Gone Medieval - The Venerable Bede

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Bede, whose name towers over early medieval English literature, is often referred to as the “father of English history.” He calculated the first tide-tables, played a role in the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels, wrote the earliest extant Old English poetry and did the earliest translation of part of the Bible into English. Despite never leaving Northumbria, he also wrote a guide to the Holy Land. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out everything you need to know about the Venerable Bede from Professor Michelle Brown, author of Bede and the Theory of Everything.This episode was edited and mixed by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It was a stormy night in the farthest reaches of northern England. Sheets of rain blown in from the wild north sea pelted the rugged cliffs of the Northumbrian coast. Blustery winds whipped through villages, impatiently nudging men and women about their work as they cursed the unwanted encouragement. For the monks of Jarrow and Monk Weirmouth, it was nothing new.

Their two abbeys built close to the estuaries of the river's thine and weir had weathered storms far worse than this. For one particular aged monk, the wet and wind were inconsequential. Sat in the chill of the stone library and writing by candlelight, he ruminated on the ancient history of his beloved Britain. He picked up his quill, dipped it in red ink, forced his tired eyes to focus in the half-life, and began to write a line that would have a truly enduring legacy. The nation of the Angles or Saxons being invited by the king arrived in Britain with three ships of war on the pretext of fighting in defence of their country

whilst their real intentions were to conquer it. Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany, Saxons, Angles and Dudes. From the Dutes had descended the people of Kent and of the Isle of White, including those in the province of the West Saxons. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons and the West Saxons. From the Angles, that is the country which is called Angulus,

are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, the Mercians, and all the race of the Northumbrians, that is of those nations that dwell on the north side of the river Humber. That famous passage, telling of how the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain, was written by the venerable Beed, and for centuries it formed the basis of what we knew about the Anglo-Saxon migration. Often referred to as the father of English history, beads named Towers over early medieval English literature.

But who was this wise, and wizzen-looking man from England's far northeast, who wrote historical works of astonishing breadth, and other things other than his history that we should remember him for. I'm delighted to be joined to find out more about the venerable Bede by Professor Michelle Brown, whose new book, Beed and The Theory of Everything, offers an insight into so much more than a writer of history. Michelle is Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Study,

at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and also previously a curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library, which is very cool. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Michelle. Hi, Matt, it's great to be here. It's great to have you on. I mean, Bede is someone who we haven't even touched on, and he seems like such a big topic to have avoided for so long,

so it'll be great to get into some detail about him. Yeah, well, most people think he's just a boring old monk, but they're wrong. We're here to put them right. To start off with, what do we know about Bede's background? When and where is he born and what do we know about his family? Okay. Well, we know who was born in 673. So we're celebrating his 1,30th and 50th anniversary of his birth this year.

And we think it was on the estates of Monk Weirmouth, which is a church that was founded in 674 by Benedict Biscop on the banks of the River Weir. And Moncton is one possibility. but we think that he might have had quite important associations in his family. Oh, okay. So he may have been fairly well to do? Well, what we're wondering is that the name bedder, which is his old English name, which means basically the servant, but of a higher calling. He wasn't from slave or working class, we don't think.

Although we don't know, he might have been. But the name bedder also occurs along with Biscop, as in Benedict Biscop, the nobleman from Northumbria who founded Mount Weymouth Abbey. They both appear in the king list of the kings of Lindsay, which is down for the sort of Lincoln Way. And it's possible that they came from the same kingworthy family, which would mean that like our current royal family, there are lots and lots of them in the wings who are 39th in line to the throne,

that sort of thing. So the fact that those two names occur, Often, names were to be passed from generation to generation. And if you were from a kingworthy family, you were very proud of having those names. And so you kept them, like all the Charleses and Williams and Elizabeths that we have. So that's possible. And that raises an interesting other possibility because, of course, the name Lindisfarne, famous Holy Island, can be read as meaning the travellers from Lindsay.

