Bede

Bede was born about 673 on land belonging to the twin monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, in Northumbria. He was handed over to the monks at the age of seven. He never really left. In the last paragraph of his great history he wrote that he had spent his whole life in that monastery, giving his attention to studying the Scriptures, and that amid the observance of the Rule and the daily task of singing in church, it had always been his delight to learn, to teach, or to write.

He was ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty. He travelled almost nowhere, a trip to Lindisfarne, a trip to York. The great sweep of his work was done from a library and a scriptorium at the northern edge of the known world.

That library was the point. Benedict Biscop, who founded the monastery, had made five journeys to Rome and hauled back books. Bede therefore had access to a collection unlike anything else in northern Europe, and he used every volume of it.

He wrote around sixty works. Most of them are biblical commentaries, Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Ezra and Nehemiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Mark, Luke, Acts, the catholic epistles, Revelation, plus homilies, saints' lives, works on grammar, metre, orthography, and the natural world.

Two of them changed things permanently.

The first is The Reckoning of Time, a technical book about the calendar, the tides, the moon, and the dating of Easter. In it he laid out the anno Domini system, counting years forward from the incarnation, and used it consistently. The idea came from Dionysius Exiguus two centuries earlier, but it was Bede who put it to work in a book everyone read, and that is why the year has the number it has.

The second is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731. It is the reason we know anything about Anglo-Saxon England: Augustine's landing in Kent, Edwin's conversion and the sparrow flying through the lighted hall, the Synod of Whitby, Caedmon the cowherd who was given a song in the night, Cuthbert on his island. Bede named his sources, distinguished what he had verified from what he had only heard, and wrote a preface asking readers to correct him. That is a historian's conscience, four hundred years before anyone else in Europe was showing one.

He died on 25 May 735, dictating the last sentence of a translation of John's Gospel into English. His pupil Cuthbert wrote the account: the boy taking dictation said the sentence was finished, and Bede said, It is well, you have spoken truth, it is finished.

Sources: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People and The Reckoning of Time; Cuthbert, Letter on the Death of Bede; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).