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 Š Rowan Williams and Benedicta Ward The moral right of the author has been asserted No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the Publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2354-1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

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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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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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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 mercenaries 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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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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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 initiative, 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 unobtrusively cleans up the style and slightly lowers the temperature, so that we can follow what is going on without too much of the grandstanding that makes Gildas such hard going.

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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 complicated 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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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 traditions 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 hagiography), 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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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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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 reluctance 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 criticized 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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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 monasteries 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

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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 wellknown 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 worldliness, 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

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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 monasteries 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 postRoman Britain, and has had to accept that the material remains offer nothing at all to support Gildas’ story of invasion and wholesale

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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 interruption 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.

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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 remembered in various Irish sources as Finnian24 wandered between British

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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

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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 authenticity. 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

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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

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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 exceptionalism’ 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 recalcitrant 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

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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 intelligible 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 authorities 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

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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.

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Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People An Introduction and Selection Rowan Williams and Benedicta Ward 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 difficult 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.

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.

PUBLICATION JULY 2012 Hardback / 234 x 156mm / 978 1 4411 23541 / 200pp / £16.99 All trade orders to MDL, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hants, RG21 6XS Tel: +44 (0) 1256 302 692; Fax +44 (0) 1256 812 521; orders@macmillan.co.uk This is an uncorrected proof copy and is not for sale. All specifications are provisional. It should not be quoted without comparison to the finally revised text. This does not reflect the quality, page size or thickness of the finished text.

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