So it's even possible that some of the early settlers of Northumbria had, previously come from Lindsay, in which case, Bede would have been from as much of an ancient lineage as you could have for the Anglo-Saxons, who of course, you know, a couple of generations ago had been mad, bad and dangerous to know and were basically refugees and raiders and pirates. So, yeah, there are interesting possibilities there. It's incredible to think, because we think of him, I think, as just being an old man who's written some books. So it's interesting to think about him as someone who is from that kind of heritage. Like you say, a couple of generations ago would have been mad, bad and dangerous to

know. He's like an Anglo-Saxon Han Solo family hovering around in the northeast of England. It's amazing to think of people having those different dimensions that we don't normally think about to their history. Yeah, absolutely. What do we know about how Beed becomes a monk? Is it a position he chooses for himself? Well, all that he says, and most of the information we have about and comes from his own work, because that's part of who the man was. He liked to give the back story and cover his sources. And so he says that when he was seven, his kinsmen, he doesn't say his parents, he says his kinsmen,

presented him to the care of Benedict Biscop and the new abbey that he had founded. So he would have come in at the age of seven to what was basically the Mies van der Ruhr building of its day in construction. This was something new. This hadn't been seen on the landscape since the work of giants, the mythical Romans, who built the wall, et cetera, and to suddenly see this dress masonry going up with the luxury of

stained glass windows, no more drafts, etc. It was a really bold enterprise. And so I think whoever has charge a bead at that time, whether his parents have perhaps died, it's a time of great pestilence and plague, it's a difficult time to be alive. They presented him to be part of this bold new world and this sort of experiment in actually transforming the world. their people from war bans into the height of European civilisation. And again, that's interesting to bear in mind when we look at what he does in later life, that he's entering that kind of community idea of creating a more settled, more, I don't know, rooted society than might have been previously,

because that might lean into why he writes about so much history, I guess. Absolutely. I think you've got it in one there, Matt. I mean, to me, what's special about Bede is that he's got joined up thinking, he's got the long view. He's not a political opportunist. He actually wants to lay the bedrock for a well-functioning, just compassionate society that has got a basis of learning, a spirituality, but which has also got its feet firmly rooted in the matter of the real world.

Matter matters. And so the physicality of the world, what makes it tick is something that, as a little boy, you must have had this incredible, intellectual curiosity. And for him to be running around this building site while, you know, they were melting glass to make the windows and trying to work out what the physical properties is. That's how his mind ticks. But then he asks the why. He doesn't stop at the how. It's the why as well. And so basically, his work is designed to give people the basis of a society that can function and that will actually allow space for not only people, but other parts of his

creation vision to have a part in it. All of a suddenly sounds a little bit like an annoying child. He's running around asking questions everywhere. But I guess we'll have to indulge him for that a little bit. Yeah, I bet just like you were. Just like you were. Not at all. Not at all.

I will say my youngest daughter, her first words were like, how and why? She was born asking questions. Beed's writings later on kind of suggests that he was a pretty well-traveled guy. He seems to know an awful lot. He writes what's basically a travel guide to the Near East. Was he well-travelled? As far as we know, the furthest he ever got was Linda's farm,

which is about what, 60-odd miles away in Northumbria. So no, he didn't travel widely. He stuck to Northumbria, but he's got a big world view, and he's busy trying to get access to everything he possibly can, every form of knowledge, every vehicle for knowledge that he can get hold of, whether it be books, whether it be images, whether it be the stories of old men around the fireplace. And he's processing it all and validating his sources, testing his sources. And so this worldview means that if something comes into his purview, he can store it on the

shelves of his inner library and pull it out when he needs to. He doesn't have to Google it. He's got a very well-trained memory. And so he's squirreling away things from all the works that he's read of the class. classics from the antique world, all of the things of the Eastern Church Fathers, as well as the Western Church Fathers, and he's adding new knowledge all the time. And then he's got this wonderful literary skill where he can transform raw mind data into a great grand vision that engages people. And it's a journey of the imagination that he wrote for himself and for

others. And we think part of the core of it, for example, is that in 690, a bishop from Gull called Arkalf had been on a tour of the Holy Land and Egypt, northern Egypt, Alexandria area. And as he's coming back through the Straits of Gibraltar on his boat and up the traditional prehistoric trade route of Iberia, Brittany, he'll get to Land's End and then he'll have the choice of do I go right up the channel or do I go left up the Celtic Sea to Ireland, Scandinavia, etc., etc. And he hits bad weather and the captain takes a wrong turn is the story. and he ends up spending Christmas on Iona, a little island with a monastery founded by St. Colomber, off of the coast of Argyll. There, he spends his time telling stories about his experiences on pilgrimage to the abbot Adavnan.

