The Old English "Bede"
In 731, Bede completed his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People). In it, he traced the conversion to Christian belief of the pagan migrant peoples from ‘three great tribes’ (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), who collectively are portrayed as a people (gens) providentially guided by God and destined to occupy a new homeland on the island of Britain. Bede is widely admired as a historian for his adoption of the AD system of dating (hitherto little used), for his careful citation of documentary sources, and for his sober reporting of events as far as he could establish their truth. Yet his history is also filled with descriptions of miracles, visions, and other signs of God’s hand in the destiny of the gens Anglorum, who were united both by ethnicity and new faith, if still divided politically into several kingdoms. For Bede, the historical and spiritual dimensions of their story were inseparable.
The Saint Petersburg Bede, Saint Petersburg, National Library of Russia, lat. Q. v. I. 18
The Old English Bede (OEB) is a translation of the Historia from Latin into Old English. For the most part it is a close and literal rendering, except that through the excision of parts—sentences up to whole chapters—the text is abridged by more than a quarter. The translator shortened Bede’s account of Roman Britain, and affairs affecting the Christian Britons, such as the rise of the Pelagian heresy in the mid-fifth century. Matters that preoccupied Bede, such as the debate over the correct date for Easter, were no longer contentious by the time the OEB was produced and accordingly are trimmed. Many of the letters and documents that Bede quoted at length are omitted, though the translator typically smooths over these excisions with skill. Conversely, the OEB retains nearly all passages that concern the miracles and visions of English saints, forming a collection of moral and spiritual examples.
It is not clear when or for whom Bede’s Historia was translated. The dialect of the text indicates that the writer was of Mercian origin, perhaps from a large ecclesiastical centre in western Mercia such as Worcester, Hereford, or Lichfield. The translator may have been connected with the program of vernacular learning instigated by King Alfred in the late ninth century. Alfred’s collaborators included the Mercians Werferth, Bishop of Worcester, Plegmund, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the priests Æthelstan and Werwulf. However, Alfred’s claim (in his preface to the Pastoral Care) that little or nothing had been translated into English before his reign must be treated sceptically. If Werferth’s translation of Gregory’s Dialogues was commissioned by Alfred, then the OEB and the Old English Martyrology, which resemble it in style and dialect, might be coeval. On the other hand, these works may predate Alfred and have served as models for later translations like the Dialogues.
Alfred undoubtedly knew of Bede’s Historia, and his invocation of a golden age of scholarship and learning among the English in earlier times is surely based on it. However, he and his scholars appear to have consulted the Latin rather than the English version. No verbal echoes of the translation are found in his own translations, or in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which draws on Bede. Nor are there additions or modifications in the OEB that would signal a connection with Alfred’s program. Some scholars have detected Alfredian ideology in changes made to the translation of Bede’s preface (originally dedicated to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria), but this preface was composed by someone other than the translator of the rest of the text. It is not markedly Merician, and was probably attached to the OEB later, along with a copy of the West Saxon Regnal List, when in the tenth century the OEB began to be circulated in West Saxon circles, and naturally came to be associated with the Alfredian corpus, which it neatly complimented.
By the tenth and eleventh centuries, the OEB was more widely read in England than Bede’s Latin. Æthelweard relied on it when compiling his Chronicon in the 980s, and Ælfric quoted from it in his Homily for the Nativity of St Gregory in the 990s. These citations affirm the text’s accessibility and pedagogical value in the vernacular.
The text of the OEB and its transmission present some complex and interesting problems. Five manuscripts survive, wholly or in part, along with a single leaf containing three brief extracts:
- T = Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Tanner 10 (early tenth century)
- C = London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho B XI (mid tenth century, copied at Winchester; now largely destroyed but transcribed by Laurence Nowell c. 1562, before the Cotton fire of 1731)
- B = Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41 (early eleventh century)
- O = Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 279B (early eleventh century)
- Ca = Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.3.18 (a copy of O, made at Worcester)
- Z = London, British Library, Cotton MS Domitian IX, f. 11 (single leaf with extracts, probably London c. 890–910)
It is not known where manuscripts T, B, or O were produced, but they probably originated in southern England. All five manuscripts exhibit varying degrees of modification whereby Mercian dialect features have been changed to West Saxon. Thus, for example, retracted spellings like ald (‘old’) are changed to WS eald; some words like the verb leoran (‘to go, to depart’) not found in West Saxon, are replaced by more familiar verbs such as gewitan or feran. Scribes sometimes misunderstood their copytext, either because of dialect, or because of the unidiomatic, Latinate syntax of the translation. In four manuscripts, the scribes tend to make changes only where they could not understand the text before them. In manuscript B, however, the text shows more systematic revision. Three manuscripts (C O, and Ca) include an alternative translation for a few chapters in Book III, probably inserted to replace material that had been accidentally lost in the ancestor of these manuscripts.
