Wormald. Bede and Benedict Biscop.
Bede and Benedict Biscop
‘We are his sons, if we hold by imitation to the path of his virtues, and if we do not turn listlessly aside from the regular course that he has charted.’
These are words from the homily for the dies natalis of Benedict Biscop, in which Bede assessed the spiritual example of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow’s founder. This paper derives its title from the consideration that, even when we have acknowledged the debt that we owe to our tutors and fellow-pupils, there remains an awareness that our character and outlook have been influenced by an educational institution as a whole. I wish therefore to glance beyond the teachers and the friends whom Professor Whitelock has discussed, at aspects of Biscop’s legacy. In doing so, I am all too well aware that we can scarcely dissociate our idea of Biscop from what Bede has chosen to tell us; there is a danger that we shall see the master only through the pupil’s eyes. Yet we can, to some extent, check Bede’s portrait against that of the anonymous biographer of Ceolfrid. It is also possible, by following the example of James Campbell in an important article, to set what we know in a wider European perspective; to clothe the frame of Bede’s story with such ready-made tailoring as can be shown to fit it. This may help us to give Biscop a social and cultural context. In doing so, we shall cast necessary light on Bede’s educational background.1 Bede speaks of Biscop’s semita regulari. We may begin, therefore, with the rule of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. It was one of Biscop’s deathbed preoccupations, and it is in Bede’s account of this famous scene that we read of how words which (according to the Anonymous) were often on Biscop’s lips were spoken for the last time. The decreta which he had ordained for his monks were not his own untaught creation; they represented a selection of what he had found best in seventeen different monasteries which he had visited on his travels.2 This rule is, of course, lost. But we are given an immediate clue to some at least of its contents when Biscop, in both accounts, compares his own plans for the succession to his abbeys with the regula magni quondam abbatis Benedicti.3 Presumably because of this reference, it was taken for granted, forty years ago, that Biscop’s rule was Benedictine. In the words which Dom Cuthbert Butler quoted from Cardinal Newman: ‘Bede is as truly the pattern of a Benedictine as is St Thomas of a Dominican.’4 Today, thanks to the truly shattering revolution in monastic studies whose course was first charted by Dom David Knowles, we know better.5
No seventh-century monastery could be described as ‘Benedictine’ in quite the modern sense. In the seventh century, we are still in what is nowadays known as the age of the regula mixta.6 This is not so much because the world had yet to awaken to the exclusive merits of St Benedict as because of a rather different attitude towards the codification of the monastic life. From the fourth to the eighth centuries, the primary meaning of the Vita regularis was the communal life of the apostolic Church, its model the description of the Jerusalem community in the fourth chapter of Acts. In the fourth century, however, it came to be felt that certain kinds of charismatic figure offered a Christian his best chance of following that model; by about 450, it had been established, both in the East and in the West, that one could get just as far by copying a holy man’s example as by listening to his teaching.7 The Rules ascribed (rightly or wrongly) to the founding fathers of the monastic life were increasingly considered to encapsulate such examples. It was from the corpus of sanctified tradition thus established that holy teachers, Benedict himself included, constructed their own patterns.8 Thus, the writings of Cassian, the most influential of early western writers, seem to stand somewhere between a descriptive account of the Desert Fathers, a prescriptive rule for their western followers, and a verbatim record of their spiritual teaching. Thus, too, Pope Gregory the Great, in a famous passage, could recommend the rule of the holy father Benedict as a reliable guide to the abbot’s life and character, ‘for his life could not have differed from his teaching’.9 The sixth century was, however, an age of codifications. As bishops claimed the right to regulate the monastic communities of their dioceses, and as several noted monk-bishops legislated for their own foundations, rules throughout the western Mediterranean became increasingly similar in content and in language.10 The seventh century was thus a period of transition. Monastic legislators now felt that they had very little of their own to add to the wisdom of the ‘Fathers’, and the extant rules are largely catenae of quotations.11 Some sources seem to regard it as a point of credit that a holy man’s rule should be indebted to the maximum number of earlier writers.12 At the same time, the holy man retains some of his autonomy; monastic founders are still considered responsible for constructing their community’s rule. The result of all this is that we can find a close, and probably revealing, parallel to Biscop’s activity in the life of his Frankish contemporary, St Filibert of Noirmoutier.
