bede's ecclesiastical history of the english people
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Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede is a key work for historians, church historians and intelligent lay readers. Here is the perfect introduction.TRANSCRIPT
Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
An Introduction and Selection by
rowan williams and
Benedicta ward slg
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First published in Great Britain 2012
Copyright © Rowan Williams and Benedicta Ward
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contents
Part one
Introduction by Rowan Williams 1
Further reading 33
Part two
Selected texts from The Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, translated by Benedicta Ward SLG 35
Index of Names and Places 171
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Part one
introduction
Rowan Williams
1. Bede’s context and purpose
Between 400 and 700ce, the cultural and political complexion
of Western Europe changed dramatically. By 700, there was no
‘superpower’ in the region; the Roman Empire in the West had
dissolved, and no single political unit had replaced it.1 The Emperor
in Constantinople represented a nominal continuity, but he had no
direct political control west of the Adriatic (although he and the
culture he embodied could still exercise a very strong imaginative
pull, as the history of the ninth and tenth centuries in Western
Europe would show). Rome was now above all the city in which the
Pope resided, the focus of Church life in a Europe where Christianity
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2 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
was an expanding and massively energetic force. The papacy might
not be a political power in the conventional sense, but — even more
than the Eastern empire — it was the authoritative resource for
images and ideas through which to understand what was happening
in and to the emerging kingdoms of the West. The Church offered
these new kingdoms a repertoire of stories against which they could
measure themselves, a sense of being part of an unfolding universal
drama, the possibility of establishing stable authority grounded in the
law of God and the blessing of God’s agents on earth. The peoples, the
gentes, of Europe could clothe themselves in the dignity of the chosen
people of God.
Bede’s great work, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum,
completed in 731 in the monastery of Wearmouth where he had lived
since 680 when he was seven, announces in its very title something
of what this project meant. This is a Church history of the ‘Anglian’
people; it is about how a gens acquired a meaningful history by being
incorporated into the Church. There is not much point in arguing
over whether Bede meant Angli to include all the Germanic settlers in
Britain or only the northern groups among whom he lived: his own
usage is in fact often unclear as to who exactly the Angli are, and he
has plenty to say about those parts of Britain settled by people who
did not call themselves by this name. What matters is that, whatever
precise name any group has been given or given itself, there is now
a single coherent story to be told about the newcomers to Britain,
designated in I.15 by the familiar names of ‘Saxons, Angles and Jutes’.
Providence has brought them to Britain, and the vocation they all
share is to establish, in this most remote area of the known world
(Bede underlines many times the distance between Britain and the
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introduction 3
rest of Europe), the true Christian faith. This faith, Bede well knows,
had arrived long before in Britain (he reproduces the legend of a
second-century mission and conversion),2 and had produced saints
and martyrs – like Alban, whose story Bede relates in detail.3 But
the British Christians have proved unstable: like the Athenians in
the biblical Acts of the Apostles, they ‘always delight in hearing
something new’ (I.8), and have been an easy prey for heresies.
Furthermore, the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain in the
early fifth century left the island isolated and weakened, ravaged by
plague and piracy; yet the intervals of relative prosperity saw only an
increase in luxury, corruption and strife. It pleased God to punish
this betrayal of Christian discipleship by the violent revolts of the
Germanic mercenaries invited in to help against the barbarians of the
North and West; like the Babylonians sacking Jerusalem, the merce-
naries enact God’s judgement upon their former British masters
(I.14–15). And so the stage is set for the Great Reversal, the coup de
théâtre of God’s grace, that will turn the foreign heathens into the true
inheritors of the divine promise.
In this light, we can better understand why Bede repeatedly
complains at the reluctance of British Christians to preach the gospel
to their new neighbours (see, for example, I.22 and, most famously,
II.2, where the British bishops refuse to collaborate in the mission
of Augustine). This reluctance is not only unchristian in itself; it is a
matter of resisting divine providence, which has brought the Angli to
Britain so that the furthest ends of the earth may again be populated
with true believers. Bede, like Augustine of Hippo, is sceptical of any
attempt to fix the date of the Second Coming of Christ;4 but he does
share the assumption that the spread of the gospel to the ends of the
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4 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
earth is a necessary (albeit insufficient) condition for the coming of
the End. British churlishness about mission to the invaders is not just
a regrettable dog-in-the-manger attitude but an obstacle to the final
consummation of human history. And it is in this light that Bede
interprets the divergences of practice between the British or Irish
Churches and the ‘Roman’ Church. What may seem to a later eye to
be minor differences have to be understood in maximalist terms, as
the mark of a fundamental departure from orthodoxy, even if it is
not always necessarily culpable. Given that they live so far from the
centre of things, the British and Irish clergy know no better; sin and
blame enter in only when they refuse to accept the instruction of
those who represent the truth.
Thus the focal disagreement between British- or Irish- and
Roman-educated clergy about how to calculate the date of Easter, a
subject to which Bede returns obsessively, becomes a confrontation
between those who do and those who do not accept the authority of
Scripture, even between those who do and those who do not accept
the necessity for salvation of the passion and resurrection of Jesus.