And Athernone writes it all down in his note form, and the bishop even draws plans of the holy places, all of the buildings, church of the Holy Sepulchre, etc., on wax tablets to show him what he means. and at some point other Vnan's notes come into the hands of Bede and Bede works it up and puts in all of the other information that he's got from the ancient Roman cartographers and all sorts and he supplies this incredible joined-up view and it was so convincing actually and so well researched that it was still being used like a Bidecker travel guide by travellers

in the Middle East as late as about 1900. So well done Bede. Absolutely. I mean now he's sounding a little bit like he's some kind of medieval one note or ever note or something. He's just gathering all of this information together. But then he also has the gift to be able to turn that into something that people want to read. He can craft things from that, as you say, from the raw data. He can make an engaging story or way to present it, which is a gift in itself. So it seems like he has so many different gifts going on. He's bringing all of this together and creating some incredible work.

And I guess it speaks as well to how connected the medieval world was, that all of this information can reach a man who's never really left the far north-east of England? Yeah, and it used to be thought that things like the tale of Arcoff was just a literary genre, a bit like Presta John in the late Middle Ages until Marco Polo actually goes there. But now we're finding that there was a lot of contact, we think, now, between the far west and the near east after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west and the 5th century. I've found evidence in my research at St. Catherine, Sinai, of two Northumbrian scribes from the middle of the 8th century working there, for example.

So they got about. And one of the things you mentioned in the book that I was completely unaware of is that we might well have Bid to thank for the idea of the year zero and thinking in AD and BC in terms of our dating? Yeah, absolutely. Well, he's the one that really popularises its use in the West and who does the full working out. But he got the idea from somebody a bit earlier who was a monk in Romania, Constancia, called Dionysius exiguous, which basically means Dionysius the Little. Now, we don't know whether

he was vertically challenged or whether it was that he was very humble. But anyway, that's his title. He's one of the Eastern fathers. And he was working in Rome in the early 6th century. And he'd made a start on that idea of how do you have a year zero and saying, well, perhaps the birth of Christ could be that and be picked up and runs with it. But the job that you've got to do then is imagine any sources you did have to work with. How are they going to be dated? Well, it's going to be the fifth indiction of the emperor diocletian. Now, A, you've got to know when diocletian was. You've got to know how long he reined for to know when the fifth year of his reign is. So it's all regnal years and things like that. It's church calendars, east and west, obviously, some differences. And nowhere had the

same dating system. You could leave Pisa in 321 and get to Florence. in 296 in terms of Beed's reckoning, because they all use different dates of cities, dates of festivals, different religious festivals, pagan and Christian, and all of these different rules of local rulers. And so it's an incredible thing to actually have synthesized. Computus is the discipline that Beed would have used, computistics, to do the advanced mathematical correlations for all of this. And so, yeah, his research in a way is a forerunner. as was that of many others in history, to modern computing. So now, Bede is a spreadsheet.

He's like an Excel spreadsheet. He's so many things. Just keep occurring to me that he's like so many of these modern things that we have around today, but doing it all without the benefit of that. I mean, trying to date all of that stuff feels like something I'd look at all the paper in front of me and think maybe that's a job for tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow. So I'm impressed. Oh, Bid was never a procrastinator.

That was his secret of success. It's what we've got to learn from this, Matt. Don't put it off. And how unusual is it that Bede wrote his own books? Because medieval and particularly early medieval authorship is an odd thing for us to know about, isn't it? Yeah, it is. We know more about him than virtually any other early author, I'd say. And in classical antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, it's very rare for authors to pick up the quill and write themselves, or the read pen, the calamus, and write themselves. It's like voice-activated computing. You'd have somebody

taking dictation, basically. Whether you were Cicero standing up and giving a speech and your publishers have got scribes there in the audience, taking notes in shorthand, etc. Or whether you were in a monastery and you might have a novice or a younger assistant, a scribe to take down your every word. But Bede, in his autobiographical notes that he leaves us, which are really valuable, says one remarkable thing. He says, in this, as in all things of monastic humility, I was both author, notary and scribe. That means he thinks it in his head. He writes it down with his own hand, is his own PA, but he's also scribe. Now, I think he's using the term scribe in the Old Testament sense when you read about scribes and Pharisees. The scribe is a priest, and only certain priests were

entrusted with the very, very sacred task of writing down holy scripture. And so he's also saying, I'm spiritually fit enough. I've been on the front line and I'm able, I'm entrusted to actually undertake the important task of actually writing down the word of God. So, yeah, he's got it all going on. He's a desktop publisher in a way. And he fits into what becomes quite a well-developed publishing program

at the two monasteries that Biscop founded, Monk Weymouth and Jaro. He found a second house at Jaro in 680. run to two. And together, there are two places with but one will, and the library, the scriptorian, would have been spread across both of them. And it would have been the most remarkable place to be. If you like, it's the Proto University. It's got what was probably one of the best, if not the best library to have survived the wreckage of the late antique and early, an early Christian Mediterranean world.

