Ecumenical Commemoration
Priest, Monk of Jarrow, & Doctor of the Church
May 25 · d. 735
also known as The Venerable Bede
Bede was a monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, given to the house at seven and buried there at sixty-two. He wrote commentaries on Scripture, treatises on the reckoning of time, two Lives of Cuthbert, and the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which remains the primary source for the conversion of England. He died on the evening of 25 May 735, having just finished dictating an Old English translation of the Gospel of John. Leo XIII named him a Doctor of the Church in 1899, the only Englishman among them.
Bede was seven years old when his kinsfolk gave him to the monastery, and he never really left it again. He said so himself, near the end, in the last chapter of his great book: born in the territory of that same monastery, given at seven to be educated by Abbot Benedict and afterwards by Ceolfrith, "spending all the remaining time of my life a dweller in that monastery." It is one of the few things we know about him for certain, because he is the one who told us. His parents are not named. His birthplace is not named. What we have is a boy handed over at the edge of the world, in a kingdom that had been pagan within living memory, and a life that stayed where it was put.
The place he was put was extraordinary, though he could not have known that yet. Benedict Biscop, who founded the house at Wearmouth in 674 and its sister at Jarrow a few years later, had crossed to Rome five times and come back each time loaded with books, relics, and craftsmen: glaziers and masons brought over from Gaul to build in stone and glass at the far northern rim of Christendom. Bede grew up inside that library. When the church at Jarrow was dedicated on 23 April 685, the stone recording it named King Ecgfrith and Abbot Ceolfrith, and that stone is still in the wall of the building today.
Then, a year later, the plague came to Jarrow. An account written at Bede's own house not long afterward says the sickness carried off everyone who could read, or preach, or sing the antiphons and the responses, until only the abbot and one boy were left, and that the two of them kept the whole round of the daily office between them. The account never says who the boy was. Later readers thought it must have been Bede, and it may have been; the source does not say. But it is the right picture for the life that followed either way: the office kept, whoever else has gone.
He was ordained deacon at nineteen, which was young, and priest at thirty, both times by Bishop John, at the bidding of Abbot Ceolfrith. Then he wrote. He wrote on grammar and rhetoric, on the reckoning of time and the shape of the calendar, on book after book of the Bible for his friend Bishop Acca of Hexham. In 708 monks at a feast at Hexham accused him of heresy over his dating of the Nativity, and Bede, who could have let it go, answered within days in writing and asked that his letter be read aloud to the bishop who had heard the charge. In 731 he finished the Ecclesiastical History of the English People and sent it to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, who had already read a draft. And he built that book the way a historian builds one: Albinus, abbot at Canterbury, supplied what was known of the mission in Kent, and the priest Nothhelm carried it north, having first gone to Rome and searched the papal archive for Gregory's own letters. Bede sat in one room in Northumbria and had the archives of Rome brought to him.
Three years later, six months before he died, he wrote to Bishop Ecgbert at York and told him the truth about his own province. Teach the Creed and the Lord's Prayer in English to everyone who has no Latin, he said, adding that he had often done it himself. Make more bishops, so people are actually visited. And break up the places that call themselves monasteries and are nothing of the kind, bought from kings with money so that laymen could hold farms and villages and answer to no one: "wasps, though they can make combs, yet store them with poison instead of honey." He was an old man in a cell at the edge of the sea, naming the corruption of his church to its face.
The last fortnight we know almost hour by hour, because his pupil Cuthbert wrote it down within weeks and sent it to a fellow monk. Bede could hardly breathe. He taught anyway, every day, and dictated an Old English translation of the Gospel of John, wanting it finished. On the last afternoon he called for the priests of the house and gave away everything he had, which was a small box of spices, some napkins, and incense, asking them to pray for him. They wept, and he told them: "It is time for me, if it be my Maker's will, to be set free from the flesh, and come to Him Who, when as yet I was not, formed me out of nothing." The boy taking dictation, Wilbert, said there was one sentence left. Bede said to write it. The boy said it was written. And Bede said, "It is well, thou hast said truly, it is finished," and asked to be held up facing the place in his cell where he used to pray. He died there on the floor, chanting the Gloria Patri, on the evening of Wednesday 25 May 735, the eve of Ascension.
