BEDE is known today principally as an historian, although throughout the Middle Ages he was renowned as a biblical interpreter and indeed spent most of his career commenting voluminously on Scripture. If medieval biblical exegesis owes much to his copious analyses, his exegetical works are only a portion of the hundreds of extant patristic and medieval commentaries. His histories, on the other hand, particularly The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, are unique. Without them whole centuries of early English history would be blank. And they are not only unique, they represent the highest quality writing of the period. These works are the mature products of Bede's scholarship and long career; The Ecclesiastical History is his last major work, supplemented by the Letter to Egbert, a final call for reform. His education, training, and talent culminate in the History. In it, his monastic vision of sacred and secular history and his reforming idealism, exemplified by his depiction of good and bad leaders and of faithful and faithless peoples, are combined. Although a cloistered monk living ascetic ideals, through his multiple contacts and extensive correspondence he knows better than anyone the complex realities of Anglo-Saxon society and he deals with the real, disorderly, and contentious factors of that life and politics.1 Because of his insightful understanding of the unifying authority of the church of Canterbury and York as envisaged by Pope Gregory the Great, Bede precociously represented a single nation of a country that actually was and would remain long a collection of Anglo-Saxon tribal divisions. His treatment of Bernician and Deiran rivalries in Northumbria and of the Mercian polity, and his contentious treatment of the British and Irish as opponents, are understood and subsumed under his vision of the unity of the gentis Anglorum.

Like all great historians Bede marshals his materials in a carefully arranged presentation. He is a master of the overarching viewpoint as well as of the discreet silence, the omission that consigns a person or factions to oblivion.

His chapters, sections, and sentences are adroitly structured, with rhetorical hypotaxis and emphasis.2 His many years as a teacher and writer of postclassical Latin, coupled with his impressive natural endowments, enabled him to write a well structured, long and coherent treatise.