Filibert, because perfect men always follow the more perfect, began to travel around the communities of the saints, in order to acquire something profitable from the holy tradition. He passed Luxeuil and Bobbio in review, also the other monasteries living by the norm of St Columbanus, together with every monastery in France or Italy, which Burgundy folds within her lap. Keeping an astute eye open, like a most prudent bee, for whatever seemed to be flowering most vigorously, he selected it among his own models. He became familiar, by assiduous reading, with the inspiration of St Basil, the rule of Macarius, the decrees of Benedict, the most holy institutes of Columbanus, and thus, reeking with the scent of virtue, he displayed a holy example to his followers.13 This passage is from a rather later life, but it conveys a fair impression of the priorities of a seventh-century monastic founder. We can thus see why Bede will have considered his patron’s rule an aspect of his charismatic example as a holy teacher. We can also guess that Biscop’s circuit of seventeen monasteries is likely to have resulted in a digest of assorted earlier rules.
For these reasons, it is both possible and necessary to consider what elements could have contributed to the mixed rule under which Bede grew up. One constituent has already been isolated. What further contribution was made by the Rule of St Benedict? It may be that scholars have been reacting too powerfully against the traditional view.14 At least two further chapters of the Rule are quoted by Bede.15 The immortal story of the plague at Jarrow in the anonymous life of Ceolfrid may conceal further evidence. For Ceolfrid’s initial reaction to the destruction of his community was to order that antiphons should cease, except in the evening and at matins. Now RB cap. 17 says that antiphons are to be abandoned if the congregation is small, and seems to be referring only to the services of terce, sext and nones.16 Ultimately, Ceolfrid reversed his decision (as the rule itself entitled him to), but not before the reader had been given a very significant glimpse of the norm.17 What, moreover, of Biscop’s cognomen? Benedict is not a common seventh-century name north of the Alps; when Bede cites Gregory’s Dialogues in the first chapter of the ‘History of the Abbots’, he hints powerfully at the source of Biscop’s inspiration.18 A final point: the view that Bede and Biscop were Benedictines could prove to be one of those errors whose very existence is a signpost to subsequent commentators.
For very little of what we can find out about Monkwearmouth-Jarrow is actually incompatible with the Benedictine Rule.19 St Wilfrid, by contrast, whose claims to be an orthodox Benedictine are often nowadays preferred to Biscop’s, ignored the Rule’s provisions for the succession and adopted an attitude to oblates more characteristic of Gallic than of Benedictine monasticism.20 The fact that his pupil, St Aethelthryth, failed to fast on festivals is a further hint of Gallic influence.21 It would seem, then, that one of Biscop’s legacies to Bede could have been as concentrated a dose of Benedictinism as was available anywhere in the seventh century.
The other components of Biscop’s rule are irretrievable. There is, as Mr Hunter Blair has pointed out, a strong probability that it will have been influenced by the customs of Lérins where, between 665 and 668, Biscop was finally tonsured;22 but these customs are themselves obscure.23 I shall return to the possible influence of Lérins in other spheres later. Meanwhile, I would like to point out that this is a very significant and controversial period in the history of the island monastery. At some date between 660 and 680, Aigulf arrived from Fleury-sur-Loire to reform the abbey along the lines of the mixed Benedictine and Columbanian observance forged by the great Hiberno-Frankish monastery of Luxeuil. His innovations were so unpopular that, not without cooperation from the local bishop, he and his protégés were massacred.24 It is not clear just where Biscop’s visit fits into this pattern of events.25
But the story has clear implications for our understanding of the influences upon him. First, if he arrived at an unreformed Lérins, he is most unlikely to have acquired there his high regard for the Rule of St Benedict. The older houses of the Rhône valley were highly resistant to reform, Benedictine or otherwise, throughout most of the seventh century. Secondly, the inspiration to reform was reaching Lérins not from Italy but from the north.26 We thus reach a further set of questions about Biscop’s rule. Where is the founder of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow most likely to have learned to admire St Benedict?
