With Bede's Letter to Egbert and Cuthbert's Letter on the Death of Bede

Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Bede was born in 673. He became a monk at an early age and lived most of his life at Jarrow. Scholar, teacher and writer, he wrote biblical and other works. He has been described as the 'Father of English History'. Bede died in 735. Leo Sherley-Price is a Rural Dean and parish priest at Devon. He has translated a number of other historical and theological texts. D. H. Farmer is author and editor of several books on ecclesiastical and monastic history.

Written in AD 731, Bede's work opens with a background sketch of Roman Britain's geography and history. It goes on to tell of the kings and bishops, monks and nuns who helped to develop Anglo-Saxon government and religion during the crucial formative years of the English people. Leo Sherley-Price's translation brings us an accurate and readable version, in modern English, of a unique historical document. This edition now includes Bede's Letter to Egbert concerning pastoral care in early Anglo-Saxon England, at the heart of which lay Bede's denunciation of the false monasteries; and The Death of Bede, an admirable eye-witness account by Cuthbert, monk and later Abbot of Jarrow, both translated by D. H. Farmer.

Bede

J. F. Webb

D. H. Farmer

This selection of writings from the sixth and seventh century AD provides a powerful insight into the early history of the Christian Church in England and Ireland. From Bede's Life of Cuthbert and Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow to the anonymous Voyage of St Brendan - a whimsical mixture of fact and fantasy that describes a quest for paradise on earth - these are vivid accounts of the profoundly spiritual and passionately heroic lives of Christian pioneers and saints. Both vital religious writings and a revealing insight into the reality of life at a formative time for the church, they describe an era of heroism and bitter conflict, and the rapid spread of the Christian faith.

Bede

Books by Bede

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