Bede as the Narrator

Everything that makes the Synod of Whitby a story — the speeches, the keys argument, the king’s ruling, and Colmán’s dignified withdrawal — comes from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History III.25–26, written at Wearmouth-Jarrow in 731, some sixty-seven years after the event, by a monk of the Roman observance drawing on Canterbury informants and Lindisfarne tradition. Beside Bede stands one rival narrative, Stephen of Ripon’s Life of Wilfrid, earlier and even more partisan, written to glorify Colmán’s antagonist. This file sets out what Bede was, compares him with Stephen, and presses the central source-critical fact: both our narrators are Roman partisans, and no account from Colmán’s own side survives.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; defender of the Celtic Pascha)

The Principal Source

The Synod of Whitby is known to us, as a narrated event with characters and argument, almost entirely from a single text: the long account in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, HE III.25, with the brief sequel at III.26 that records Colmán’s resignation and departure (Bede, HE III.25–26; trans. Colgrave & Mynors 1969). It is Bede who gives us the assembly at Hild’s monastery of Streanæshalch in 664 under King Oswiu; the set-piece dispute between Colmán for the Irish reckoning and Wilfrid for the Roman; the appeal to the keys committed to Peter (Matthew 16:18–19); Oswiu’s decision in favour of Peter “the doorkeeper”; and then, at III.26, the famous notice that Colmán, unwilling to conform, withdrew to Iona and Ireland, taking with him a portion of the relics of Aidan (Bede, HE III.25–26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Strip away Bede’s chapters and the synod collapses into a bare fact: that the Northumbrian church changed its paschal observance in or about 664. The debate as we know it is Bede’s literary construction upon that fact (Goffart 1988; Higham 2006). For the debate itself as Bede stages it, see Colmán and Wilfrid Debate; for the keys argument and the king’s ruling, Oswiu’s Decision.

This dependence on one principal narrator is the governing condition of any study of Colmán. It is not a defect to be lamented and passed over but a fact to be held continuously in view, because the one narrator was not a neutral party. To read Bede on Whitby is to read the considered account of a man who believed, and wished his readers to believe, that the side Colmán defended had been in error (Bede, HE III.25, V.21–22; Mayr-Harting 1991; Stancliffe, in Darby & Wallis 2014). The integrity of the portrait depends on reading him knowing that.

What Bede Was

Bede (c. 673–735) was a monk of the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, where he had been given as a boy of seven and where he spent his whole life in study, teaching, and the writing of Scripture-commentary, computus, and history (Bede, HE V.24, the autobiographical note; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). He completed the Ecclesiastical History in 731, by his own dating, at the end of that work (Bede, HE V.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Three features of his position bear directly on his testimony about Whitby.

First, he wrote late. The synod fell in 664; Bede finished the History in 731 — a gap of some sixty-seven years, well beyond living memory of the event itself by the time he wrote, though he had known older men whose own teachers reached back toward it (Bede, HE preface, V.24; Higham 2006). He was not a witness and never claims to be; his account is reconstruction from report and record (Goffart 1988).

Second, he was himself of the Roman use. By Bede’s lifetime the Northumbrian church had long since adopted the Roman Easter that Whitby ratified, and Bede was a convinced and learned partisan of that reckoning; his own technical works on the calendar, De temporibus and De temporum ratione, defend the Dionysiac Easter computus that the Irish had not used (Bede, De temporum ratione; Mayr-Harting 1991; Corning 2006). When he narrates Whitby he narrates the victory of his own observance, and he frames the Irish position as a sincere but mistaken adherence to an outdated cycle rather than as a live and defensible option (Bede, HE III.25; Stancliffe, in Darby & Wallis 2014). The treatment of that bias as a literary and theological problem belongs to section 06 (see The Rhetoric of the History).