To this question one may return a short, and possibly correct, answer: he got the Rule from Wilfrid. Bishop Wilfrid, Ceolfrid’s ex-abbot and Biscop’s diocesan, must have been a major influence upon Monkwearmouth-Jarrow in its early years;27 and he is of course reported to have introduced the Rule to Northumbria, more probably on his return to Ripon in 666 than earlier.28 But such an answer scarcely moves the inquiry forward. What lay behind Wilfrid? The answer that will this time spring to the lips is Rome. Yet not the least of the shocks that modern research has reserved for the harassed historians of monasticism is that the early dissemination of the Rule owed much less to Rome than to an environment where we might least have expected to find it: the large network of north Gallic and Burgundian monasteries which drew their inspiration from St Columbanus’ Luxeuil and much of their prosperity from official patronage. After an isolated, and still unexplained, appearance in south-western Gaul, the continuous history of the Rule began, not at Rome, where it is extraordinarily difficult to find evidence for its early observance, but at the Neustrian court.29 It was under the joint patronage of Saints Benedict and Columbanus that the monastic movement exploded in northern and eastern Gaul.30 (It may be noted that Luxeuil and its founder are given special emphasis in the odyssey of St Filibert.) Then, as the seventh century drew to a close, St Benedict’s name began to appear unaccompanied.31
In the light of these points, the Frankish connections of Wilfrid and Biscop acquire a further significance. Wilfrid is unlikely to have discovered St Benedict at Lyons for the reasons described above. But he spent up to two further years in Gaul, during and after his consecration (664–6), and it may have been then that he adopted the Rule.32 One of his probable hosts, his patron Acgilbert, apparently belonged to the Columbanian connection, and Acgilbert’s abbey of Jouarre, if Wilfrid stayed there, must have observed the joint rule.33 Even if Wilfrid returned to Lyons, he will, by this date, have found a reforming bishop in office; for Genesius was a protégé of Queen Balthildis, who had refounded Chelles with nuns from Jouarre, and it was at Chelles that Genesius was buried.34 Biscop himself had his links with these circles. In the winter of 668–9, on his way home from Rome with Theodore and Hadrian, he must have spent five months either with Acgilbert himself or with Emmo of Sens and Burgundofaro of Meaux.35 Burgundofaro was as closely tied to the Luxeuil connection as was Acgilbert, while Emmo was at least a patron of the joint rule.36 There is a final point to make here. Biscop had close and early links with Wessex, quite apart from his relations with Acgilbert. It was in Wessex that he planned to found his monastery, before his ultimate return to Northumbria.37 Obscure as early West Saxon history is, two things about it are quite clear. In the first place, Frankish influence must have been extremely strong; the bishop under whom Biscop planned to settle in 672 would have been Acgilbert’s cousin, Hlothere, who subscribed the only early charter with unimpeachable Frankish features.38 Secondly, Wessex is an early and much-neglected outpost of Benedictine influence in Britain. St Aldhelm claimed to live by the Rule. St Boniface, with his shadowy West Saxon background, was the most important single figure in the history of the Rule between St Benedict himself and his Carolingian namesake.39 I suspect myself that there is something unusual about the attitude of some Englishmen to the Rule of St Benedict, and that it is linked with their veneration for Pope Gregory and their interest in his Dialogues. Nonetheless, we must now acknowledge that their probably extensive knowledge of the Rule connects Biscop and Wilfrid not so much with Rome as with northern France. For all their long experiences of the Midi, they find their counterparts in the Frankish and Burgundian noblemen, whose first inclinations were towards the older communities of the south, but who were soon drawn into the orbit of Luxeuil.40
