The Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum

Bede completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731, dedicating it to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, and in five books carried the story from Julius Caesar’s invasions through Roman Britain, the Gregorian mission of 597, the conversion of the English kingdoms, the Synod of Whitby in 664, and the reorganization of the church under Theodore of Tarsus, down to his own day. It is not a chronicle of battles but a providential history of a people brought into the universal Church — the gens Anglorum becoming a Christian nation. This file sets out what the work is, how it is built, what it argues, and the great scenes by which it has been remembered; the assessment of Bede’s sources and his biases is reserved for the companion study.

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

The Book and Its Occasion

The work Bede titled Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum — the Ecclesiastical History of the English People — was finished in 731, the date Bede himself fixes at the close of the narrative, where he surveys the state of Britain “in the present year, which is the 731st year of the Lord’s incarnation” (Bede, HE 5.23; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). He had reached the age of about fifty-nine; he would die in 735. The book is the crown of a long scholarly life lived almost entirely within the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, and its closing chapter includes the autobiographical note and the catalogue of his own writings by which we know the shape of his career (Bede, HE 5.24; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). On Bede the monk and his formation, see The Monk from the Age of Seven; on the library and method that made the work possible, The Library and the Method.

The History opens with a prose Preface addressed to Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria (reigned 729–737), who had received a draft of the work and returned it with comments before the final copy was made (Bede, HE, Preface; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The dedication is not a courtesy only. Bede tells Ceolwulf in the Preface that he has written so that the king and his people may have set before them the examples of good men to imitate and of evil men to shun — and this stated moral purpose governs the whole. “Should history record the good deeds of good men,” Bede writes, “the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good; or should it record the evil deeds of wicked men, the devout and earnest listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and perverse” (Bede, HE, Preface; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The history is thus offered as a school of conduct, a mirror held up to a Christian king and a Christian people.

A Five-Book Structure

The History is divided into five books, and the division is not arbitrary: each carries the story forward through a distinct phase of the conversion and ordering of the English church (Goffart 1988; Wallace-Hadrill 1988).

Book 1 runs from the geography of Britain and Julius Caesar’s invasions, through the Roman occupation, the coming of Christianity to Roman Britain and its martyr Alban, the Pelagian controversy and the mission of Germanus of Auxerre, the withdrawal of Rome and the coming of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, down to the arrival of the Roman mission under Augustine in 597 and the first years of the Kentish conversion (Bede, HE 1.1–1.34; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Much of the early material Bede draws openly from earlier writers, naming Orosius, Gildas, and the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius in Rufinus’s Latin version among his sources.

Book 2 carries the story through the death of Gregory the Great — for whom Bede supplies a warm encomium and to whom he gives a chapter of his own — and on through the spread of the faith from Kent, the conversion of Northumbria under King Edwin, and the setback that followed Edwin’s death (Bede, HE 2.1–2.20; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Book 3 is dominated by the Northumbrian saints and the Irish mission from Iona: the holy king Oswald, the gentle bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne, the labors of the Irish clergy, and the great turning-point of the Synod of Whitby in 664 (Bede, HE 3.1–3.30; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). On the Irish mission and its protagonists see the companion collections on St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and St. Colman of Lindisfarne.

Book 4 opens with the arrival of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop of Canterbury in 669 and his reorganization of the English church — the dividing of the great dioceses, the holding of synods, the planting of learning — and goes on to Cuthbert, Caedmon, the foundations of Whitby under Abbess Hild, and the consolidation of the church through the later seventh century (Bede, HE 4.1–4.32; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). On Whitby and its abbess see St. Hilda of Whitby; on Cuthbert, St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Bede’s own Lives of Cuthbert. Book 5 continues with miracles, the missions of Willibrord and the English to the continental Saxons, the Easter question in its last northern reaches, Adamnan and Iona’s eventual conformity, a recapitulating chronological summary, and the closing survey of Britain in 731 with Bede’s autobiographical note and book-list (Bede, HE 5.1–5.24; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The Thesis: An “Ecclesiastical” History of a People

The adjective in the title is doing real work. Bede did not set out to write the political history of the English kingdoms — though kings and battles appear — but the history of how the gens Anglorum, the English people, were brought out of paganism into the one Church (Goffart 1988; Brown 2009). The model is the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, known to Bede in Rufinus’s Latin, which had made the deeds of God’s providence in the Church the proper matter of historical writing; Bede transposes that genre onto a single barbarian gens and tells the story of its salvation (Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Brown 2009).

