa.³¹ Rather, he described Bede variously as ‘a famous priest and teacher’ (line 685), ‘a priest of outstanding merits’ (1289), magister (‘master’: 1207, 1305, 1315), doctor (‘teacher’: 1307) and ‘blessed father’ (1317–18). Bede was included in several eleventh-century calendars but always as ‘St Bede’, with or without ‘priest’.³² Bede’s ‘venerability’ is, therefore, very much a later construct, originating apparently in the ninth and gaining hold in the eleventh–twelfth centuries, but it is a powerful one. While the term has on occasion been used of many individual churchmen, it has long been linked quite specifically with this particular figure, for who today does not think of Bede when the expression ‘the venerable’ is used? It has become part of his modern-day persona, a central feature of his mythology, part of the tough hide which keeps at bay the arrows and spears of historical huntsmen. It must be said that ‘saint’ would work better in English but that might at various stages have risked losing the very ‘Englishness’ of this icon of insular scholarship by intruding what could have seemed an unpalatably papist term.

So far so good, but we need to be very cautious regarding the vehicles by which much of this very limited information has reached us. Although we can make reasonable judgements about some aspects of Bede’s person on the basis of his surviving work – his Latinity and scho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• (Re-)Reading Bede
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 (Re-)Reading Bede: an author and his audience
• 2 The Ecclesiastical History: Bede’s purposes and ours
• 3 Structure, organisation and context
• 4 Message and discourse
• 5 Text and context: Bede, Ceolwulf and the Ecclesiastical History
• Notes
• List of abbreviations
• Select bibliography