‘We have frequently seen’, Bede wrote, ‘the whole season of summer overturned in violent winds and wintry storms.’ It was his belief that such excesses of nature, whether of drought, heat or rainfall, were the breeding ground of infectious disease, known simply as pestilentia, or in English, cwealm, whose consequences for the world in which he lived were undoubtedly much more devastating than warfare. As a boy he himself survived an attack of plague which came near to destroying the newly-founded community at Jarrow, but in 664, some six or seven years before his birth and shortly after the synod of Whitby, there was a particularly severe and widespread visitation. After attacking southern England with such severity that Bede could write of parts of the countryside being depopulated, the infection spread to Northumbria where it raged for a long time, killing many people, and also to Ireland whose inhabitants were afflicted with equal severity. From the little that we know in detail we may suspect that the consequences for the church were all but disastrous. In the north, Tuda died almost immediately after becoming bishop at Lindisfarne, in succession to Colman who had withdrawn in consequence of the decisions taken at Whitby.