In Our Time - The Venerable Bede

Episode Date: November 25, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Venerable Bede. In 731 AD, in the most far-flung corner of the known universe, a book was written that represented a height of scholarship and erudition that was not to be equalled for centuries to come. It was called the Ecclesiastical History of the Angle Peoples and its author was Bede. A long way from Rome, in a monastery at Jarrow in the North East of England, his works cast a light across the whole of Western Civilisation and Bede became a bestseller, an internationally renowned scholar and eventually a saint. His Ecclesiastical History has been in copy or in print ever since it was written in the eighth century and his edition of the Bible remains the Catholic Church's most authoritative Latin version to this day.How did Bede achieve such ascendancy from such an obscure part of Christendom? And what was so remarkable about his work?With Richard Gameson, Reader in Medieval History at the University of Kent at Canterbury; Sarah Foot, Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Sheffield; Michelle Brown, a manuscript specialist from the British Library.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 731 AD, in what Pope Gregory called the outermost edge of the known world, a book was written that reached a dazzling height of scholarship and erudition not to be equal to centuries to come.

It was called the ecclesiastical history of the English people. Its author was Beed, a monk. Working far away from Rome in a monastery at Jarrow in the northeast of England, his many and varied works cast a light across the whole of Western civilization, and Bede became an internationally renowned scholar and eventually a saint. His ecclesiastical history has been in copy or in print ever since it was written in the 8th century, and his addition of the Bible remains the Catholic Church's most authoritative Latin version to this day. Dante put him in power.

Paradise. How did Beade achieve such ascendancy from such an obscure part of Christendom? How did his work define the English? And what was so remarkable about his work? With me to discuss the Venerable Beed is Sarah Foote, Professor of Early Medieval History at Sheffield University, Michelle Brown, a manuscript special from the British Library and lay canon at St. Paul's Cathedral. And Richard Gameson, reader in medieval history at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Richard Gamson, can you just headline a few more in three or four sentences? Beed's great achievements. Beed's great achievement was to write comprehensively about the history and interpretation of the Bible for his own day,

and also to write comprehensively about the history, nature, and spiritual identity of the people of his own day. And such was the attractiveness, such was the power of these words, that the circulation of his works was formidable in the early Middle Ages, in the high Middle Ages, and even in the early printing era. And he was a genius that we met in the so-called Dark Ages, hadn't met one for a long time, and were not to meet again for a long time. He was certainly England's greatest historian prior to the Norman conquest, and most people would think in the medieval centuries as a whole.

Right. Let's get cracking from the beginning. The monastery where Bede spent most of his life was a double monastery, a monk Wymouth Jaro, 10 miles apart. How and when was that established? We're very well informed about the establishment of Weymouth Jaro, both through direct and indirect sources. Bede himself wrote a life of the abbots, the early abbots of the community. Looking at Bede's works critically, we can see the things that he himself had access to,

and of course there are significant surviving remains from that period at both sites. When was that monastery established? It was established by a noble Northumbring called Benedict Biscop in the 6th 70s. He first of all founded monk. Weymouth, Benedict Biscope was a cosmopolitan character and after a youth in the service of King Oswey of Northumbria, he travelled the known world, Frankia, he went to Rome several times. Interestingly, his foundation of Weirmouth, Jaro, seems to have come because of the resources he had gathered on his travels. We're told by Bede that he went to the then-king of Northumbria,

showing the relics and the books, and because of this impressive amount of resources he had, he was given the land for the first foundation, which was Weymouth in the early six-seventhies, and then ten years later, by which time he had gathered more resources, he was given a second site at Jero. One of the astonishing things about that period is how much these people travelled, how far they went, how often they went. And Biscop, to focus in on what interests us, he collected a fantastic, and I'm using that word delivered,

a fantastic library for the period for the time. And he was prepared to pay for it. He once gave a thousand acres of Latin for one manuscript. Now then, just tell us about that library that Bede would have encountered when he went in. The library of Wiamath Jaro was unquestionably one of the greatest, if not the greatest of its day, and the greatest in England at the end of the 7th century. We're repeatedly told by Bede that whenever Biscop went on his many journeys to Rome or travelled through Gaul, he gathered books. He bought them, he begged them from people.

On his way to Rome, he would acquire some in Gaul. and leave them there to collect on his return. Now, I can't give you absolute figures for how many books were held at Weymouth Jarrow, but it was a substantial number. Well, the figure I've read is around about 700. Is that sort of reasonable? I suspect that's too high.

