The Cambridge Old English Reader

The Venerable Bede (c. 672–735) spent all his life from the age of seven at the monastery of Jarrow, part of the twinned institution of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria. This was at the time the most powerful of the independent Anglo- Saxon kingdoms, with kings willing and able to endow great centres of faith and learning. Wearmouth-Jarrow became one of the most important in the Christian West, largely owing to Bede. Ælfric of Eynsham, whose own works dominated a later period of Anglo-Saxon England (see p. 40), was to call Bede ‘the wise teacher of the English people’. The range of his writings was immense: biblical exegesis, history, hagiography (writings about saints), grammar, poetry, natural science and computus (astronomical and chronological calculation). His works, which define for us the first great period of cultural development in Anglo-Saxon England, were in demand on the Continent also, both in Bede's own lifetime and throughout the Middle Ages. The thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante afforded him the rare privilege of a place among the blessed souls inhabiting ‘the heaven of the sun’ in his Paradiso (part III of the Divina Commedia).

The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’) was Bede's greatest achievement. In five books, it tells the story of his country from Julius Caesar's attempted invasion of Britain in 55 BC to the year in which Bede finished writing, AD 731. His aim was a fundamental Christian one: to record the growth of the English church and to reveal it, and England, as part of the divine scheme of history. To that end, the main narrative is filled out with letters, accounts of holy men and of miracles, and many anecdotes which became part of the literary heritage of England. Bede wrote in Latin, but when, at the end of the ninth century, King Alfred came to launch a revival of learning in Wessex (see p. 38), the Historia ecclesiastica was a natural choice for putting into OE, even though Alfred's direct involvement has not yet been proved.

Like much early translation into OE, this one tends to stick close to the original Latin, sometimes at the expense of natural idiom, with awkward results; and in a few instances the translator's misunderstanding of the Latin has caused problems (as indicated in the notes below).