Bede

Bede, or BĒDA, the VENERABLE, the greatest name in the ancient literature of England, was born in the neighbourhood of Monkwearmouth, in the county of Durham, about the year 673 A.D. He was educated under the care of the learned and liberal abbot, Benedict Biscop, and his successor, Ceolfrid, in the Benedictine abbey at Monkwearmouth, to which the young scholar came an orphan child in his seventh year. Ultimately he entered the monastery at Jarrow, an offshoot of the same foundation, and here he remained until his death. Here he took deacon's orders in his nineteenth year, and was ordained priest in his thirtieth, by John of Beverley, then Bishop of Hexham. In the shelter of his quiet and sacred retreat he devoted himself to study, while he was diligent in observing the discipline of his order, as well as in the daily service of the monastery church. His industry was enormous, and he was continually employed in reading, writing, and teaching. Besides Latin and Greek, classical as well as patristic literature, he studied Hebrew, medicine, astronomy, and prosody. He wrote homilies, lives of saints, hymns, epigrams, works on chronology and grammar, and commentaries on the books of the Old and New Testament. His calm and gentle spirit, the humanising character of his pursuits, and the holiness of his life, present a striking contrast to the turbulent temper of his time. When labouring under disease, and near the close of his life, he engaged in a translation of St John's Gospel into Anglo-Saxon, and dictated his version to his pupils. The well-known story of how he finished the last sentence of his version on the very day of his death casts a light on the serene and simple piety of his life. His brethren had all gone to the festival, and he was left alone with the scribe. 'Dearest master,' said the latter, 'there is one chapter wanting, and it is hard for thee to question thyself.' 'No, it is easy,' said he; 'take thy pen and write quickly.' When evening came, the young scribe said, 'There is yet one more sentence, dear master, to write out.' He answered, 'Write quickly.' Shortly after the boy said, 'Now it is finished.' 'Well,' said the aged saint, 'thou hast spoken truly "it is finished." Then he bade them place him where he could look on the spot on which he was wont to kneel in prayer. Then he chanted the Gloria Patri, and as he uttered the words 'the Holy Ghost,' he breathed his last, and 'so passed to the kingdom in heaven,' on the day of the Feast of the Ascension, 26th May 735. He was buried in the monastery of Jarrow: long afterwards (in the middle of the 11th century) his bones were removed to Durham. His most valuable work is the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, an ecclesiastical history of England, in five books, to which we are indebted for almost all our information on the ancient history of England down to 731 A.D. Bede gained the materials for this work partly from Roman writers, but chiefly from native chronicles and biographies, records and public documents, and oral and written communications from his contemporaries. King Alfred translated it into Anglo-Saxon. At the close of his great work he gives the names of the thirty-seven books which he had written up to 731. His De Sex Ætatibus Mundi was an important book in chronology. 'First,' says Green, 'among English scholars, first among English theologians, first among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that English literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who gathered round him for instruction, he is the father of our national education.' Among the editions of Bede's History may be noticed: the first, supposed to have been printed at Strasburg about 1473, others, more correct, at the same place, in 1483 and in 1500; a much better edition, by Canon J. Smith (Cambridge, 1722); one not less valuable, by J. Stevenson (2 vols. Lond. 1838); another, by the late Dr Hussey (Oxford, 1846); that by G. H. Moberley at the Clarendon Press (1869); and that by Holder (Freiburg, 1882). Editions of his complete works have been published in Paris (6 vols. folio, 1544-45), Basel (8 vols. folio, 1563), Cologne (1612 and 1688), at London in 12 vols. by Dr Giles (1843-44), and at Paris by J. P. Migne as vols. xc.-xcv. in the Patrologiæ Cursus Completus (1844). English versions of the Ecclesiastical History were published by Stapleton in 1655; by Stevens in 1723; by Hurst in 1814; by Dr Giles in 1840; and by L. Gidley (1870). See also H. H. Hanson's Essays on Bede's Ecclesiastical History (1888).