HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

ETHNIC AND NATIONAL HISTORY CA. 500‒1000 65two decades of his life. The HE generally is believed to have beencompleted by 731. 70 It covers the history of Britain and the Englishfrom Julius Caesar’s first attempt to conquer the island in 60 B.C.to the death of Archbishop Bertwald in A.D. 731. It is remarkablethat Bede pays little attention to the first three decades of the eighthcentury, i.e., to his own times, about which he could have writtenwith the authority of a witness; these years are treated summarily ina few final chapters of Book V. Bede’s interest centers primarily onthe conversion of the English and their unification—with the otherinhabitants of Britain: Scots, Picts, and Britons—under the Romanmodel of Christianity.The epistle dedicating the HE to King Ceolwulf of Northumbriaenumerates at length Bede’s informants for the various regions ofBritain as well as the sources of their knowledge: Roman and localarchives, oral tradition, personal experience. Throughout the HE,Bede specifies the sources of many segments of his narrative, introducingthe famous story of Pope Gregory and the English slaves(II,1), for instance, as a “traditio maiorum”, and his account of thesinful goings-on in the monastery at Coldingham as having been toldhim by the priest Edgils, a resident of Coldingham at the time(IV,25). This measure of methodological caution has earned Bedethe applause of twentieth-century historians, who find him to beaware of the requirements of historical evidence to a degree otherwiseunexampled in the historiography of the period.The HE begins from the territory, with a description of Britainand Ireland and their native inhabitants before the coming of theAnglo-Saxons. Book I is by far the most important from the standpointof secular history, unfolding as it does the centuries of Romanrule, the eventual withdrawal of the Romans, with the constructionof the Hadrianic and Antonine walls, the coming of the Angles,Saxons, and Jutes and their eventual takeover of the island, as wellas Gregory the Great’s organization of a first mission to the English,the arrival of Augustine and his fellows in Kent in 597, and thebeginnings of English Christianity. Bede’s is the fundamental earlymedieval account of these events and has provided the accepted representationof the coming of the English until very recently. His portrayalof the Britons is essentially negative, while the Anglo-Saxons70Though a reference in V.23 to a Saracen defeat in Gaul may concern thebattle of Poitiers (732).