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Monasticism and Reform in Book IV of Bede's ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2010

SCOTT DeGREGORIO
SCOTT DeGREGORIO
Affiliation:
Department of Literature, Philosophy and the Arts, University of Michigan – Dearbon, 4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI 48128; e-mail: sdegreg@umd.umich.edu
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Abstract

The reform of the Northumbrian Church constitutes a predominant theme in much that Bede wrote in his later years. Recent analyses of his later biblical commentaries have confirmed this, although a tendency remains to treat his historiographic masterpiece, theEcclesiastical history of the English people, completed in c. 731, as only aloofly reformist in outlook. This article contests such a view through an analysis of the narrative and characters of book iv, which when scrutinised can be seen to amplify some of the key reform-oriented issues voiced in Bede's last and most openly reformist work, theLetter to Egbert.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 673 - 687
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010
CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series latina

EH

Bede's Ecclesiastical history of the English people, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1969

Ep. Ecg.

Epistola ad Ecgbertum, ed. Charles Plummer, in Baedae Opera historica, Oxford 1896; repr. 1946

SC

Sources Chrétiennes

Thanks to recent scholarly effort, there is now a sharper sense of the interconnections amongst the many works of the Venerable Bede and also of the dates and circumstances when and in which he wrote them. This marks an advance over the scholarship of an earlier generation, which often had to tread more gingerly, treating his works in isolation and speculating more generally about their dates of composition. Ground has been gained most in knowledge of the biblical commentaries: seldom read not all that long ago, today they are being studied with increasing care.Footnote 1 Thus they have regained the centrality that Bede himself would surely have accorded them, indeed did accord them when, at the end of the Ecclesiastical history of the English people, he listed all his writings.Footnote 2 The inclination to see them as derivative and timeless compositions has passed, having ceded to a recognition that the question of their ‘originality’ can often be framed in terms of the nuance of their response to the specific historical moments that helped to shape them.Footnote 3 It is a development that has paid dividends not just for the commentaries but also for understanding Bede himself and everything that he wrote. Perhaps above all, it is now clear that the mind-set of his later years was decidedly reformist, and that the works composed then are coloured by a similar orientation.Footnote 4

In his recent monograph on the Ecclesiastical history, Nicholas Higham follows this current trend by devoting a brief section to the issue of reform.Footnote 5 He takes stock of the differences that set the Ecclesiastical history apart from those other works that are invested in reform, especially the Letter to Egbert, that masterpiece of excoriation in which Bede explicitly calls out the abuses that were plaguing the Northumbrian Church in his own day and outlines the solutions he wished his bishop friend to implement.Footnote 6 Higham rightly notes that the Ecclesiastical history contains ‘very few complaints regarding secular or corrupt monasteries such are to be found in the Letter to Egbert’, and he contends that, if the Ecclesiastical history has a reformist agenda, it is best described as ‘comparatively low key and very largely implicit, occurring primarily in a host of carefully constructed characterisations which are offered up in affirmative contexts as exemplars of appropriate behaviour to his audience’.Footnote 7 Higham's view is generally sound, although the obvious point may be added that different kinds of works normally do proceed in different fashions. Accordingly, as important as the letter is as a window onto the full scope of Bede's ideal of reform, and as much as it must for that reason anchor any serious discussion of that topic, the outraged tone of its critique should not be viewed as the sole litmus for deciding whether or not a given Bedan text is reformist. The strictures of genre obviously determined much of what Bede could and could not say in any given composition: and so a work of narrative prose, the declared intention of which is to edify its hearers – including, amongst other elites, the kingly figure of Ceolwulf of NorthumbriaFootnote 8 – would of course never proceed by mimicking the letter's invective over the course of five long books. In James Campbell's wise formulation, the Ecclesiastical history is nothing if not a work ‘distinguished by great discretion’, due precisely to the restraint it displays in saying anything directly about matters that are known to have weighed heavily on its author's mind.Footnote 9 But the fact that Bede, in his masterwork of historiography, had to dress his reformist objectives in different rhetorical clothing does not necessarily minimise the force of those objectives, as may be demonstrated by attending to the way that they have informed the treatment of monasticism that he develops in book iv.

Before addressing that topic, it is well to emphasise one evident point that is most relevant to the question of the Ecclesiastical history and reform: namely, that the project of writing that work must have occurred mainly during the 720s, when Bede was busy with the prose Vita sancti Cuthberti and his exegetical trilogy on the Jewish sanctuaries comprised of De tabernaculo, De templo and In Ezram et Neemiam – all of which are reformist in outlook.Footnote 10 More than that, Bede's work on the text reached into the 730s, close to the time of the Letter to Egbert, which he drafted on 5 November 734.Footnote 11 Within the text of the Ecclesiastical history, Bede presents his narrative as drawing to a close in ‘the year of our Lord 731’.Footnote 12 But as others have argued, all this really means is that 731 is the terminus at which Bede chose to end his account; it need not mean that the act of writing the Ecclesiastical history concluded then once and for all.Footnote 13 In this connection, D. P. Kirby's speculation that sections of the text may have been reworked as late as 734 is intriguing.Footnote 14 After all, the view that after 731 Bede put down his pen and produced nothing at all, until ire stirred him to write to Egbert, is not very plausible; if the account of his death holds merit, it must rather be assumed that he remained industrious until the very end of his life.Footnote 15 There is no need to go so far as to claim that Bede spent his final moments reworking parts of the Ecclesiastical history in light of his heated remarks to Egbert. The point is merely that if the composition of the Ecclesiastical history is to be placed within a frame spanning the years 720 and 731 or later, as seems sensible enough, then the likelihood must be acknowledged of its feeding off the same reformist ideas that nourished the other reform-infused works of this period. How Bede sought to express those ideas is another matter.