He had finished the sentence. That is the thing to hold on to: a man who had spent fifty-five years in one house learning, teaching, and writing, given just enough breath to get to the end of the page, and then turned toward the corner where he prayed.
You will probably not be given one room and sixty years in it. But you will be given something smaller than you hoped, and the question Bede puts to you is whether you can be faithful inside it without waiting for the larger thing. He learned, taught, and wrote in the same house he was handed to as a child, kept the daily office through plague and through fame, and spent his last afternoon finishing one sentence of the Gospel in a language his neighbors could read. None of it was chosen; almost all of it was fruitful. What is the work in front of you today that you have been treating as too small to be your vocation?
Bede is that rare early medieval saint whose life rests mainly on his own pen and on an eyewitness. The spine of the biography is the closing chapter of the Ecclesiastical History (V.24), written about 731, where he gives his birth in the monastery's territory, his fosterage at seven, his ordinations at nineteen and thirty, and his own list of his works. Alongside it stands the letter of his pupil Cuthbert on Bede's death, written within weeks of it in 735, which supplies the entire deathbed narrative. His own Historia Abbatum gives the founding of Wearmouth in 674 and the abbatial succession; an anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, written at the same house, gives the plague of 686 and Ceolfrith's departure for Rome in 716. Physical evidence corroborates the setting: the Jarrow dedication stone of 23 April 685 is contemporary, dated, and still in place.
The dates that scholarship supplies rather than the sources are worth naming as such. The birth year, 672 or 673, is an inference from a single stated age (his fifty-ninth year, at the time of writing) against a completion date of about 731; the one-year spread turns on inclusive reckoning and on a birthday Bede never mentions. A twelfth-century Durham tradition associated with Simeon of Durham gives 677 instead, and there is a specific explanation for how that number arose: the closing pages of the Chronological Epitome were added by a later hand, and were not recognized as such. The year Jarrow was founded is genuinely unresolved between 681, 682, and 684-5, and no consensus should be manufactured. The dating of several works, including De Temporibus (703) and De Temporum Ratione (about 723), rests on modern reconstruction rather than dated colophons.
The death date deserves plain statement because two dates circulate and neither is an error. Cuthbert's letter places Bede's death on the eve of Ascension Day, and Ascension in 735 fell on 26 May; the eve of the 26th is the 25th. But by the reckoning that begins the liturgical day at Vespers, Ascension had already begun when he died that evening. Hence both 25 and 26 May appear in the literature. The feast is a separate question: when Leo XIII decreed on 13 November 1899 that Bede be honored throughout the Church as a Doctor, the feast was set on 27 May, because 26 May belonged to Augustine of Canterbury, who also died on that day; the calendar reform of Paul VI moved it in 1969 to 25 May for the same reason, and Anglican calendars, including this one, keep it there. Orthodox and some other calendars still keep 27 May.
Modern readers meet two hard places in Bede, and both should be named rather than smoothed. The first is that the same book which cites named correspondents and hedges what it has only by common report is also full of visions and cures at the tombs of the saints. That is not inconsistency so much as a different category of claim: following Gregory the Great, Bede's world understood miracles as evidentiary and instructive, a step toward truer faith, and the History was written on that understanding. The second is harsher. At II.2 Bede reports that after the Battle of Chester King Æthelfrith had some twelve hundred British monks killed, unarmed men present only to pray, and closes the episode with a sentence in his own voice: "Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of the holy Bishop Augustine." Bede is our only source that the massacre happened at all, and that framing sentence is his own, not a king's speech reported. It is his Northumbrian and pro-Roman commitments at their least attractive, and it belongs in any honest account of him. So does a related silence: he reports the trade in English children at the Roman slave market, the scene of Gregory's famous pun at II.1, as unremarked background, and never turns to look at it. He does not defend slavery; he simply does not raise the question. A further modern observation, and a fair one, is that the Ecclesiastical History is thin on Mercia and Wessex, omits Boniface, and is reticent about Bishop Wilfrid. "Father of English history" is a title earned by method, by chronology and source-citation and named informants, and it was never a claim to disinterested completeness.