Third, he wrote on information gathered from particular quarters. In the preface to the History Bede names his informants and his method, thanking above all Abbot Albinus of Canterbury, who transmitted to him through the London priest Nothelm what could be learned from the records and memory of the Kentish church and the Roman mission (Bede, HE preface; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). This Canterbury channel was itself a channel of the Roman party, the party of Augustine’s mission and its successors (Mayr-Harting 1991; Higham 2006). For Northumbrian and Lindisfarne matters Bede also drew on the traditions of the northern church — he knew the community of Lindisfarne and used its memory of Aidan and its early bishops with evident respect, which is part of why his portrait of Colmán retains so much dignity (Bede, HE III.5, III.17, III.26; Mayr-Harting 1991). But for the synod specifically, the weight of his information ran through Roman-aligned sources, and the speeches he reports — Colmán’s appeal to Anatolius and Columba, Wilfrid’s appeal to Peter and the universal Church — are composed in the manner of ancient historiography, conveying what Bede took to be the substance of each side rather than transcribing words spoken in 664 (Bede, HE III.25; Goffart 1988; Higham 2006).

The Rival Account: Stephen of Ripon

Bede is not, however, our only narrator of Whitby. An earlier text covers the same synod: the Life of Bishop Wilfrid (Vita Sancti Wilfridi) by Stephen of Ripon, the author traditionally called Eddius Stephanus, which treats Whitby in its tenth chapter (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; ed. & trans. Colgrave 1927). Stephen was a member of Wilfrid’s own circle, writing not long after Wilfrid’s death in 709 — conventionally dated to about 710–720 — and writing for a frankly hagiographical purpose: to commemorate, defend, and magnify his hero (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid, preface and ch. 10; Colgrave 1927; Kirby 1983). His account of Whitby is therefore the earlier of the two narratives, and it is the more openly partisan.

In Stephen’s telling Wilfrid is the protagonist throughout. It is Wilfrid who is put forward to speak for the Roman side, Wilfrid whose learning and eloquence carry the day, and Wilfrid whose triumph at the synod is presented as a stage in his providential rise to greatness (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; Colgrave 1927). Colmán, by contrast, is a foil. Where Bede grants the defeated bishop a sympathetic exit and a celebrated tribute to his community, Stephen’s interest in Colmán ends with his defeat; the chapter is shorter, sharper, and unambiguously triumphalist, the record of a victory rather than the close of a tragedy (Stephen of Ripon, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; Colgrave 1927; Kirby 1983; Goffart 1988).

The Two Accounts Compared

Read side by side, Bede and Stephen agree on the essential outline and diverge sharply in emphasis — a pattern that tells us something about both the event and its sources.

Where they agree. Both place the synod in Northumbria under King Oswiu and present it as a decision over the date of Easter and the related customs (Bede, HE III.25; Stephen, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; Colgrave 1927, Colgrave & Mynors 1969). Both make Wilfrid the spokesman for the Roman observance against the Irish reckoning Colmán defended (Bede, HE III.25; Stephen, ch. 10). Both report that the decisive argument turned on the authority of Peter and the keys of the kingdom committed to him, and both report that the Roman side prevailed and the Northumbrian church conformed (Bede, HE III.25; Stephen, ch. 10; Mayr-Harting 1991; Corning 2006). This convergence of two independent — or at least separately shaped — accounts on the basic facts is the strongest warrant we have that the synod happened broadly as reported: a real assembly, a real victory for Wilfrid and the Roman Easter, a real argument from the Petrine keys (Higham 2006; Corning 2006).

Where they differ. The differences are differences of length, tone, and generosity. Stephen’s chapter is brief and concentrated on Wilfrid’s triumph; Bede’s two chapters are fuller, give the Irish case a more articulate hearing (the appeal to Anatolius and to Columba’s holiness), and end not with the victor but with the vanquished — with Colmán’s resignation, his withdrawal carrying Aidan’s relics, and the extraordinary passage of praise for the frugal, holy, unworldly life of the Irish-trained community he left behind (Bede, HE III.26; Colgrave & Mynors 1969). It is Bede, not Stephen, who supplies the famous community-praise and who lets the loser keep his dignity; Stephen has no comparable note (Bede, HE III.26; Stephen, ch. 10; Goffart 1988; Stancliffe, in Darby & Wallis 2014). The contrast is instructive: the more partisan source is also the poorer in human detail, while Bede’s greater generosity coexists with — and partly serves — his own settled conviction that Colmán was wrong, a tension explored at length in section 06 (see Honor for the Defeated and The Rhetoric of the History).

