We have taken account of some of the books which Bede and his contemporaries read and copied — the Biblical commentaries both old and new, the lives of the saints, the works of the Christian poets, the historians of the Christian church — writings which would lead to a better knowledge and understanding of Scripture. We have also reviewed some of Bede's own writings — the schoolbooks on Orthography, on Metre and on Figures, the scientific treatises on Times and on the Nature of Things, the Lives of the Saints whether they had lived in the east or nearer at hand in Bede's own Northumbria, the history of his own monastery and of the abbots who ruled it. But these works, though a very considerable achievement for a scholar of this age, amount only to a small part of the totality of his writings. We may remind ourselves of his own remark that from the time of receiving priest's orders in his thirtieth year until he reached his fifty-ninth year he had been at pains, for his own needs and for those of his brethren ‘to compile from the works of the venerable fathers brief notes on Holy Writ, and also to make additions according to the manner of their meaning and interpretation’.