Bede c. 672 – 735

Bede, called the Venerable, was an English Benedictine monk, scholar, and the most learned writer of the early medieval West. From the age of seven he lived at the joint monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, where he produced a vast body of biblical commentary, scientific writing on chronology and natural phenomena, hagiography, and history. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, established the framework of early Anglo-Saxon historiography and the use of the Anno Domini system in Western chronology. He was canonized as a doctor of the Church in 1899, the only native of Britain to bear the title.

The Venerable Bede was born around 672 or 673 on lands belonging to the new monastery of Wearmouth in Northumbria. He was given to that house at the age of seven, transferred as a boy to its sister foundation at Jarrow, and remained there for the rest of his life under the abbots Benedict Biscop, Ceolfrith, and Hwætberht. He was ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty by John of Beverley, and described his life in his own famous self-summary as devoted entirely to study, the divine office, and the writing of books.

His works include the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, completed in 731; the chronological treatises De Temporibus and the great De Temporum Ratione (725); De Natura Rerum; the prose and metrical Lives of St Cuthbert; the Lives of the Holy Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow; biblical commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, the books of Samuel, the Acts of the Apostles, the Catholic Epistles, and Revelation; homilies; the textbooks De Arte Metrica, De Schematibus et Tropis, and De Orthographia; and the Letter to Egbert.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History gave the English their first self-conception as a Christian people, narrated the Synod of Whitby and the conversion missions of Augustine and Aidan, and decisively popularised the Anno Domini system of dating taken over from Dionysius Exiguus. He died at Jarrow on the eve of Ascension Day in May 735, dictating to the last; he was declared a Doctor of the Church by Leo XIII in 1899 and is the only Englishman in Dante's Paradiso.