Bede (c. 672-735), biblical scholar and 'Father of English Church History', spent his entire life in the Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow. His horizons, however, extended far beyond Northumbria. He was something of an armchair traveller. Through texts and travellers he was acquainted with the geography and culture of Europe and as a result Anglo-Saxon England was able to preserve and transmit the Christian culture of the Latin Mediterranean.
Bede described how books, relics, musicians, vestments and glaziers were procured by Benedict Biscop, abbot of Wearmouth who travelled to Rome six times and was well acquainted with monastic life in Gaul, having received the tonsure at Lerins. Ceolfrith left Wearmouth-Jarrow for Rome with a complete Latin Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, but died at Langres. Kings travelled to Rome and sent their daughters to monasteries in Gaul. The turbulent career of Bishop Wilfrid took him to Rome, Gaul and Frisia where the Northumbrian missionary Willibrord later established a bishopric.
Anglo-Saxon England became a notable centre of study through the establishment of schools.
Theodore, a Greek monk originally from Tarsus, came to England from an Italian monastery with the African, Hadrian, to become archbishop of Canterbury. He established a school at Canterbury equipped with Greek texts. Foremost among its students was the scholar Aldhelm, who established a school of his own at Malmesbury. Boniface, the future apostle of Germany composed his Ars grammatica at a school at Nursling, and in Northumbria the bishopric and school at Lindisfarne produced an anonymous life of its famous bishop, Saint Cuthbert, and a series of lavishly written manuscripts, most notably the Lindisfarne Gospels.
Bede was also aware of the geography of the Holy Land as a result of the travels of the Frankish bishop, Arculf, which were recorded by the ninth abbot of Iona, Adomnan. Adomnan visited Northumbria and enabled Bede to compose his De Locis Sanctis. Bede's world was threatened by Arabs. He knew that they had invaded Sicily and that Charles Martel had defeated them at Poitiers in 732.
S. Coates
THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES (c. 1100-c. 1300)
World History