An even more striking illustration of this paradox (if paradox it really be) could prove to be the papal charter of privilege with which Biscop equipped his foundations; it was another of his main concerns as he lay dying.41 Once again, it has been lost. But once again, one may make a reasoned guess at its contents, with Wilhelm Levison as an authoritative and well-tried guide.42 In doing so, there are two considerations, as Levison could see, which are of primary importance. The first is that Biscop’s charter be set against the background of normal diplomatic practice, papal and episcopal, during the seventh century.We cannot realistically suppose that his charter will have been of a type unrecorded at any time elsewhere. Secondly, it can hardly be coincidence that Hadrian, Wilfrid and Biscop all secured privileges from the same pope at what may very well have been the same time.43 (The Monkwearmouth-Jarrow privilege, like that of Wilfrid, was subsequently confirmed by Benedict II and Sergius I.) The links between Biscop and Wilfrid have already been noticed more than once. Those between Monkwearmouth and Canterbury are too obvious to need further comment.44 Thus there is a much better than even chance that we shall be able to reconstruct significant features of Biscop’s charter from the evidence of Eddius and from the substantially genuine text of Hadrian’s privilege, especially with continental analogies to guide our judgement.45 In the first place, Monkwearmouth-Jarrow sources tell us that the abbey’s privilege and its confirmations guaranteed the freedom of abbatial elections from outside interference. Hadrian’s charter contains a similar provision.46 From Eddius, we learn that Wilfrid’s charter protected the properties and revenues of his regnum ecclesiarum, excluded alien interference, and obstructed the conversion of Ripon into an episcopal see.47 There is nothing in any of this that is at variance with canonical norms.48 However, the St Augustine’s privilege also shuts out the jurisdiction of any Church but the apostolic See; unless it is requested by the abbot, no ceremony may be performed in the abbey. At least from Sergius’ time, moreover, Wilfrid’s charter apparently invoked the disciplinary authority of the pope alone.49 Finally, though Bishops John and Acca of Hexham are known to have officiated at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, this was by invitation only; Ceolfrid did not seek his diocesan’s permission to depart as St Boniface was to do, and as canon law demanded.50 These are all indications that Biscop’s charter belonged to a new class of monastic privilege.
The early history of monastic exemptions has been complicated by their great subsequent importance. Historians have, on the whole, failed to appreciate that we cannot expect the juristic precision of the post-Cluniac age in the world of the Vulgar Law. The truth is that canonical sources vary in the emphasis that they give, from one local tradition to another and from one class of document to the next.51 The situation remains fluid to the point of embarrassment.52 But the fundamental position is clear enough. Monasteries were normally protected from tampering with their property, from interference in their elections, and from large-scale ceremonial in their churches. Diocesan bishops, on the other hand, retained their sacramental monopoly, from the ordination of the abbot to the blessing of chrism, and they remained responsible for the good discipline of a monastery; in effect, therefore, they could vet a community’s choice of ruler. This position is obscured only by the differing emphases of the sources. The canons of the Merovingian councils and, perhaps significantly, the early English sources too, emphasize the rights of the bishop to the point of apparent tyranny.53 The privileges of Pope Gregory the Great, for their part, grant not so much exemption as protection from the abuse of episcopal power;54 and there is a class of papal privilege in the early English Church, like that of Pope Constantine for Bermondsey and Woking, which is less concerned to change the jurisdictional situation than to guarantee the status quo.55