Book iv of the Ecclesiastical history ideally suits my purposes because its overwhelming concern is with monasticism, and the regular life, as the Letter to Egbert makes clear, constitutes a predominant strand of Bede's reform discourse. A focus on book iv is not intended to discount the relevance of other sections of the Ecclesiastical history: Bede's treatment of Aidan in book iii, with its notorious quip that ‘Aidan's life was in great contrast to our modern slothfulness’,Footnote 16 has often been noted, as has that ominous passage near the end of book v where Bede observes that present peace and prosperity have led many Northumbrian nobles to put down their weapons and take up the tonsure, ‘preferring that they and their children should take monastic vows rather than train themselves in the art of war. What the result will be, a later generation will discover’.Footnote 17 Comments such as these no doubt provide something of a smoking gun for investigating the Ecclesiastical history's ties to reform, were one necessary. But the equally suggestive content of much of book iv has yet to receive comment in discussions of Bede's views on reform. For modern scholarship, the book's main attraction has long remained the memorable tale in chapter 24 of the cowherd-poet Cædmon.Footnote 18 And Cædmon's celebrity as poet has had the undue effect of pulling scholarly interest in other directions. But the subtleties of Old English poetic metre and oral-formulaic theory were not, it is probably safe to assume, topics that were generally high in Bede's mind, let alone the raison d'être of his interest in Cædmon.

Like the other books of the Ecclesiastical history, book iv constructs its narrative from a series of colourful episodes and personages, but with an overwhelming focus on the monastic. The large number of references to monastic figures and topics is itself a notable feature of Bede's treatment, but more conspicuous are the numerous echoes and parallels with the Letter to Egbert that are there for any careful eye to detect. And while it is obvious that those echoes and parallels generally assume a rather different tone from what is encountered in the letter, having been purged of any trace of ire and desperation as is only to be expected, when examined contextually and viewed collectively they are no less trenchant in their effect. For example, the first two chapters immediately establish a reform-oriented tone by introducing the grand figures of Theodore and Hadrian, two monks chosen by Pope Vitalian (d. 672) as new heads of the nascent Anglo-Saxon Church. On the face of it Bede's account may appear to be little more than straightforward narrative reporting, but more careful analysis detects several pointed contrasts with the Letter to Egbert, and it is instructive to ponder them. Where the letter berates the slackness of monastic leaders for giving themselves up ‘to laughter, jokes, storytelling, eating, drinking, and other seductions of the soft life’,Footnote 19 in Theodore and Hadrian we meet two men said to be ‘extremely learned in sacred and secular literature’ who filled the minds of their students with ‘the streams of wholesome learning’.Footnote 20 Where the letter enumerates abuses in the Church that need rectifying, Bede underlines Theodore's scrupulous orthodoxy by making his first significant act the rectification of Chad's irregular consecration so that it accords with ‘the catholic manner’ (‘catholica ratione’).Footnote 21 And where the letter makes loud mention of the many inaccessible regions in mountains and forests ‘where a bishop has never been seen over the course of many years performing his ministry and revealing the divine grace’,Footnote 22 in Theodore Bede presents the diametrical opposite, a bishop who ‘journeyed to every district, consecrating bishops in suitable places and, with their help, correcting whatever he found imperfect’.Footnote 23

In the chapter that follows such emphases continue and even intensify the note of contemporary critique. The first point of focus is Bishop Chad. In a short space, Bede informs us of his ascetical devotion to his pastoral work (carried out on foot rather than by horseback), his establishing regular discipline at Barrow and his building of ‘a more retired dwelling-place not far from the church, in which he could read and pray privately with a few of his brothers, that is to say seven or eight of them; this he did as often as he was free from his labours and from the ministration of the word’.Footnote 24 The significance of these actions is magnified if the urgency with which Bede admonishes Egbert is recalled regarding the importance of holy living and teaching, especially the melding of active and contemplative pursuits such as Chad models so effectively here.Footnote 25 The scene then shifts to another figure, Owine, a monk at Chad's monastery at Lastingham. Bede makes a point of noting that Owine had only recently been inducted into the religious life, explaining that he ‘had come with Queen Æthelthryth from the kingdom of the East Angles, being the chief of her officers and the head of her household’.Footnote 26 It is a key detail in light of what Bede says next:

As his faith and zeal increased, he decided to renounce the world and this he did in no half-hearted way: he stripped himself so completely of his worldly possessions that he left all that he had and, dressed only in a plain garment and carrying an axe and an adze in his hands, he came to the most reverend father's monastery at Lastingham. He did this to show that he was not entering the monastery for the sake of some ease, as some did; for as he was less capable of the study of the Scriptures, he applied himself more earnestly to manual labour.Footnote 27

The miracle of heavenly song that ensues takes up the bulk of the chapter and serves to confirm Owine's sanctity. Yet this is not what strikes anyone who has read the Letter to Egbert. For in Bede's presentation Owine is the very antithesis of those laymen described in the letter whom Bede condemns for using the monastic life as a ruse for the satisfaction of their profligate appetites.Footnote 28 In a significant point of contrast to those laymen, Owine prefers the regular life to the secular world and its allurements, rather than using monastic retirement as a means to cultivating them.Footnote 29 In particular, it is the language that Bede employs in his casting of Owine that calls to mind the letter's remarks on this theme. For phrases such as ‘in no half-hearted way’ (‘non hoc segniter fecit’) and ‘as some did’ (‘ut quidam’) add a special resonance to the passage that is hard to miss, imbuing it with a contemporary edge that invites association with the letter's critique.