And B, the boy with this wonderful, sparky imagination, is in the middle of it all and grows up with it. And it's his playground. And he runs everywhere throughout it, gathering fruits and flowers to create this wonderful garden, this vision of how the world could be. It seems really provident that you've got the person capable of all of those things in a place able to accommodate him and supply him with what he needed

to do everything that he wanted to do. It is, and from his writings, you can sometimes see he's got this thing about Samuel and the idea that his mother knows, because she's had trouble conceiving a child, she knows that when she does, that the child's going to be special. And she's prayed and she said to God, if you give me a child, I'll give him back to you. And so it's almost like Bede identifies with that. And then he identifies when he's in the monastery, he gets his father figure. The abbot of the two monasteries, Chalfreth.

He takes a particular shine to him. And you can imagine the abbot having a time for this annoying little boy because he was so bright. And at one point he moves to Jaro when that's built in 682. So he's in on the ground floor on that. And in his early teens, it seems that at one point only he and the Abbott Chalfreth were left alive in the whole community because everybody else had been wiped out by plague. So imagine the early stages of COVID just ripping through that monastery. and only the middle-aged man and the young boy were left

to actually keep the office going and keep that little flame flickering alive on the oil and then obviously rapidly they then re-recruit. So it's a remarkable thing. We think at its heyday, when Bede was a man, there would have been about 600 months spread across the two locations. And of course, Benedict Biscop, the founder and Chalfreth, between them undertake six journeys to Rome.

On one occasion, they take 84 men with them. and they come back with carts heaving, groaning, with books, with paintings, with icons, anything they could possibly salvage. So it's like an incredible late 7th century Italian grand tour. And that's how they managed to create the resources that allows Bede to flourish. It feels like Bid might have been annoyed at missing out on a trip like that, except that they bought all this amazing stuff back for him. But I'd imagine he'd have wanted to go and see for himself.

I think he would, but he does say my greatest love in life has been to study, to write and to teach. And I think in a way, Bede was happy cultivating his garden. He was happy cultivating the garden of other young minds. So I think he would have loved it. But I think ultimately that little sanctuary of a safe place, free from having to turn out and be part of feuding armies every year. And they would go out because, of course, they're providing the humanitarian aid in the middle of situations of warfare, famine and plague.

These guys and gals in the monasteries and the armies were the ones that came out and the hermits were the ones that actually provided whatever there was in the way of education and healthcare, as well as being political diplomats. They're tied into the world. They're real, they're not locked in a cloister. But whenever Bede could, he would get to his books and his students. And that was his long view. That was laying the solid rock, the first. foundations to build on. And as someone who is remembered predominantly as an historian, he writes a history of the British Isles, one of the things you talk about in the book is we

often forget Bede's contribution to the English language. Yeah, at one point, one of the people that's taken notes from him says that, of course, Bede really loves the songs of our people. And so that means that Bede loves pop songs in the English language. He likes the early equivalent of Beowulf, etc. And even as a little boy, before he came into the monastery at 7, he would have been living in a society where he would have heard these stories. He would have heard Bard's singing,

and she got singing around the fires, and the twirling shadows and his imagination being fired by all of that. And he would have known the realities of life. There was no privacy growing up. You'd have heard people getting it on all around you and the noises in the night, etc. People didn't have their own bed.

chambers. And so he'd had exposure and continued to have exposure to the real world. It's due to be that we've got some of our earliest examples of English poetry because he captures them and includes him in his work, Cadman's him, the cowherd, who's so embarrassed at Whitby Abbey when it comes time for everybody to sing a song around the table after you've had your meal that he always runs off to the buyer to look after the cattle until one night God gives him the gift does song and you can't shut him up after that. And B's the first one to record that. And he writes his own death, him and other things, which is very beautiful or moving. And he uses his own language, old English, as well as Latin, to be able to do that. So yeah, he'll use whatever means he can to

