Wearmouth-Jarrow

The twin monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth (founded 674) and St Paul at Jarrow (681/682), built by the Northumbrian nobleman Benedict Biscop and conceived as “one monastery in two places,” was the workshop in which all of Bede’s scholarship was made possible. Through Biscop’s six journeys to Rome and Gaul came the books, relics, pictures, masons, glaziers, and the Roman chant-master that turned a foundation on the northern edge of Christendom into the home of the best library north of the Alps — the library that produced the Codex Amiatinus and underwrote every page Bede wrote. This file describes the house, its founder, its library, and the deliberate Romanitas of the Northumbrian renaissance, drawing above all on Bede’s own Historia abbatum.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)

One Monastery in Two Places

The monastery into which Bede was given as a boy was the creation of one man’s purposeful labour. Benedict Biscop (Biscop Baducing) was a Northumbrian thegn of noble birth who renounced a secular career, made the first of his journeys to Rome, and was tonsured a monk; Bede records that he spent some two years at the great island monastery of Lérins, off the coast of Gaul, before returning to England (Bede, Historia abbatum 2; trans. D. H. Farmer in The Age of Bede, Penguin). After a period serving Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus at Canterbury, Biscop received from King Ecgfrith of Northumbria a grant of land at the mouth of the river Wear, and there in 674 he founded the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth (Historia abbatum 4; Farmer trans.). Some seven years later, in 681 or 682, the same king gave a further grant, and Biscop built a second house dedicated to St Paul at Jarrow, on the Tyne a few miles to the north (Historia abbatum 7; Farmer trans.).

The two houses were not rivals but a single institution. Bede is explicit that Wearmouth and Jarrow were governed as “one monastery in two places” (unum monasterium in duobus locis), bound by a common rule, a common abbatial authority, and a common spiritual purpose, “just as the body cannot be separated from the head” (Historia abbatum 7, 15; Farmer trans.; on the unity of the foundation see George Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede, Boydell, 2009). This dual house is the institution generally called Wearmouth-Jarrow, and it is the monastery Bede means when he says at the close of the Ecclesiastical History that he spent the whole of his life within its walls (HE 5.24; trans. Colgrave & Mynors, 1969). The foundation dates and the unity of the house are among the best-attested facts of Bede’s world precisely because Bede himself, an inmate and eventually the historian of the place, set them down.

Biscop’s Journeys: Books, Relics, and Pictures

What made Wearmouth-Jarrow extraordinary was not its lands but its furnishings, and these were the fruit of Benedict Biscop’s repeated travelling. Bede counts six journeys to Rome in the course of Biscop’s life, and treats each as an occasion for enriching the monastery (Bede, Historia abbatum 4, 6, 9; Farmer trans.; Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009). From these journeys, and from stops in Gaul, Biscop brought back an “innumerable” quantity of books of every kind, which Bede names first among his founder’s acquisitions and which he plainly regarded as the chief treasure of the house (Historia abbatum 4, 6, 9, 11; Farmer trans.). He brought relics of the apostles and martyrs, intended to sanctify the altars of the new churches; he brought sacred vessels and vestments that could not be made in England; and, in a detail Bede dwells on, he brought pictures — panel-paintings of the Mother of God and the apostles, of scenes from the Gospel, and of the visions of the Apocalypse — which he set up around the churches so that all who entered, “even if ignorant of letters,” might gaze on the face of Christ and his saints, call to mind the Incarnation, and examine themselves in the memory of the Last Judgement (Historia abbatum 6, 9; Farmer trans.; on the images and their catechetical purpose, Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009). Bede’s careful, approving report of these imported icons is itself a small witness to the place of the image in the pre-Schism Western Church (see The Pre-Schism Church).

Biscop’s purpose was nothing less than to plant in Northumbria the whole material and liturgical culture of Rome. To this end he imported skilled labour as well as objects. Because the English of his day built in timber, Biscop “sent agents to Gaul” to fetch masons who could build him a church of stone in the Roman manner, and likewise glaziers — craftsmen skilled in making glass for windows, lamps, and vessels, an art then unknown in Britain — who not only glazed the windows of the church but taught the English the craft (Bede, Historia abbatum 5; Farmer trans.; Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009). The stone church of St Peter at Wearmouth, with its glazed windows and its painted boards, was meant to look and feel like a church of the Roman world; the surviving fabric at both Jarrow and Monkwearmouth, and the excavated coloured window-glass, bear out Bede’s account (on the archaeology and the architecture, see Scott DeGregorio, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bede, Cambridge, 2010).

John the Archcantor and the Roman Chant

Biscop’s Romanizing programme reached into the very performance of the Office. On one of his Roman journeys — the one undertaken in the company of Abbot Ceolfrith — Biscop obtained from Pope Agatho the services of John, the archcantor of St Peter’s in Rome and abbot of the monastery of St Martin, and brought him to Northumbria (Bede, Historia abbatum 6; and HE 4.18; Colgrave & Mynors, 1969; Farmer trans.). John’s commission was to teach the monks of Wearmouth the chant for the liturgical year as it was sung at St Peter’s in Rome, and to instruct them in the correct manner of reciting and singing the Office; Bede adds that John set down in writing what was needful and that these documents were still preserved in the monastery library in his own day, and that singers came from the other monasteries of the region to learn from him (HE 4.18; Bede, Historia abbatum 6; Colgrave & Mynors, 1969). The episode is characteristic of the whole enterprise: it was not enough to have Roman books and Roman stone; the very voice of the monastery at prayer was to be conformed to Rome. For Bede, who would describe his own daily life as bound up with “the daily task of singing in church” (HE 5.24), this Romanized chant was the soundscape of his entire monastic existence (see The Monk from the Age of Seven).

The Library

The cumulative effect of Biscop’s collecting, continued by his successor Ceolfrith, was a library without equal in the Britain of its day and arguably the finest in Western Europe north of the Alps. Bede tells us that Ceolfrith, the second abbot, “doubled” the library that Biscop had assembled, adding among other things three copies of a new translation of the Bible (the Pandects discussed below) and exchanging a richly worked manuscript for an estate of land (Bede, Historia abbatum 15; Farmer trans.; Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009). The classic reconstruction of the contents of this library — assembled from the citations and quotations scattered through Bede’s own works — is that of M. L. W. Laistner, whose study of “the library of the Venerable Bede” remains the foundational treatment (M. L. W. Laistner, “The Library of the Venerable Bede,” in Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson, Oxford, 1935; and see the surveys by Rosalind Love and Joyce Hill in DeGregorio, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bede, 2010).

What that reconstruction reveals is the indispensable precondition of Bede’s whole achievement. The library held the Latin Fathers in depth — Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory the Great — together with grammarians, computists, classical and late-antique authors, Eusebius–Rufinus, Orosius, Gildas, and a substantial body of Scripture in more than one version (Laistner, 1935; Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009). It is no exaggeration to say that almost everything Bede knew, he knew because Biscop and Ceolfrith had carried it up from the Mediterranean and shelved it at the mouth of the Tyne. Bede travelled scarcely at all; the world came to him in books. His extraordinary citation-discipline — his habit of naming his authorities and quoting them accurately, remarkable for the early Middle Ages — was possible only because he had the texts to hand and could check them (on Bede’s method and the library that fed it, see The Library and the Method). The library is thus not a piece of background but the very engine of the scholarship; remove it, and there is no Bede.

The Codex Amiatinus

The single most spectacular surviving product of the Wearmouth-Jarrow scriptorium is the Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible in one volume (a pandect) to survive, and a manuscript of immense scholarly importance. Bede records that Abbot Ceolfrith had three single-volume Bibles copied, two for the churches of Wearmouth and Jarrow and a third which he resolved to carry to Rome as a gift to St Peter (Bede, Historia abbatum 15; and the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith; Farmer trans.). Ceolfrith set out for Rome in 716 bearing this great codex, but died on the journey at Langres in Gaul; the Bible nonetheless continued on toward Rome (anonymous Life of Ceolfrith; Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009; DeGregorio, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bede, 2010).