This is spelled out eloquently in Bede’s account of the debates at the
Synod of Whitby in 664 (III.25) and in the long, complex and intense
letter sent by Ceolfrith, abbot of Bede’s own monastery, to the Pictish
king Nechtan, probably around 710, which Bede reproduces in V.21
– a letter that he himself may have helped to draft. In this sort of
argument, British and Irish error is implicitly assimilated to Jewish
resistance to the new revelation of the gospel and also to the most
notorious heresy associated with the region, the teaching of Pelagius
in the early fifth century which was held to deny the necessity of
saving grace. Bypassing the details of the argument, Bede’s chief goal
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introduction 5
is very clear. The opposition between the British and Irish Churches
and those who follow Roman practice is an opposition between
people who obey the Lord’s calling and people who refuse it.
This is worked out in several parallel ways. The repeated reference
to the remoteness of Britain and the powerful narrative of the near
complete desertion of Britain by the Roman armies early in the fifth
century, combined with small signals like Bede’s use of the Latin urbs
to describe the Anglian royal capital (III.16),5 imply that the British
are outside the normative, civic world – the ‘normative’ world that
was once identical with the Roman Empire and is now identical
with Roman Christianity. The comparison of the bloodthirsty pagan
Northumbrian king Aethelfrith with the biblical Saul (I.34) implies
that the Germanic settlers (even while still heathen) are the new
Israel and the British (even though they call themselves Christian)
are the Canaanites and Philistines whom the chosen people must
exterminate. And the arguments already mentioned about the date
of Easter cast the British and their allies as the old Israel versus
the new, the true Church. As we shall see later, this is a deliberate
undermining of the British Christian self-image as Bede knew it,
and gives to the whole of the Historia a quite distinctive energy and
focus. Other Christian scholars were beginning to write histories of
the new kingdoms in Europe,6 but none of them has a comparably
bold theme. In other texts, we can see how the doings of ‘barbarian’
peoples and their rulers were organized and judged within the
framework of Scripture; but for Bede, the church history of the
Anglian gens is the story of how scriptural history, both Old and New
Testament, came to be replayed in one particular corner of Europe,
with the displacement of unfaithful Canaan by faithful Israel and the
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6 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
subsequent replacement of faithless Israel by the true Church. This is
just about the most sharply marked example possible of how the new
kingdoms could be brought into the world of Christian and biblical
discourse.
It is this background that must qualify the kind of judgement
once regularly made about Bede – that he treats his sources and
materials in the manner of a ‘modern’ historian.7 He would have
been baffled by such a verdict. He is first and foremost a theological
writer of history, whose purpose is to show how God’s providential
design appears in human affairs, and how the moral and imaginative
norms of scriptural narrative give us a comprehensive framework in
which to interpret past and current events. But what the misdirected
compliment does recognize is that he is a painstaking and serious
reader of what is before him and is concerned to gather dependable
material. His introductory dedication to King Ceolwulf lays out with
great care and clarity the methods he used to assemble such material.
To deny him the anachronistic dignity of a modern historian is not
to say that he is uncritical, superstitious, unreliable or manipulative.
But what he has in common with a modern historian is simply that he
frames what he is not sure of within the boundaries of what he is sure
about; and he is sure about the all-embracing character of the biblical
story and about living in the last days of the world. The vast bulk
of his written work was commentary on the Bible8 – commentary
that is outstanding among the products of his own century; and his
reputation as an exponent of computus, the charting of dates and
the working out of when ecclesiastical festivals should be held, was
second to none.9 He was acknowledged — quite justly — as probably
the foremost European Christian intellectual of his generation largely
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introduction 7
because of his expertise in these fields. His histories — not only the
Historia ecclesiastica but other works such as his life of St Cuthbert
and the history of the abbots of his own monastery — are part of
a greater intellectual enterprise, the unfolding of God’s purpose in
creation itself, in the progression of natural times and seasons, as
well as in the sacred history which the Bible relates and the Church
celebrates and re-enacts in its liturgy.
2. methods and sources
How, then, does he set about his task? As we have noted already, he
catalogues the material he has used in his dedicatory letter to the
Northumbrian king. He distinguishes between what he has digested
from earlier writers and what he has pulled together by his own initi-
ative, and he describes how he made use of the networks of a clerical
élite dispersed throughout Britain. He summarizes the historians who
have dealt with the early history of Britain; he collects the memories
preserved in Canterbury of the first days of Augustine’s mission from
Rome at the end of the sixth century and commissions a friend to
do further research in the papal archives; and he consults a variety
of local bishops and prominent monasteries about the histories of
their churches. In the text itself, he distinguishes frequently between
what he has heard ‘related’ or what so-and-so ‘was accustomed to
tell’ and what he has found in a written source; and it is this kind of
carefulness that won him such applause from an earlier generation
of modern scholars. He himself hardly ever left the monastery he
had entered at the age of seven, the great community at the mouth of
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8 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
the river Wear split between the two sites of Wearmouth and Jarrow,
seven miles apart (the general consensus is that he spent most of
his time at Wearmouth, but the extensive library of the community
seems to have been divided between the two sites,10 so he will have
been familiar with both), although he did spend a brief time on the
island of Lindisfarne and perhaps in York. Reading the later books of
the Historia, we encounter a series of ‘dossiers’ – bundles of locally
sourced material on the history of Paulinus’ mission in the North, on
the lives of great figures like Aidan and Cuthbert and John of Beverley
or about significant events at a great monastic house, like the convent
at Barking. It is very much how earlier ecclesiastical historians from
Eusebius in the fourth century onwards11 had worked; and what it
loses in overall narrative clarity it gains in vividness. Yet, this being
said, the Historia remains a profoundly coherent work; Bede holds
the entire structure together by the clarity of his overall vision and
the unfussy elegance of his style.