actually engage people and get them on board to actually learn to grow and to hopefully be part of a better society. And I guess that's the difference of finding a writer in a monastery who's using vernacular language where he can because that shows he wants to connect with people in the wide world. He's not writing for a small cloistered audience who can understand Latin. He wants people to read his work. That's right. He's a great one, especially later in life, for writing letters to bishops and telling them ever so nicely that they're not really doing their job properly. And they're neglecting the people. They're looking too much at the structure and the hierarchy and not the real people and a job to be done. And he says at one point that he thinks it would be a good

idea if parish priests, given that there weren't many of them at that point, and common law marriage and things would carry on being accepted because you couldn't be expected to wait a year until a circuit priest came round to your part of the Cumbrian Moors or whatever. And so he says, wouldn't it be a good idea if parish priests were allowed to say the paternoster and the creed in their own language in Old English, because basically they don't understand the Latin, let alone their congregations. And the person that was with him in the law. And the person that was with him in the last weeks of his life. He died when he was 62 at Jaro. And they say that he spent the last weeks of his life translating the little gospel that speaks of the things that work of love, John's Gospel,

the visionary, to share with his own people in his own language. Now that's a remarkable thing, because that meant he was able to do so, free of the constraints that Wycliffe and Tyndale would face as heretics for doing the same, translating the gospel. in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. And I think in a way that might be why Bede left it to his deathbed because it's a risky thing to do because you're putting your own language up there with the sacred languages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

And that's exactly what Bede is doing. And we thought we'd lost that. It was composed on his deathbed in 735, but in the new book, I rehearse my arguments for saying that I think we do actually still retain it. And the reason we retain it is a remarkable book that Bede had a lot to do with, is the Lindisfarne Gospels that was made on Holy Island in 715 to 21, 22. And in the mid-10th century, somebody called Aldred, who's a monk who's joined the community of Cuthbert,

which by this time is in Chesterloo Street up towards Durham. And he glosses it between the lines. And he does a sort of schoolroom translation, word by word, or phrase by phrase. phrase. So you couldn't print it out as a continuous literary text. But that is thought to be the earliest surviving translation of the Gospels into the English language. And that's an incredibly important thing. And that was in a statement when the North was now part of the Dane law. And Old Norse was probably the first language of those in power, not Old English. It's a reassertion of English identity. And it's very important. And so that ordinary people could

understand when it was read to them. But Beed had started that all those years earlier. And for the last gospel, John writes some of it in the ordinary text that he uses for the gloss throughout and some of it in red ink. And work by myself and others indicates that the red ink encapsulates Beade's lost translation of John, which he undertook on his deathbed. So that pushes our earliest example of scripture translated into English right back to 735. And that's really important for the origins of the English language because, of course, dear old Alfred the Great, when he's fighting the Danes in the later 9th century, basically he has to do the PR thing and say, well, it's all me, it's all me and my scholars

that are using old English, but there's a big backstory. And Bede was writing poetry. He wrote a prose life of Cuthbert, but also a verse life of Cuthbert so people could sing it, and could remember it better, et cetera. So, yeah, it's a big figure in English language and English literature and poetry. And that's an incredible discovery. You can push that English translation of the Bible

into Old English so much further back into history and to be able to associate bead with it as well. Yeah, and talking about him being a scribe of scripture, I mean, many people have tried before and people haven't been quite convinced and my attempts might go the same way. But again, in the book, I think I've localized his handwriting. and I think we can find him, as you would expect to, as one of the scribes who wrote three

massive single-volume Bibles for Chalfreth, and one of them was taken by Chalfreth to Rome in 716 as a present for the Pope and still survives in Florence. The Codex Amiatinas came back to Britain for the first time a couple of years ago. And it's a library, it's a building of a book, takes five people to even lift it, and Bede is one of, well, probably the leading mastermind behind the incredible research work of making these books. And I found his hand as one of the scribes there and in probably another couple of books as well. So I've outlined all of that in the new work and the detective story that Bede would have loved of actually working out, which was his hand and which was the smoking quill,

if you like. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, to think that we've not only got his ideas then, but you can physically see his handwriting on a page as he expresses that. It must have been amazing to see. It really is, Matt, and it's one of those shivered down the spine moment for somebody who's anorakish about this stuff like I am and to actually get to do that with the real material. But the other thing that's really exciting that we can all do is, of course, these incredible new buildings built in the Roman fashion of dress

masonry with stained glass and wonderful sculptures and everything that he lived in are still there. They're one of the most amazing survivals of our built heritage in Britain. So if you go to St. Peter's at Mount Williamworth and you go to St. Paul's at Jaro, and you can get nice, convenient little metros out from Newcastle, and you're actually there, and there's substantial parts of those buildings. So you can actually imagine what it was like to be Beed and Chalfreth in those buildings and understand the landscape and how they feed into the long-term history of those landscapes.