We're probably talking about somewhere between 2 and 300, but to put that in perspective, medieval libraries were small by our standards. So, for instance, the common library at the University of Cambridge in the 15th century at its recorded peak, numbered 330 books. The key thing is, within the 200 to 300 volumes that we assume that he had,

was almost everything that you needed for Christian learning and culture of the day. He could have a comprehensive holding of the lives of the fathers. So he got the monasteries, established by the priestry, we've got it in, we know where it is and we've got this terrific library. Seraph Wood, he entered, Bede, entered this monastery

when he was seven years old. There's some controversy over his origins. He wrote an extremely brief autobiographical note. It doesn't say much about his origins. What's your view of where he came from? We know he came from the district, but what is his background? We know he came from the area of the monastery. One must assume that he was probably of noble birth

because it's hard to understand why his relatives would otherwise have wanted to give him to the religious life. But all he tells us is that some of his relations gave him to be an oblate to religion when he was seven years old. and that's all we know about him, that they would probably have paid some sort of diary for him, we might expect. But again, he gives us no information about that at all because he goes on immediately to say that thereafter he spent the whole of his life in that monastery working and praying to the service of God. Would it be unlikely that someone, age seven, who was thought to be bright, the tradition established in the church then and before and went on centuries since, need not necessarily have come from an aristocratic background. I'm not opening any class warfare here.

I'm just sort of questioning whether absolutely necessarily he should have come from an aristocratic. We know aristocratics had a huge influence on the early church, massive, purchase of land and so on. But is it, are you as sure as you seem to be? It can't be absolutely certain what Beed's origins were. But I think one of the most important things about early English monasticism is how well it does implant itself into contemporary aristocratic Germanic society. These are households of people from more. more or less the same kind of background, who choose to live a lifestyle which in outward form

is not dissimilar to that they would live in an aristocratic household, but bounded within the shape of the monastic ruler and a life devoted to prayer. When Bede in his history talks about people who are not of noble origin, he does draw attention to the fact that they came from more lowly backgrounds, and that might perhaps suggest that they were more unusual in the cloister. It might equally be to honour them. I mean, he is not particularly sympathetic to the,

the warrior aristocrats in his book, is he? And he himself did not progress, as you would have expected an aristarchist, to progress inside the monastery, to any sort of high office whatsoever. At the age of 30, he became a priest because of the Christ age, 30, and he stayed a priest. Yes, he was ordained to the deaconate at 19.

He becomes a priest at 30, and he never advances beyond that level. But I'm not sure that that would be, in Bede's mind, remotely any sorts of sense of failure. A bishop. He didn't want to live in the world in the household of kings. He wanted to serve God within the quiet and confines of his own cloister. Michelle Brown, he's in the monastery. Can you take us through what his day was like? He was devoted as, as I said in the introduction I said before,

there's no evidence that he strayed more than a mile and two away from a monastery's entire life. So there he is in this place. What's it like and what does he do? Well, he is constrained by the divine office. That forms the structure of the day, the hours of day and night, at which time the private dialogue with God that is publicly enacted within the monastic community takes place in choir, where you go into church, you engage in communal prayer and notably in the singing of the Psalms and the reading of the lectures. Within that structure, however, you had a number of other activities during the course of the Monastic Day that had to be observed.

You had your prayer and study time. You had time for physical labour, for testing of humility, and that sort of hard labour aspect of your vocation. But within that framework, if you showed any predisposition to having a strength in a certain area, that would be allowed to come through and to develop. Can we just be really, Basically, is he living in a cell?

It's the 8th century. He's got candlelight. I mean, sort of like a physical thing and what's going up, up on the northeast. Not the best climate in Europe. And Gregory had something in what he said about Osloat out here. So he's there. Is it a sort of, is it a miserable physical existence? I think basically, compared to what other people are coming from at the period, it's one of the most attractive and exotic lifestyles on offer.

