ABSTRACT
Bede was a highly experienced and very accomplished writer who apparently had a specific brief in mind when setting out to write his Ecclesiastical History, although we can today only reconstruct his purposes haltingly from the somewhat paradoxical evidence internal to it. As Alcuin makes clear in the extract from his work quoted above, commentators only a generation or so removed from the work particularly stressed Bede’s historical accuracy. Unsurprisingly, historians in the modern period have tended to trawl the Ecclesiastical History with their attention fixed on the affairs of men (and women of course, albeit they are a minority representation therein), seeking out ‘unwitting’ as much as ‘witting’ testimony – that is, what the author included to provide context and of necessity to make sense of other materials, besides what he particularly purposed to write. By so doing they – we – seek to extract insights through which to maximise the little that can safely be surmised concerning the seventh and early eighth centuries,2 and so build up an historical narrative for the period, but this is only one approach and others may be at least as valid.
