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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2013
Bede's preoccupations in the later years of his life have recently come under close scrutiny. This article will set out the argument to this point, then explore how the Ecclesiastical history conforms to more general perceptions of Bede's purposes. It will conclude that this work was designed to address just one part of his wider reform agenda, as that pertained to the Northumbrian king of the day, Ceolwulf. To this end, Bede painted a picture of the current situation within the Church which is far more optimistic than that on offer in the Letter to Ecgberht just a few years later. It must be concluded that his specific purposes as regards any particular work, and the audience at which that work was aimed, exercised a considerable influence over his strategy, which varies enormously from one part of his output to another.
1 Vita sancti Cuthberti prosaica, ed. and trans Bertram Colgrave, in Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, Cambridge 1940, 142–307; Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1969.
2 Thacker, Alan, ‘Bede's ideal of reform’, in Wormald, Patrick, Bullough, Donald and Collins, Roger (eds), Ideal and reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society: studies presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Oxford 1983, 130–53Google Scholar.
3 Bede's Epistola ad Ecgberhtum episcopum is dated 5 November 734 and Bede died on 26 May 735. For the text see Venerabilis Baedae opera historia, ed. Charles Plummer, Oxford 1896, ii. 405–23.
4 Thacker, ‘Bede's ideal of reform’, 130; DeGregorio, Scott, ‘The Venerable Bede on prayer and contemplation’, Traditio liv (1999), 1–39Google Scholar; ‘Nostrorum socordiam temporum’: the reforming impulse of Bede's later exegesis’, Early Medieval Europe xi (2002), 107–22; ‘Bede's In Ezram et Neemiam and the reform of the Northumbrian Church’, Speculum lxxix (2004), 1–25; and ‘Footsteps of his own’, in Scott DeGregorio (ed.). Innovation and tradition in the writings of the Venerable Bede, Morgantown 2006, 143–68.
5 Bede, On Ezra and Nehemiah, trans. Scott DeGregorio, Liverpool 2006, pp. xxx–xxxvii.
6 EH iii. 5.
7 EH i. 26.
8 EH iii. 5: a more literal translation would be ‘the sluggishness of our time’.
9 EH i. 15, summarising Gildas, De excidio Britanniae xxii–xxiii.
10 See Roger Ray, ‘Who did Bede think that he was?’, in DeGregorio, Innovation and tradition, 11–36.
11 For example at EH iv. 2.
12 See EH v. 20, 23.
13 Nicholas J Higham, [Re-]reading Bede: the Ecclesiastical history in context, London 2006, 56–7.
14 The exception is the now deceased monk of whom he complained at length in EH v. 14.
15 For example the new archbishop, Tatwine, whom Bede describes in EH v. 23 as ‘renowned for his devotion and wisdom and excellently instructed in the scriptures’; Acca, in EH v. 20; or Ecgberht as ‘the greatly revered and holy father and priest’ in EH iii. 4, whose final triumph and death was chronicled at the very close of the work with appropriate acclaim in EH v. 22.
16 As when the bishops are listed in EH v. 23.
17 EH iv. 12.
18 Goffart, Walter, The narrators of barbarian history (A. D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon, Guildford 1988, 235–328Google Scholar.
19 Fouracre, Paul, ‘Forgetting and remembering Dagobert ii: the English connection’, in Fouracre, Paul and Ganz, David (eds), Frankland: the Franks and the world of the early Middle Ages: essays in honour of Dame Jinty Nelson, Manchester 2008, 70–89Google Scholar at p. 85.
20 Higham, [Re-]reading Bede, 180.
21 He was, of course, a priest as well as a monk and prominent author.
22 The view that Bede was a cloistered monk detached from the world, to which Thacker held in 1983, is not now widely supported: compare Wormald, Patrick, ‘Bede and Benedict Biscop’, in Bonner, Gerald (ed.), Famulus Christi: essays in commemoration of the thirteenth centenary of the birth of the Venerable Bede, London 1976, 141–69Google Scholar at p. 155; Thacker, ‘Bede's ideal of reform’, 130; and Mayr-Harting, Henry, ‘Bede's patristic thinking as an historian’, in Scharer, Anton and Scheibelreiter, Georg (eds), Historiographie im frühen Mittelalter, Vienna 1994, 367–74Google Scholar at p. 373, with Higham [Re-]reading Bede, 13–16.
23 Higham, [Re-]reading Bede, 56–7.
24 DeGregorio, Scott, ‘Monasticism and reform in book iv of Bede's “Ecclesiastical history of the English people”’, this Journal lxi (2010), 673–87Google Scholar.
