Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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


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


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


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


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


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.

Documents

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People