The stretch of chapters running from 4 to 18 also feature an impressive parade of monks and nuns who match the examples set by Theodore, Hadrian and Owine. What stands out most in these chapters are the many references to monastic discipline and regulation. By contrast, the Letter to Egbert presents a deteriorated situation where any sense of regulation by a Rule has long become defunct, noting that ‘there are many such places, as we all know, that only in the most foolish way deserve the name of monastery, having absolutely nothing of real monastic life about them’.Footnote 30 In one of the letter's more notorious passages, monastic cells are described as places huddled with the disobedient and the deformed, where laymen posing as monks copulate with their wives in complete defiance of regular strictures.Footnote 31 The letter is forthright in blaming such abuses on a lack of instruction, concluding that ‘such blindness could certainly be ended at any time were it to be confined by the discipline of regular monastic life and expelled far beyond the borders of the holy church by joint Episcopal and conciliar authority’.Footnote 32 Against so dreary a picture the many evocations of life under Rule presented in Book iv become something more than quaint reflections on a former golden age. Colmon's instituting a Rule to ensure the stabilitas of his monks;Footnote 33 Eorcenwald's founding two monasteries and establishing ‘an excellent form of monastic Rule and discipline in both’;Footnote 34 the nun Torhtgyth's devotion to helping Abbess Æthelburh ‘keep the discipline of the Rule by teaching or reproving the younger ones’;Footnote 35 Abbess Hildelith's presiding over her monastery until old age yet remaining ‘most energetic in the observance of the discipline of the Rule’;Footnote 36 and John the arch-chanter's careful instruction of the brothers at Bede's own institution at WearmouthFootnote 37 – the examples of these characters become scripts for present action (rather than mere idealisations of the past) when they are juxtaposed to the negative characterisations of Bede's letter. And when, furthermore, it is recognised that the letter's plea for increased episcopal and conciliar authority is answered in Book iv's account of the councils at Hatfield and Hertford, narrated in chapter 17 and chapter 5 respectively, it becomes easy to perceive how the narrative drive of book iv can been seen to work in concert with the letter's reforming agenda.

Chapters 19–32, in rounding off book iv, are capped at one end by two grand abbesses, Æthelthryth of Ely and Hild of Whitby, and at the other end by the dauntingly holy Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Within this frame Bede extends and amplifies some central themes of the preceding chapters. In particular, he emphasises Hild's establishing a life according to rule at both Hartlepool and Whitby,Footnote 38 and underlines Cuthbert's role as an exemplary preacher.Footnote 39 These saintly figures have been much discussed; their potency as images within Bede's reform programme is undisputed and provides more than a hint of what Bede is up to in book iv of the Ecclesiastical history.Footnote 40 The other major personality of this final section of book iv, the cowherd Cædmon, has been discussed no less frequently but with very different ends in view. It is therefore crucial to say something about his place in the narrative of book iv lest the overwhelming focus on the hymn in the scholarly literature distracts from the broader designs of what Bede is doing here. Indeed, by prioritising the hymn and its analogues, critical discussion has made the chapter into something of a digression from the larger flow of the book in which it resides.Footnote 41 To resist this urge is in part to acknowledge that, far from a digression, Bede's portrayal of Cædmon actually plays a vital role in the discussion of monasticism and reform that he is concerned to articulate in book iv.

Two fundamental points need to be stressed if the contextual significance of Bede's treatment of Cædmon is to be uncovered. The first is that the story occurs precisely in book iv, that is, in the context of many other vignettes about the monastic life. In particular, it is embedded in a narrative about Abbess Hild – herself a model of the monastic ideal for Bede – and about events at the monastery of Whitby, one of Bede's ideal royal monastic institutions. So resonant a setting should place us on alert for parallels with the preceding chapters and Bede's thinking about monastic reform more generally. Secondly, it is noteworthy that, proportionately at least, the focus of chapter 24 is not the miracle of Cædmon's sudden gift of song but rather his induction into the uita regularis and the impact that his life as monk has on those around him; and in that respect, the story is not so very different from the other episodes that populate book iv. These basic points warrant redirecting away from the metrics and analogues of the hymn to the whole episode as a functional and functioning unit within a broader narrative and ideological economy.

When read from the larger perspective of book iv and the many compelling images of monastic life found there, and then from the even larger perspective of the reform discourse of Bede's post-720s output and above all from the perspective of the Letter to Egbert which caps that discourse, the Cædmon story can be viewed as a piece that has been honed to fit meticulously within that textual frame. For the subject with which it deals is as much the making of an exemplary Christian monk as the emergence of an expert Christian poet. Bede himself, after all, indicates that much directly, saying of Cædmon that ‘He was a most religious man, humbly submitting himself to the discipline of the Rule. He opposed all those who wished to act otherwise with a flaming and fervent zeal.’Footnote 42 In a work peopled by so many lauded saintly figures, the comment hardly comes across as something striking. But such mention of fervent commitment to monastic discipline, when other primary sources of the time show that it was precisely the lack of such discipline in Northumbrian monasticism that had Bede incensed to the core, must be treated as a detail that is both deliberate and ostensive. It furnishes a vital clue to reading the Cædmon episode as a constitutive element of the reform-based discourse evidenced throughout book iv and elsewhere in Bede's œuvre.

