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XXVll Bede's time.1 Copies of Bede's works were made here too, and if it had not been for these extensive libraries and splendid scriptoria, there could never have been such a scholar as Bede who, in the words of Notker Balbulus, writing at St. Gall in the late ninth century, was 'a new sun in the west, ordained to illuminate the whole globe'.2 v. Northumbria and the West When Bede was born about 673 King Ecgfrith had been reigning over Northumbria, consisting of the combined kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, for some three years. Oswiu, Ecgfrith's father and predecessor, had been stretching out his borders all through his reign and, when Ecgfrith came to the throne, the whole of eastern
Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was in English hands. At the beginning of his reign the Piets rose against him, looking upon him as a dangerous potential enemy. But they were heavily defeated about 672. It is probable that Strathclyde came under his subjection at this time too. About 680 the monastery at Abercorn became the episcopal seat of a Northumbrian bishop called
Trumwine. In 684 Ecgfrith sent an expedition against Ireland and devastated part of the kingdom of Meath, perhaps to intimi date the tribes who were attempting to support their kinsmen against his inroads in Dalriada. In 685 Ecgfrith was trapped in the mountains and killed with all his retainers by the Piets at Nechtansmere in Forfarshire.3
The task of protecting the northern border now lay with Aldfrith, Ecgfrith's half-brother and son of an Irish princess. But it was Bede's opinion that from this time the strength of the Northumbrian kingdom began to 'ebb and fall away'.4 The Piets and Irish in Dalriada and the Britons, presumably of Strathclyde, all regained their territories so that Trumwine had to leave his see
1 Some attempt is at last being made to study the special features of the surviving manuscripts from these scriptoria. See E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini
Antiquiores, vi, and English Uncial Script (Oxford, i960): also T. j. Brown in Codex Lindisfamensis (Olten and Lausanne, i960), 11. 89-106.
1 Notkcri Balbuli, De interpretationibus divinarum scripturarum, PL, cxxxi.
996. Quoted by D. Whitelock, After Bede, Jarrow Lecture, i960 (Jarrow, 1961). The lecture is an important study of the growth of Bede's reputation after his death.
3 iv. 26; VA, iv. 8; VP, chapter 27.
4 iv. 26. Bede is quoting Virgil, Aeneid ii. 169.
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at Abercorn and many Englishmen were either killed or enslaved or forced to flee to their native land.
Yet in many ways it was a great relief to Northumbria to be freed from the troubles brought about by an ambitious king constantly on the look-out for means to increase his dominions.
Aldfrith was a scholar who had been educated in Ireland and spoke Irish fluently. He was naturally interested in the new monasteries—or rather monastery—at Wearmouth and Jarrow and must have been delighted at the biiilding up of the libraries there as well as those at York, Hexham, Ripon, and other places.
In many parts of Northumbria the English and Irish, and possi bly even Italian scholars and Eastern artists who had come in the train of Theodore of Tarsus, combined to produce works of art of many kinds. Perhaps the most important were the magnificent series of illuminated gospels which appeared around the turn of the century, the most famous being the Lindisfarne Gospels now in the British Museum. And after Aldfrith's death works of art continued to be produced and learning to flourish: for instance the remarkable free-standing crosses of stone of which many fragments remain all over the North of England. The best known are the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, the Bewcastle Cross in Cum berland and the splendid fragments to be seen at Croft, South
Church, Great Ayton, Aycliffe, Escomb, and elsewhere. In addition to the churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow, there were also Wilfrid's two great churches at Hexham and Ripon, of which the crypts still survive almost intact. At Escomb there is a largely unspoilt church which pretty certainly belongs to the early eighth century as also do some parts of the church at Corbridge.1 In fact the whole of the first half of the eighth century seems to have been a time of great cultural advance over all Northumbria including the country around Solway Firth and Carlisle and Galloway in spite of a succession of unsatisfactory kings.
On Aldfrith's death he was succeeded by a boy of eight, his son Osred, who grew up to be a vicious youth and met a violent death at the age of nineteen having called down upon himself the bitter condemnation of St. Boniface.2 He was succeeded by Cenred and then Osric, both of whom reigned for only a short time; when
1 For further information about the churches and sculpture see Clapham and Taylor, passim.
2 Tangl, No. 73 and EH D , 1. 755.
H IS T O R IC A L IN T R O D U C T I O N
XXIX their brief reigns had ended, Bede and his fellow monks must have looked forward with some relief to the reign of Ceolwulf, who came to the throne in 729 and to whom Bede dedicated his
History. But even before the History was finished, Bede was looking anxiously to the future. He had to acknowledge that the beginning and the course of Ceolwulf's reign had been full of troubles so that he could not guess what would be the outcome of it all. He was probably thinking chiefly of the incident in 731 when Ceolwulf was taken and forcibly tonsured, presumably as a gesture of contempt.1 For Bede the outlook was dark at home and abroad; the Moslems, or the 'Saracens' as he termed them, were pressing hard on Christian Europe. Furthermore the ap pearance of two comets in 729 portended 'dire disaster to east and west alike'.2 At home Bede saw the rapid rise of a sham monasticism which he condemned in his last written work, the Letter to Egbert. He lived long enough to hear about the repulse of the Moslems at the battle of Tours by Charles Martel in 732, though he can hardly have recognized the significance of the victory. He even inserted a sentence after he had finished his
History in which he mentions this battle.3 He died in 735 and two years later Ceolwulf resigned his throne, ending his life in the monastery at Lindisfarne. Learning and the arts, however, con tinued to flourish in the twin monasteries for at least sixty years after Bede's death. Then began the Scandinavian raids and, a century after his death, the monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, Lindisfarne, Hexham, and York were shadows of their former selves.
It is often said that Bede's life was that of the typical peaceful scholar and that is no doubt true; but it was also a time of great political tension. Bede, living as he did in a monastery where visitors came probably in some numbers, could not fail to hear what was happening in the countries beyond the seas. As he wrote his History he saw around him anarchy and decay and, from across the seas, he had learned the news of how the whole of Christian
Africa and most of Christian Spain had fallen victims to the Moslems. It was a time of anxiety for the whole of western
Europe and the History, like many of the world's greatest books, was written at a time of political upheaval.
1 Baedae Continuatio, s.a. 731, p. 572.
2 V. 23.
3 V. 23 and note.