It now seems clear, however, that the seventh century saw new departures in monastic exemption. The relevant formulae of the Liber Diurnus remove all sacerdotal dicio from a community in favour of Petrine jurisdiction; no masses may be said except by invitation.56 These formulae are first known to have been used in the charter of Pope Honorius for Bobbio (628); Jonas of Susa considered that they excluded the diocesan authority altogether.57 Very similar formulae are used in Pope Agatho’s charter for St Augustine’s, Canterbury. Meanwhile, Pope Theodore’s confirmation of the Bobbio privilege spelt out its implications in great, if occasionally anachronistic, detail: monks were entitled to a choice of officiating bishop, whenever one was called for; failure in an abbot’s authority was to result in immediate papal discipline.58 At the same period in France, as a classic study by Professor Ewig showed, the functions of the diocesan were being either removed or limited by the bishops themselves. Their disciplinary duties were taken over, in some cases, by a college of abbots following a similar rule, or by the head of the monastic family.59 A decisive indication that something had changed is supplied by the privilege of Pope Adeodatus for Tours (c.676) – the sole surviving papal charter from seventh-century Gaul which is of unquestionable authenticity, but one ‘which there is no reason to consider exceptional’.60 The pope was uneasy that religious places should be removed from a bishop’s regimen, but he agreed to abide by the generous example of the Gallic episcopate. Returning, therefore, to Biscop’s charter, we should remember that Hadrian’s privilege resembles that of Pope Honorius for Bobbio, and that Wilfrid’s seems to have involved direct papal authority, as Bobbio’s did.61 The suggestion is then that Biscop belonged to a monastic movement whose primary concern was that episcopal power over monks should, in some respects, be limited. In the pre-Cluniac age, this fact of limitation was more important than the papal nature of the guarantee. Now, as Levison saw, there is something very suggestive about the context in which these developments originated. Whether in France or Italy, Irish influence seems to stand somewhere in the background, even if it be possible to exaggerate its long-term influence.62 The papal series began at Bobbio. The episcopal charters of Gaul are granted by and for the members of the connection of Luxeuil. The paradox of Biscop’s rule is thus repeated. From what we know of the Monkwearmouth-Jarrow charter of privilege, it seems that even so ‘Roman’ a treasure as this may have found its analogues in the Irish-influenced circles of Francia and Lombardy. It may not, once again, be coincidence that both Burgundofaro and Emmo granted extensive exemptions, while Acgilbert’s Jouarre was almost certainly a privileged community.63 It may also be noted that Biscop visited Tours on his way home with his charter in 679–80.64 It looks, in short, as though Biscop got more from Gaul than glaziers, architects and a few books. If I were looking for the mysterious Torhthelm, it is in these circles that I would search.65
These, of course, are no more than probabilities, though they are the probabilities dictated by the distribution of the continental evidence. As probabilities, however, they set up a shocking contrast with the impression of Biscop’s horizons that is given by Bede. In Bede’s view, it is Rome and almost only Rome that counts in the making of Biscop; the Gallic episodes are asides and afterthoughts. The image of Pope Gregory, above all, seems to dominate the atmosphere at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow and perhaps inspires its air of gravitas.66 How, then, are we to reconcile a Roman orientation which is manifest both in Biscop’s biographies and in his rule and charter, with the fact that its closest parallels seem to lie in the barbarian north? Largely, I suggest, by thinking in terms not so much of Gallic influences as of analogies in Gaul. We must recognize that Biscop is one of many seventh-century figures on the circumference of a circle, whose centre is a powerful Roman magnet. The Frankish contemporaries of Biscop and Wilfrid can now be seen to have shared some at least of their attraction to Rome.67 It would not, then, be surprising if they had marginally affected the direction of his interests.