Certain details in the story are essential to rounding out such an interpretation of Cædmon. They are easily missed if the focus is too exclusively the miracle or the hymn, yet they are keys to unlocking the episode's contemporary thrust, its reformist edge. The first has to do with Cædmon's social status. Here it is crucial to realise just who – or better what – he is. He is introduced to us at the start of chapter 24 as ‘frater quidam’, one of the monks of the Whitby community.Footnote 43 But this, of course, is to look ahead at what he becomes, the result of the miraculous transformation of social identity that he undergoes. Of Cædmon's life prior to that transformation, we are told (also at the onset of the story) that ‘he had lived in the secular habit until he was well advanced in years’Footnote 44 – by itself not an especially helpful comment. Yet the task of having to tend cattle, which he performs with alacrity in hope of missing his turn to sing at the feast, as well as his subservience to the reeve who escorts him to the Abbess Hild, sufficiently clarify the nature of his secular status. He is a rusticus, a labouring serf on the estates of the royal monastery at Whitby.Footnote 45 To think of him merely as a layman, then, is insufficient, since it fails to take stock of his true social standing. Peter Hunter Blair perhaps said it best when, in a memorable phrase, he called Cædmon an ‘untutored peasant’.Footnote 46

Why should Cædmon's social status matter? Other rustici appear in the Ecclesiastical history: there are the peasant hill-dwellers (‘plebem rusticam’) whom Cuthbert searches out during his pastoral rounds;Footnote 47 and famously, in a story just prior to the Cædmon episode, the thane Imma feigns – unsuccessfully – the part of a rusticus in an attempt to save his life from his captors.Footnote 48 Such social colouring is rare in the pages of the Ecclesiastical history; in Thacker's words, ‘Bede's stage [in the Ecclesiastical history] is peopled by kings and nobles and high ecclesiastics; he has little to say about those who were not themselves grandees’.Footnote 49 And yet, the scarcity of such colouring aside, such instances are valuable, for they remind us that distinctions of class were as recognisable a facet of Bede's social world as they are of our own.Footnote 50 Indeed, in the case of Cædmon it is critical to recognise the extent to which his social class, far from being some inconsequential detail or piece of quaint description, is a determinative element in the story. For the transformation he undergoes is not simply from layman to monk, from secular to monastic life, but from unlettered peasant to erudite monastic doctor, of the very kind that Bede promoted so fervently elsewhere in his writings.

Especially in his biblical commentaries, Bede characterises these doctores as comprising something like a social class of their own. Together they form an elite corps of initiates whose superior knowledge of the faith makes them fit to discharge a wide range of contemplative and pastoral functions. In his commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah, he describes them as persons who are ‘superior in merit and education’ who ‘either show to those who preach the word the example of their own virtues or produce plentiful pages of holy writings so that, strengthened by their exhortations and promises, they might grow less weary in their heavenly labour’.Footnote 51 And in his commentary on the Song of Songs he likens them to a neck, ‘since they both instruct the unlearned with an edifying word and in the process of that same instruction convey the food of salvation to the members of the Holy Church entrusted to them’.Footnote 52 Again and again Bede stressed that the spiritual health of society hinged on the activities of these teachers; as he put it tersely in his commentary on Proverbs, ‘where there are no learned preachers the crowd of people assemble to hear in vain’.Footnote 53 Needless to say, it is not a role that would quickly be associated with rustici, and yet that is precisely the image Cædmon presents. Like a Bedan monastic doctor, Cædmon is both a contemplative exegete, ruminating on Scripture ‘like some clean animal chewing the cud’ (‘quasi mundum animal ruminando’),Footnote 54 and a preacher whose words are able ‘to turn his hearers away from delight in sin and arouse in them the love and practice of good works’.Footnote 55 Bede observes that one result of this exchange is that Cædmon's ‘teachers (‘doctoribus’) became his audience' – a comment that well underscores the specific nature of the herdsman's newly elevated social role. In the end, what Bede does is not dissimilar to the technique of characterisation that he employs to different ends in the Lives of the abbots of Wearmouth-Jarrow when he depicts the noble abbot Eosterwine winnowing and threshing and milking the cows. Eosterwine, like Cædmon, is the exception that proves the rule.Footnote 56

The force of all this in the wider scope of chapter 24, and book iv generally, becomes clear only when, having completed that chapter, we read about the destruction of the minster at Coldingham in chapter 25. It is a calculated juxtaposition, and one whose implications for the meaning of the Cædmon episode cannot be overstated. The chapter begins innocuously enough with a report of the monastery's destruction, explaining that it ‘was burned down through carelessness’ (‘per culpam incuriae flammis absumtum est’). But in the next breath Bede offers a different explanation for its demise: ‘all who knew the truth were easily able to judge that it happened because of the wickedness of those who dwelt there and especially of those who were supposed to be its leaders (maiores)’.Footnote 57 The chapter then turns to an inmate of the monastery, the Irish monk Adamnan, devoting several lines to his unbridled desire for penitence before returning to the reasons for the monastery's destruction, which, it turns out, had been foretold to the Irish ascetic by an angel. While praising Adamnan for this austere piety, the heavenly visitor condemns the general population of the monastery for its spiritual lassitude:

many besides yourself need to atone for their sins by good works and, by setting themselves free from worldly occupations, to labour more eagerly to cultivate a desire for their eternal welfare; yet there are very few who do this. Men and women alike are sunk in slothful slumbers or else they remain awake for the purposes of sin. And the cells that were built for praying and for reading have become haunts of feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights; even the virgins who are dedicated to God put aside all respect for their profession and whenever they have leisure, spend their time weaving elaborate garments with which to adorn themselves as if they were brides, so imperilling their virginity, or else to make friends with strange men. So it is only right that a heavy vengeance from heaven should be preparing for this place and for its inhabitants in the form of raging fire.Footnote 58

If stripped of its visionary framework, the passage is nothing if not a strong parallel to the critique found of Northumbrian pseudo-monasteries in the Letter to Egbert.Footnote 59 Like the letter, the Coldingham episode takes the form of an outright condemnation of the sins responsible for subverting the rules upon which monastic life must be modelled. Of course, the strictures of genre allow Bede to go only so far, and so naturally his account of the Coldingham disaster is not as impassioned nor as detailed as the attack he lets loose in the letter. But the essence of his preoccupation in both places is fundamentally the same. Most tellingly, in both the letter and the Coldingham episode it is the aristocratic sphere with its elite pursuits that he singles out as a principal cause for the dilution of true monastic values. What sharper critique of the inhabitants of that sphere could Bede devise than having a lowly cowherd outstrip them in the very obligations that they have so heedlessly abandoned?