The governing idea is providential. The conversion of the English is, for Bede, an act of God working through visible means — the mission Gregory sent, the kings who received it, the bishops and monks who carried it, the councils that ordered it. The unity that the story drives toward is the unity of a people gathered into the catholic Church, observing the catholic Easter and the catholic discipline, in communion with Rome and the wider Christian world. This is why the long Easter controversy is so central to the narrative and not a mere ecclesiastical technicality: for Bede it is the question of whether the English will be one people in one Church or remain divided (Bede, HE 3.25, 5.21–22; Goffart 1988; Higham 2006). On the pre-Schism Church into which Bede places his people, see The Pre-Schism Church.

The Set-Pieces

Bede was a writer of great art, and the History is remembered as much for a handful of unforgettable scenes as for its frame. These episodes carry the book’s argument in narrative form.

Gregory and the English boys. In the chapter on Gregory the Great, Bede relates the famous story that, before he became pope, Gregory saw fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman market and asked from what nation they came. Told they were Angli, he answered with a pun: not Angli but angeli, angels, for they had angelic faces and ought to be coheirs of the angels in heaven; learning their province was Deiri, he said they should be snatched de ira, from the wrath of God; and hearing their king was Ælle, he made Alleluia of the name (Bede, HE 2.1; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede does not give this as his own knowledge but explicitly as a tradition he has received — “a story told by the men of old” (traditio maiorum) — and the scholarship treats it accordingly (Bede, HE 2.1; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; on its status, see Bede’s Sources and Reliability). The pun crystallizes Bede’s whole theme: the very name of the English already points to their destiny in God.

The Gregorian mission. The heart of Book 1 is the mission Gregory dispatched in 596–597 under Augustine, sent to Kent where King Æthelberht had a Christian Frankish wife, Bertha. Bede narrates the missionaries’ fearful hesitation, Gregory’s letters of encouragement, their landing on the Isle of Thanet, the king’s cautious reception of them in the open air, their entry into Canterbury chanting litanies, and the baptism that followed (Bede, HE 1.23–1.26; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede preserves a remarkable dossier of Gregory’s correspondence here, including the so-called Libellus responsionum, Gregory’s answers to Augustine’s questions about church order (Bede, HE 1.27; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). On Gregory himself, see St. Gregory the Dialogist.

Edwin and the sparrow. The conversion of Northumbria under King Edwin is staged as a council in which the king consults his chief men. The pagan high priest Coifi confesses that the old religion has brought him no profit; and then one of the king’s counsellors offers the image that has become the most quoted passage in all of Bede. The present life, he says, is like the swift flight of a sparrow through the king’s hall in winter: it comes in from the storm at one door, passes through the warmth and light where the men sit at supper, and flies out the other into the dark again — “of what went before this life or what follows, we are utterly ignorant.” If the new teaching brings any more certain knowledge, it deserves to be followed (Bede, HE 2.13; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The speech is one of the glories of early English prose; it is also, by the conventions of ancient and medieval historiography, a composed speech rather than a transcript, a point treated in the companion file (see Bede’s Sources and Reliability).

Oswald. Edwin’s eventual successor Oswald, who had received the faith in exile among the Irish of Iona, sets up a wooden cross before the battle of Heavenfield, kneels with his army in prayer, and wins back Northumbria for Christ; Bede makes him a model Christian king, generous to the poor, and after his death in battle against the pagan Penda a worker of miracles through his relics and the very earth where he fell (Bede, HE 3.1–3.13; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Oswald’s bishop, the Irishman Aidan, Bede praises warmly even while regretting his Easter reckoning — a generosity that shows the History is no simple anti-Irish polemic (Bede, HE 3.3, 3.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The Synod of Whitby. The dramatic centre of Book 3 is the synod held at Hild’s monastery of Streanæshalch (Whitby) in 664, where the Northumbrian church decided between the Irish and Roman methods of computing Easter (Bede, HE 3.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede stages it as a formal debate: Colman speaks for the Irish usage as received from Columba and ultimately, he claims, from the Apostle John; Wilfrid answers for the Roman and universal usage, grounding it in Peter, to whom the Lord gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven. King Oswiu, hearing that the keys were Peter’s, declares for Rome, lest Peter turn his back on him at the gates of heaven, and the Northumbrian church conforms (Bede, HE 3.25; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). For Bede this is the moment the English church chooses catholic unity over isolation; how far his telling shapes the event is examined separately (see Bede’s Sources and Reliability).