And the monastery, the combined monastery at which Bede is serving, is one of the best endowed. It's one of the most extraordinary in terms of its architectural statement, in terms of the visual imagery, the smell, the sounds of the place. Every monastery of the period would have had a rather different character. This one is, if you like, one of the more exotic in the Mediterranean and as opposed to the Desert Father traditions. So to have the candlelight, the imagery, the sounds, to have had somebody like John the Arch Cantor,

the Pope's own private singing master, come and teach the chant to people like Bede, would have opened up vast new vistas. And again, Bede shows that he's got a great appreciation of song and culture from the secular stance as well. He gives the impression of somebody who knew about the Mead Hall, the vernacular songs on his deathbed. One of the things is a song in Old English about death,

the sort of thing that people would have heard outside. but transported into this wonderful exotic framework, but also a very disciplined and structured framework. It gave a whole new vista. He's doing eight services a day still, and he's doing that, and he's perhaps doing his labour, and so on. And yet he's written over 30 books, not only editing the Bible,

books on dating, on spelling, on poetry, on natural history. And this drive is a core monastic drive and his own work drive as well. Sarah, Sarah Foote, We remember, I mean, be, well, remember, celebrate, read and continue to, he's in motion in our life, in our intellectual lives as the father of English history. But in his day, he perhaps thought that his greatest contribution was his editing of the Bible, which then went to Rome and it was the Vatican's favorite Bible until late last century. It's still there, still the favorite Bible, but used until 1963.

Can you tell us how important that was for him and what he did with that Bible? I think for Bede, the Bible is the core text for explaining the Christian message. And for him explaining the Bible to his contemporaries was a key part of his work as a teacher. He was concerned that that the text should be well edited and that there should be a good quality Latin text available. But he was also very concerned that the meaning of that text should be explained to his contemporaries. And if you read the list of the works that he said that he had written and that he appends to the end of his history

when he gives his own brief autobiography, which is almost a bibliography of his work. He starts with a long list of commentaries on the books of the Bible, explaining what the word of God means and how that message might be lived out within his own age. A key point that people may not realize is, of course, that having a whole Bible was extremely rare at this time anyway. The Bible in the early middle ages circulated as independent books,

and therefore... Like the Gospels and the Pentateuch, yeah. and the Pentateau. And the fact that Benedict Biscop had acquired the text of a whole Bible and several texts was remarkable in itself and then Bede and other scholars at Wyrmouth Jarrow are able to produce their own revised standard version, which is the copy that is then produced one for Weymouth,

one for Jaro, and a third magnificent giant copy that is sent off to Rome. There is a strong connection between, a much strong connection between Rome and this part of the world. call it England for the sake of getting on with this discussion, than in many other places because of the great Roman mission, which Gregory sent and the Senator Whitby, which will come in a moment, and so and so forth. Why was his Bible so much more elegant as it seems

and just so much more long-lasting than other editions and translations? Is that something that we can't describe, or do we know why? Have scholars looked over it and said, yes, it's a better idea? I think, again, it's the amount of deliberation and thought, and if you like literary and scholarly sensitivity that's actually gone into that and a true appreciation of what it meant to be part of that ongoing process of transmission and revelation that took you back

in direct line of succession to the evangelist, Christ, the prophets, etc., yourself. He's not copying any one Mediterranean text exclusively. The role of the work of Cassiodorus, for example, has been cited as one of his core sources, is the little Neapolitan gospel book from Naples from the 6th century, which was used to inform the gospel sections of the three Chelf with Bibles and the Lindisfan Gospels. All of these are well rehearsed.

But the Great Chelfwith Bibles, these three single-volume Bibles, whenever you get single-volume Bibles, it's always part of a quite remarkable attempt to try and take on that process of transmission when Alquin and others have done similar at different periods. And for Bede, I think to actually... get a team together who could... Oh, we'd work with a team on this, would you work with you?

Oh, undoubtedly. I think when you look at the number of hands within the fragments and the Codex Amia team that survive... In hands, we're talking literally. Yeah, we're talking literally about the number of scribal hands, but also from his own tradition of actually being engaged as a scholar and scribe and not being necessarily divorced functions. And so every aspect of the recension that he is producing has been as carefully studied and researched using access to as much

many different sources as are available in one of the best libraries of Europe at the time. Right. The history of the English nation, English peoples, this is an massive enterprise. Can you just give us an outline of what it was, Richard, what he was trying to do there? Briefly, what did he set out to do? In five books, he attempts to give the history of the English people's conversion to Christianity. So he starts off in book one with the Roman background and the way that the British inhabitants are overrun by Anglo-Saxon invaders who are pagan. And at the end of book one, we see the arrival of a new hope

in the form of Gregory the Great's mission to Kent with Augustine. In book two, the story of the mission to Kent is fulfilled and it moves to Northumbria. In book three, this is Beade's golden age picture of the church under Aden and Oswald. In book four, in the aftermath of the Synod of Whitby, we're given us... That brings in the Celtic element of that in. book three does. In book four, in the aftermath of this Synod of Whitby,

we see the institutional regularisation of the church under a new Archbishop Theodore. And then interestingly, in book five, though we do meet good figures, the tone becomes darker. And one of the striking things is as Bede moves towards his own day, he becomes a raw reticent about particular facts and more critical in tone.