These were places well positioned for international trade, for industry, for commerce, and they were part of all of that. And the remains around them of these industrial and post-industrial societies make them very fascinating places and really worthwhile visiting. Sounds like a perfect day out. Take a copy of your book and go and sit at one of those monasteries where Bede was writing all of these works and learn even more about the incredible man. Absolutely.

You can even do two in a day. They're only seven miles apart. two places with but one will. There you go. Half a book at each place. There you go. The subtitle of the book is The Theory of Everything, which to me kind of speaks to science rather than literature maybe.

Is this another aspect of what Bede is doing? Yeah, absolutely. That was my intention. It's partly just to make people do a double take. A toe, a theory of everything, is normally spoken about more in scientific circles than it is in generally in society. And basically figures such as Einstein and Steve,

even Hawking, amongst those who had experimented with trying to devise a theory of everything. So it's a theory of the whole multiverse, if you like. But they said that although they think it could exist, that their work wasn't able to encompass it, partly because they got particular views on relativity, on string theory, etc. And they couldn't square the circle. And mostly because they felt that there needed to be a sort of, quantum dimension of the spiritual, but their work couldn't encompass that.

Now, B, it's given the restrictions, obviously, of his own day and it being through a glass darkly that he's seeing these things, his theory of everything is everything. So it's art, faith, poetry, science, everything working together. Anything that, in his view, allowed you to get deeper into the mind of God and what makes it tick. And so yeah, he is fascinated with the natural world. And he is very reliant on figures such as Pliny for the Natural History when he writes his On the Nature of Things. He's looking at Isidore Seville. And he's got this sort of encyclopedic view of anything in the natural world. How does it work? How does it function? How does it relate to everything else? So he does on the nature of things,

he does on the nature of time and the computers for on the reckoning of time. Big reason for that is to solve finally big debates and schisms and rouse that are going internationally around the world then on things like dating of the big ceremonies of Easter, etc. And people were falling out, pokes were being assassinated, people were going to war with each other about it. And Bede wanted to actually say no, people have tried, this is the contribution so-and-so made. But now we've got something we can all subscribe to.

And so the computers is really important. But for example, for a boy of seven, again, going into a monastery, having just the natural world around him and his world of books and images to inspire him, he basically, although he doesn't call it gravity, he works out gravitational pull of the moon. He's got hold of a book by an ancient Roman general called Vagetius, and it's called De Rei Militari on Military Matters. And in there, it's got all sorts of fascinating stuff about siege engines, trebisions,

ballistic trajectories and things, and why do missiles go up and then come down again? And from that, B's got the cosmos above him. He knows which order the planets are in in the solar system, although like everybody in until Copernicus, he thinks it all revolves around us, rather than us revolving around the sun. But all the planets are in the right place. The Earth is round. etc. He's learnt from the ancients. And he works out that the tides seem to be related to the

waxing and waning moon. And so he develops that theory and works out gravitational pull of the moon on tide patterns and writes the first tide timetables, which were essential for people who were mostly scudding along the Northumbrian coast and islands like Linda's farm at a tidal. You really need tide time tables. And so it's practical application of the knowledge that he finds in principle in books, but then goes on to develop through practical experimentation and observation in the natural world around him. Is Bede having his own enlightenment like a thousand years too early? Absolutely. And that's why sometimes people will talk about the Northumbrian Renaissance.

And we think of the Renaissance as there's only being one in Italy in the 14th or 17th centuries. but there were lots of little renaissancees on route. And if it hadn't been for Bede, Biscop, Chalfreth and the other scholars, and Britain at this time, it's got Celts, Britain's, Anglo-Saxons. Bede creates the idea of Anglo-Saxons and English. His people were Angerian, so therefore we're Angles, we're English, and the idea of giving some unity. But they're all pulling against each other,

and there's a lot of work to be done to get them working together and reconciled and respecting each other's independence. and separate identities and cultures. And Bede is quite big in that. He's got a down on the British because they won't come into uniformity. The Irish do and the Scots, but the British, the Welsh, the Cornish, etc. Don't until quite late. So he's got a bit of a problem with them.

