ABSTRACT
The culmination of Bede’s decades of thinking and experimenting with chronology can be found in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, specifically in his adoption of Annus Domini to recount Anglo-Saxon history. This work transformed the potential of the Anno Domini (AD) system, playing a major role in its dissemination across Carolingian Europe, and is a significant factor in the chronology’s subsequent and long-lasting popularity. Bede received AD years from the Easter table of Dionysius Exiguus, compiled in AD 525 with a start date in 532. Dionysius created his Easter table in AD 525, about 70 years after Victorius, and he must have been familiar with the Victorian Easter cycle, as this was the preferred Easter practise in Rome at the time. The earliest examples of AD dates from Anglo-Saxon England are in a poem from Northumbria and on charters recording land transactions.
