St Peter’s Church in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, still retains the Saxon porch and west wall (i.e. the bottom of the tower, and its surrounding wall) built in 674. The upper tower was added in the 10th century, and the rest of the church is 14th century. Bede, whose family lived on church land, was a schoolboy here at the monastery of St Peter (now long gone) until he was nine.
Part 1 of 3
THE church of St Peter in Monkwearmouth is all that remains today of a monastery founded in 674 by St Benedict Biscop, a local man who had studied abroad and was a frequent visitor to Rome. The land was donated by Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria, and included the home of a Christian family with a one-year-old boy called Bede.
When he was seven, Bede was sent to the monastery school to be tutored by Benedict in Latin and Greek, astronomy, music and art. Two years later, he was taken to a new monastery school in Jarrow further north, and continued his studies under Abbot Ceolfrid.
Bede spent the remainder of his life at Jarrow. Although he did some travelling (he went to Lindisfarne and York), peasants, kings and monks – such as Adamnán,* who came to learn the Northumbrian way of singing the liturgy – brought him news, while Benedict brought him books, music and icons from his journeys to France and Rome.*
Rome in Bede’s day was under Constantinople’s governance and was culturally Greek, with Greek-speaking popes and strongly eastern culture. Benedict borrowed a musician from Rome named John to set up a music school at Monkwearmouth, and according to Andrew J. Ekonomou in ‘Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes’ he too was probably an Easterner, brought over under Pope Vitalian (r. 657-672) to help St Peter’s in Rome emulate the glory of Agia Sophia in Constantinople. See How Benedict Biscop brought Byzantium to Britain.
Précis
Bede was born in modern-day Sunderland, on lands acquired by St Benedict Biscop for a new monastery that Bede later attended as a schoolboy. Most of his life however was spent in a daughter-house at Jarrow, surrounded by books gathered from all over Europe, and fed with news by a constant stream of visitors from across the British Isles. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
The chapel of St Paul in the monastery at Jarrow, built in 685, where Bede sang and later acted as deacon and then priest. According to Bede’s own testimony, we must imagine colourful icons of Mary and Christ stretched across a screen in front of the altar, and more icons on the walls, showing scenes from the Old and New Testaments. And no pews, of course.
IN 686, a devastating plague swept the monastery in Jarrow, and responsibility for the monastery’s daily worship fell on the thirteen-year-old Bede. So expert did he become that at nineteen, six years before the minimum age, Bede was ordained deacon by St John, bishop of Hexham, and priest at thirty.
Bede was a keen student of music, Biblical interpretation, astronomy and mathematics; he was fluent in Latin and Greek, and well-acquainted with classical authors including Virgil, Ovid and Horace. Towards the end of his life, he compiled a history of the English church and people, setting a new standard in historical accuracy, and fostering a sense of national unity and Christian enlightenment in a land that had known only petty kings and pagan superstition.*
Yet Bede was foremost a monk, devoted to St Cuthbert and delighting in Psalms and Northumbrian sacred verse in English, who used to say that he could not skip any church service because the angels would miss him.
Bede is also credited with inventing footnotes. And where would we be without them?
Précis
Bede’s love for sacred music was honed by assuming responsibility for the monastery chapel when just thirteen, after a plague devastated the monastery. He is more famous however as author of a history of the English church and people which helped foster a sense of national identity and culture in a land which had not known them before. (58 / 60 words)
Part Three
This tomb in the Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral is inscribed with the words: Hac sunt in fossa / Bedae Venerabilis ossa (‘In this grave lie the bones of the Venerable Bede’). His relics were at one time kept in a glorious reliquary, but it was stolen by the government at the Reformation. Fortunately, someone kept the contents.
BEDE fell ill just before Easter in 735. His fellow-monks found his deterioration hard, but Bede remained cheerful, singing to them and reciting passages from the Psalms and the letters of St Paul, and also from local Northumbrian verse:
Before that journey all must make,
none is too wise if he consider,
while he yet awaits his going,
what may be reckoned of his deeds,
both good and evil, and his soul’s worth,
when death-day is past.*
Bede spent Wednesday May 25th, the day before the Feast of the Ascension, finishing his English translation of St John’s Gospel, and giving away his few possessions.
Towards the evening, he asked a young monk called Wilbert to help him sit up in the posture he had so long used in prayer, and with failing breath his last words came in song:
‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; now and forever, and to the ages of ages.’
An account of the death of Bede, written by an eyewitness named Cuthbert (not the famous saint), can be read at The Death of Bede. It is not clear from Cuthbert’s account whether Bede’s short poem was composed by him or simply recited, but he prefaces it by saying that Bede was ‘learned in our native poetry’.
Précis
Bede died on May 25th, 735, the eve of the Feast of the Ascension, after a brief illness. He finished his translation of St John’s Gospel and divided his few possessions among his brethren, before falling asleep as he sang the short Doxology — a fitting end to a life devoted to scholarship, sacred music, and the love of God. (59 / 60 words)