Bede
Bede spent his whole life in one monastery in Northumbria and wrote the history of the English church. He was given to the monastery of Monkwearmouth at seven in about 680, moved to its sister house at Jarrow, was ordained at thirty, and by his own account never went further than a few days' journey from it. The monastery was an unusual place to be. Its founder Benedict Biscop had made five journeys to Rome and brought back a library of a size not otherwise available in northern Europe, and Bede used it. He wrote some sixty works: commentaries on scripture, textbooks on orthography and metre, treatises on time and on the calculation of Easter, and the lives of saints. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731, is the reason he is remembered. It is the only narrative source for much of early English history, and its method is what distinguishes it — he names his informants, distinguishes what he has read from what he has been told, and says when he is uncertain, which almost nobody else was doing. He also popularised dating from the incarnation, the anno Domini system, which was not general practice before him and is now the world's. His account of the conversion contains the sparrow flying through the lighted hall, which is the most quoted passage in Old English historiography. He died in 735 dictating a translation of John's gospel, and was made a doctor of the church in 1899. He is also the reason English history has a beginning at all. Without him there would be no narrative of the conversion, no dates for the seventh-century kingdoms, and no framework into which the archaeology could be fitted, which is a great deal to owe to one monk in a windy monastery.
- Lived: 673 CE – 735 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: writer, religious_leader, scientist