The surviving pandect now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence (whence “Amiatinus,” from its later home at the abbey of Monte Amiata) was identified in the late nineteenth century, on the evidence of an altered dedication-inscription, as one of Ceolfrith’s three Bibles — the very copy destined for Rome (the identification rests on the work of G. B. de Rossi and F. J. A. Hort and is now standard; see Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009, and the discussion in DeGregorio, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bede, 2010). The book is a monument of Romanitas: written in a beautiful uncial hand modelled on Italian exemplars, and prefaced by diagrams and a famous miniature of the prophet Ezra (or a scribe in his likeness) at his writing-desk before a book-cupboard, an image widely held to derive from a model in the Codex Grandior, the great Bible of Cassiodorus that Bede knew was at Wearmouth-Jarrow and that he cites in his exegetical works (Bede refers to the Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus in his commentaries; on the dependence of the Amiatinus prefatory matter on Cassiodorus’s pandect, see Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009, and the scholarship surveyed in DeGregorio, ed., 2010). The textual character of the Amiatinus — a remarkably pure Vulgate — and its derivation from Italian models make it a chief witness for the history of the Latin Bible. That such a manuscript could be produced at Jarrow within Bede’s own lifetime, by scribes he must have known, is the most eloquent possible measure of what Biscop’s and Ceolfrith’s library had made possible.

The Romanizing Northumbrian Renaissance

Wearmouth-Jarrow belongs to the cultural flowering of seventh- and early-eighth-century Northumbria sometimes called the “Golden Age of Northumbria” or the Northumbrian renaissance — the same milieu that produced the Lindisfarne Gospels, the great stone crosses, and the scholarship of figures around Theodore’s Canterbury (Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009; DeGregorio, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bede, 2010). The distinctive feature of this flowering, as it appears at Wearmouth-Jarrow, is the convergence of two Christian currents. Northumbria had first been evangelized in part from Iona and the Irish (Columban) tradition, through Aidan and the monks of Lindisfarne, and that tradition left a deep mark on Northumbrian Christianity (on the Irish mission see St Aidan of Lindisfarne and St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne). Over against and alongside this came the Roman current — the mission of Augustine sent by Gregory the Great, reinforced by Theodore of Tarsus and by exactly the kind of Roman acculturation that Biscop embodied (on the Roman mission see St Gregory the Dialogist).

Biscop’s whole programme — Roman books, Roman relics, a stone church in the Roman manner, glass, painted icons, the chant of St Peter’s taught by a Roman cantor, a Vulgate pandect modelled on an Italian Bible — was a deliberate act of Romanitas, an effort to make a Northumbrian monastery a true outpost of the universal Church centred on Rome (Brown, A Companion to Bede, 2009). This is the world that formed Bede, and it shaped his sympathies decisively: his lifelong commitment to the Roman Easter reckoning, his veneration of Gregory the Great as “our apostle,” and his providential reading of the English conversion all grow from the soil of Biscop’s foundation. Yet the convergence was not a simple erasure of the Irish inheritance; Bede honours Aidan and Cuthbert even where he faults their Easter computus, and the spirituality of Lindisfarne flows into his own hagiography. Wearmouth-Jarrow was the place where these currents met, and where a boy given to the monks at the age of seven could grow into the scholar who would tell the whole story.

References

Bede. Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Historia abbatum). Trans. D. H. Farmer, in The Age of Bede. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1998. (Cited by chapter: the foundation of Wearmouth at chs. 4–5 and Jarrow at ch. 7; the “one monastery in two places”; Biscop’s journeys, books, relics, and pictures at chs. 4, 6, 9, 11; the masons and glaziers from Gaul at ch. 5; John the archcantor at ch. 6; Ceolfrith and the three pandects at ch. 15.)
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (John the archcantor at HE 4.18; Bede’s autobiographical note and “the whole of my life in this monastery” at HE 5.24.)
Anonymous. Life of Ceolfrith (Vita Ceolfridi). Trans. D. H. Farmer, in The Age of Bede. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1998. (Ceolfrith’s departure for Rome with the pandect in 716 and his death at Langres; the plague at Jarrow.)
Laistner, M. L. W. “The Library of the Venerable Bede.” In Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. (The classic reconstruction of the contents of the Wearmouth-Jarrow library from Bede’s citations.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. (Biscop and Ceolfrith; the library; the Codex Amiatinus and its identification; the Romanizing programme and the Northumbrian renaissance.)
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Surveys by Rosalind Love and Joyce Hill on Bede’s library and learning; the architecture and archaeology of the site; the Codex Amiatinus and its Cassiodoran models.)