So he's telling ecclesiastical history, but he's also bringing in a great deal of, History, history, social history, and we've got the Romans going up there, we've got the Celts coming down, particularly to Northumbria, and a lot more besides. Sarah, how did his historical methods differ

from those of his predecessors? Why was he the father of English history? Is he the father of English history? Can you talk about his own? He must be the father of English history because there is nobody in England attempting to write history before his time. His method is perhaps partly based

on the church historian of Constantine, great Eusebius, who had written a history of the development of the church until the moment of Constantine's conversion. And to some extent, I think it could be argued that Bede thought that he was carrying on that story about God's plan for humanity and the way in which that is translated to the English as a new people to be saved. And Bede's method depends very much on his insisting in telling us how much what he has to say is true. He has a great deal to say about where the sources of his information were. Can you give us some examples of those?

He provides a lot of text in his history. About a seventh of the text as a whole is copied out passages from other texts that people have given him, particularly letters that came from the Papal Archive. Representatives from the Church of Canterbury were sent to Rome and copied out letters for him. And then he includes the letters of Gregory and later popes in his history. When he has an account to give where he's dependent on

an oral witness, he will always tell us who that witness was. So and so a very holy bishop told this to me. We have a hierarchy of witnesses among whom... And latterly, by which I mean over the last few decades, a couple of generations, we've learned to trust oral history more and more, haven't we? Yes, we have. And Bede has a great deal of respect for the personal testimony, particularly people who witnessed events, those who were there when many Northumbrians were baptized in the River Trent,

those who were present on the occasion when Edwin decided that he would accept the faith. And several passages in the text, he puts words in people's mouth. He gives speeches that people gave, the high priest, the pagan high priest, coiffy, who realizes the uselessness, the vanity of the pagan religion

and recognizes that the truth and the way forward is through Christianity. After the story of the swallowing through the hall. And the famous story of the swallet through it. How far can we trust him then? briefly, Bishar. How far can we trust what he says? I mean, for instance, he doesn't say much about Pender of Mercia, who is a pagan.

For instance, he doesn't much like Wilfred, my particular like I said, the great warrior bishop who charging all over the place, because he doesn't like warrior bishops who charge all over the place with the retinues of soldiers. So how far can we, how far is he giving us

the whole picture? How far is that? Well, this isn't an objective journalistic account, if indeed there is any such thing as an objective journalistic account. What he's doing here is showing God's purpose for the universe the role of the English and their neighbours within that. He is concerned in presenting role models socially as well. So obviously spending time covering the career of those who are less edifying,

who are going to provide less of a model of government for kings such as Chal Wolf of Nufumbria to whom the book is dedicated. Well, it's providing role models for kings because he, He anticipates being read by kings. He's trying to teach the ways of God to kings in that sense, isn't it? He's envisaging a society and how it might be, which is implied through his account of a flawed society and how it's evolved. But he's always pointing implicitly to ways in which that can be improved.

He's also very concerned about his sources, and this is where his history writing isn't distinct from his scriptural authority. He invents footnoting, for example, because at one point in his career, he's almost excommunicated for daring to engage in innovation. Yeah, this is interesting, yeah. And so this is basically because his audience aren't as well read as he. And innovation was a sin because you had to proceed from precedent, hadn't you? Yeah, it's Tridio and Innovatio, which isn't as repressive as we might think.

The best sort of innovation actually has and will always come from an engagement with achievements and lessons of the past. He lived in a powerful kingdom, Northumbria, with very, very powerful kings, and mostly, we must regard, mostly pagan, and savage, at influential court on which his monasteries, the monasteries were to a great extent dependent. How far was he influenced, Richard, by the politics of the day? I mean, I suppose at its crudest, you would say, was there any sense in which he was a propagandist for that time, as this is. distinct from the church, which was being explained. He dedicates the ecclesiastical history to a king, to King Cherwolf. Not perhaps a good choice, because Cherwolf had political difficulties almost immediately, was deposed, re-regained his throne, but subsequently gave it all up for a monastic life at Lindisfarne.