In perhaps the most quoted sentence of his entire œuvre, Bede made a point in the opening words of the preface of announcing the purpose of the Ecclesiastical history:

Should history tell of good men and their good estate, the thoughtful listener is spurred on to imitate the good; should it record the evil ends of wicked men, no less effectually the devout and earnest listener or reader is kindled to eschew what is harmful and perverse, and himself with greater care pursue those things which he learned to be good and pleasing in the sight of God.Footnote 60

As Calvin Kendall has shown, Bede is indebted here to a long historiographic tradition predicated on the rhetorical concept of imitation, whereby history and those acts of individuals who make it are replete with models for our betterment.Footnote 61 But as in any work of historiography as masterfully crafted and complex as Bede's, the presence of multiple agendas operating simultaneously deep within the interstices of the narrative is not hard to detect. And while Higham is right that Bede's method here, with its reliance on a ‘host of carefully constructed characterisations’, differs markedly from that of the Epistola ad Ecgbertum, a reading of some of those characterisations may suggest a need to revisit his claim that ‘there is comparatively little which is explicitly and actively reformist’ in the Ecclesiastical history.Footnote 62 The string of episodes and personages that constitute book iv, especially the juxtaposition of Whitby with its doctor rusticus and Coldingham with its idle aristocrats, leave little doubt that the construction of that book, and of those chapters above all, was intended to serve particular needs in Bede's own day. However much Cædmon's native scop-cræft may be the most attractive part of the episode, it is clear that this peasant-turned-monastic-doctor was also a well-designed ideological tool, a finger in the eye of those secular Northumbrian aristocrats whom Bede felt should themselves have endeavoured to fulfil that role. Whatever else it may do, such a reading of Cædmon makes best sense of his presence in book iv of the Ecclesiastical history, as it allows both him and that larger work to assume the rightful place that they must surely have in the chain of narratives and expositions that make up Bede's discourse of reform.

References

1 The English translations published in Liverpool University Press's Translated Texts for Historians series are perhaps the brightest indicator of the resurgence of the commentaries in recent scholarship. See, most recently, Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah, trans. Scott DeGregorio, Liverpool 2006, and Bede: On Genesis, trans. Calvin B. Kendall, Liverpool 2008. Twelve of Bede's exegetical commentaries have now been translated: for bibliography and further discussion of this key development see Scott DeGregorio, ‘Introduction: the new Bede’, in Scott DeGregorio (ed.), Innovation and tradition in the writings of the Venerable Bede, Morgantown 2006, 1–10, as well the chapters on Bede's biblical exegesis in Scott DeGregorio (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Bede, Cambridge 2010.

2 Bede enumerates his works, placing his biblical commentaries first, in EH v.24 (pp. 567–71). Two new editions of the Ecclesiastical history have recently appeared: Bède le Vénérable: Histoire ecclésiastique du peuple anglais, I: (Livres i.ii); II (Livres iii.iv): III (Livre v), critical text by Michael Lapidge, introduction and notes by André Crépin, translation by Pierre Monat and Philippe Robin, SC cccclxxxix–xci, Paris 2005; and Beda: Storia degli inglesi (Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum), ed. Michael Lapidge, trans. Paolo Chiesa, Milan 2008–9. For critical commentary in English see J. Robert Wright, A companion to Bede: a reader's commentary on the Ecclesiastical history of the English people, Grand Rapids 2008.

3 Bede's originality is a leitmotif of the chapters on exegesis in DeGregorio, Innovation and tradition. On the issue of dating see the important debate on the commentary on Ezra-Nehemiah between DeGregorio, Scott, ‘Bede's In Ezram et Neemiam and the reform of the Northumbrian Church’, Speculum lxxix (2004), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Meyvaert, Paul, ‘The date of Bede's In Ezram and his image in the Codex Amiatinus’, Speculum lxxx (2005), 1087–1133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The seminal discussion is Thacker, Alan, ‘Bede's ideal of reform’, in Patrick Wormald and others (eds), Ideal and reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society: studies presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Oxford 1983, 130–53’, Early Medieval Europe xi (2002), 107–22Google Scholar; ‘Bede's In Ezram et Nehemiah: a document in church reform?’, in Stéphane Lebecq and others (eds), Bède le Vénérable entre tradition and postérité, Lille 2005, 97–107; and ‘Bede's In Ezram and reform’.

5 N. J. Higham, (Re-)reading Bede: the Ecclesiastical history in context, London 2006, 54–8.

6 For discussion of the letter's key themes see DeGregorio, ‘“Nostrorum socordiam temporum”’; ‘Bede's In Ezram et Neemiah’; and ‘Bede's In Ezram and reform’, as well as the fine comments of John Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon society, Oxford 2005, 100–8.

7 Higham, (Re-)reading Bede, 56–7.

8 In the preface Bede addresses the work ‘Gloriosissimo regi Ceoluulfo’: EH, praefatio (p. 2). On the tantalising question of Ceolwulf's role in shaping the work see Kirby, D. P., ‘King Ceolwulf of Northumbria and the Historia ecclesiastica’, Studia Celtica xiv–xv (1979–80), 168–73Google Scholar, as well as Higham's own remarks in (Re-)reading Bede, ch.v.