This last characteristic comes through very plainly when we see
how he deals with one of his important sources for the early period.
Some time in the middle of the sixth century, a British writer —
presumably a cleric — named Gildas wrote a lengthy polemic against
the religious and secular authorities of his day under the title of de
excidio Britanniae, ‘the downfall of Britain’.12 His Latin is infuriating
to a degree – arch, pompous, allusive, never missing an opportunity
of saying things in the most indirect and complicated way possible.
Bede reproduces a good deal of Gildas in his first book, but unobtru-
sively cleans up the style and slightly lowers the temperature, so
that we can follow what is going on without too much of the grand-
standing that makes Gildas such hard going.
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introduction 9
But in other ways Bede’s use of Gildas shows how his overall
purpose shapes the way he treats sources. Gildas rebukes the British
of his day in terms drawn from Scripture: like the Israelites of the Old
Testament, the Christian people of God in Britain have abandoned
their calling and are suffering the punishment for their sin. And,
although they are ‘citizens’, cives, a word Gildas likes to use for the
Christian population of Britain, God has delivered them over to the
savagery of barbarians, as God delivered Israel to the Babylonians.
Gildas is not claiming that the British are a chosen race, only that
Christians are; neither does he see the ‘civic’, Roman dignity of the
native population as threatened or negated by barbarian assault. But
on both counts — as has been hinted already — Bede transforms the
story. Christian Britain’s claim to be part of the new Israel is cancelled
by their sinfulness, especially the culminating sin of not preaching
to the Anglian incomers. These incomers are now the true Israel –
not only, it seems, as Christians in general, but very specifically as
a gens drawn together by providence to overcome those who have
put themselves outside the divine purpose. And they are the true
‘Romans’, the true citizens, part of a cultural and spiritual network
extending across the known civilized world. Bede will underline the
importance of the direct involvement of Rome in every significant
development in the new Christianity of Britain, from Pope Gregory’s
very hands-on direction of Augustine’s mission through to the
close liaison with the Roman Church enjoyed by Benedict Biscop,
founder of Bede’s monastery, which allowed Biscop to invite no less
an authority than the choirmaster of St Peter’s in Rome to come
to Northumbria and instruct the monks of Wearmouth–Jarrow in
liturgical chant and ceremony (IV.18). When Caedwalla, the West
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10 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
Saxon king, resigns his throne and travels to Rome to be baptized,
he receives from the Pope the baptismal name of Peter and is later
buried in St Peter’s basilica (V.7): there could hardly be a stronger
symbol of the fusion between the new order in Britain and the focus
of Western Christian imagination in Rome. The old Britain and its
Church have lost their claim to be representatives both of Israel and
of Rome; Bede confidently presents the gens Anglorum as both a kind
of chosen people and an integral part of the universal civilized world
that is reassembling around the papacy. It is, as we shall see, a compli-
cated ideological legacy.
Bede slightly tones down Gildas’ abuse of the Germanic invaders;
but he does not deny the bloodthirstiness of the unconverted Angles
and Saxons. It is one of the things that has won him credit with
nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers that he does not completely
whitewash even his heroes. In this sense, his use of his sources, while
it may be highly creative (even revolutionary, as with Gildas) is not
dishonest. He does not conceal the fact that King Oswiu, one of
the most important figures in the story he has to tell, the man who
confirms the triumph of Roman practice at the Synod of Whitby, was
responsible for the murder of his devout co-ruler Oswine, friend of St
Aidan (III.14); neither does he draw any veils over the early genocidal
activities of Caedwalla, who made such a good end in Rome (IV.15–
16). And perhaps the most marked example of this is his treatment of
Augustine of Canterbury himself, the leader of the great mission to
the English in 597. Pope Gregory’s gentle but firm rebuke to Augustine
for wanting to turn back is recorded (I.23), as are his patient replies
to Augustine’s raft of sometimes rather overanxious questions about
discipline in the newly planted church (I.27) and his warning to the
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introduction 11
archbishop against putting too much stress on miraculous signs (I.31).
All this is an impressive product of the research in the papal archives
commissioned by Bede. But he also uses with some nuance the tradi-
tions that are available more locally; and in the well-known story of
Augustine’s meeting with the British bishops, he indicates a theme
that will surface again in the later books of the Historia, and which is
a key to understanding the subtlety of what he is trying to achieve.
The narrative in II.2 is, on the surface, straightforward. The new
archbishop invites ‘bishops and teachers’ from the British territories
to meet with him at a site never precisely identified but probably
between the Cotswolds and the Severn estuary, to discuss divergences
in practice between the Roman and British churches (especially
the date of Easter) and to encourage cooperation in mission to
the heathen. No consensus emerges, but Augustine reinforces his
spiritual authority by healing a blind man. The British grant that
he has proved himself but ask for a second meeting. This involves a
large delegation from the important monastery of Bangor-on-Dee.
But, prior to the meeting, this delegation asks advice from a hermit,
who tells them that they will be able to recognize Augustine as a
true man of God if he shows humility and rises to greet them on
their arrival. Augustine remains seated and negotiations are stalled.
