The Critique of the Church

On 5 November 734, less than a year before he died, Bede wrote to Egbert, bishop of York and his former pupil, a long letter of reform — the Epistola ad Ecgbertum episcopum. It is the sharpest and most practical thing he ever wrote: a demand for more bishops and new sees, for bishops who preach and visit rather than collect tribute, for a laity taught the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in their own tongue and brought more often to Communion, and, above all, a furious attack on the false monasteries by which Northumbrian nobles defrauded both the church and the kingdom. This file sets out the occasion, the programme, and the bite of the Letter, the document in which the serene historian of Jarrow stands revealed as a prophet rebuking the order he lived under.

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

The Occasion

The Letter to Egbert carries its own date: Bede closes it by noting that it was written in the year of the Lord’s incarnation 734, on the day before the Nones of November — that is, 5 November 734 (Bede, Letter to Egbert 17; trans. McClure and Collins 1994). It was therefore composed at the very end of his life; he died in May 735, and so the Letter stands within months of the death recorded in Cuthbert’s Epistola (see The Death of Bede). It is, in effect, the testament of a dying man to the church he was about to leave, and that knowledge gives its urgency its edge.

The recipient was Egbert (Ecgberht), bishop of York, a kinsman of the Northumbrian royal house and a former pupil of Bede’s (Bede, Letter to Egbert 1; Brown 2009). Bede opens by recalling that he had meant to visit Egbert again that year but had been prevented by illness, and that he is sending in writing what he would rather have said in person (Bede, Letter to Egbert 1; McClure and Collins 1994). The previous year he had visited York and stayed with Egbert; the letter looks back to conversations begun there and continues them (Bede, Letter to Egbert 1; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). The intimacy is real — Bede addresses Egbert as “most beloved” — and it licenses the candour that follows: this is counsel from an old teacher to a younger man now set in authority, and Bede uses every inch of that standing.

The letter bore practical fruit. Among its central demands was the elevation of York to metropolitan rank, and in 735 — the year of Bede’s death — Egbert received the pallium from Rome and became the first archbishop of York since the seventh century, restoring the northern province that Gregory the Great had originally envisaged (Brown 2009; Thacker 1983). Whether the Letter caused this or merely urged a step already in motion, it stands as the programme to which the event answered.

“More Bishops”: The Case for New Sees

The first great theme of the Letter is the inadequacy of the Northumbrian episcopate as it stood — too few bishops, with dioceses too vast for any one man to shepherd. Bede argues that the number of bishops should be increased and new sees created, so that every community might be reached by its pastor (Bede, Letter to Egbert 5–7; McClure and Collins 1994). He reminds Egbert that this was the original intention of Pope Gregory, who had directed that the English church should be organized under two metropolitans, at London (in the event, Canterbury) and York, each with twelve suffragan bishops — a plan Bede had himself recorded in the Historia ecclesiastica (Bede, Letter to Egbert 5; cf. Historia ecclesiastica 1.29; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). The reality fell far short, and Bede presses Egbert to make York a true metropolitan see and to multiply the bishoprics under it (Bede, Letter to Egbert 9; Thacker 1983).

The argument is pastoral before it is administrative. A diocese so large that the bishop cannot traverse it in a year, Bede contends, cannot be properly taught or visited; the people in its remoter villages may live and die without ever seeing their bishop or hearing him preach (Bede, Letter to Egbert 7; McClure and Collins 1994). Bede even proposes a concrete mechanism: new episcopal seats might be established in monasteries, with the consent and cooperation of the religious houses, so that the existing endowment could support the new sees without fresh exactions (Bede, Letter to Egbert 10; Brown 2009). The proposal links directly to his attack on the false monasteries below — the misappropriated monastic land is precisely the resource he would redirect to the church’s genuine work.

The Negligent Bishop: Preach and Visit, Do Not Merely Collect

The second theme is the conduct of the bishops themselves, and here Bede’s tone sharpens from counsel to rebuke. A bishop’s first duty is to teach: to preach the gospel to the people committed to him and to see that they are instructed in the faith (Bede, Letter to Egbert 2–3; McClure and Collins 1994). Bede grounds this in the example of the apostles and in the practice of the early bishops he had chronicled, and he sets it against a contemporary abuse he names without flinching — bishops who exact tribute and dues from villages and estates they never visit, drawing the revenue of the cure of souls while neglecting the cure itself (Bede, Letter to Egbert 7; Thacker 1983).

The image is of a hireling rather than a shepherd: the bishop who descends on his scattered dependencies only to collect, who cannot even name the people from whom he takes, and who leaves them without the word of God or the sacraments (Bede, Letter to Egbert 7; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). Against this Bede sets the duty of annual visitation — the bishop must go round his diocese, reaching even the remotest settlements, confirming, teaching, and correcting (Bede, Letter to Egbert 7–8; McClure and Collins 1994). Where a diocese is too large for this to be possible, the answer is again to divide it and consecrate more bishops (Bede, Letter to Egbert 9). The critique of episcopal greed and the case for new sees are thus a single argument: the structure must be reformed so that the pastoral duty can actually be discharged.

Teaching the Unlearned: The Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in English

A third concern is the religious ignorance of the ordinary laity, and Bede’s remedy is strikingly concrete and pastoral. The people must know, at the least, the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer; and because most of them have no Latin, these must be taught and said in English (Bede, Letter to Egbert 5; McClure and Collins 1994). Bede tells Egbert that he has himself often given English translations of both the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer to unlearned priests — that is, to clergy who did not know Latin well enough to teach them — so that the priests in turn might teach the people (Bede, Letter to Egbert 5; Brown 2009). It is the same impulse that, on his deathbed, set him translating the Gospel of John into English for the same unlearned (see The Death of Bede): the great Latinist of the age insisting that the rudiments of the faith reach the people in the only language they had.