Bede was never formally canonized. There was no process, no examined miracles, no postulator; his standing rests on a devotion old enough that the Church simply recognized it, the pattern known as equipollent canonization. Popular accounts that say Leo XIII canonized him in 1899 have it slightly wrong: what happened that November was the grant of the title Doctor of the Church, following a petition begun in 1859 by Cardinal Wiseman and the English bishops. The honorific "Venerable" is far older, attested within two generations of his death by Alcuin and by a council at Aachen in the 830s, which called him a venerable and admirable teacher of these modern times. Two later legends explain the title more charmingly than the record does: that a monk carving the epitaph could not fit a word to the metre, went to bed, and found venerabilis filled in by morning; and that the aged, half-blind Bede, tricked into preaching to an empty rocky valley, heard the stones themselves answer Amen, very venerable Bede. Neither is history, and the first was already being denied as legend a century ago, but both are true to how his name has been held.
The bones travelled once. Durham tradition, doubted by modern scholars and first written down at least a century after the fact, says the sacrist Ælfred Westou carried them from Jarrow to Durham around 1020 in a linen bag hidden inside Cuthbert's coffin. They were found there in 1104 when Cuthbert's coffin was opened for the new Norman cathedral, given a gold-and-silver reliquary by Bishop Hugh de Puiset late in the twelfth century, and in 1370 moved into a shrine of their own in the Galilee Chapel at the cathedral's west end, which is the moment Bede became a place of pilgrimage in his own right rather than a companion to Cuthbert. The shrine was destroyed in 1540 and he was reburied beneath it under a plain chest tomb reading HAC SVNT IN FOSSA BAEDAE VENERABILIS OSSA, "in this grave are the bones of the Venerable Bede." When Canon James Raine opened the grave on 27 May 1831 he found a partial skeleton and almost nothing else: a plain iron ring and a few coins. No other church anywhere claims him.
Bede's own words in this account come from the Ecclesiastical History of the English People and from his letters. The autobiographical passage, the delight in "learning, or teaching, or writing," and the closing prayer are from Book V, chapter 24, in A. M. Sellar's revised translation of 1907, freely available through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The counsel on teaching the Creed and the Lord's Prayer in English is from section 5 of the Letter to Ecgbert, written in November 734; the passage on monasteries bought from kings, and the proverb of the wasps, are from sections 10 to 13 of the same letter; both are quoted in J. A. Giles's translation of 1845, printed in the second volume of his Historical Works of the Venerable Bede, pages 138 to 155. The framing sentence on the slaughter at Bangor is from Book II, chapter 2. The deathbed material, including "It is time for me, if it be my Maker's will, to be set free from the flesh" and "It is well, thou hast said truly, it is finished," is from the letter of Cuthbert of Wearmouth-Jarrow on the death of Bede, written within weeks of it in 735 and given here in Sellar's translation as printed with his Life of Bede. Readers who want the whole book in a modern rendering should look to the critical edition of Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford Medieval Texts, 1969), which prints Cuthbert's letter as an appendix and remains the text against which quotations should be checked, or to the Oxford World's Classics translation by Judith McClure and Roger Collins (1994).
The holy and venerable Bede was born in England, and when he was seven years of his age he was delivered to Benet Biscop of Jarrow, for to learn, and after his death he was put to Ceolfrith, abbot of the same place, and learned and profited much in holy life and conning. And the nineteenth year of his age he was made deacon, of John, bishop of York, and in the thirtieth year of his age he was made priest. Then began he to write and to study and to expound holy writ, whereupon he made many noble homilies, and notwithstanding his great business, was daily in the service of religion, as in singing and praying in the church. He had great sweetness and liking to learn, to teach and to write; he wrote seventy eight books; he accounted the books and years from the beginning of the world in Historia Anglicana. In the book of Polycronicon is rehearsed that is wonder, that a man that is without use of school made so many noble volumes in so sober words in so little space of his life time. It is said he went to Rome for to show there his books, for to see them according to holy writ and to the lore of holy church, but hereof some doubt, and say that he never went to Rome. Also it is said that when he was blind he went about for to preach, and his servant that led him brought him whereas were many hopples of stones, to whom he made a noble sermon, and when he had all finished his sermon the stones answered and said, Amen.
