Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People

An Introduction and Selection

Rowan Williams, Rowan Williams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441181923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede is a key work for historians, church historians and intelligent lay readers. Here is the perfect introduction. 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. Yet it is a key text for any student of English history. 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 attraction and fascination of his work is partly in seeing the tension between the strategic use of wealth and political power for religious ends and the example of self-effacing service and simplicity of life offered by some of Bede's greatest Christian heroes. 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 Brita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index of Names and Places