to the arrival of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in 597 A.D., the first missionary to arrive from Rome. At the age of seven he was sent to a monastery for his education, which at the time did not necessarily herald a life of a solitary priest but that is indeed the life which Bede would take up, spending most of his life inside monastery walls, working tirelessly as a scholar.īede’s Ecclesiastical History was a work in five volumes, covering a vast sweep of history – from Julius Caesar’s raids of Britain ca. It seems likely that Bede came from a noble family, fairly well-to-do. He was born in the year 672 or 673, in Jarrow in what is now Durham in England. Most of the information that we have on the life of Bede comes from the final chapter of the Ecclesiastical History, in which he recounts his own life up to that point. But it is beyond question that his most influential and most important work is the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, or The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He also wrote the first martyrology, or anthology of the lives of the saints. He wrote not only on the history of English Christianity, but numerous books on nature, music, astronomy, and poetry, as well as commentaries on sacred Scripture. This work had a profoundly lasting effect on the world, Christian and non-Christian.īede has become known as the Father of English History, and is considered one of the foremost Anglo-Saxon scholars. Bede the Venerable – has provided for posterity an invaluable and unparalleled record of life in the Christian Church in England up to its date of completion around 731 A.D. The Venerable Bede, as he is commonly known – although he has indeed been canonized, and is more technically known as St. Prior to the foundation of the Church of England by King Henry VIII in the sixteenth century, the Church took hold in England thanks to missionaries from Rome their tale and the tale of the Church that flourished in their wake come down to us through an Anglo-Saxon called Bede.

There is fundamental and very important distinction between the Church of England on the one hand, and the Church in England on the other.

Bede english history