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Updated: May 25, 2025
I cannot doubt that among the books imported in the seventh century from Italy by Benedict Biscop and Theodore and Hadrian, and in the great library of York, which Alcuin panegyrizes in his poem on the saints of York, there were texts now lost. But the Danes made a clean sweep of all those treasures, as they did of the whole vernacular literature of Northumbria, undoubtedly a rich one.
It is hard to imagine how among the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the monk, Bæda could have found time for the composition of the numerous works that made his name famous in the West. But materials for study had accumulated in Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and the libraries which were forming at Wearmouth and York.
The libraries were burned, and Northumbria was overwhelmed in darkness and slavery; and Alcuin wrote again, 'He who can hear of this calamity and not cry to God on behalf of his country, must have a heart not of flesh but of stone. Benedict Biscop was our first English book-collector.
Bæda the Venerable Bede as later times styled him was born nine years after the Synod of Whitby on ground which passed a year later to Benedict Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he reared by the mouth of the Wear. His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his friend Ceolfrid. Bæda never stirred from Jarrow.
Some of his short pieces, e.g.: "If there were dreams to sell," and "If thou wilt ease thine heart," are masterpieces of intense feeling exquisitely expressed. Historian and scholar. B., who is sometimes referred to as "the father of English history," was in his youth placed under the care of Benedict Biscop, Abbot of Wearmouth, and of Ceolfrith, afterwards Abbot of Jarrow.
His skill in the ecclesiastical chant was derived from a Roman cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop. Little by little the young scholar thus made himself master of the whole range of the science of his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him, "the father of English learning."
The elder of these, Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce the usages in which the Irish Church differed from the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of his realm should be decided. The points actually contested were trivial enough.
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