07 — The Letter to Egbert and Reform
The last phase of Bede’s life, in his own most practical and most pointed voice and in the eyewitness account of his death. The Letter to Egbert of 5 November 734 — written to his former pupil, the bishop of York, less than a year before he died — is Bede the reformer: a monk on the edge of the world rebuking the negligence of bishops, the ignorance of the laity, and above all the bogus “monasteries” by which Northumbrian nobles drained the church and the kingdom under cover of piety. Cuthbert’s Letter on the Death of Bede, written by a pupil to a fellow student, records how the dying scholar spent his last weeks dictating an English Gospel of John and died on the eve of the Ascension, 735, singing the Gloria. This section sets out the critique and the death together: the reformer’s bite and the monk’s end belong to the same man.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)
It is easy to read Bede as nothing but the serene scholar of Jarrow, the patient compiler who valued his commentaries above all else and who praised the Northumbrian church and its conversion as a work of providence. The two documents in this section correct that picture. In the last year of his life Bede turned his learning to the state of the church around him and found it wanting, and he said so to a bishop — bluntly, in writing, with a list of abuses and a programme of reform. The Letter to Egbert is the sharpest thing he ever wrote, prophetic in the strict sense: a summons to repentance addressed to those in power. And the account of his death, set down by one who was there, shows the same man holding to his discipline of teaching and prayer through illness to the last breath. The reformer and the dying saint are one figure, and the section reads them as such.
The first file treats the Letter to Egbert itself: its occasion in Bede’s visit to York the year before; its programme of more bishops and new sees (the elevation of York to a metropolitanate with the pallium followed in 735); its demand that bishops preach and visit rather than exact tribute, that the unlearned be taught the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in English, and that the people communicate more often; and, at its centre, its furious attack on the false monasteries and its call for the revocation of the charters that created them. The second file treats Cuthbert’s Epistola de obitu Bedae, the eyewitness narrative of Bede’s last days and death — the unfinished English John, the distribution of his small treasures, the boy-scribe and the last sentence, and the death “while singing” on the eve of the Ascension. The two are placed side by side because the Letter is dated within months of the death the Epistola records: the reform programme is, in effect, Bede’s last testament to the church he was leaving.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Critique of the Church | The Letter to Egbert (5 November 734): its occasion, its programme of new sees and a metropolitan York, its demand that bishops preach and visit and that the laity be taught the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in English, its call for frequent Communion, and above all its attack on the false monasteries and the charters that created them — Bede the reformer, sharp and prophetic. |
| The Death of Bede | Cuthbert’s Letter on the Death of Bede (Epistola de obitu Bedae): the eyewitness account of Bede’s last weeks dictating an English Gospel of John and extracts from Isidore, the boy-scribe and the last sentence (“it is finished”), the distribution of his small treasures, and his death singing the Gloria on the eve of the Ascension, 735 — with the disputed “Death Song.” |
See Also
- The Monk from the Age of Seven — the life of disciplined study that the reform programme and the death both close
- The Historia Ecclesiastica — the History of 731, whose serene providential reading the Letter of 734 complicates
- St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne — the Northumbrian saint whose Life Bede wrote, and the church whose abuses the Letter attacks
- St. Boniface — the near-contemporary English reformer and missionary, a fair comparison for Bede’s reforming voice
- The Church Fathers — the patristic reform tradition in which Bede’s exhortation stands
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of the West to which both documents belong
References
- Bede. Letter to Egbert (Epistola ad Ecgbertum episcopum). In Bede: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People; The Greater Chronicle; Bede’s Letter to Egbert, ed. and trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Also in English Historical Documents I: c. 500–1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd ed. London: Eyre Methuen, 1979.
- Cuthbert. Letter on the Death of Bede (Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae). In Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, ed. and trans., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 579–587. Also in McClure and Collins (1994).
- Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
- DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Thacker, Alan. “Bede’s Ideal of Reform.” In Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald et al. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983, 130–153.
- Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.