9 James Campbell, ‘Bede’, in T. A. Dorey (ed.), Latin historians, New York 1966, 159–90 at p. 176. Campbell continues (pp. 176–7): ‘While his commentaries contain numerous references to the shortcomings of the Church and in his letter to Egbert he is open and violent in denunciation he has very little to say directly about the sins of the clergy in his history … Had we to rely on the Ecclesiastical History for our knowledge of the Church in the first generation of the eighth century we should know little of it, and still less of Bede's severe judgment on it.’

10 On Bede's treatment of Cuthbert see Thacker, ‘Ideal of reform’; on the commentaries see DeGregorio, ‘Reforming impulse’ and ‘Bede's In Ezram et Neemiam’.

11 Bede himself supplies this date at the end of the letter: ‘Scripta Nonas Nouembris, indictione tertia’: Ep. Ecg. § 17 (p. 423).

12 ‘dominicae autem incarnationis anno DCCXXXI’: EH v.23 (p. 561).

13 To use Walter Goffart's terminology, the year 731 is best viewed as the work's ‘official date’: The narrators of barbarian history, Princeton 1988; repr. Notre Dame 2005, 235–328 at p. 242. See also the remarks of Lapidge in Beda: Storia degli inglesi, i, pp. xlviii–ix n. 2.

14 D. P. Kirby, ‘Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum: its contemporary setting’ (Jarrow Lecture 1992), 2–3; repr. in Michael Lapidge (ed.), Bede and his world: the Jarrow Lectures: 1979–1993, Aldershot 1994, ii. 906–7. See also Goffart, Narrators, 241 n. 34, and Baedae Opera historica, ed. Charles Plummer (1896), Oxford 1946, 338–9.

15 Cuthbert, ‘Epistola de obitu Baedae’, EH, 582.

16 ‘In tantum autem uita illius a nostri temporis segnitia distabat’: EH iii.5 (p. 226).

17 ‘Qua adridente pace ac serenitate temporum, plures in gente Nordanhymbrorum, tam nobiles quam priuati, se suosque liberos depositis armis satagunt magis, accepta tonsura, monasterialibus adscribere uotis quam bellicis exercere studiis. Quae res quem sit habitura finem, posterior aetas uidebit’: EH v.23 (p. 560).

18 Scholarship on Cædmon is extensive: see the recent bibliography in Daniel Paul O'Donnell, Cædmon's hymn: a multi-media study, edition and archive, Woodbridge 2005, 233–48.

19 ‘risui, iocis, fabulis, commessationibus et ebrietatibus, ceterisque uitae remissioris illecebris’: Ep. Ecg. § 4 (p. 407); trans. J. McClure and R. Collins, Bede: the Ecclesiastical history of the English people, The greater chronicle, Bede's letter to Egbert, Oxford 1994, 344–5.

20 ‘Et quia litteris sacris simul et saecularibus, ut diximus, abundanter ambo erant instructi, congregata discipulorum caterua scientiae salutaris cotidie flumina inrigandis eorum cordibus emanabant’: EH iv.2 (p. 332).

21 EH iv.2 (p. 334); cf. iv.6 (p. 354), where Theodore is shown undertaking a similar role, deposing the Mercian bishop Winfrith for ‘some act of disobedience’ (‘per meritum cuiusdam inoboedientiae’).

22 ‘Audiuimus enim, et fama est, quia multae uillae ac uiculi nostrae gentis in montibus sint inaccessis ac saltibus dumosis positi, ubi nunquam multis transeuntibus annis sit uisus antistes, qui ibidem aliquid ministerii aut gratiae caelestis exhibuerit; quorum tamen ne unus quidem a tributis antistiti reddendis esse possit immunis’: Ep. Ecg. § 7 (p. 410); trans. McClure and Collins, Bede: Ecclesiastical history, 347.

23 ‘Itaque Theodorus perlustrans uniuersa ordinabat locis oportunis episcopos, et ea quae minus perfecta repperit his quoque iuuantibus corrigebat’: EH iv.2 (p. 334).

24 ‘Fecerat uero sibi mansionem non longe ab ecclesia remotiorem, in qua secretius cum paucis, id est septem siue octo, fratribus, quoties a labore et ministerio Verbi uacabat, orare ac legere solebat’: EH iv.3 (p. 338).

25 For general discussion of the symbiosis of action and contemplation in Bede's thought see DeGregorio, Scott, ‘The Venerable Bede on prayer and contemplation’, Traditio liv (1999), 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bede's treatment of St Cuthbert's anachoresis instances a comparable melding of the two lives. For discussion see Clare Stancliffe, ‘Cuthbert and the polarity between pastor and solitary’, in Gerald Bonner and others (eds), St Cuthbert, his cult and his community to A.D. 1200, Woodbridge 1989, 21–44; Simon J. Coates, ‘The bishop as pastor and solitary: Bede and the spiritual authority of the monk-bishop’, this Journal xlvii (1996), 601–19; and Thacker, ‘Ideal of reform’.

26 ‘Venerat enim cum regina Aedilthryde de prouincia Orientalium Anglorum, eratque primus ministrorum et princeps domus eius’: EH iv.3 (p. 338).

27 ‘Qui cum crescente fidei feruore saeculo abrenuntiare disponeret, non hoc segniter fecit, sed adeo se mundi rebus exuit, ut relictis omnibus quae habebat, simplici tantum habitu indutus et securim atque asciam in manu ferens, ueniret ad monasterium eiusdem reuerentissimi patris, quod uocatur Laestingaeu. Non enim otium, ut quidam, sed ad laborem se monasterium intrare signabat. Quod ipsum etiam facto monstrauit, nam quo minus sufficiebat meditationi scripturarum, eo amplius operi manuum studium inpendebat’: ibid.

