The Venerable Bede and His Historical Legacy

In 2018 a big fat book returned to England, where it had been written, for the first time in 1,302 years. The Laurentian Library in Florence was lending, for an exhibition at the British Library, the Codex Amiatinus: the oldest surviving complete text of the Latin Bible.

Bibles tend to fall apart or be destroyed by Vikings, French Revolutionaries and fires. But if you like old books, there is a lot to like about the Codex Amiatinus. Its 1,040 leaves are a foot and a half high. The volume weighs 34kg. It took the skins of 515 calves to provide the vellum on which it is written. And some of the beautifully legible script was probably written out by Bede.

That is an exciting idea to anyone keen on Bede. In theory, the English are keen on him. There is a station called Bede on the Tyne and Wear Metro; it’s south of the Tyne, on the yellow line towards South Shields. If you alight at Bede, the road leads to the brutally named Bede Industrial Estate, past the headquarters of the Clean It UK Group, Spiralguard and FG Trailers.

But if you walk north-west instead, past Greggs, things cheer up a bit, and among the trees in a crook of the river Don stands St Paul’s church in Jarrow, with an astonishing survival: the dedication stone was carved in AD 685. That strikes awe into me, because it is so old and because St Bede the Venerable was living in the monastery at the time.

He was called “venerable” by Alcuin of York, who in AD 782 went out to help Charlemagne make his empire civilised. Alcuin didn’t mean that Bede was an old man, nor that he was less than a saint – “venerable” as a step in the process of canonisation being established only centuries after Bede’s death – merely that he was venerated for his holiness.

But, apart from that, why should we venerate Bede today? Principally it must be because of the only book of his that most people can name: the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The Anglo-Saxon historian James Campbell pointed out that this is the only work, other than parts of the Bible, read by every English generation from Bede’s to our own.

Bede was such a good historian because he weighed sources and sought them out, obtaining documents from Rome and writing letters to a surprisingly wide network of the learned in England. He did this while scarcely setting foot beyond the seven miles between the two halves of the double monastery of Wearmouth (St Peter’s) and Jarrow (St Paul’s).

He used a library of perhaps 250 books, not set upright on shelves but laid on their backs in cupboards, as seen in an illumination in the Codex Amiatinus. Apart from his great History, he wrote 30 books, mostly commentaries on books of the Bible, which retain their value. He wrote two books on calendricals (too difficult for the modern reader), some hymns and – the book of which we might most regret the loss – a translation into English of the Gospel of St John, which Bede completed on his deathbed.

There’s also a charming and surprising biography of St Cuthbert, who died in AD 687, when Bede was 14. It relates several stories of wildlife. One is of Cuthbert at night bathing in the sea and having his feet warmed by otters when he came ashore. This was witnessed by a young monk hidden among the rocks. I would like to think that the young monk was Bede, but I don’t think it was.

I was reminded of this story by a striking passage in a new biography, Bede: The Man Who Invented England, by Edoardo Albert. It tells of Ceolfrith, the founder of Jarrow, who was left alone in the new monastery when all his brethren were killed by the plague – apart from one boy. Together, they started the monastery all over again. Albert says: “Historians pretty well unanimously accept that the small boy was Bede.” But James Campbell thought that “it is more probable that the great scholar was received at Wearmouth and remained affiliated with the older site” – he wasn’t the boy.

Albert, a novelist interested in archaeology, then gives a fictional account of a conversation between the teenager and Ceolfrith. The old monk recalls entering the monastery as a child: “After my parents left me, I cried every night for a four week. I only stopped when the other oblates, fed up with my crying, dumped a bucket of water over me.”

Still, Albert does give us a picture of England in Bede’s day, when there were no towns and (as we hear several times) the buildings of Wearmouth-Jarrow were very unusual for being constructed of stone, with glass windows. I don’t know that Bede “invented England”; it was more that he recognised the common culture of people sharing a language. But I agree with Albert that, after God, “Bede believed in books”.

I have an aversion to interleaving fact and fiction. The made-up Ceolfrith conversation has more impact than the factual parts when the narrative sometimes seems to disappear into a froth of friths: Ceolfrith and Ecgfrith, Ahlfrith and Aldfrith, not to mention Æthelfrith.

That is how, after entering the monastery aged seven, he got to know Virgil, Horace and Ovid; Augustine, Ambrose and Gregory; Macrobius and Prudentius; the historians Josephus and Eusebius; and the encyclopaedic Isidore of Seville. He was not alone in his love of learning, for Theodore, the Asian Archbishop of Canterbury, was building up a solid school in the south.

Bede’s time has been called an Indian summer of the late-antique world. His was not a Dark Age, and he impelled the light of learning onward to the Carolingian renaissance a century later. But in AD 794 the Vikings destroyed his monastery and its books. As he lay dying, Bede’s thoughts turned not to the book he was working on – a recension of Isidore – but to his primary task for more than 50 years: “Take my head in your hands, for it pleases me very much to sit opposite my holy place where I used to pray, so that as I sit I may call upon my Father.”