ABSTRACT
Had his statue been placed here, however, one might pause to wonder how Bede himself might have viewed this initiative, had he the opportunity, to site a memorial to his own scholarship, and his role as national icon, some 300 miles (484 km) south of his normal stamping grounds, and in a thoroughly secular space originally designed to commemorate victory by the Protestant ‘British’ – two terms with which he would have had enormous difficulty identifying – in a bloody sea battle against Catholic opponents off the coast of Spain almost 1100 years after his own demise. Admittedly, the original design by Charles Barry in 1832 was intended to provide scope for the Arts, but the centrepiece was always to be the great war-hero, Nelson, atop his column. Today, Trafalgar Square serves as something of a communal open space, particularly at times of great celebration or tragedy, for a Metropolis which has a reputation for materialism, consumerism and hedonism, as well as a mix of peoples as broad as any to be found in a single community
anywhere in the world. Whether or not Bede might have appreciated any aspect of the proposed commemoration must remain in doubt, but the desire to give him such a memorial which that petition demonstrated reflects claims on national identity today by groups within society who feel less than central to current notions of either ‘Englishness’ or ‘Britishness’, including elements of the religious establishment, the academic world, and a regional community in the North-East which has often felt itself to be peripheral to the nation state. A statue of Bede established permanently on the long-vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square had some potential to assuage these senses of difference, therefore, and establish ‘Geordie’ claims on the nation, even while offering a symbol of Christian learning and authorship to the intelligentsia as a whole.