The relationship between the two texts is itself a scholarly question and not a settled one. [Disputed: D. P. Kirby, "Bede, Eddius Stephanus and the *Life of Wilfrid*," *EHR* 98 (1983), argues that Bede knew and used Stephen's *Life of Wilfrid*, drawing on it (while correcting and reshaping it) for episodes including Whitby; others hold that Bede drew chiefly on independent Northumbrian and Canterbury tradition and used Stephen only sparingly or treated his account with reserve, given the friction between the Wearmouth-Jarrow and Wilfridian milieus (cf. Goffart, *Narrators of Barbarian History*, 1988, on Bede's deliberate distance from the Wilfrid cult). The priority of Stephen's text (c. 710–720) over Bede's (731) is secure; the extent and manner of Bede's dependence on it are not.] What is not in doubt is the order of composition: Stephen wrote first, Bede later, and Bede’s richer and more balanced narrative is the work of the second, not the first, hand (Stephen, Life of Wilfrid, c. 710–720; Bede, HE, 731; Kirby 1983; Higham 2006).

The Central Source-Critical Fact

The decisive observation follows from the two preceding sections, and it cannot be stated too plainly: both of our narrative sources for Whitby are partisans of the side that won. Bede was of the Roman use and wrote from Roman-aligned information; Stephen wrote to glorify the Roman spokesman himself (Bede, HE III.25; Stephen, Life of Wilfrid ch. 10; Goffart 1988; Kirby 1983). Neither is a neutral transcript of the synod, and neither pretends to be. They are the literary products of the victorious observance, shaped — Bede’s with great art and restraint, Stephen’s with frank advocacy — to present the outcome as right (Goffart 1988; Higham 2006; Stancliffe, in Darby & Wallis 2014).

Against this stands an absence that defines the whole subject: there is no surviving Celtic-side account of Whitby. No text from Iona, Lindisfarne-in-exile, or Ireland gives us Colmán’s own case in his own framing, or narrates the synod from the standpoint of the defeated (Charles-Edwards 2000; Corning 2006). What we can recover of the Irish position we recover through the reporting of its opponents — through Colmán’s speech as Bede chose to compose it, and through the customs the Roman sources catalogue in order to refute (Bede, HE III.25; Stancliffe, in Darby & Wallis 2014). The Irish documentary record, examined in the companion file, supplies dates and bare notices but no rival narrative of the debate (see The Irish Record). The consequence is that the life of Colmán must be written, of necessity, from the records of those who held him to have been mistaken — a discipline of reading the winners against the grain that this whole section is built to practise. The theological setting of that discipline is the one undivided pre-Schism Church, within which both reckonings of Pascha were held by men in communion (see The Pre-Schism Church), so that the partisanship at issue is liturgical and ecclesiastical, not the later confessional division it must not be read back into (see Orthodox and Catholic).

References

Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Cited by book.chapter; Whitby at III.25–26; the relics of Aidan and Colmán’s withdrawal at III.26; the preface naming Albinus and Nothelm; the autobiographical note and the dating of the work to 731 at V.24; the paschal chapters at V.21–22.)
Bede. De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time). Trans. Faith Wallis. Translated Texts for Historians. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. (Bede’s defence of the Dionysiac Easter computus.)
Stephen of Ripon (Eddius Stephanus). The Life of Bishop Wilfrid (Vita Sancti Wilfridi). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. (Cited by chapter; Whitby at ch. 10; composition c. 710–720.)
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. (Bede’s historiographical method and his deliberate distance from the Wilfrid cult.)
Kirby, D. P. “Bede, Eddius Stephanus and the Life of Wilfrid.” English Historical Review 98 (1983): 101–114. (The argument for Bede’s use of Stephen’s Life.)
Higham, N. J. (Re-)Reading Bede: The Ecclesiastical History in Context. London: Routledge, 2006. (Bede’s purposes, sources, and the construction of his narratives.)
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (Bede, Canterbury, Lindisfarne, and the paschal question.)
Stancliffe, Clare. “Bede and the Britons.” In Bede and the Future, ed. Peter Darby and Faith Wallis, 107–148. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (Bede’s handling of the Insular churches and his partisanship.)
Corning, Caitlin. The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (Whitby and the absence of a Celtic-side account.)
Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (The Irish church and the limits of its surviving record.)