Venerable father of English history

It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when its hero entered the monastery at Wearmouth, Northumbria at the age of seven and, as far as we know, never left. Not that Bede was entirely parochial, distributing what was then an exotic luxury, pepper, amongst his peers on his deathbed. But his was essentially a virtual and vicarious world, reliant on a network of informants and an unrivalled library largely collected by its founder, Benedict Biscop, here memorably described as ‘the “millionaire” monk’, even if the more than 200 books we know Bede knew will seem small beer to most of us with bigger bookshelves.

But unlike modern browsers, who tend to flit and sip, Bede’s intellectual curiosity was more than kindled: he really knew his books backwards, and in the best-known of the many that he wrote himself, the characteristically precisely titled Historia Ecclesisatica Gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’), he offered history with a deliberately narrow focus on the Church on the one hand and the English on the other. With the instincts of a true historian, Bede also meticulously names his local sources, and in doing so he was greatly assisted by the exceptionally incestuous nature of the upper echelons of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical hierarchy, where members of the royal family of one kingdom were regularly (and often irregularly) related to the aristocracy of the church in another.

In this brisk and often breezy narrative, including glancing references to Doctor Who and The Archers, the distinguished medievalist Henrietta Leyser beautifully lays bare Bede’s prejudices and blind spots: his airbrushing away of the role of the Britons, already Christian when the Anglo-Saxons arrived; his relative reticence about the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, whose incipient ascendancies eventually eclipsed that of Bede’s native Northumbria.