PREFACE TO BEDA. § 1. It is a cause for deep regret that no contemporary life of the Venerable Beda1 has reached our times. Whilst we have detailed and authentic information respecting his less important contemporaries, St. Guthlac and St. Cuthbert, St. Columbanus and St. Wilfrid, St. Wilbrord and St. Willibald, we are left without any such guide when investigating the life of the earliest English historian. What he did so willingly and so well for others, others did not do for him. No biography of him anterior to the eleventh or twelfth century is known to exist; and that, as might have been expected, is too vague to be of any critical value. § 2. Yet, assuredly, this deficiency in our early literature did not arise from any ignorance on the part of his contemporaries respecting the merits of Beda, or from any unwillingness to acknowledge them with due respect and reverence. Shortly after his death his sanctity was universally admitted, having been established by the miracles said to have been wrought by his relics. His works were circulated far and wide among the principal churches of the continent, and were eagerly sought after and studied by the most learned men throughout Europe. Nor was this reputation of a transitory character, for it extended with each succeeding generation; and the history of our early church exhibits few individuals whose character stands higher, either for moral worth or literary acquirements, than does that of the Venerable Beda. § 3. We must therefore look elsewhere for the reasons of this apparent neglect; nor will it be difficult to find them. They arise from the character of the historian's life, which passed without the occurrence of any of those incidents which afford the chief scope for the exercise of the biographer's occupation. Had a life of Beda been written by a contemporary, it would almost necessarily have been scanty, even to meagreness; and though we might have possessed definite information upon many points which are at present obscure, or even unknown to us, yet in all probability we should not have been gainers to the extent which at first might be anticipated. These remarks, let it be remembered, apply only to the external incidents of his life. Had he possessed a biographer enabled, by circumstances and kindred feeling, to record his conversation and the tone and character of his mind, to furnish us with the picture 1 The editor has not hesitated to discard the erroneous form of Bede, and to restore to our historian, his true name of Beda. Not only is this the correct and grammatical termination, but by this designation he was known to our earlier English writers, such as Jewell, (Works, iv. 778, 779,) Fulke, (Rhemish Testament, 1 Epist. John iii. annot. 4. Apoc. ix. 1,) Featley, (Clavis Mystica, p. 393,) and many others. of his every-day occupations, as he was at study in the cell, or at prayer in the church, and to admit us to communion with his spirit as his days passed in the retirement of the monastery, this indeed would have been a treasure. Yet we scarcely have a right to expect such a document. Beda was, in his own time, no prominent character. The placid devotion of his existence in this world was similar to that of thousands of others whose good works and labours of love are unrecorded, and whose very names are forgotten. His learning, extensive as it was, drew no very marked distinction between himself and his fellows, for he lived in a learned age, and among those by whom learning could be appreciated; he left behind him a wide circle of learned scholars; and, generally speaking, the mere possession of literature affords no sufficient scope, in itself, for the biographer. His peculiar recommendation as the historian of the English church, in which character he is best known to later generations, arises partly indeed from the merits of the work itself; yet not entirely. That reputation is, in some measure, the growth of the centuries which have passed between his era and our own. His contemporaries could not, in their day, anticipate the combination of circumstances which stamp upon every page of that precious document the peculiar value with which time has invested it. It is without a rival in the literature of our country. However much, therefore, we may lament the absence of an early biography of Beda, we ought not to be surprised at this omission. There was not much to record beyond his birth and his death, his prayers and his labours. He did not, like St. Guthlac, retire into the wilderness, and wage war with the evil spirits by which it was haunted. did not, like St. Cuthbert, lay aside the bishop's robe for the hermit's cowl, and exchange the splendour of a court for the solitude of a rocky island. He did not, like St. Columbanus, carry the reputation of his native church into foreign countries, and establish monasteries which should vie with each other in recording the history of their founder. He did not, like St. Wilfrid of York, plead his cause before kings and synods, and strive, through all opposition, to raise the ecclesiastical power above the secular authority. He did not, like St. Wilbrord and St. Willibald, preach Christianity among the heathen, and leave home and kindred for the extension of the everlasting gospel. Had he done any of these things he would, most probably, have found a biographer; but his life presented no such salient points, and it was unrecorded. He § 4. Yet we must not suppose that no authentic materials remain whereupon a life of Beda may be founded.' He himself has 1 The earliest of these appears to be the "Vita Venerabilis Bedæ, Presbyteri, et Giruensis Monachi," a translation of which is appended to this Preface, see p. xxxix. A second life, apparently of the thirteenth century, is contained in the Barlow MS. 39, fol. 143 (see § 82). It is framed on Beda's information respecting himself, gleaned, with some care, from his various writings, and it consequently supplies us with no new facts, as the writer candidly admits, for he thus humbly expresses himself:-"Nos autem novam materiam non invenimus; sed more fabri, vetera et usu ita ac particulatim comminuta in ignem reponentes, follium ac incudis seu malleoli adjutorio in unum readunamus." He states that Beda died upon the 7th of the kalends of June, A.D. 734, being Ascension-day. The |