28 Ep. Ecg. §§ 12–13 (pp. 415–18).

29 This, after all, appears to be a major facet of Bede's attack: ‘At alibi grauiore adhuc flagitio, cum sint ipsi laici, et nullo uitae regularis uel usu exerciti, uel amore praediti, data regibus pecunia, emunt sibi sub praetextu construendorum monasteriorum territoria in quibus suae liberius uacent libidini’: Ep. Ecg. § 12 (p. 415).

30 ‘Ac si opus esse uisum fuerit, ut tali monasterio, causa episcopatus suscipiendi, amplius aliquid locorum ac possessionum augeri debeat, sunt loca innumera, ut nouimus omnes, stilo stultissimo in monasteriorum ascripta uocabulum, sed nichil prorsus monasticae conuersationis habentia’: Ep. Ecg. § 10 (pp. 413–14); trans. McClure and Collins, Bede: Ecclesiastical history, 349–50.

31 ‘Horum distortis cohortibus, suas, quas instruxere, cellas implent, multumque informi atque inaudito spectaculo, idem ipsi uiri modo coniugis ac liberorum procreandorum curam gerunt, modo exsurgentes de cubilibus, quid intra septa monasteriorum geri debeat, sedula intentione pertractant. Quin etiam suis coniugibus simili impudentia construendis, ut ipsi aiunt, monasteriis loca conquirunt, quae pari stultitia, cum sint laicae, famularum se Christi permittunt esse rectrices’: Ep. Ecg. § 12 (p. 416).

32 ‘Quae nimirum caecitas posset aliquando terminari, ac regulari disciplina cohiberi, et de finibus sanctae ecclesiae cunctis pontificali ac synodica auctoritate procul expelli, si non ipsi pontifices magis huiusmodi sceleribus opem ferre atque astipulari probarentur’: Ep. Ecg. § 13 (p. 417); trans. McClure and Collins, Bede: Ecclesiastical history, 352.

33 EH iv.4 (pp. 346–8).

34 ‘Hic sane, priusquam episcopus factus esset, duo praeclara monasteria, unum sibi alterum sorori suae Aedilburgae construxerat, quod utrumque regularibus disciplinis optime instituerat’: EH iv.6 (p. 354).

35 ‘quae [Torhtgyth] multis iam annis in eodem monasterio commorata et ipsa semper in omni humilitate ac sinceritate Deo seruire sategebat, et adiutrix disciplinae regularis eidem matri existere minores docendo uel castigando curabat’: EH iv.9 (p. 360).

36 ‘eidem monasterio strenuissime et in obseruantia disciplinae regularis et in earum quae ad communes usus pertinent rerum prouidentia praefuit’: EH iv.10 (p. 360).

37 EH iv.18 (p. 388).

38 ‘Cum ergo aliquot annos huic monasterio regularis uitae institutioni multum intenta praeesset, contigit eam suscipere etiam construendum siue ordinandum monasterium in loco, qui uocatur Streanaeshalch; quod opus sibi iniunctum non segniter impleuit. Nam eisdem, quibus prius monasterium, etaim hoc disciplinis uitae regularis instituit, et quidem multam ibi quoque iustitiae pietatis et castimoniae ceterarumque uirtutum, sed maxime pacis et caritatis custodiam docuit’: EH iv.23 (p. 409).

39 ‘Porro Cudbercto tanta erat dicendi peritia, tantus amor persuadendi quae coeperat, tale uultus angelici lumen, ut nullus praesentium latebras ei sui cordis celare praesumeret, omnes palam quae gesserant confitendo proferrent, quia nimirum haec eadem illum latere nullo modo putabant, et confessa dignis ut imperabat, poenitentiae fructibus abstergerent’: EH iv.27 (p. 432).

40 On Hild see especially Peter Hunter Blair, ‘Whitby as a centre of learning in the seventh century’, in Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (eds), Learning and literacy in Anglo-Saxon England: studies presented to Peter Clemoes, Cambridge 1985, 3–32; on Cuthbert see Thacker, ‘Bede and reform’.

41 For one exception to this tendency, which however offers a rather different reading from what is proposed here, see Less, Clare and Overing, Gillian, ‘Birthing bishops and fathering poets: Bede, Hild, and the relations of cultural production’, Exemplaria vi (1994), 35–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 ‘Erat enim uir multum religiosus et regularibus disciplinis humiliter subditus; aduersum uero illos, qui aliter facere uolebant, zelo magni feruoris accensus, unde et pulchro uitam suam fine conclusit’: EH iv.24 (p. 418).

43 ‘Frater is used more generally in speaking about men within monasteries and may encompass estate workers or tenants on the ecclesiastical estates as well as monks’: Cubitt, Catherine, ‘The clergy in early Anglo-Saxon England’, Historical Research lxxviii (2005), 273–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 275. Accordingly, the term could possibly also describe Cædmon's status as a labourer on the monastic estates before his official profession of vows. For more on the term's range of meanings see Sarah Foot, Monastic life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–900, Cambridge 2006, 179.

44 ‘Siquidem in habitu saeculari usque ad tempora prouectioris aetatis constitutus’: EH iv.24 (p. 414).

45 Cædmon is the only named person of such stature in the Ecclesiastical history: Scott DeGregorio, ‘Literary contexts: Cædmon's hymn as a center of Bede's world’, in Allen J. Frantzen and John Hines (eds), Cædmon's hymn and material culture in the world of Bede, Morgantown 2007, 51–79 at p. 77.

46 Blair, ‘Whitby as a centre of learning’, 3; cf. ‘Vocations to the religious life were not restricted to the highest strata of society, nor were only those of noble birth educated to a sufficient understanding of Christianity to voice spiritual ambitions. Even so, it must have been difficult for those of peasant stock to express a pious ambition to renounce the world. Not only did they lack the material resources to create their own religious houses, they were also bound in service to a secular lord. Cædmon's story is patently exceptional’: Foot, Monastic life, 122.