The close, literal style of translation of the OEB, has been described as ‘clumsy’ or ‘somewhat tortured and hardly idiomatic’, but this was evidently a strategic choice. The translator usually had an excellent grasp of Latin, and his approach may have been intended to facilitate comparison with the Latin original. In passages where he appears to have been particularly engaged by his subject matter, his style can be freer, even tending to a degree of poeticism. One such admirable rendering is that of the famous simile of the sparrow flying through the royal hall. Here paruissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso is happily translated as eagan bryhtm and þæt læsste fæc, ‘the twinkling of an eye and the briefest moment’. Not only does the translator make Bede’s phrasing more vivid, but he shows his learning in adding a biblical allusion (cf. i Corinthians 15. 52: ‘In momento, in ictu oculi’), built onto Bede’s own referencing of a sparrow from scripture (cf. Matthew 10. 29).
The translator was exacting in the way he rendered Bede’s terminology, and in this respect his lexical choices suggest training in the traditions of glossing and textual explication from Canterbury and Mercia, such as those seen in the Vespasian Psalter, and Aldhelm glosses. Learned part-by-part translations of Latin terms are often employed. For example, the Latin miseri-cord-ia ‘mercy’ is always rendered by the calque mild-heort-nes; com-punct-io ‘compunction, urging’ by in-bryrd-nes. These and similar constructions are also found in the Vespasian Psalter gloss, Gregory’s Dialogues, the Martyrology, and the Mercian saints’ lives Guthlac and Chad). In contrast, compounds such as eðelturf (patria ‘native land’) and bædewæg (poculum ‘cup’) appear to be drawn from poetic tradition.
Another feature of the OEB also found in other Mercian prose texts is the frequent rendering of a single Latin word with a pair of English synonyms. For example: bodade ond lærde ‘preached and taught’ (praedicabat); synna ond mandæda ‘sins and wicked deeds’ (scelera). Semantic clarity, rhetorical force, and rhythmic cadence are added through this device.
The OEB is one of our most important records of Mercian dialect, but beyond that it is an intriguing and influential reworking of Bede’s Latin. It is an outgrowth of the early vernacular glossing practices, and a precursor of the vernacular accomplishments of the Alfredian and Benedictine Reform periods. As such, it is not simply a translation but a culturally significant reworking of one of England’s foundational historical texts.
Select Bibliography
Edition and modern translation of the Old English text
The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Thomas Miller, EETS os 95, 96, 110, 111 (London: N. Trübner, 1890–8).
Editions of Bede’s Latin text
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and transl. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). [With English translation.]
Beda: Storia Degli Inglesi (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum), ed. Michael Lapidge, transl. Paolo Chiesa, 2 vols. (Rome: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 2008–10). [With Italian translation. Lapidge’s edition contains important new discussion.]
Print facsimile of the Tanner manuscript
The Tanner Bede: The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Oxford Bodleian Library Tanner 10 together with the Mediaeval Binding Leaves, Oxford Bodleian Library Tanner 10* and the Domitian Extracts, ed. Janet M. Bately, EEMF 24 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1992).
Digital images of Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 279B
Digital images of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41
https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/qd527zm3425
Digital images of Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.3.18
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-KK-00003-00018/1
Criticism
Bately, Janet M. ‘Did King Alfred Actually Translate Anything? The Integrity of the Alfredian Canon Revisited’, Medium Ævum 78 (2009), 189–215.
Fulk, R. D., ‘Anglian Dialect Features in Old English Anonymous Homiletic Literature: A Survey, with Preliminary Findings’, in Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change, ed. Susan Fitzmaurice and Donka Minkova (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 81–100.
—. ‘Anglian Features in Late West Saxon Prose,’ in Analysing Older English, ed. David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully, and Emma Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 63–74.
Godden, Malcolm R., ‘The Alfredian Project and its Aftermath: Rethinking the Literary History of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries’, Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 93–122.
—. ‘Did King Alfred Write Anything?’ Medium Ævum 76 (2007), 1–23.
Harbus, Antonina, ‘The Presentation of Native Saints in the Old English Translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’, in Miracles and the Miraculous in Medieval Germanic and Latin Literature, ed. Antonina Harbus, Tette Hofstra and Karin E. Olsen, Mediaevalia Groningana, new series 6 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 155–74.
Klaeber, Frederick. ‘Zur altenglischen Bedaübersetzung’, Anglia 25 (1902), 257–315; 27 (1904), 243–82, 399–435.
Lemke Andreas. The Old English Translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in its Historical and Cultural Context (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2015).
Molyneaux, George, ‘The Old English Bede: English Ideology or Christian Instruction?’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1289–323.
Rauer, Christine. ‘Old English Literature before Alfred: The Mercian Dimension’, in The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c.850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan, Studies in Old English Literature 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 51–71.
Rowley, Sharon M. The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Anglo-Saxon Studies 16 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011).
Waite, Greg. ‘Translation Style, Lexical Systems, Dialect Vocabulary, and the Manuscript Transmission of the Old English Bede’, Medium Ævum 83 (2014), 1–48.
—. ‘The Preface to the Old English Bede: Authorship, Transmission, and Connection with the West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List’, Anglo-Saxon England 44 (2015), 31–93.
—. 'The Old English Bede: Some Reflections on Origins and Text', in Rethinking English Literary Culture in the Age of Alfred, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan, Studies in Old English Literature 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 151–210.
Whitelock, Dorothy. ‘The Old English Bede’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), 57–90.
Greg Waite (greg.waite@otago.ac.nz) is Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of English and Linguistics, University of Otago, where he taught from 1981 to 2018.
