Bede, The Venerable

Who Was the Venerable Bede?

The Venerable Bede was the most learned man in eighth-century Europe and the father of English history. Born near the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, he entered the monastery at the age of seven and never left it, spending his entire life in study, prayer, and writing within a few miles of his birthplace. In those sixty years he produced a body of work — biblical commentaries, hagiographies, scientific treatises, and above all the Ecclesiastical History of the English People — that defined the intellectual culture of the early medieval church in England and shaped the writing of history for centuries.

The Ecclesiastical History (731) is Bede’s masterwork: a history of the English church from the Roman period to his own day, written with a scholarly precision, a narrative skill, and a theological seriousness that place it among the great works of medieval Latin prose. It is the primary source for our knowledge of early English Christianity, and it established the method of dating events from the birth of Christ — the BC/AD system — that Western civilization still uses.

Bede died in 735, dictating the last sentences of his translation of the Gospel of John to a student on his deathbed. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1899 — the only native of England ever to receive that honor. His life represents the Benedictine ideal at its most complete: learning in the service of faith, scholarship ordered by prayer, the love of God expressed through the love of truth.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Ecclesiastical History of the English People — 731
• Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles — c. 709
• De Temporum Ratione (On the Reckoning of Time) — 725
• Life of Cuthbert — 721
• Commentary on the Apocalypse — 703