Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Summary

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731 at the monastery of Jarrow, tells how the peoples of Britain received the Christian faith. A dedication to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria explains that history offers good examples to imitate and bad ones to shun, and names his informants, chief among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who searched the papal archives in Rome. Book I describes the island and its peoples, the Roman conquest, the martyrdom of St. Alban, the Pelagian controversy and the mission of Germanus, the departure of the Romans and the coming of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and then the mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great under Augustine, who lands in Kent in 597 and baptizes King Ethelbert; Gregory's letters and answers to Augustine's questions are given in full, including his advice to turn pagan temples into churches. Book II opens with Gregory's life and the famous story of the fair-haired boys in the Roman market whose people were called Angles, whom he wished to be co-heirs with the angels. It follows the conversion of Northumbria under King Edwin through the preaching of Paulinus, including the council at which a counsellor compares human life to a sparrow flying through a lighted hall in winter, and the pagan priest Coifi rides out to profane his own temple. Book III tells of King Oswald, the Irish monk Aidan sent from Iona to Lindisfarne, the conversion of the West Saxons, Middle Angles and East Saxons, and the Synod of Whitby in 664, where King Oswy chooses the Roman reckoning of Easter over the Irish. Book IV covers the work of Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, the plague of 664, Abbess Hilda of Whitby, the cowherd Caedmon, who receives the gift of religious song in a dream, the Queen Ethelthryth, and the life and miracles of St. Cuthbert. Book V gives the healings of John of Beverley, the vision of Drythelm, the English missions to the Frisians and Germans, the death of Wilfrid, the acceptance of the Roman Easter by the Picts and Iona, and a survey of the English Church in 731, ending with a short account of Bede's own life and a list of his writings. The library text is A. M. Sellar's revised translation (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), based on J. A. Giles's version of 1842, with Sellar's introduction, a life of Bede that prints Cuthbert's letter on his death, notes, the Continuation of Bede and an index.

Top Lessons

• History as a school of example

  In his preface Bede tells King Ceolwulf that history relating good deeds stirs the hearer to imitate them, and history of evil deeds warns him away. He therefore gathers lives of kings, bishops, monks and humble brothers as examples. He also names his sources and asks readers not to blame him for errors that came from common report, joining a moral purpose to a careful method.

• Conversion by persuasion and patience

  Gregory advises that pagan temples be cleansed and used as churches and that festivals be turned to Christian feasts, because hard hearts cannot be stripped of everything at once. Edwin deliberates for years and consults his council before he is baptized. Bede shows a faith carried from Rome and Iona that wins kings and peoples through preaching, example and patience.

• Holiness that teaches by example

  Aidan walks rather than rides so that he can speak with anyone he meets, gives away the gifts of kings, and teaches nothing he does not practise. Oswald gives his Easter dinner and the silver dish to the poor. Bede holds up such lives, along with Hilda's and Cuthbert's, as the means by which faith took root.

• Unity and the date of Easter

  At Whitby in 664 the Irish-trained churches of the north and the Roman-trained churches of the south meet to settle when Easter should be kept. King Oswy decides for the Roman reckoning after hearing that the keys of the kingdom were given to Peter. Bede, who wrote on the calculation of time, praises the holiness of the Irish monks while arguing that unity in the date of the feast mattered.

• Every gift for the praise of God

  Caedmon, a cowherd who left feasts when the harp came to him, receives in a dream the gift of making songs about the creation, and Hilda receives him into the monastery to put Scripture into English verse. Bede's own life, which he says he spent delighting in learning, teaching and writing, is offered as another kind of humble service.

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Medical Lens

The History is an important source for the great pestilence of 664 and the plagues that followed, often identified by historians with the Justinianic plague pandemic: Bede records that it emptied the south and then Northumbria, carried off Bishop Cedd and his followers at Lastingham and Archbishop Deusdedit, struck Ireland, and drove the East Saxons back to idolatry; Sellar's life of Bede notes the plague of 686 at Jarrow. Book IV contains a rare early English account of surgery: the physician Cynifrid describes lancing the tumour under Queen Ethelthryth's jaw shortly before her death, and the healed incision found when her body was moved. Book V's chapters on John of Beverley include the healing of a mute youth, whom the bishop teaches to speak letter by letter and then gives to a physician to treat his scabbed head, alongside cures by blessing and relics. Visions such as Fursa's and Drythelm's, and Caedmon's dream, are presented as spiritual events; any medical reading of them is interpretive. Bede reports miracles from his informants as a historian of the Church, and the record treats them as part of his narrative rather than as clinical history.

• Book III, Chapters XXIII, XXVII and XXX

  Cedd and his companions die at Lastingham; the pestilence of 664 spreads through southern England, Northumbria and Ireland; the East Saxons lapse into idolatry during the plague.

• Book IV, Chapter XIV

  A pestilence in a South Saxon monastery ends after a boy's vision of Saints Peter and Paul and the intercession of King Oswald.

• Book IV, Chapter XIX

  The physician Cynifrid recounts opening Ethelthryth's tumour beneath the jaw, her death, and the healed wound seen at her translation.

• Book V, Chapter II

  Bishop John teaches a mute youth to speak and has a physician treat his scalp.

• Book V, Chapter XII

  Drythelm, who seemed to have died, revives and describes a vision of the places of the dead, then lives as a penitent monk.