09 — Veneration and Legacy
What became of Bede after his death at Jarrow in 735: the journey of his bones to Durham — taken, the Durham tradition says, from Jarrow by a priest named Ælfred Westou in the early eleventh century and laid with St. Cuthbert, then given their own shrine and finally enthroned in the Galilee Chapel in 1370, where the tomb stands today — and the still larger afterlife of his writings. This section weighs the relic-tradition against its sources and offers a sober assessment of the man called “the Father of English History”: the foundational source for nearly the whole early English Church and for almost every other Northumbrian saint in this slate, a scholar of remarkable range and method, and a writer with limits and a thesis, whose own self-understanding was that of a servant who only “made brief notes.”
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Doctor of the Church; the Father of English History)
Bede died in his cell at Jarrow on the eve of the Ascension, 26 May 735, and was buried in his own monastery, as his pupil Cuthbert records in the Letter on the Death of Bede (Epistola de obitu Bedae, in Colgrave & Mynors 1969). He did not become, in his lifetime or for centuries after, the object of a great cult; his fame was that of a teacher and a book. Yet both his bones and his writings travelled far. This section follows both journeys. The first file traces the translation of his relics to Durham Cathedral and their resting-place in the Galilee Chapel, pinning the whole account to the medieval Durham historians who alone preserve it. The second weighs his legacy: the immense and genuine influence of the Ecclesiastical History, the computus, and the commentaries across the medieval West, and a sober Orthodox assessment of his greatness and his limits — for Bede is at once the indispensable witness to the conversion of the English and a transmitter more than an originator, a saint whose holiness took the form of learning faithfully handed on.
The two studies belong together because they are two forms of the same thing. The veneration of Bede’s relics and the veneration of his books are the Church’s two ways of keeping a scholar-saint: the one honours the body that was the instrument of a life of prayer and study, the other honours the fruit of that study, copied and re-copied until it became the memory of a whole people.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Relics at Durham | Burial at Jarrow in 735; the Durham tradition that the sacrist Ælfred Westou removed Bede’s bones to Durham (c. 1020s–1030s) and laid them with St. Cuthbert; the separation of the relics, the gold-and-silver shrine of 1370 in the Galilee Chapel, the despoiling at the Reformation, and the surviving tomb with its inscription HAC SUNT IN FOSSA BAEDAE VENERABILIS OSSA — the whole account pinned to Symeon of Durham and Reginald of Durham per METHODOLOGY §3.5. |
| Legacy and Assessment | “The Father of English History”: the foundational standing of the Ecclesiastical History, the diffusion of the computus and commentaries through Alcuin, Boniface, and the Carolingian schools, and Bede’s role as the source for nearly every other saint in this slate — with a sober assessment of his greatness (range, accuracy, method, devotion) and his limits (his biases, his providential lens, his thin sources, his work as transmission), and the Orthodox reading of the scholar-saint. |
See Also
- The Death of Bede — Cuthbert’s eyewitness account of the death at Jarrow that these files take up where it ends
- A Doctor of the Church, Venerated East — Bede’s standing East and West, the ground of the veneration these relics receive
- The Historia Ecclesiastica — the work whose afterlife is the heart of Bede’s legacy
- Bede’s Sources and Reliability — the critical care and the biases weighed in the assessment
- The Church Calendar — the Orthodox commemoration of Bede on 25/27 May
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of the West to which Bede belongs
References
- Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cited by book.chapter; includes Cuthbert’s Epistola de obitu Bedae.)
- Symeon of Durham. Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis ecclesie (Tract on the Origins and Progress of this the Church of Durham). Ed. and trans. David Rollason. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
- Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009.
- DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990.