Andy Orchard

Venerable father of English history

Henrietta Leyser’s brisk journey through the seven kingdoms of Dark Age Britain centres on the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian monk who famously wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People while remaining entirely cloistered for 60 years

issue 15 August 2015

It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when its hero entered the monastery at Wearmouth, Northumbria at the age of seven and, as far as we know, never left. Not that Bede was entirely parochial, distributing what was then an exotic luxury, pepper, amongst his peers on his deathbed. But his was essentially a virtual and vicarious world, reliant on a network of informants and an unrivalled library largely collected by its founder, Benedict Biscop, here memorably described as ‘the “millionaire” monk’, even if the more than 200 books we know Bede knew will seem small beer to most of us with bigger bookshelves.

But unlike modern browsers, who tend to flit and sip, Bede’s intellectual curiosity was more than kindled: he really knew his books backwards, and in the best-known of the many that he wrote himself, the characteristically precisely titled Historia Ecclesisatica Gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’), he offered history with a deliberately narrow focus on the Church on the one hand and the English on the other.

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