An exasperated Augustine eventually warns them that if they refuse
to evangelize the invaders, they will suffer at their hands; and sure
enough, within a few years, Aethelfrith of Northumbria massacres
a huge number of monks from Bangor after his victory over the
‘heretic’ British at Chester.
It is a story that does Augustine no favours; and Bede’s own
relish in describing the slaughter of the ‘heretical’ monks is the most
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12 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
unattractive passage in the whole work. But its composition is more
complex than at first appears. The second meeting is described in a
very different way from the first, with repetitions of ‘it is said’ and ‘it
is related’. It also contains, unusually, two British personal names, that
of the abbot of Bangor, Dinoot (the Dunawd of later Welsh hagiog-
raphy), and that of the British chief who fails to protect the monks
at Chester, Brocmail (perhaps the Brochfael or Brochwel Ysgythrog
of the Welsh genealogies). It looks very much as though there is a
British source somewhere in the background, as well as what must
be a Canterbury tradition of the encounter, including Augustine’s
miracle (which echoes the miracle performed earlier by St Germanus
to prove his authority in the contest with Pelagian heretics in I.18).13
Various explanations have been offered, but the simplest is that
Bede is stitching together two rival accounts of a meeting, one from
Canterbury, the other from a British text whose complete reliability
he is obviously not sure of (hence the cautious ‘it is said’).14 Both are
defences of a position, one explaining why the British were justified
in not cooperating (and perhaps blaming Augustine for a ‘curse’ that
was fulfilled in the massacre at Chester), the other demonstrating the
punishment for wilful disobedience to lawful authority reinforced
by miracle. Bede knows where the moral of the story lies, but is
scrupulous in recording Augustine’s share in the responsibility for the
breakdown of negotiations. It is the first foreshadowing of a concern
that haunts later books: the British undoubtedly do their bit in
holding back the work of providence – but the arrogance of some in
authority on the ‘right’ side also plays its part and invites judgement.
More of that later; the point to note for now is that Bede does
not let the clear ideological thrust of his narrative simply distort
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introduction 13
what is before him, even giving houseroom to materials from the
losing side and recognizing that this is no black-and-white record.
Providence may be at work; but it does not absolve historical agents
from real responsibility. In a way rather reminiscent of some kinds
of biblical narrative — the story of Joseph in Genesis or the records
of the upheavals and intrigues during the reign of King David in
2 Samuel, for example — the clear outworking of God’s purpose
does not mean that we can forget the sins and errors of those
who are his instruments. Bede, in a way that brings together his
two greatest theological authorities, Augustine of Hippo and Pope
Gregory the Great, allows for the irremediably mixed character of
human action and motivation in a violent and confused world, while
firmly maintaining his commitment to the providential nature of
legitimate authority in the Church and the ordering of human history
towards justice. The Historia is, after all, dedicated to a king and, as
the introduction makes plain, is meant to help him do his job.
3. The Historia as spiritual challenge
It is this three-dimensional quality that makes Bede still so readable.
Once we have allowed for the insistent ideological biases, the work is
still immeasurably more than a simple apologia for Roman custom
and Anglo-Saxon hegemony. What generations have treasured in
Bede is the wealth of anecdote, related with such vividness and
sometimes poignancy: the Anglian slaves in Rome who prompt
Gregory to think of a mission to this remote land; the Northumbrian
nobleman who unforgettably compares human life to the flight of a
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14 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
sparrow out of the storm through a warm and lighted hall (II.13); the
little boy on his deathbed in the convent nursery at Barking calling
out for his favourite among the sisters, ‘Edith! Edith! Edith!’, and she
dies the same day (IV.8); the shy herdsman Caedmon being prompted
by a visitor from heaven to sing ‘about the beginning of created
things’ (IV.24); and, of course, the incidents in the lives of Bede’s
greatest heroes, the saints of the Northeast, Aidan, Cuthbert and John
of Beverley. Aidan giving away to a poor man the horse the king has
given him (III.14), Cuthbert ‘lingering among the hill folk’ (IV.27)
on his preaching tours, John teaching a youth who cannot articulate
his words (perhaps with Downs’ Syndrome or some comparable
condition) to talk, syllable by syllable (V.2) – these are what gives
Bede’s work its lasting quality simply as a literary achievement.
But much of this anecdote is there to make some sharp spiritual
and moral points. While Bede takes it for granted that ‘proper’ mission
ought to be something that comes with a clear guarantee from Rome
— hence the careful mention of the Roman credentials of the earliest
mission to Ireland (I.13), Birinus’ work in Wessex (III.7) and even,
stretching credibility a bit, Ninian’s evangelizing of the Southern Picts
(III.4) — it needs more than that; and he is open about the fact that
at least some highly effective missions have gone forward without the
Roman seal of approval. The clearest instance is the work of Aidan
in Northumbria: shaped by his years in the community of Iona,
for which, and for whose founder Columba, Bede always expresses
great respect, Aidan exercised what Bede regards as an exemplary
pastoral ministry that sets a standard from which present clergy and
bishops have fallen away (III.5). As bishop, he replaced another Irish
cleric who gave up the job having failed to make any impact; Aidan,
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introduction 15
says Bede (ibid.), discerned that the problem was a lack of pastoral
gentleness and sensitivity, and, in his own ministry, he showed at
every point what this might mean. He refuses to ride on horseback so
as to give himself the chance of casual pastoral encounters; he does
not buy in to the elaborate rituals of courting the great or wealthy by
gifts and privileges; he presses the kings and magnates of the region to
give to the poor and uses donations of money for the relief of poverty
and hunger and the buying back of those sold into slavery. It is clear
that he represents for Bede the ideal of episcopal ministry – although
the awkward fact has to be recorded that he failed to keep Easter at
the right date, not being properly instructed (III.3, 17). His disciple,
the English-born Chad, follows in the same tradition: the same reluc-
tance to travel on horseback is specially noted (III.28, IV.3), and it
recurs in Bede’s account of Cuthbert as well (IV.27). The accounts of
these figures, especially Aidan, deliberately echo what is said about
the exemplary manner of life of Augustine’s early community in
Canterbury (I.26), with its echoes in turn of the Acts of the Apostles.
