ABSTRACT
In the brief preface that Patrick Wormald wrote to introduce his second volume of collected essays, The Times of Bede, he drew attention to the significance of his father, Brian Wormald (the volume’s dedicatee) in shaping the way in which he thought about the past:
In assembling this collection over the last thirty years, I have often had in mind a classic study of the way in which a historian was moulded by experience of his own times whilst permanently changing its image in the eyes of posterity. I have learned much of what I think about history and historians from the author of Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion since it was published when I was four years old.1
