The Death of Bede

Everything we know of how Bede died comes from a single letter: the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae, written by Cuthbert — a pupil of Bede’s, later abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow — to a fellow student named Cuthwine, as an eyewitness account of the master’s last days in 735. Cuthbert reports that Bede, ill and short of breath through the weeks after Easter, kept teaching and dictating to the end, racing to finish a translation of the Gospel of John into English and a set of extracts from Isidore; that on the eve of the Ascension, his last day, the boy-scribe Wilberht wrote down the final sentence at Bede’s bidding and said “it is finished”; and that Bede, asking to be turned toward the place where he prayed, died singing the Gloria. This file gives the death as Cuthbert’s letter attests it, pinned throughout to that source, and notes the dispute over the famous “Death Song.”

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

The Source: Cuthbert’s Letter

The account of Bede’s death is not independent tradition but the testimony of one document, and the discipline of this file is to keep that fact in view (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae — “the Letter of Cuthbert on the Death of Bede” — was written by Cuthbert, who describes himself as a pupil and fellow-disciple, and was addressed to a former schoolfellow named Cuthwine; Cuthbert later became abbot of the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; in Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 579–587). It is presented as a first-hand report — Cuthbert says he was present and writes what he saw and heard — and it survives in a substantial number of manuscripts, copied and recopied as a precious record of the great teacher’s end (Colgrave and Mynors 1969, introduction; Brown 2009). What follows is therefore not “what happened” certified as fact but what Cuthbert’s letter reports; the details, including the celebrated last words and the verses, are its testimony, and they are given here as such.

The Last Weeks: Teaching and Dictating Through Illness

According to Cuthbert, Bede fell ill before Easter of 735 and grew steadily weaker, troubled above all by shortness of breath, yet without much pain and in good cheer; the letter says he was thus afflicted for about two weeks before his death, which fell after Easter, in the days leading to the Ascension (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 581–583). Through these weeks, Cuthbert reports, Bede did not lay down his work. He continued to give daily lessons to his pupils and spent the rest of the time in prayer and in dictation, returning thanks to God and singing psalms and antiphons even as his breath failed (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 583; Brown 2009).

Two projects occupied his last strength. He was at work, Cuthbert says, on a translation of the Gospel of John into English — rendering it for the benefit of the unlearned, down to a certain point in the text — and on a selection of extracts from the works of Isidore of Seville, lest his students should read what was inaccurate in them after his death (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 583; DeGregorio 2010). The English John is of a piece with the pastoral concern of the Letter to Egbert, written months earlier, that the rudiments of the faith reach the people in their own tongue (see The Critique of the Church): the dying scholar spent himself translating Scripture for those who had no Latin. Cuthbert records Bede saying, as the work pressed on him, that he did not want his boys to read a lie or to labour without profit after he was gone — a teacher’s care for his pupils to the last (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 583).

The Songs of Ascensiontide and the Old English Verses

Cuthbert dwells on Bede’s singing in these days. Knowing himself to be dying, Bede was often in tears and gave thanks continually; he sang the antiphons proper to the season, and Cuthbert singles out the Ascensiontide antiphon beginning “O King of glory, Lord of hosts” — the antiphon that prays the Lord, ascended in triumph, not to leave us orphans but to send the promised Spirit — pausing in his weeping at the words about not being left orphans (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 583–585; cf. John 14:18). The detail places the death firmly within the liturgical season: Bede was dying into the feast of the Ascension, and the texts of the feast were on his lips.

Cuthbert also reports that among the things Bede uttered in these days were verses in his own English tongue — the five-line vernacular poem on the soul’s reckoning before God that has come to be called “Bede’s Death Song,” meditating on the journey every soul must take and the judgment that awaits it (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 580–582; Brown 2009). The poem is preserved within or alongside many copies of Cuthbert’s letter. [Disputed: the exact words and several details of the death are as Cuthbert's letter reports them and cannot be independently checked; and the authorship of the Old English "Death Song" is debated — Cuthbert's letter (in many manuscripts) presents the five-line poem as verses Bede spoke, but scholars differ on whether Bede composed it himself or quoted a traditional verse, the more so since the letter's Latin paraphrase of the lines and the vernacular text are not identical across the manuscript tradition. See the discussion in Colgrave and Mynors 1969 and the standard editions of the Old English poem.]