The early Northumbrian kings of Bede’s narrative, Oswald, Oswine
and even the slightly less satisfactory Oswiu are, it seems, responsive
to this style of ministry, accepting that they may be challenged or criti-
cized by their unworldly protégés. And as Bede tells the story, these are
the figures who really make a difference in the spread of the faith among
the mass of the population. Royal partnership is vital in the mission,
that is plain enough: the evangelists need protection, support, land. But
this does not imply a simple contract with kingly power, let alone an
assimilation to its norms. The kings are praised for their willingness to
listen to the generous and ascetical precepts of the Iona and Lindisfarne
monastic tradition – echoing, probably deliberately, Augustine of Hippo
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16 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
in his City of God (V.24 and 26) in which he depicts the ideal Christian
monarch as always ready for constructive rebuke and willing to share
what he has in property and power for the general good.
Yet the awkwardness cannot be smoothed over. Iona and
Lindisfarne stand for practices that Bede has already stigmatized as
heretical, and the confrontation which reaches its climax in 664 at
the Synod of Whitby is inevitable. And at Whitby, the spokesman for
the triumphant Roman party is a figure he regards with very mixed
feelings, Wilfrid, later bishop of York. Bede relates some of the details
of Wilfrid’s chequered career (see particularly III.25, IV.2–3, 12–3,
V.19) and reproduces the laudatory epitaph from his tomb in Ripon.
He never directly criticizes Wilfrid; but his unstinting praise of Chad,
displaced at York by Wilfrid, tells its own tale. In III.28, Bede notes
that Wilfrid was consecrated bishop in Gaul magno cum honore,
‘with great dignity’ immediately before introducing us to Chad as
sanctus, modestus moribus, ‘a holy man of simple habits’. And when
Bede in V.19 describes the repeated trips of Wilfrid to Rome to clear
himself from various allegations of irregular exercise of authority, he
reports, poker-faced, that the unanimous judgement in Rome was
that Wilfrid’s accusers had manufactured false charges – nonnulla in
parte, ‘to a certain extent’; not quite a ringing endorsement. Behind
all this is what comes out more clearly elsewhere, in other writings
of Bede and in the enthusiastically partisan biography of Wilfrid by
his pupil Stephen of Ripon:15 Wilfrid’s highhandedness had led to
continuing tension with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of
Tarsus, whose plans for the more efficient and coherent organizing of
the Church in England Bede thoroughly approved of; and Wilfrid’s
tenure of the bishopric at Lindisfarne in immediate succession to
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introduction 17
Cuthbert (IV.29) was evidently a disaster, as Bede indicates more
directly in his Prose Life of Cuthbert (40). In other words, the
uncompromising energy and self-confidence that had helped to
win the day in the debates at Whitby also put at risk the health and
harmony of the Church. Wilfrid, like Augustine, is in some sense the
instrument of providence; but that does not mean that he is either a
good example of pastoral ministry or himself incapable of putting
at risk the purposes of providence through his personal arrogance.
And it cannot have helped that the younger Bede’s scholarship and
orthodoxy had been impugned by a cleric in Wilfrid’s circle some
time in the first decade of the eighth century, producing an unusually
heated response from Bede in his Letter to Plegwin in 709.
What emerges from this is precisely what makes the Historia such
an exceptionally nuanced and humane work. The primary goal of
establishing a Church at the ends of the earth that is unimpeachable
in its orthodoxy and obedience to Roman practice is attained in
part through the actions of persons whom Bede cannot present as
unambiguously righteous. The reader cannot – and is not meant to –
read the book simply as the record of an unbroken advance towards
the best possible state of things. Bede’s Letter to Egbert, written at the
very end of his life, is a fierce indictment of the abuses that disfigure
the life of the Northumbrian Church in the 730s: founding monas-
teries has become a way of accumulating land and consolidating
aristocratic power — something like an early mediaeval tax dodge —
and the people who live in these so-called monasteries have no grasp
of the fundamentals of monastic or even Christian life. Bede argues
for a drastic solution, the cancellation of royal or aristocratic charters
establishing unsatisfactory or irreformable houses; they should either
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 17 13/06/2012 14:54
18 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
be abolished or reconstituted under clear episcopal oversight.16 The
culture of patronage which worked so well with pious kings and
unworldly clergy who knew their respective roles has now become
a corrupting influence. Constantly in the background is the ideal of
Lindisfarne in the golden age of the seventh century. Its monks may,
before Whitby, have been ‘uninstructed’ and unorthodox as regards
the date of Easter and the shape of the monastic tonsure,17 but they
were in no doubt of their spiritual priorities. The steady assimilation
of episcopal lifestyles to those of the Anglian nobility has changed
this; and Bede’s narrative overall seems to be implying that figures
like Wilfrid, however irreproachably disciplined in their personal
lives, have to take some responsibility for this. To adapt a well-
known saying attributed to the Duke of Wellington, a victory may be
only a little less tragic than a defeat. The Roman party has won the
immediate battle, but the real and continuing war is against world-
liness, self-indulgence and the lack of pastoral compassion. In that
war, the memory of the ‘uninstructed’ saints of Iona and Lindisfarne
is an essential resource, and the Historia is written to make sure that
it is not lost. And the moving account of Bede’s deathbed written by
one of his close disciples shows vividly something of the spiritual
intensity and simplicity of the monastic atmosphere in which Bede
lived and died, an atmosphere profoundly shaped by that heritage.
