Bede or Baeda, St, also called the Venerable Bede c.673-735
Anglo-Saxon scholar, theologian and historian

Born near Monkwearmonth, Durham, he studied at the Benedictine monastery there from the age of seven. In 682 he moved to the new monastery of Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, where he was ordained priest in 703 and remained a monk for the rest of his life, studying and teaching. Besides Latin and Greek, classical as well as patristic, literature, he studied Hebrew, medicine, astronomy and prosody. He wrote homilies, lives of saints, lives of abbots, hymns, epigrams, works on chronology, grammar and physical science, commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, and translated the Gospel of St John into Anglo-Saxon just before his death. His greatest work was his Latin Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ('Ecclesiastical History of the English People'), which he finished in 731, and is the single most valuable source for early English history. It was later translated into Anglo-Saxon by, or under, King Alfred. He was buried at Jarrow, and his bones were moved to Durham in the 11th century. He was canonized in 1899 and his feast day is 27 May.

Bibliography: P H Blair, The World of Bede (1970)