Article. Laistner. Bede as a Classical and a Patristic Scholar. 1933.
Bede as a Classical and a Patristic Scholar
Author: M. L. W. Laistner
Source: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fourth Series, Vol. 16 (1933), pp. 69-94
When Bede was born neither of the two monastic houses with which his name is so closely linked was yet founded; only four or five years had passed since Theodore of Tarsus landed in England. On the other hand, much civilising work had been carried on for the past half-century in the northern parts of England by Paulinus, Wilfrith, and their associates, and by the Irish from Iona. These last laid the foundations of Northumbrian scholarship and gave to the English a script which they transmuted into a national hand. The monastery of Wearmouth was founded in 674 by Benedict Biscop. To the care of its abbot and teachers the boy Bede was entrusted at the age of seven. When he was nine or ten, another religious house was established near-by at Jarrow. Wearmouth and Jarrow were indeed intended to form a single monastery. But political and ecclesiastical affairs often demanded Benedict Biscop’s presence elsewhere, so that in practice each house had its own permanent head. Bede appears to have been transferred to Jarrow at, or soon after, its foundation; at all events, if the identification of him with the small choirboy, who aided Abbot Ceolfrith to carry on the services of the Church during the awful visitation of the plague in 686, is correct, he was established by that year in the surroundings where he was to pass the remainder of his life. There is but little information about the schools at Wearmouth and Jarrow. The picture which modern writers have been apt to draw, by using in the main the evidence of the Carolingian schools, is likely to be more misleading than helpful. Two facts, however, stand out: Benedict Biscop had brought many books to the north and Abbot Ceolfrith added greatly to them.1 In the second place, even the earliest works of Bede, though they may show little originality, make it abundantly clear that he had already then read widely, doubtless far more widely than any of his school-fellows. It is well to remind oneself, moreover, in order properly to appraise the magnitude of Bede’s achievement, that Latin was a foreign language to the people of England. Bede’s mastery over Latin idiom, like the German Einhard’s a century later, is the more astounding.
1 Bede, Historia abbatum, 4, 6, 9, 11, 15.
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