4. ‘telling it slant’: what Bede doesn’t say
Contemporary students naturally want to know how far Bede can
now be taken as a reliable guide to the 400–700 period in the history
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 18 13/06/2012 14:54
introduction 19
of these islands; and the answer to this is already in some degree
given by the nature of his sources. For the earliest centuries, he relies
heavily on the early fifth-century Spanish writer Orosius, author of
a not very dependable universal history ‘against the pagans’.18 The
account of the martyrdom of Alban uses a text current in some
form by the fifth century; Bede understandably but almost certainly
wrongly follows Gildas in dating the event to the ‘Great Persecution’
of the early fourth century, whereas a significant number of scholars
would now date it to the mid-third.19 For the mid-fourth century
onwards, there is Gildas, of course – but Gildas has no obvious
written sources and nearly everything he relates seems to depend
on hearsay and oral recollection; and there is also Constantius’ Life
of St Germanus, a text of very uneven reliability. The sixth century
is a total blank in Bede until the Roman mission of 597 – reflecting
the absence of any contemporary written material from Britain apart
from Gildas, whose highly coloured denunciations of the Western
British kings of his day are not of interest to Bede. The missions of
Augustine and Paulinus are filled out by the quite ample epistolary
evidence preserved (presumably) both in Rome and in the monas-
teries in Canterbury and the North. And from this point on, both
documentary and traditional sources are obviously more in evidence.
This means that the narrative of the ‘invasion’ of Britain by the
Angles, Saxons and Jutes rests on a very slender thread of testimony
– primarily Gildas, who, as we have noted, has practically no
documentary sources. Recent scholarship has paid far more attention
than hitherto to the archaeological record of late Roman and post-
Roman Britain, and has had to accept that the material remains offer
nothing at all to support Gildas’ story of invasion and wholesale
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 19 13/06/2012 14:54
20 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
slaughter.20 The origin legends of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms — in
Bede and in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — naturally portray a warlike
aristocracy winning lands by conquest. But the very detail of these
heroic stories can betray their fictional character. The names of the
Jutish leaders Hengest and Horsa — variants of ‘horse’, as has often
been observed — look like a detail from folklore, and Bede’s developed
story of their arrival in Kent and their dealings with the British King
Vortigern is a blend of Kentish tradition and the reworking of Gildas’
typically unclear statements.21 Even more tellingly, the earliest kings
of Wessex in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have unmistakeably British
names (as does Bede’s villainous and penitent Caedwalla later on).
The natural conclusion is that the origins of the kingdom of the West
Saxons lay in a gradual fusion of British and ‘settler’ communities,
and that some of what was recalled as warfare between Briton and
Saxon was a series of opportunistic local conflicts that did not break
down along strictly ethnic lines. Even Bede’s Caedmon at Hilda’s
community in Whitby has a name that is almost certainly British
(‘Catumanus’, Cadfan in later Welsh, is a well-attested name in Wales
at this period). Populations mixed, and historic patterns of cultivation
and settlement seem to have gone on without a huge amount of inter-
ruption in the immediate post-Roman period. Undoubtedly, as new
patterns of leadership, protection, land ownership and social control
evolved,22 there were violent clashes, sometimes between settlers and
natives, sometimes simply between rival warbands. Gildas’ traditions
of bloodshed and of efforts to contain aggressive groups of settlers
by the last remnants of the Romanized squirearchy need not be
total fiction, but they have an axe to grind and should not be read as
indicating generations of nationwide racial struggle.
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 20 13/06/2012 14:54
introduction 21
And this, in turn, is bound to qualify Bede’s picture of a distinctive
‘British Church’ systematically refusing to engage with the newcomers.
There were parts of Britain where the Christianizing of local settler
populations evidently happened primarily through the influence of
local native populations (the West Midlands and the Severn basin, for
example). If local British ‘kings’ survived in what was left of the Roman
towns of Bath, Gloucester and Cirencester, as we know they did, so,
surely, did their bishops; and the British bishops who took part in the
consecration of Chad and thus compromised his legitimacy in the eyes
of later opponents (III.28) may well have been among them. Even in
Northumbria, it is possible that clergy from the neighbouring British
kingdom in Lancashire and Cumbria played some part in the mission of
Paulinus to the court of King Edwin of Northumbria and afterwards.23
Meanwhile of course, evangelistic activity in Ireland had been
proceeding apace. The Palladius mentioned by Bede, with his papally
approved mission was not the only early Christian presence in
Ireland; and it is a surprise for some readers to realize that Bede
shows no knowledge of St Patrick (even if he had heard of him, he
would probably have regarded him as prima facie suspect, both as a
freelance – non-papally authorized – missionary, and as a Briton).
Irish sources suggest a very regular exchange between Western
Britain and Ireland in the uncharted sixth century: Gildas appears as
an authority consulted by Irish clergy and the perennially elusive St
David initially has a higher profile in Irish than in British tradition.
The Irish monks so admired by Bede were thus part of a continuing
cultural commonwealth that took in Western Britain, Ireland and
Brittany. Teachers of note like the originally British figure remem-
bered in various Irish sources as Finnian24 wandered between British
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 21 13/06/2012 14:54
22 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
and Irish monasteries, just as enthusiastic Anglian monks found their
way to Ireland, as Bede himself reports.
All of which means that the picture of a British and Irish Church
that was isolated and uninformed is a very slanted one. The Irish
reputation for outstanding scholarship in Bede’s day and later was
rooted in a very lively and cosmopolitan ecclesial culture in the
preceding century or so. Gildas’ Latin may try the patience, but it
would have been recognized as stylish if a little old fashioned by
continental savants; and he is as familiar with Vergil as with the
Old Latin Bible. And he is writing for a British readership who may
be expected to appreciate his blossoms of eloquence, a readership
that must have included some at least of the monks and perhaps
nuns whose communities he regularly mentions. The eighth-century
Life of the Welsh St Samson, who travelled throughout the ‘cultural
commonwealth’ of the Western seaboards 200 years earlier, reflects a
learned and sophisticated monastic environment in all the contexts
he is connected with; he has his formation in a community in
South Wales that sounds like a modest local version of Cassiodorus’
contemporary venture in scholarly asceticism. Even allowing for
the effect of two centuries of tradition and elaboration, all of this is
quite congruent with what we know from elsewhere and with the
best of the Welsh Latin inscriptions of the period. Like the slightly
later Irish Columbanus, Samson eventually settles on the Continent
(in Brittany), and his signature can be found among the attendance
list at church councils in Paris in 553 and 557 – a signature phrased,
tellingly, in a neat Latin hexameter.25
Neither Samson nor Columbanus appears to have had any lasting
trouble over divergences in ritual or calendar from what their
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 22 13/06/2012 14:54
introduction 23
neighbours thought of as normative. And that is important for
understanding Bede: it may have felt possible, even natural, in Gaul
or Italy to tolerate foreign holy men who stuck to ancestral customs,
but within Britain it had to be a fight to the death, a matter of
competition for the souls of the providentially chosen people who
were to restore the integrity of the Church. And thus it is entirely
in the interest of the story Bede has to tell that the native Christian
population should be presented first as remote and out of touch,
and then as obstinately clinging to their peculiarities in the face of
catholic consensus. It is unlikely that Bede knew anything of Samson,
although he does know something of Columbanus (II.4); but the
experience of pilgrim ascetics in Europe cannot really bear on the
question in Britain, which is essentially one of authority and authen-
ticity. The new Christians of Britain, the Anglian gens, must be in all
things obedient to revelation as determined from Rome; as we have
seen, they must manifestly embody both the new Rome and the new
Israel.
A great deal of nonsense has been written about ‘Celtic Christianity’,
as if this were an intelligible designation for some self-contained
variant of catholic orthodoxy in the early Middle Ages, a variant
more attuned to the sacredness of nature and less obsessed with
institutional discipline. Historically, the Churches of those regions
where Celtic languages were spoken never thought of themselves as
part of a network other than that of the Western Catholic Church.
They wrote and spoke Latin, they looked to Rome as the focus of
their ecclesial life (Welsh kings as well as English spent their final
years in Rome) and they accepted the creeds and canons of the
Catholic Church. The irony is that Bede’s concern to show them as
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 23 13/06/2012 14:54
24 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
mysteriously and suspiciously ‘other’ to the Roman norm is one of
the roots of modern mythologies about a Celtic Christianity that
is somehow deeper and more spiritually comprehensive than the
orthodox mainstream. His vague and general allegation that the
British were especially susceptible to heresy and the more specific
mention of the prevalence of Pelagianism in the fifth century26
are part of building up a picture of a disturbingly different style of
Christianity. And even when he is underlining the difference in a
positive way – the contrast between the humility and simplicity of the
Irish-trained monks and the self-advertising and arrogance of others,
past and present – he is reinforcing what modern fantasy has turned
into a contrast between institutional ‘Roman’ Christianity and native
Wordsworthian innocence and mystical insight. Bede’s unwitting
assistance in creating this mirage of a radically ‘other’ Celtic Christian
identity is one of the odder aspects of his legacy.
