ABSTRACT
The influence of the Benedictine Rule on Bede’s life and work has long preoccupied scholars, and with good reason. Benedict’s Rule remains one of the most imposing achievements of early medieval textual culture, a culture to which Bede himself contributed much, and the prospect of linking them no doubt has its attraction.1 Add to this the equally attractive image of the Rule’s transit to English shores at Pope Gregory’s behest, not to mention the early English provenance of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 48, the oldest surviving manuscript of the Rule, and the allure of it all is plain.2 But attempts to piece it together, to determine once and for all the extent of Bede’s debt to Benedictine monasticism, have not fared as well as one might have hoped. Calling it a ‘controversy’ may be to overstate, but the shifts in opinion and amount of ink spilt in train have made the discussion no less difficult to ignore. As with other big questions in England’s early history, it is also a place where the views of Patrick Wormald have indelibly fixed themselves.