But other than that, it's all about how do you get them all together? How do you get them singing from the same hymn sheet? But how do you respect their own cultures? So you're not imposing your culture upon them. And so it's this that really gives the vibrancy, but also the fact that Bede and others are concerned about social justice. It's on their watch that you get the first law in the world brought on the Irish statute books because of their collaboration together, which actually protects women, children and non-competence in warfare. That was an incredible thing to do.

You get the first occurrences of moves to freeing slaves and turning society on its head. and kings who become Christian are assassinated by their bodyguards because they turned soft and Christian and forgave their enemies and made peace, or they gave their wealth away to the poor and freed slaves. It's walking the walk. It's not just talking the talk. And this is what they're about. It's radical. It's socially transforming and it's electrifying. It is. And I think striking as well that Bede is able to move himself out of of Christian dogma. He's not campaigning to convert everybody.

You don't have to be Christian to fit in Beads world. He's building a world that encompasses everybody, even if you're not Christian. Yeah, ideally he wants everybody to be Christian, but to be the sort of Christian that will be open and tolerant to other people's traditions up to a point. He recognises that if you get to a point where you've got two traditions that get to the slogging it out stage,

that's not particularly healthy. And you've got to try and convince them by reasoned argument of your point of view. But yeah, he's got a lot of comic whimsy in his work. So, for example, when he says about how the King of Northumbria, Edwin first converts, it's because he's married a Christian and it's in the marriage contract, basically. But Paul Linus goes up from Kent to convert him.

And when the king is saying to his courtiers, if you like, well, what do you think about this new teaching? It's the pagan high priest who's the first to leap up and say, well, I think we ought to give it a good old hearing because, you know, it's got a lot going for it. And quite frankly, nobody could have obeyed the old gods and their king as well as I have. But it hasn't ever done me any good, as it hasn't got me any wealth or status, your majesty. And so he's the first to go into his pagan temple and to desecrate the orders on his white horse with his weapons. And you can tell B, seeing, oh, yeah, transferable opportunities, very visible to that particular person.

But yeah, he does give us a lot of our information about paganism. And of course, things like our days of the week, part Roman and part Germanic, Woden's Day, Wednesday, and even Easter takes its name from the Germanic goddess Aostra. And so there is this thing about synthesising. And B said when the early missionaries came from Rome, and they wrote back to the Pope, who isn't the sort of Pope we think of in the Middle Ages. This is the westernmost of the Eastern Patriarchs who's left with the leaky ship of the West trying to keep it afloat. And they write to Gregor, and they say, right, we're here,

boss, they've got religions already. What do we do about it? And Gregory says, well, if there's a party going on, join in. And if it's a place where people have brought their hopes and fears for centuries, you don't destroy it unless there's actual evil human sacrifice going on. You embrace it, you make it your own. So, you know, where I live now in West Cornwall, you've got Holy Wells that have been used since deepest prehistory, since the Bronze Age, if not earlier, that we use by the Celts, and used by Christians, Celts and Anglo-Saxons and all sorts subsequently in different parts of the country that are still functioning today.

And are used by people of many different beliefs, including Christians, and those of none, as places in the landscape that they feel a connection with something bigger than themselves, as B did when he saw the natural world, and when he looked up at that incredible panoply of stars above him and wanted to work out how they related to him. He is appointed as a doctor.

of the church in 1899, how rare an honour is that for someone like Beed? He's the only English person to ever have been given it. And I think that's saying something. To be venerable, you're a doctor of the church. That means you're a really hot brain who they consider to have made a really big contribution. And Beed is certainly that. I don't know how he would have felt about that because he comes across as being very self-effacing and quite humble in his own writings.

And he likes women too. He gives a lot of page space to women and the role that they're playing in society. And, of course, for women, if you didn't want to have to go through the trial of giving birth to 14, 15 children and burying an awful lot of them, the opportunity of going into an abbey and becoming a leading intellectual yourself and a diplomat and a healer and an educator gave women an incredible scope as well. And Bede really gives them a fair crack. of the whip. And I think it's right of all of the religious writers in Britain that he should have been honoured in that way, because he does mark that synthesis of the secular world with the visionary world of a perfected society in an eternity to come and how the quantum

effect works to actually relate past, present and future in that sort of dynamic whole. And I think well deserved, Bede. Well done. I feel like I ought to ask, did Bede have any failings? Because it sounds like everything is a positive so far. Well, he was once accused of heresy, which I suppose his contemporaries saw as a failing. He got entrapped into having dinner with a lot of friends of a very powerful churchman called Wilfred of York. And he had a very different vision of how you constructed the church and society in the Wild West that was written at this time. and he didn't have much time for the contribution of the Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Wales and Scotland, which Bede did.