5. The Historia and english history
That legacy is an exceptionally rich one, and, as the foregoing
discussion will have suggested, quite a complex one too. The Historia
circulated widely in Europe, probably thanks to the significant
activities of Anglo-Saxon teachers on the Continent in the eighth
and ninth centuries;27 and in England, it was translated and adapted
in Old English and some of its contents became well known through
homilies. In the Middle Ages it came to be rather overshadowed by the
shamelessly fictional ‘history’ composed by Geoffrey of Monmouth
(which turned upside down Bede’s privileging of the English over the
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 24 13/06/2012 14:54
introduction 25
British); but the Reformation era brought Bede back on to the agenda,
albeit not as a major focus. Just as Augustine of Hippo has been called
‘the father of both Reformations’ (i.e. both Protestant and Catholic
reform), so Bede could be prayed in aid by both parties. Some
Reformers used him as a witness to pure and uncorrupted English
faith at the time when the errors of popery were triumphing abroad;
but the dedication to the first modern English translation (1565) of
the Historia, by the Catholic recusant Thomas Stapleton, pointed
out the undeniable importance of the See of Rome in his narrative
and urged Queen Elizabeth to emulate her remote Northumbrian
forebears and restore the true faith. Archbishop Parker’s enthusiasm
for the Anglo-Saxon Church focused more on later material – which
may reflect a realistic judgement on the Archbishop’s part that Bede
was not a good ally in a defence of the autonomy of the national
church.28
That being said, it is hard to deny that Bede’s vision is one of
the ingredients that makes up the history of ‘English exception-
alism’ which the English Reformation did so much to boost – the
conviction that the English people had a special destiny under God,
or that they embodied in a distinct way the biblical archetypes of the
holy community.29 Looking back on this from the far side of a history
of imperial adventure and racial myth, it is hard to be objective; in
the same way, with South African history in mind, the model of
divinely authorized settlers who are summoned to subdue a recal-
citrant native population in imitation of Israel’s conquest of Canaan
is likely to stick in the throat of the contemporary reader.30 Bede,
however, is not offering an apologia for straightforward conquest
or exploitation; he may condone atrocities (like the massacre at
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 25 13/06/2012 14:54
26 Bede’s ecclesiastical History of tHe englisH PeoPle
Chester), but the centre of his concern is the passionate eagerness to
see the Church firmly established here, at the farthest reaches of the
known world, held in catholic unity by its close connections with the
central seat of authority in Rome and holding together the diverse
elements in the gens Anglorum as a people with essentially one
history and one coherent future. The Church thus offers an intel-
ligible common identity to groups who might otherwise be at war,
and it is the task of both clerics and kings to reinforce that common
identity. Bede has a clear view of the vocation and destiny of the gens
Anglorum, but it is not, ultimately, one that is meant to legitimize
conflict or aggression.
From another perspective, of course, his history might at first sight
lend support to a strongly ‘ultramontane’ theology, a commitment
to the privileges of central Church authority over local variations
in devotion or practice. It is not an accident that, in the nineteenth
century, the publication of an eloquently pro-papal ‘Life of St Wilfrid’
as part of a series of Lives of the English Saints was one of the things
that got John Henry Newman into serious trouble with the author-
ities of the Church of England;31 neither that the most extravagant
of all converts to Roman Catholicism in the mid century, Frederick
William Faber, author of that ill-fated ‘Life’, founded a short-lived
religious community under the patronage of Wilfrid and himself
took the name of Wilfrid as a religious.32 To someone like Faber,
there must have been irresistible echoes of Bede in the tensions not
only between Roman Catholics and Anglicans but also between the
‘Old Catholic’ clergy and laity who had lived through the centuries
of legal discrimination and harassment and the new generation who
wanted to see English Catholicism come into line with the practice
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 26 13/06/2012 14:54
introduction 27
of Continental Europe. But what this fails to take into account is
the complexity of Bede’s own portrayal of old and new, local and
universal – including the complexity of his assessment of Wilfrid. If
Bede finds a genuine nineteenth-century Catholic echo, it is perhaps
more obviously in the mature Newman, who both understood the
need for universal communion and valued the spiritual legacy of
those who, for a variety of good and bad reasons, had stood on or
beyond the edges of that communion.
For the twenty-first century student, Bede’s work is as challenging
as it is engaging. It opens up some deep issues around national
identity, reminding us that this is always something constructed
in history, not just given by nature. It unambiguously presents
the Church as a necessary element in that construction. To have a
coherent national identity must be to have some sense of common
moral purpose; and Bede leaves us with the — very timely —
question of how exactly we are going to secure this in the absence of
a common faith, or at least a common story of how faith has shaped
our discourse. It also leaves us with the properly unresolved question
of how a non-violent faith, whose greatest figures are those who
renounce the obvious means of power, can become such a shaping
force in society without losing its integrity and turning into yet one
more competitor for cultural control. But above all, it remains a work
of intense literary and spiritual vitality, full of memorable portraits
and incidents. It celebrates at least as much as it argues; and this is
always part of what makes any work — theology, history, scientific
analysis — really durable.
9781441123541_txt_print.indd 27 13/06/2012 14:54
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Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People An Introduction and Selection
Rowan Williams and Benedicta Ward
Rowan Williams is Archbishop of Canterbury. He was formerly Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Archbishop of Wales.
Sister Benedicta Ward is a member of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God. She is Reader in the History of Christian Spirituality at the University of Oxford, and an honorary lecturer at Harris Manchester College.
The Archbishop of Canterbury explores how Bede opens up deep issues around national identity, and the role of the Church in its construction
Bede’s best known work, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, was written in Latin and is not immediately easy to understand and follow. Rowan Williams shows in his introduction how Bede works to create a sense of national destiny for the new English kingdoms of the seventh century, a sense that has helped to shape English self-awareness through the centuries, by using the imagery both of imperial Rome and of biblical Israel.
But Bede also wrestles with the diffi cult question of how the Church relates to and serves the political order. The issues around these questions are not academic or antiquarian. Understanding Bede is a key to understanding British society in the present as well as the past.