Also it is said that he found a writing of three R's and three F's over the gate of Rome, which he expounded thus: The first R betokened regna, the second ruent, the third Rome, that is: Regna ruent Rome. And the first F betokened ferro, the second flamma, the third fame, that is: Ferro, flamma, famæque. Also pope Sergius wrote a letter to the abbot Ceolfrith and prayed for to have Bede come to Rome for to assoil certain questions that were there moved. Here is to be noted, that how noble and worthy the court of Rome held him, when so noble a court had need to have him for to declare and assoil the questions that were there moved. Also we ought to hold him noble and holy by the manner of his living and his teaching. He must needs be virtuous and eschew vices that was so well occupied in spending his wit and thought in expounding of holy writ, and his cleanness was much seen at his last end. For his stomach had indignation of meat seven weeks continually, and of drink, so that unnethe he might retain any meat, and was strait and short-breathed, but for all that he spared not the travail of lecture and of books, and every day among the detty travail of service and of psalms, he taught his disciples in lessons and in questions. He transiated S. John's Gospel into English, and said to his scholars: Learn you, my small children, whiles I am alive and with you; I wot not how long I shall abide with you, and alway among he said that saw of S. Ambrose: I have not so lived among you that me shames to live, neither me dreads to die, for we have a good Lord.
On night's time when he had no man to teach then would he devoutly be in prayers and thanking our Lord of all his gifts. The Tuesday tofore Ascension-day his death approached, and his feet began to swell; he was houseled, anointed and kissed his brethren, and prayed them all to remember him, and he gave to divers of his servants things that he had in privity. On the Ascension-day the hair was spread, and he laid him down thereon, and prayed for the grace of the Holy Ghost, and said: O king of bliss, and Lord of virtues, that have the prize and are this day styed up above all heavens, leave you us not fatherless, but send you in to us that behest of the Father, the ghost of soothfastness. And when he had ended that, he gave up the last breath with a sweet dour and savour, and there he was then buried, but the common fame tells that he now lies at Durham with S. Cuthbert.
There was a devout clerk, which laboured in his mind for to make his epitaph, and in no wise he could make true metre, wherefore on a time he went to the church and prayed God to give him conning to make a true verse. And after came unto his tomb and saw there written by an angel:
Hic sunt in fossa
Bedæ venerabilis ossa.
Then let us pray to this holy man that he pray for us, that after this life we may come to everlasting life.
British (Received Pronunciation): Northumbria /nɔːrˈθʌmbriə/; Wearmouth-Jarrow /ˈwɪərmaʊθ ˈdʒæroʊ/; Venerabilis /ˌvɛnəˈrɑːbɪlɪs/
Transmission is unusually well documented for the History itself, and much less so for the rest. Roughly 160 manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical History are known from the standard hand-list of Laistner and King (1943), a figure the scholarship itself labels a rough guide; about half are Continental rather than insular, which is a measure of how fast the text travelled. Two witnesses stand very close to the author: the Moore Bede at Cambridge, traditionally dated 734 to 737 and possibly copied at Wearmouth or Jarrow itself, which also preserves the earliest text of Cædmon's Hymn; and the St Petersburg Bede, dated on internal memoranda to no later than 747, which carries the earliest known historiated initial in Western art. The internal memoranda used to fix both years have been vigorously challenged, though both manuscripts are securely eighth-century on other grounds; "within a generation of the author" is the safe description. The critical edition is Colgrave and Mynors (1969), which superseded Plummer of 1896 and was the first to use the St Petersburg manuscript fully. In English, an Old English version was made somewhere between about 890 and 930, long attributed to King Alfred's programme though current scholarship is more cautious, and it abridges Bede substantially; the first modern English translation was Thomas Stapleton's, made by a Catholic recusant at Antwerp in 1565; the Victorian and Edwardian line runs from Stevens through Giles to Sellar's revision of 1907, which is the freely available text most often quoted; and the two current standards are Sherley-Price's Penguin version of 1955 and the Colgrave translation as reissued by Judith McClure and Roger Collins in 1994.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Bede the Venerable special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52