But Bede is very clear, as you say, that the favour of kings is necessary. And throughout the ecclesiastical history, there are moral messages for kings that good kings prosper, bad kings are mad, bad or preferably both. Does he dare to criticise the Nossumbria dynasty? His warning to kings is very sharp because at the beginning of book three, he tells us that there were two kings before the Blessed Oswald who apostatized, who gave up the Christian faith. And he then says something that seems strange to us but will have been terrifying at the time

that because of this, they are written out of history, that nobody includes them in the reckoning. Their names are to be forgotten forever. Now one has to see this in relation to a culture which, as Beowulf shows us, memory was very important and that after your death, the deeds of a great man should live on. The church brought this new power, this new technology of writing, and Bede is here warning kings very clearly that the pen is mightier than the sword.

One of the set pieces which is very, very graphic and enjoyable in this, Sarah Ford is the Synod of Whitby, the Synod of Whitby, where, in essence, the Celtic Church and the Roman Church clash with their, and their differences, let us reduce them to the dating of Easter, which is profoundly important because when Christ died and was resurrected, and the tonsure, the way you, I display your faith through the cut of your. Now, what do you think, does he give it inordinate importance in the book? Can you describe it more than I have?

I think in many ways the Synod of Wicbis is the narrative climax of the book. It's almost the hinge around which the whole story falls. Because for Bede, this is one of the most important moments. It's the moment when the English church decides that it will align itself liturgically with Rome and not follow what Bede thinks to be the path of error. And for Bede, of course, the Roman answer is right because this. This is the Church of St Peter. And forbid it is St Peter who holds the gates of heaven

who will recognise the faithful when they come to his gates. And if Peter says this is how we should celebrate Easter, then that is the way that it should be done. And he allows, it puts speeches in the mouths of those who are there and Avan is allowed to speak on behalf of the Celtic Church. And Aethan says, this is what St. Columba did. This is how we calculate the date at Iona. And then there's a rather sad moment when,

the king said, I've heard about St. Peter and I've heard about St. Colomber and outside these shores, who's St. Columba? Therefore, I side with St. Peter. And I think the implicit message we're getting here from Bede is that when you get to heaven and Peter says, who are you?

If you hold up your hand and say, I'm an Englishman, he'll open the pearly gates and let you in. That is the beginning of the idea. The idea is implanted there, which runs right through English history, that English are a chosen people in the way that Israel were a chosen people. They are special people. And this is the specialness of Englishness.

That's right. The word, do-d-d-d-do-do-do-do begins there, doesn't it? Yes, yes, it does. But of course for B, it begins in the slave market in Rome when Gregory saw the angel-faced boys and realized that this was a people at the edge of the world who was there to be saved. So the idea of Englishness is constant throughout the whole history.

This is margin and centre again. We started with on the edge of the known world. And the idea that once the apostolic mission is, complete, it will have reached the outer edges of the known world. Again, this prophecy of completion. Alfred the Great, who can be said to have saved English language, if not

the English nation, because it didn't exist then, had this translated into Old English. Or it was translated in his period. Yes, he had it. Well, let us assume he ran the show. He ran everything else with the Navy and the Army wanting to run translation, the publishing house at Winchester. And

that was one of the dramatic move into further to use to use Michel's into the sort of away from Europe but in in our terms into the mainstream this was now central to

the way that we began, we the English began to understand ourselves yes it was a selective translation and it has to be said that it enjoyed limited circulation in comparison with the Latin version that survives in 200 manuscripts as opposed to about eight manuscripts but yes it provides

a different audience with access to Beade's words. Beed might have approved, because of course at the end of his life he was translating, so we're told, the Gospel of St John. On the other hand, throughout all his works, and even in the ecclesiastical history, Bede was deeply critical of the English for their laziness in learning foreign languages. So his approval of making it accessible would probably have been tinged with regret that it was pandering to the English lack of ability to read that in. But I think Alfred is using this idea that there is an overarching English.

English sense of identity to help relate to contemporary political circumstances. There is no ethnic group, the English, but they are a religious saved group. It is very interesting. The Old English Bee does not include the chapter that gives the detailed account of the Senate of Whitby. Would you agree that it is, Richard, to sort of bring this towards an end, that starting as one thing as the religious enterprise, Michelle most eloquently pointed out, It becomes another thing. It becomes a historical destiny.

Yes, he defines something which arguably doesn't exist in his own day, but which continues to serve needs in subsequent eras, and it's being read for completely different purposes in the aftermath of the Norman conquest, and we can still read today for all sorts of different interesting reasons. Bede, I think, designed the book to be read chapter by chapter almost as a liturgical devotional text, and it gives itself to detail.

held scrutiny and I think we can still learn much from it today. I think that's a very good way to come out of this programme. Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you for listening. And next week we'll be talking about Carl Jung. Thanks a lot. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.c.com.com.