A final illustration of these shared enthusiasms is furnished by a third of Biscop’s deathbed anxieties, his book collection.68 For Bede’s patron was only the most successful of the northern noblemen who plundered the libraries of Italy and southern France for their treasures in this period. Saints Amand, Gertrude and Audoin – all major figures in the new monasticism of Gaul, and all, one might add, more or less familiar with the Rule of St Benedict – each sought books from Rome.69
In the central volumes of Codices Latini Antiquiores, one may detect a steady drift of manuscripts northwards for some time before 750. By about this date, the great royal abbey of Corbie in Picardy had established the nucleus of a collection comparable with that of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow.70 Like Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, it had books from Vivarium.71 Significantly, it already possessed at least one, and possibly both, of the ancient Italian codices regularum, which contain the Regula Magistri.72 The library of the Venerable Bede can be paralleled in scope if we are prepared to add together the evidence of surviving manuscripts from identified north French scriptoria; this is a comparison which is bound to flatter the English house, with its Bedan maestro.73 These parallels exist because, all over northern Europe, similar stimuli are at work in a similar environment. Southern culture is being sucked into the vacuum created by the awakening interest of barbarian aristocracies in the legacy of the ancient Christian Mediterranean. The achievements of the Northumbrian Church are thus part of a ‘wider upsurge’.74 The ‘Cinderella’ seventh century can now be considered every bit as important for the Carolingian ‘Renaissance’ as are the thirteenth and fourteenth for the Italian.75
My concern thus far has been to show that Biscop is, after all, the man of his age.
Yet there is both more and less to the career of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow’s founder than this. Consider once again the many similarities between Biscop and Wilfrid. In outline, their careers have much in common. Both were the products of the Irish mission in Northumbria, though both gravitated early towards the Romani. Both set out before 664 for Rome and were subjected to two or three years of southern French culture. Both brought back ideas about the regulation and security of the monastic life that are ‘Roman’ in origin and appearance but which may have been transmitted through Gallic circles. Both had a taste for art and architecture more Romanorum. Both were aristocrats – what German scholars call Adelsheilige. Biscop could be said to have emerged, like many Frankish contemporaries, from the Schola Palatii.76 But it would scarcely be necessary to remind you of these parallels were there not also some startling differences. If, moreover, one is prepared to take a European perspective, it is Wilfrid who is much the closer to seventh-century type. Like many Merovingian saints, Wilfrid combines monastic profession with a bishopric. He is a major political figure, if not quite so obviously involved with governing circles as some Frankish contemporaries.77 His biographer mentions twenty-three kings and four queens; several he describes as Wilfrid’s amici. We also hear of relations with the secular aristocracy.78 Dr Kirby has reminded us that Wilfrid and his followers were figures of major importance in the dissemination of the cult of Oswald.79 Wilfrid was himself a miracle-worker. Biscop, by contrast, was never a bishop and was never a thaumaturge; one would like to know why not. The seven kings that feature in his biography exist almost solely as suppliers of endowment or as ex-employers; of secular nobles outside the monastery one hears nothing.
80 For what the point is worth, Bede’s martyrology has no entry for Oswald, though the calendar of Ripon-educated Willibrord certainly does.81 That a hagiographer’s views reflect those of his hero is never, of course, a safe assumption. But Biscop’s Lives, like Wilfrid’s, emerge from his own community comparatively soon after his death. In any assessment of these two monastic paladins it may, therefore, be significant that, for all the obvious links between Monkwearmouth and the Northumbrian court, the Vitae of its abbots present us with an impression of relative isolation and detachment; Eddius, on the other hand, gives us a saint who seems to share many of the interests and values of aristocratic society in the Northumbria of the time.82 Why should this be? What does it mean?
