Samuel Willoughby Duffield

It happened with Bede as with some other Latin hymn-writers—there were several persons who had the same name as himself. Hilary and Fortunatus and Notker are not the only cases of confusion, for there were certainly three Bedes, and they were not long removed from each other in point of time. Beda Major—the elder or greater Bede—was a presbyter and monk of Lindisfarne, commemorated by his more celebrated namesake. Another was a holy man of the time of Charles the Great. But our own Beda or Bedan was a presbyter and monk of Jarrow, and is distinguished from the rest by the title of “Venerable,” which he shares with Peter the Venerable of Cluny.

There are few finer figures in early English history. Sprung from pagan and utterly illiterate ancestry, he has taken his place as an historian, a scholar, a natural philosopher, and a poet; and in every department of this varied knowledge he has shown his ability and industry. English literature recalls him; English history praises him; English scholarship has elaborately edited his writings, and English patriotism has affectionately honored his memory.

Cuthbert, his disciple, who wrote his life, begins his narration in the following words:

“The presbyter Beda, venerable and beloved of God, was born in the province of Northumbria, in the territory of the monasteries of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which is in Wearmouth and at Jarrow, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation the six hundred and seventy-seventh, which is the second year of the solitary life of St. Cuthbert.” It also was the ninth year after the reduction of Saxon England to the Roman obedience at the Synod of Whitby.

Bede himself relates that when he was seven years of age the care of his education was committed by his relatives to the Abbot Benedict and afterward to the Abbot Ceolfrid. He adds that from that date to the time at which he prepared the accompanying list of his works he had spent his days in the same place. His existence was passed in meditating upon the Holy Scriptures; and he “found it sweet,” in the midst of his observance of the conventual discipline and daily chanting in the church, “either to learn, or to teach, or to write.” The choice of this word “sweet” (dulce) is significant, for no man could more carefully have mingled the sweet with the useful. A gentle spirit breathes across his studious pages, as over the rough beards of the yellow grain a breeze moves and sways them, harsh though they are, in graceful waves. For he loved learning with a perfect avidity. His works reveal his desire to accumulate it—to teach it again in plain and simple fashions—and this benevolent desire redeems many a tedious discourse.

This life of his was devoid of personal incident. He includes nothing of his individual history in the little notices which he makes of contemporary events, and he is singularly silent even about the affairs of which we should think he would naturally speak. The light which we get upon his surroundings and circumstances we must, therefore, derive from other sources, but fortunately these are at hand. We know, for example, that Benedict Biscop, who founded those twin monasteries in which Bede dwelled all his life, was himself a remarkable person. He was of noble birth, and gave up place and ambition in the court of the king to proceed to Rome, there to be trained as a monk, and then to return and found Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 682. To the second of these religious establishments, situated upon the Tyne, Bede was transferred under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and there thenceforth he remained. We are even able to determine his usual food as a school-boy, for, says his latest biographer, Rev. G. F. Browne, “we have a colloquy in which a boy is made to describe his daily food in his monastery. He had worts (i.e., kitchen herbs), fish, cheese, butter, beans, and flesh meats. He drank ale when he could get it, and water when he could not; wine was too dear.” There is, indeed, in these Saxon monasteries the honest and hearty food which belonged to their age and people. Cedric the Saxon, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of Ivanhoe, represents very fairly the popular feeling on the subject. Chaucer, too, can be quoted upon this same profusion and the generosity of the time. Of the Franklin he says:

“It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”

With such a patron as Biscop the monasteries never lacked any good thing. He brought back from the Continent the best matters of the period—books, pictures, relics, skilled mechanics, makers of stained glass, and choir-masters. He saw before him a land in which the monk was to be the conservator and promoter of learning. And in carrying out this purpose he did more than plant a monastery, for he planted and reared a man. We have the word of that historian whose life and death so nearly approach those of his favorite author, when we declare that “prose took its first shape in the Latin history of Baeda.” For John Henry Greene closed his history of the English people much as Bede ended his own career, weary with his labor and yet completing what he had begun.

That which lies before us is what Greene finely styles “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge.” It was no hoarding, avaricious, trilobite life to be fossilized for future ages in the dead strata of ecclesiastical records. Instead, it concerned itself with all learning; and though it perished in the blackness of a general ignorance, it is a source of light and force to-day.

But let us return to Bede’s brief points of change. While he was still a boy, the monastery was desolated by one of the great plagues which followed the Synod of Whitby, and every monk who knew how to sing in the choir, except the Abbot and Bede, were among the victims. Unaided these two struggled with the double task of teaching the others to sing and keeping up the monastic services in the mean time. The antiphons they had to abandon, but they struggled through the Psalms, often weeping and sobbing as they sang. At nineteen—six years before the usual age—he became a deacon; at thirty he was a priest; at fifty-nine he died. He acquired his Greek through the agency of Archbishop Theodore, who had come from Paul’s city of Tarsus in Cilicia. There were many in England who actually spoke in that tongue, owing to his encouragement of it. And Bede was no mean nor small factor in its diffusion, for he taught at Jarrow a school of six hundred monks, besides an uncounted number of strangers who sought his instruction. The genealogy of school masters is truly suggestive. From Bede to Alcuin, from Alcuin to Rabanus Maurus, from Rabanus and his liberal methods on to the times of Abelard and the free inquiry; so the torch of learning passes down the generations. And when we remember Alcuin’s commendation of Bede and Rabanus Maurus’s instruction by Alcuin, we cannot doubt the close connection of these three earliest names. Abelard really revived the bolder and broader style which had been opposed at first in the Abbey of Fulda.

How the monk ever found time for his accomplishment of study and writing among his constant labors—his chanting and his teaching and his frequent preparation of homilies—it is indeed hard to discover. But he wore away the thin scabbard of the body by the keen edge of his sheathed and unsheathed mind, until he died before his days were truly done. How often must we lament the incredible monotony and weary routine of these noble lives! How much more, we say to ourselves, they could have achieved under better and freer conditions! But perhaps not. Perhaps this very constriction was a source of strength; and perhaps the severe stress which finally broke this noble student was, after all, the creator of his best powers and the director of his finest energy.

Did he ever visit Rome? Monks from the Anglo-Saxon monasteries went on pilgrimage back and forth, but if he went with them neither he nor they have mentioned it. Yet there is a letter of Pope Sergius to Ceolfrid which hints at such a journey, and might easily furnish a ground for the opinion. On the whole, we must consider Bede as an unflickering light, burning itself away at Jarrow, but illuminating all England with its rays. It is not because of deficiency in acquirement that we deny these traditions. He knew all that was then current. His writings are an encyclopaedia of universal learning. Honorius of Autun says of him, scripsit infinita—he wrote incalculably much. Lanfranc cites his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Alcuin compares him to the Younger Pliny, and quotes him with great delight as “Magister Beda.”

The hymns ascribed to the Venerable Bede, on what appears to be good authority, are the following: