Writing from his bed of sickness to the Patriarch of Alexandria in the summer of 598 Gregory the Great was able to pass on the joyful news, but lately arrived in Rome, that large numbers of the English had been baptised on Christmas Day 597. He thought it necessary to tell the Patriarch that the English were a people who lived in a remote corner of the world and who had until recently worshipped sticks and stones. Almost exactly a hundred and fifty years later the great English missionary, Boniface, wrote from Germany to the abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow asking him if he would send him some of the works of the monk Bede whose scriptural scholarship had lately made him eminent among his people as a shining beacon of the church.

I have tried to show in this book how it was that a seed sown in this chill northern soil flourished so greatly that some of those who were nurtured upon its fruits became for a short while, before the age of the Vikings, the spiritual, intellectual and artistic leaders of much of northern and western Europe. I have deliberately confined myself to what has seemed to me the most interesting aspect of Bede's times — the transition from illiterate paganism to the kind of world which enabled him to indulge to the full his delight in learning, teaching and writing.