Bede, often referred to as "The Venerable Bede," was born in England more than two centuries after Anglo-Saxon invaders from what is now Germany and Denmark swept in and conquered the Celtic peoples who had controlled Britain for nearly a millennium. To Bede, that invasion was a central event of his people's his-fory, fhough lafer crifics came fo believe that he missed a larger perspective: in fact the invasion had been coming for a long time, and was not so much one event as a series of events.
As was typical of intelligent young men in medieval Europe, Bede was trained for a career in the church. This began for him at the age of seven, when his parents put him in a monastery, a place where monks studied the Bible and the writings of early church fathers such as Augustine and Gregory I (see entries). His primary teacher was the abbot— that is, the head of the monastery—Ceolfrid (CHAYL-frid).
In 686, when Bede would have been about fourteen years old, the abbey was devastated with a plague, or an epidemic of disease, but he continued his studies. Despite the fact that he lived in England, far from the Italian and Greek centers of ancient European civilization, Bede became a master of the Latin and Greek languages, and even learned some Hebrew. He advanced rapidly in the church, becoming a deacon at age nineteen, even though that position was usually reserved for
Men much older. He was ordained as a priest at the age of thirty. Apart from a few short trips—most notably a visit to Lindisfarne, a celebrated English center of learning off the coast—Bede traveled little during his life.
Bede wrote numerous works on history and theology, or the analysis of religious faith. As a medieval scholar steeped in the teachings of the church, he saw history as an unfolding of God's purposes, and in his view, church history was history. Accordingly, his most famous work was Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). The term "ecclesiastical" refers to the church, and Bede's historical writings in general make little mention of secular events, or things of a non-spiritual nature.
Despite the shortcomings in some of his historical analysis, most notably his reliance on questionable information concerning the distant past, Bede offered a valuable record of events in the early part of the medieval period. He died on May 25, 735, at the age of sixty-three, and within a century, the term "Venerable," meaning distinguished, was attached to his name. In 1899 he was canonized, or recognized as a saint.
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