47 ‘sed demoratus in montanis plebem rusticam uerbo praedicationis simul et opere uirtutis ad caelestia uocaret’: EH iv.27 (p. 432).

48 ‘A quo interrogatus qui esset, timuit se militem fuisse confiteri; rusticum se potius et pauperem atque uxoreo uinculo conligatum fuisse respondit, et propter uictum militibus adferendum in expeditionem se cum sui similibus uenisse testatus est’: EH iv.22 (p. 402).

49 Alan Thacker, ‘Monks, preaching and pastoral care in early Anglo-Saxon England’, in John Blair and Richard Sharpe (eds), Pastoral care before the parish, Leicester 1992, 137–70 at p. 137; cf. ‘Virtually, the only non-aristocratic churchman to appear in our sources is the Whitby cow-herd Cædmon who was miraculously inspired to compose religious song, which sufficiently accounts for his prominence in the church despite his lowly social class’: David Rollason, Northumbria, 500–110: creation and destruction of a kingdom, Cambridge 2003, 182.

50 For an excellent recent discussion see Christopher Loveluck, ‘Cædmon's world: secular and monastic lifestyles and estate organization in northern England, ad 650–900’, in Frantzen and Hines, Cædmon's hymn, 150–90.

51 ‘Dant autem principes patrum Iosue uidelicet et Zorobabel ac fratres eorum pecunias eisdem latomis et cementariis quo eos promptiores ad operandum reddant cum euangelizantibus uerbum hi qui tempore merito eruditione praecessere doctores Christo auctore uel exempla uirtutum suarum proponunt uel diuinorum apicum paginas largiuntur quorum exhortationibus uel promissis confortati minus in labore caelesti lassescant’: In Ezram et Neemiam, ed. David Hurst, CCSL cxixa, Turnhout 1969, 275; trans. DeGregorio, Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah, 58.

52 ‘Vnde recte in collo ecclesiae doctorum persona designatur qui et uerbo aedificationis rudes instituunt et eiusdem institutionis officio cibum salutis in commissa sibi sanctae ecclesiae membra transmittunt’: In Cantica Canticorum, ed. David Hurst, CCSL cxixb, Turnhout 1983, 202; my translation.

53 ‘ubi non sunt docti praedicatores frustra ad audiendum confluit turba plebium’: In prouerbia Salomonis, ed. David Hurst, CCSL cxixb.83; my translation.

54 For discussion of the image see West, Philip J., ‘Rumination in Bede's account of Cædmon’, Monastic Studies xii (1976), 217–26Google Scholar, and more recently Pizarro, J., ‘Poetry as rumination: the model for Bede's Cædmon’, Neophilolgus lxxxix (2005), 469–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 ‘Sed et alia perplura de beneficiis et iudiciis diuninis, in quibus cunctis homines ab amore scelerum abstrahere, ad dilectionem uero et sollertiam bonae actionis excitare curabat’: EH iv.24 (p. 418).

56 ‘mansit humilis, fratrumque simillimus aliorum, ut uentilare cum eis et triturare, oues uitulasque mulgere, in pistrino, in orto, in coquina, in cunctis monasterii operibus iocundus et obediens gauderet exerceri. Sed et abbatis nomine graduque assumpto, idem animo qui prius manebat ad omnes’: Historia abbatum auctore Baeda § 8, ed. Plummer, Baedae Opera historica, 371–2.

57 ‘Quod tamen a malitia inhabitantium in eo, et praecipue illorum qui maiores esse uidebantur, contigisse omnes qui nouere facillime potuerunt aduertere’: EH iv.25 (p. 420).

58 ‘quia et tibi et multis opus est peccata sua bonis operibus redimere et, cum cessant a laboribus rerum temporalium, tunc pro appetitu aeternorum bonorum liberius laborare; sed hoc tamen paucissimi faciunt. Siquidem modo totum hoc monasterium ex ordine perlustrans, singulorum casas ac lectos inspexi, et neminem ex omnibus praeter te erga sanitatem animae suae occupatum repperi; sed omnes prorus, et uiri et feminae, aut somno torpent inerti ut ad peccata uigilant. Nam et domunculae, quae ad orandum uel legendum factae errant, nunc in comesationum, potationum, fabulationum et ceterarum sunt inlecebrarum cubilia conuersae; uirgines quoque Deo dicatae, contemta reuerentia suae professionis, quotiescumque uacant, texendis subtilirentia suae professionis, quotiescumque uacant, texendis subtilioribus indumentis operam dant, quibus aut se ipsas ad uicem sponsarum in periculum sui status adoraent, aut externorum sibi uirorum amicitiam conparent. Vnde merito loco huic et habitatoribus eius grauis de caelo uidicta flammis saeuientibus praeparata est’: EH iv.25 (p. 424).

59 For the parallel between Bede's letter and the reforming ideals of the Council of Clofesho later in the eighth century, and the further observation that ‘The account in canon twenty … of the occupations to be banned in devout monasteries reads like a description of Bede's Coldingham’ see Catherine Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon church councils, c. 650–850, Leicester 1995, 121.

60 ‘Siue enim historia de bonis bona referat, ad imitandum bonum auditor sollicitus instigatur; seu mala commemoret de prauis, nihilominus religiosus ac pius auditor siue lector deuitando quod noxium est ac peruersum, ipse sollertius ad exsequenda ea quae bona ac Deo digna esse cognouerit, accenditur’: EH praef. (p. 2).

61 Calvin Kendall, ‘Imitation and the Venerable Bede's Historia ecclesiastica’, in Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens (eds), Saints, scholars and heroes: studies in medieval culture in honour of Charles W. Jones, Collegeville, Mn 1979, i. 161–90.

62 Higham, (Re-)reading Bede, 56.