To some extent the Lives of Biscop and Ceolfrid belong to an older style of hagiographical writing: one where renunciation of the world is actually reflected in the scarcity of biographical information supplied, and where sanctity is confirmed not by signs and wonders but by personal virtues and affecting death-scenes.83 This type of biography was particularly well established in the great and early days of Lérins.84 The standard was set by Hilary of Arles who, in his encomium on Honoratus, the founder of Lérins, steadfastly refused to say a word about his hero’s background and specifically dismissed the miraculous as irrelevant to his greatness.85 In accounting, therefore, for the mysterious lack of miracles in the Lives of the Monkwearmouth abbots, we should not exclude the possibility that Biscop and Ceolfrid were uninterested in being remembered by them.86 Alternatively, we might choose to say that, in this respect, Biscop’s communities were simply behind the times. Southern France as a whole was an old-fashioned sort of place in the seventh century, and one recalls that, by Carl Nordenfalk’s canon, the Codex Amiatinus is still a Late Antique type of book.87
But Biscop’s idiosyncrasies must be more than a matter of a touch of southern sun. Wilfrid, after all, spent three years at Lyons. Several of the most important Merovingian saints actually came from the south, especially from Aquitaine.88 It is time, in fact, to abandon our talk of cultural influences and to consider the possibilities of a more directly spiritual inspiration. The splendid homily with which Bede assessed his founder’s virtues becomes valuable evidence here. Unlike the biographies, it contains the considered and explicit judgement of a gifted pupil on his master’s true significance. Bede saw Biscop as the rich young man of the Gospels, who had asked what he must do to be saved.89 Unlike his biblical prototype, thought Bede, the wealthy and nobly born Biscop had fulfilled Christ’s commandment. He had left house, brothers, sisters, father, mother, wife, children and estates for Christ’s sake. His hundredfold reward had been paid even in this life.
For obvious reasons, this text was particularly appealing to the barbarian aristocracies of the early Middle Ages. It is a hagiographical commonplace, a peregrinatio text which is often used in conjunction with God’s command to Abraham in the Book of Genesis.90 Its impact on the world of early Irish Christianity is well known.91 Now when Bede uses the word peregrinatio or its cognates, he always means foreign travel.92 But, in his homily, he gives the Matthaean text a more general significance. For Biscop remained a pilgrim in spirit, after he had ceased to be one in fact. He had abandoned his kindred; the result was veneration at home as well as abroad. He had renounced his estates; in exchange, he had received lavish hospitality overseas and endowment for his monasteries in his native land. He had scorned the prospect of wife and children; he had founded a spiritual family, one hundred times greater.
These, says Bede, are Biscop’s spiritalia gesta; this, he declares (in a possible echo of Hilary), is the real miracle that God had wrought in Biscop.93 It is of the essence of peregrinatio in the early Middle Ages that one should lose the solace and security of one’s kindred. Bede’s point is that Biscop has achieved the requisite social dislocation in the entirely stable environment of the monastery. A ‘fugitive’ had actually become a ‘cloistered virtue’.94
Bede’s assessment of Biscop is one of the most powerful elaborations of a familiar theme in early medieval hagiography. Moreover, its perspective is supported by various considerations. First, there is the general agreement of the two Lives of Biscop in giving an impression of a figure detached from Anglo-Saxon society. In the Anonymous, we even catch a glimpse of aristocratic reaction to the austere discipline imposed by Biscop and his deputy; perhaps their standards were exceptional, although such stories are not uncommon.95
Second, there is the greatest of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow products, Bede apart, the Codex Amiatinus. One has only to set this masterpiece alongside the strictly contemporary Lindisfarne Gospels for the insular touches which betrayed to Lowe and to Dr Bruce-Mitford the wholly English origin of the book to be put in their true perspective.96 This is not just a comparison between an Italian book and an insular one, nor even between a Late Antique manuscript and one which heralds the Middle Ages. It is also a contrast between a technique and an artistic repertoire which revel in what contemporary secular culture has to offer, and one which does all it can to cover its tracks.97 Now that we all know where this colossal book originated, it might be instructive to remember how difficult this was to find out.
There may even, third, be something significant in the discrepancy between the comparatively paltry number of small finds thus far unearthed at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, and the wealth of knick-knacks revealed by the great royal abbey of Whitby.98 Nobody, of course, is going to deny any longer that the culture of Biscop’s monasteries was marginally influenced by insular styles, still less that they had a major impact of their own on Northumbrian art as a whole.99 There are good grounds, in any case, for supposing that the atmosphere was changing as the eighth century advanced.100 Nonetheless, the limited nature of the insular contribution in the abbey’s early years seems to tell its own story.