The demand is that this catechesis be universal — that not only those in monasteries but the whole laity, men and women, learn to say these texts and understand them, so that the faith is not a clerical possession but the common knowledge of the baptized (Bede, Letter to Egbert 5; Thacker 1983). Coupled to this is a call for more frequent reception of the Eucharist: Bede urges that the faithful, and especially the more devout among the laity, be encouraged to communicate often, after the manner of the early Church, rather than to hold back from the sacrament out of misplaced fear or neglect (Bede, Letter to Egbert 15; McClure and Collins 1994). The reform he envisages is thus not only structural but sacramental and catechetical, reaching down to what an ordinary Christian should know and do.

The False Monasteries: The Heart of the Critique

At the centre of the Letter, and rising to its highest pitch of indignation, is Bede’s assault on what he calls the false or counterfeit monasteries — and it is here that he most fully earns the name of reformer. The abuse he describes is specific and systemic. Northumbrian nobles and laymen, he says, had for some thirty years been acquiring grants of land “in the name of monasteries” — estates booked to them by royal charter as if for religious houses — while founding nothing of the kind; they had themselves declared abbots, populated their “monasteries” with their own followers, and held the land as hereditary family property, passing it to their heirs (Bede, Letter to Egbert 11–12; McClure and Collins 1994; Thacker 1983).

The motive Bede exposes is fiscal and military. Land granted to a monastery — bookland, held by charter — was exempt from the public burdens that ordinary estates owed to the king, and in particular from the obligation to provide warriors for the royal host (Bede, Letter to Egbert 11; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). By disguising secular estates as monasteries, the nobility escaped these duties while keeping the land and its revenues. The result, Bede argues, is a double ruin: there is no longer land available to reward the young warriors and the sons of nobles who should defend the kingdom, so that they leave the country or live without proper provision, weakening Northumbria against its enemies; and the genuine religious life is corrupted and discredited by these establishments, which are monasteries only in name and are in truth dens of indulgence (Bede, Letter to Egbert 11–13; Brown 2009; Thacker 1983).

Bede does not spare the moral charge. These false houses, he says, are places where men and women live licentiously under the cloak of religion; some are filled with those expelled from genuine monasteries for misconduct; the very word monasterium is debased by them (Bede, Letter to Egbert 12; McClure and Collins 1994). And he traces the corruption to the charters that created it: the grants were obtained, he says, by the foolishness and connivance of kings, bishops, and other powers who set their hands and seals to documents they should never have granted (Bede, Letter to Egbert 11–13; Thacker 1983). The remedy he proposes is correspondingly drastic. Such charters, having been granted unjustly, ought to be revoked; and this revocation should be the work of a synod, with the king and the bishops acting together to undo what they had wrongly done — Bede explicitly calls for conciliar action, for the bishop and the king to convene a synod and reform the abuse by canonical authority (Bede, Letter to Egbert 10–13; Wallace-Hadrill 1988; DeGregorio 2010).

The Boldness of the Critique

What is most arresting about the Letter is the position from which it is launched. Bede was a monk who had scarcely left his monastery in sixty years, a man without office or rank in the world; and from that cell he arraigns the whole Northumbrian order of church and state — kings, bishops, and nobles together — for a corruption running through its foundations (Brown 2009; DeGregorio 2010). He names the abuse, traces its mechanism, assigns the blame to the highest authorities, and demands that they convene to undo it. The serene compiler of the Historia ecclesiastica, who had told the story of the English conversion as a work of providence (see The Historia Ecclesiastica), here turns the same gaze on his own day and finds it gone wrong.

Modern scholarship has insisted on taking this side of Bede seriously. Alan Thacker reads the Letter as the fullest statement of “Bede’s ideal of reform,” continuous with the reforming temper visible in his later exegesis (Thacker 1983). Scott DeGregorio has argued that the reforming impulse is not confined to the Letter but runs through the biblical commentaries of Bede’s last years — his work on Ezra and Nehemiah, on the Temple, on the rebuilding of the holy city — where the figures of restoration carry a contemporary charge, a lament over the “sluggishness of our times” (nostrorum socordiam temporum) and a summons to renewal (DeGregorio 2010; cf. Brown 2009). On this reading the Letter to Egbert is not an isolated outburst but the open, practical face of a concern that shaped Bede’s later work as a whole: the historian and exegete was also, to the end, a critic of his church who longed for its reform.

For an Orthodox reader the document is a salutary corrective to any hagiographic flattening of Bede into mere serenity. He was no uncritical celebrant of his own age. His criticism is sharp, particular, and prophetic in the biblical sense — addressed to those in power, grounded in the gospel and the canons, and aimed at repentance and amendment. That the reformer and the saint are the same man, and that the Letter was written in the same months as the death recorded by Cuthbert, is the burden this section means to carry.

References

Bede. Letter to Egbert (Epistola ad Ecgbertum episcopum). Cited by section. 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.
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Cited by book and chapter. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Gregory’s plan for two metropolitans, 1.29.)
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Including DeGregorio’s account of the reforming impulse in Bede’s later exegesis; cf. his “‘Nostrorum socordiam temporum’: The Reforming Impulse of Bede’s Later Exegesis,” Early Medieval Europe 11 [2002]: 107–122.)
Thacker, Alan. “Bede’s Ideal of Reform.” In Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough, and Roger Collins. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983, 130–153.
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.