So they were out to get him, basically. And they were at dinner, and the conversation starts turning a bit nasty and a bit pointed. And you can hear in Bede's words on the page his confusion and his disbelief as gradually he's entrapped and he's being accused of the heresy of innovation. Because in the Middle Ages, you stood on the shoulders of giants to see, further. It was like law of precedent. You made new laws out of old laws. You did research on previous things and that took you further on the road forward, which Bede did. And it was always very careful to acknowledge your sources. And the problem was those accusing him of innovation

and saying, well, where are all these ideas coming off in the top of your head? They hadn't heard of Vagetius. They hadn't heard of Ephraim the Syrian and John Chrysostom, et cetera. And they didn't know that Bede was citing them in his work. And so he gets his revenge by inventing foot notes. So in future, whenever he wrote anything, he'd write in the margins the initials of the authors that he was reliant upon for some of his knowledge. And he would write little lightning flashes in the margins that are like a yellow marker pen that would mark when he was quoting from something else. And he's always very careful to cite his sources, etc. It made him a better a more careful scholar, and it didn't stop him taking risks and criticising those in real

positions of power subsequently. So I don't actually see it in any way as a fault. I see it as part of his strengths. Yeah, and even if it was a fault, he's just invented footnotes out of the fault in his character. But the big one that people normally say is that he's not very pro the British. That's the Romano-British continuum. And Welsh, Wales, means strangers or foreigners in Old English and because they were still actively in enmity with each other and you'd be put to death if you showed somebody from either group around your territory, you'd be killed as a spy, basically, or a collaborator. So he's got a blind spot about that, but he wants them to come into a universal concord and reconciliation.

And so he does try and work to convince people about the way to do that. And of course, he has a big part, I think, in inspiring the making of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which is made, I think, by one of his closest friends, Bishop Adfrith of Lindisfarme. And although Ayadfrith did the incredible work single-handedly, a lot of it is inspired by Bede. And when you look at those incredibly beautiful pages, Bede has got this neo-platinist view of beauty is truth. And so when Ayadfif creates these incredible pages with a vision of the whole of the flora and fauna and the elements of creation, all beautifully harmonised and held together by

the word. This isn't Jesus meek and mold. This is the cosmic logos that was there at Big Bang. And that vision of a unity to come in eternity, even if we can't quite ever manage it here, because we're human, is every bit as convincing as an envisioning as the images produced by the Hadron Pallider of how matter works in the quantum of eternity and the life of the spirit. And so I think the beauty of the Lindisfarne Gospels is an attesting visual embodiment of a lot of Beads' vision that he shared and developed with a adrift and is a blueprint for going forward if we care to look at it and be part of that lovely, writhing mass of the whole of creation. What a wonderful place to end. I mean, it sounds like Beade did.

deserved his title venerable, but we're doing him a disservice by just remembering him as the father of history, because it sounds like he's the father of so much more, a genuine medieval polymath. Yeah, indeed. And his history of the English church and people is basically about putting us in our picture of the bigger view of history of the ancients and the early Christian church, but also giving an identity to something that was totally amorphous. And, you know, as I say, it's a bit like the Wild West, lots of protectionism thing. And how do you shape? that into a stable society that can take its place in that eternal vision. Well, thank you so much, Michelle. I mean, you've done a fantastic job of bringing Bede to life.

I definitely want to go and visit both monasteries and read half the book again in each of the monasteries. You've really done injustice, I think, and put flesh on the bones of someone whose name we probably know, but we don't know enough about. Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so, Matt, and do go, I mean, the northeast just rocks. But Bede wrote about all sorts of things. And one of his biggest suppliers of information, where the barking nuns, or rather the nuns are barking. So there are all sorts of places where we can go and visit places that have got these deep roots. And there's still often incredible things to see and to experience there. So yeah, get out from behind your screens and

get out there and walk it and live it, guys. Incredible. That's wonderful. Thank you so much, Michelle. Michelle's book, Beed and The Theory of Everything is out now. If you'd like to know even more about this fascinating polymath. There are a new episode of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe

or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us out. Anyway, I'd better let you go.

I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.