Creation

Ecclesiastical History of the People of the Angles

Quoted from the edition: Venerable Bede. Church History of the People of the Angles (translated by V. V. Erlikhman). St. Petersburg. Aletheia. 2001

The Father of English History

Vadim Erlikhman

I. The Life and Works of Master Bede

In completing his Ecclesiastical History of the People of the Angles in 731 A.D., the monk Bede of the Northern English monastery of Yarrow could count on the grateful memory of posterity. Unlike the anonymous chroniclers, who diligently supplemented the records of their predecessors with their own, he rightly put his name on an unprecedented work – the first history of England. True, he himself did not value this work very highly – in the list of his works given at the end of the History, it stands at the very end, giving way to commentaries on the Holy Scriptures. Their Bede composed his whole life "for his own good and for the benefit of the brethren" [2] – few of those who entered the monastery knew Latin, and he considered it his duty to enlighten and instruct the novices. For the same purpose, he translated the Symbol of Faith and the main prayers into his native Anglo-Saxon language, and just before his death he began to translate the Gospel of John.

For the sake of enlightenment and instruction, he also wrote treatises on chronology, natural history, and versification. For this purpose, he wrote the History, which was the result of his many years of difficult work. By his own admission, he drew material for it "from all trustworthy sources" [3]. These sources were divided into three main groups: the writings of historians of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the writings of the Church Fathers, and oral traditions reported to him by numerous informants from different parts of Britain. Bede was able to combine all this mosaic of facts and legends with a rare art for his time into a single picture of the history of his native island. Such diverse topics as the miracles of saints, wars and alliances of kings, natural phenomena and even the behavior of animals, he covered with the same skill of storytelling and common sense. The vivid pictures of the past of England painted by him were included in school anthologies. In addition, Beda possessed the most important property for a historian – the ability to single out the main thing in the chaos of written and oral evidence and to combine the facts obtained into a single cause-and-effect chain.

It is no coincidence that "History", like its author, was waiting for great fame. Immediately after writing, it began to be copied in monastic scriptoriums in England, and then in other countries. Almost 160 manuscripts of Bede's work have survived to this day, which in itself speaks of his enormous popularity in the Middle Ages. In addition, four of these manuscripts date back to the eighth century, that is, they were written by the author's contemporaries or even by his disciples. Most manuscripts have unusually few errors [4]; This suggests that their copying was entrusted to the best scribes. In 880, King Alfred the Great of England, a patriot and educator, had Bede's work translated into Anglo-Saxon as one of the four books "most necessary for all men" [5]. The "History" was not forgotten even after the invention of printing; it was one of the first books published in the 1470s by the famous Strasbourg printer Heinrich Eggenstein. Then there were dozens of publications, translations into different languages, detailed scientific research, and now the "History" still occupies an honorable place not only in the tablets of science, but also on the shelves of bookstores. Perhaps the monk from Yarrow himself would be pleased with such a result of his work.