![]() There was one major exception to Bede's Latin, however. Bede knew what he knew, and what he didn't, and what was in between, and the word legetur (it is said) appears often as a clue to where Bede signals he is not fully sure of his source.īede wrote the History in a graceful and educated Latin, but it was so influential that King Alfred the Great selected it among only a few works that he ordered translated into Old English, during the 9th century. Although his methods were not modern, and Bede would not have understood the current obsession with "objective" history, nonetheless historians have long spoken approvingly of Bede as a historian. The History contains a wealth of historical detail, some found nowhere else. In it, Bede tells the story of cultural conflict and religious controversy unfolding according to the divine plan for what became known as the British Isles. As the British historian Christopher Dawson wrote, Bede's History is an "exceptional, almost a unique" work of history. ![]() ![]() The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow by the Venerable Bede and completed in AD 731, is one of the great achievements of Western literature. ![]()
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