Caedmon. In Book 4 Bede tells of Caedmon, a herdsman of Hild’s monastery who could not sing, and who would leave the feast in shame when the harp came round to him. One night, having withdrawn to the cattle-byre, he received in a dream the gift of song and woke able to compose verses in praise of God the Creator; Bede gives a Latin paraphrase of the Hymn and explains that Caedmon went on to turn the whole of sacred history into English poetry (Bede, HE 4.24; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Caedmon is the first English Christian poet known by name, and the episode is Bede’s testimony that the vernacular itself was taken up into the praise of God. Bede attests the dream as a gift of divine grace, on the authority of the monastery’s tradition (Bede, HE 4.24; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; on Bede and the miraculous, see Miracles in the History).

Literary Art in the Service of an Argument

These scenes are not decoration. Bede was a master of Latin prose who had spent his life in the Scriptures and the Fathers — Augustine, Gregory, Jerome — and the History deploys the full range of his craft (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). His narrative selects, arranges, and dramatizes so that the providential pattern stands out: paganism gives way to faith, division to unity, the local to the catholic. The miracles, the speeches, the deathbed scenes, the conversions all advance the single thesis that God has been making the English a Christian people. On Bede’s exegetical formation, which shapes the History throughout, see The Commentaries.

It is precisely this artistry and purposefulness that has driven the most influential modern re-reading of the work. Walter Goffart, in The Narrators of Barbarian History (1988), set Bede beside Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, and Paul the Deacon and argued that the History is a far more pointed and contemporary book than its serene surface suggests — that Bede wrote with the church politics of his own Northumbria in view, advancing a particular vision (associated with the see of Canterbury and with reformist concerns) and shaping his narrative, including his handling of figures such as Wilfrid, to serve it. Goffart’s reading is controversial and has been contested in detail; but it is presented here fairly because it has permanently sharpened the question of why Bede tells the story as he does, and not merely whether his facts are right (Goffart 1988; cf. Higham 2006; DeGregorio 2010). That double question — the high accuracy of the History together with the purposefulness of its selection and arrangement — is the subject of the companion study (see Bede’s Sources and Reliability).

Reception and Standing

Whatever the arguments over its aims, the History became at once and has remained the indispensable narrative of the conversion of England. Bede’s near-contemporaries copied and continued it; it was carried to the Continent; and it secured for him the title by which he is still known, the Father of English History (Brown 2009; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). His later veneration — the only Englishman placed by Dante in the Paradiso, his designation as a Doctor of the Church in 1899, and his standing in the pre-Schism communion of the saints — rests in large part on this book (on which see the master collection README and Legacy and Assessment). For an Orthodox reader the History is doubly valuable: as the record of how a whole people was gathered into the one undivided Church of the first millennium, and as a model of history written under the conviction that God governs the affairs of nations (see The Church Fathers).

References

Bede. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Edited and translated by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Latin text and English translation; the Preface and dedication to Ceolwulf; the five-book structure; the date 731 and autobiographical note at 5.23–24; Gregory and the English boys at 2.1; the Gregorian mission and the Libellus responsionum at 1.23–27; Edwin and the sparrow at 2.13; Oswald and Aidan at 3.1–17; the Synod of Whitby at 3.25; Caedmon at 4.24; Theodore at 4.1ff; the Easter question at 5.21–22.)
Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. (The influential revisionist reading of the History as a purposeful, contemporary, and polemically shaped work; the Wilfrid problem and the Canterbury connection.)
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. (Chapter-by-chapter historical commentary; the Eusebian model and the providential frame; the high reliability of Bede’s information.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Anglo-Saxon Studies 12. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. (Bede’s life, learning, and works; the History among them; its literary art and patristic formation.)
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Essays on the History, its purpose and rhetoric, and the state of the scholarly debate, including responses to Goffart.)
Higham, N. J. (Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context. London: Routledge, 2006. (The History in its Northumbrian political and ecclesiastical setting; engagement with and qualification of Goffart’s thesis.)