Fourth, and above all, there is Biscop’s attitude to the succession. Despite the injunctions of innumerable monastic legislators, the claims of a founder’s kindred to succeed him as abbot were widely recognized in more than just the Celtic world of the early Middle Ages.101 Extremely few barbarian noblemen devoted their dying breaths to the explicit exclusion of their family from the succession to their abbacy. Yet this is the last and, for Bede, perhaps the most important of Biscop’s dying injunctions. Once again, it brings him into contrast with Wilfrid. It cannot merely be that Biscop’s brother was uniquely wicked.102 His attitude to his kindred is of a piece with his concept of the monastic vocation as a sort of pilgrimage. So it is that this thoroughly ‘Roman’ figure achieved a new variation upon an idea normally associated with the Irish. The isolation of his monasteries from the world had its sociological and cultural dimensions.
Two conclusions follow. First, the pupil’s portrait of his master is, essentially, a faithful likeness. We can suspect that Bede exaggerates and intensifies the tendencies of his founder. Pupils usually do. We can perhaps measure the difference between ideal and reality in Bede’s treatment of the anonymous Life of Ceolfrid. Bede ignores a significant detail about Biscop’s contacts in Gaul;103 he suppresses the sole concession to the miraculous.104 Most interesting, Bede makes no mention of Biscop’s frequent summons to advise the king, and thus ascribes a false explanation to the appointment of Eosterwine.105 The result of this editorial work is an even more totally consistent view of the abbots of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, with their admiration for Rome, their estrangement from the saeculum, their lack of concern with the miraculous. But these two Lives are much more like one another than either is like Eddius. We may conclude that ideal and reality were not far removed either; that Bede has not distorted his patron’s character.
Second, therefore, Biscop had influenced Bede. Bede’s horizons are very like those of the Codex Amiatinus, with its meticulous and eclectic scholarship, its ultramontane models and its lack of contact with the tastes of the Northumbrian world outside the monastery.106 The preoccupations that dominated Biscop’s last hours, which I have made the framework of my communication, are Bede’s preoccupations too. The preservation of a learned tradition; the commitment to the works of Rome (and especially to the memory of Pope Gregory); the regulation of the monastic life; above all, the protection of its integrity from the encroachments of the world: these were some of the central concerns in Bede’s life. Of course, they are not original, nor were they unique in Bede’s time. But I think I detect a certain single-mindedness in Biscop’s adoption of each of these principles, and this thoroughness, too, he passed on to his disciple.
One of the advantages of considering early English history in the widest possible continental context is that one then sees not only what is (often surprisingly) similar, but also what is significantly different. By looking briefly at Benedict Biscop against the background of his age, I have sought to show that much of what is frequently singled out as most remarkable about him is not so very unusual after all. As bibliophile, builder, monastic legislator and papal protégé, Biscop had his continental counterparts. Any differences that there are might be better described as differences of degree rather than of kind. What does, then, emerge as remarkable is not his interest in Rome and the Mediterranean, but the extent to which this interest remained relatively unmodified by the values of the real aristocratic world around him. So it is with Bede. Bede is much admired for his learning and his common sense.107 But I do not think that he would be quite so important had he been merely the most learned man of his age; he would certainly not be so difficult had he been simply a man of good sense. Bede’s dynamic was neither learning nor common sense, but idealism. It was idealism which dictated his conception of the past, just as it coloured his opinion of the present. As a historian, the most extraordinary thing about him is not that he doesn’t tell us about society; unlike Eddius and some Frankish and Lombard writers, he hardly even reflects it. In this communication, I have been trying to suggest that Bede’s idealism may have owed almost as much to the monastic atmosphere created by his founder as did his learning to Biscop’s library. I believe that Monkwearmouth and Jarrow had a role to play in the evolution of a History that is much more than a factual record: it is also a vision of timeless grace and power.