The life of St Bede
He spent nearly the whole of the rest of his life within its walls, ordained deacon around 691 and priest around 702, rarely traveling beyond brief visits to nearby friends, and gave himself instead to study, teaching, the daily round of choral prayer, and a body of writing that grew to some forty works across biblical commentary, natural science, and history. Learned in Latin and Greek, and possibly in some Hebrew, he drew on the library that Benedict Biscop had built up through repeated journeys to Rome, a resource that made his own scholarship possible. His most enduring work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, traced the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity and remains, for long stretches of that period, nearly the only detailed witness historians have; saints such as Alban, Cuthbert, and Ninian are known to us today chiefly through what Bede himself recorded of them, sometimes centuries after they had lived. He died at Jarrow on May 25, 735, and the title Venerable was attached to his name sometime in the century that followed, honoring a life spent almost entirely within one small English monastery yet reaching, through his pen, across the whole of his people's early history.