The Day of His Death: “It Is Finished”

The climax of Cuthbert’s account is the last day, the eve of the Ascension. Through that Tuesday and into the Wednesday Bede was very weak, his breathing labored, but he continued to dictate the translation of John and the extracts from Isidore, urging his scribes to write quickly, for he did not know how long he would last (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 585). On the Wednesday — the eve of the Ascension — the dictation came to its end. Cuthbert reports the scene that has become the most famous moment in Bede’s life. The boy who was writing at his dictation, a young scribe named Wilberht, said: “There is still one sentence, dear master, that we have not written down.” And Bede said, “Write it.” After a little the boy said, “It is finished now.” And Bede answered, “You have spoken truly: it is well finished” (bene; Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 585–587). The exchange deliberately echoes the consummatum est, “it is finished,” of the Gospel he was translating — the last word of Christ from the cross in the very text Bede was rendering into English (John 19:30) — so that the completion of the work and the completion of the life are spoken in the same breath, in the words of the dying Lord.

Then, Cuthbert continues, Bede asked the boy to lift his head and to turn him so that he might face the holy place where he was accustomed to pray; and so, sitting on the floor of his cell, he sang “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” — the lesser doxology, the Gloria Patri — and as he came to the naming of the Holy Spirit he breathed his last and departed to the heavenly kingdom (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 587). To die in the act of glorifying the Trinity, at the very words “and to the Holy Spirit,” is the shape Cuthbert gives the death: the last breath spent in the doxology.

The Distribution of His Treasures

Cuthbert records one further scene from these last days, touching in its smallness. Bede had kept in his little chest a few possessions — Cuthbert names pepper, napkins or handkerchiefs, and incense — and on the day of his death, or near it, he asked that the priests of the monastery be summoned, and he distributed these small treasures among them, asking them to remember him and to say masses and prayers for him (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 585; Ward 1990). The detail is precious for what it shows of the monastic life: the great scholar’s entire worldly estate was a handful of spices and cloth, costly little luxuries on the edge of the world, which he gave away to be prayed for. Cuthbert reports that Bede spent that last day in joy, and that those around him wept as he spoke of his coming death and the reward he hoped for, mingling tears and gladness (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 585–587).

The Date

Cuthbert’s letter places the death on the eve of the feast of the Ascension. The Ascension is the fortieth day after Easter; in 735 it fell on Thursday 26 May, so that its eve was Wednesday 25 May, and Bede died in the night, after Vespers, as the Ascension was beginning — the night of Wednesday 25 May into the feast of 26 May 735 (Cuthbert, Epistola de obitu Bedae; Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 587; Brown 2009; Wallace-Hadrill 1988). His feast is kept on 25 May in the Western calendar and is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on 25 or 27 May (see The Church Calendar). The coincidence of the death with the Ascension — Bede dying into the feast of the Lord’s going up, singing its antiphons and the Gloria — was not lost on those who told the story, and Cuthbert frames it as a fitting end: the teacher who had spent his life reckoning the sacred seasons died on the very threshold of the feast.

The Death as Cuthbert Tells It

It is worth holding the whole picture together as Cuthbert presents it, for the letter is a deliberate composition as well as a report. Bede dies teaching, dictating, and singing — the three activities of his whole life — and he dies translating the Gospel of John for the unlearned and the Gloria on his lips. The scene is built to show a death that is the seamless continuation of the life: the discipline of study and the discipline of prayer carried unbroken through illness to the last breath, and crowned by the doxology to the Trinity. Whether every word fell exactly as Cuthbert reports it cannot be verified; the account is his, written soon after by one who says he was there, and it is the only window we have onto the scene (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). What it gives us is not the bare fact of a death but its meaning as the community of Wearmouth-Jarrow received and remembered it — and as that community handed it on, the Epistola de obitu Bedae became, with the autobiographical note that closes the Historia (see The Monk from the Age of Seven), one of the two indispensable witnesses to the man behind the books.

See Also

References

  • 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. (Latin text and English translation; the illness and shortness of breath; the translation of John and the extracts from Isidore; the Ascensiontide antiphon and the Old English verses; the boy-scribe Wilberht and the last sentence; “it is well finished”; the distribution of pepper, napkins, and incense; the death singing the Gloria Patri; the dating to the eve of the Ascension, 735. The Old English “Death Song” and its textual problems are discussed in the editors’ notes.)
  • Cuthbert. Letter on the Death of Bede. Also translated 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.
  • Holy Scripture. Gospel of John 19:30 (“It is finished,” consummatum est); 14:18 (“I will not leave you orphans”); the Gloria Patri (lesser doxology).
  • Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
  • DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
  • Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.