25 Thacker, ‘Bede's ideal of reform’, 146–8.
26 As set out in the preface. For a full exposition see Campbell, James, ‘Bede’, in Dorey, T. A. (ed.), Latin historians, London 1966, 159–90Google Scholar, repr, as ‘Bede i’, in Campbell, J., Essays in Anglo-Saxon history, London 1986, 1–27Google Scholar.
27 For this use is made of A concordance to the Historia ecclesiastica of Bede, Cambridge, Ma 1929.
28 See EH i. 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, parts at least of which derive from Bede's reading of Gildas, De excidio Britanniae, ed. Michael Winterbottom, London 1978, chs xxi–xxvii. Gildas's complaints regarding the kings and priests are in chs xxvii–xxxvi and lxvi–lxxv respectively.
29 Acca's qualities in the present context are spelled out in a lengthy passage in v. 20. Walter Goffart insists that this is mere politeness and that Bede was in fact critical of his own diocesan, most recently in his ‘Bede's history in a harsher climate’, in DeGregorio, Innovation and tradition, 203–26 at pp. 219–20, but this passage remains Bede's most extended and fulsome praise of any contemporary in 731, surely exposing Goffart's case as special pleading; Daniel appears in the preface as one of Bede's informants, termed reverentissimus, and reappears in v.18, where his learning and expertise are praised.
30 J. McClure, ‘Bede's Old Testament kings’, in Wormald, Bullough and Collins, Ideal and reality, 76–98 at pp. 90, 98.
31 EH iii. 6.
32 EH iii. 14.
33 Ibid.
34 Bede told the tale of Oswine's betrayal to, and murder by order of, Oswiu in EH iii. 14.
35 EH iii. 29.
36 EH iii. 23.
37 EH iii. 25.
38 EH iv. 1–2.
39 ‘fortissimo Christianique reges’: EH iv. 2.
40 Ibid.
41 EH iv. 3. The similarities between this account and Bede's depiction of Aidan are transparent.
42 Ibid.
43 EH iv. 4.
44 By this he meant the peoples of Fife. The contrast is with the loss of English control of Fife following Ecgfrith's death in iv. 24 (26). This comment chimes with Bede's reference to the English kings who struck ‘terror into the barbarian nations’ in iv. 2.
45 The parallel that Bede was drawing here was undoubtedly with Aidan in iii. 5.
46 Bede was particularly keen to praise Bisi in iv. 5 and Eorcenwold in iv. 6, adding a series of stories regarding the latter's monastic foundations in 7–10 which do much to confirm the excellence of these senior clergy.
47 In 1988 Walter Goffart proposed that in the Ecclesiastical history Bede was the mouthpiece of an anti-Wilfridian faction within the Northumbrian Church competing for control of the forthcoming archdiocese of York, and this view has been repeated several times since: Goffart, Narrators, 235–328; ‘The Historia ecclesiastica: Bede's agenda and ours’, Haskins Society Journal ii (1990), 29–45; and ‘Bede's history in a harsher climate’. The case is far from sound however, in particular because there is no evidence that the promotion of York as an archdiocese was actually begun by 731, given that Ecgberht only became bishop in 732: Higham, [Re]-reading Bede, 58–69. In fact, Wilfrid is an exceptionally prominent figure in the EH, whom Bede refers to repeatedly in language which compares closely with the terms that he applies to such august figures as Gregory, Augustine and Theodore.
48 EH iv. 6.
49 EH iv. 6–10.
50 ‘a man much devoted to God, Sebbi … given to religious acts, constant prayers, and the holy joys of almsgiving’: EH iv. 11.
51 EH iv. 16. Bede's inference here is that although the conversion was itself praiseworthy there were aspects of it that were unnecessarily harsh.
52 EH iv. 17 (15).
53 EH iv. 23 (21).
54 For the suggestion that Streanaeshalch was Strensall near York see Blair, Peter Hunter, ‘Whitby as a centre of learning in the seventh century’, in Lapidge, Michael and Gneuss, Henry (eds), Learning and literature in Anglo-Saxon England: studies presented to Peter Clemoes on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, Cambridge 1985, 3–32Google Scholar at p. 10 n. 3; for more recent discussion see Barnwell, Paul S., Butler, Laurence A. S. and Dunn, C. J., ‘The confusion of conversion: Streanæshalch, Strenshall and Whitby and the Northumbrian Church’, in Carver, Martin (ed.), The cross goes north: processes of conversion in northern Europe, AD 300–1300, York 2003, 311–26Google Scholar. The conventional attribution to Whitby remains the more likely, given both the archaeological evidence for a monastery there but not at Strensall and Bede's belief that the monastery was a short journey from Hackness (Hacanos): EH iv. 23(21)).
55 The ‘feel-good’ factor has often been recognised; most recently by Goffart: it was ‘written to sound exactly as it sounds – serene and beautiful’: ‘Bede's history in a harsher climate’, 213.
