St. Bede

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St. Bede

• Caedmons Hymn

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• Contents
• St. Bede- life and works
• Caedmon- life and ascribed works
• Caedmons Hymn- an alliterative vernacular praise
  poem

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St. Bade- life and works

• Bede, also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, or
  Beda (from Latin), was a Benedictine monk at the
  Northunbrian monastery of Saint Peter at
  Wearmouth.
• His scholarship and importance to Catholicism
  were recognized in 1899 when he was declared a
  Doctor of the Church as St. Bede the Venerable.

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Life

• Very little is known about Bedes life- the
  only historical evidence is a notice made by
  himself in his work- Historia ecclesiastica
  gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of
  the English People)-he was placed in the
  monastery at Wearmouth at the age of seven, then
  he became a deacon in his nineteenth year, and
  priest in his thirtieth, remaining a priest for
  the rest of his life. He implies that he finished
  the Historia at the age of 59, and since the work
  was finished around 731, he mast have been born
  in 672/3. He died on Wednesday 25th May 735. It
  is not clear whether he was of noble birth. He
  was trained by the abbots Benedict Biscop and
  Ceolfrid, and probably accompanied the latter to
  Wearmouths sister monastery of Jarrow in 682.
  There he spent his life, prominent activities
  evidently being teaching and writing. There he
  died and was buried, but his bones were, toward
  the beginning of the eleventh century, removed to
  Durham Cathedral.

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Work

• Bedes writings are classed as scientific,
  historical and theological, reflecting the range
  of his writings from music and metrics to
  Scripture commentaries.
• The most important and best known of his
  works is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis
  Anglorum, giving in five books and 400 pages the
  history of England, ecclesiastical and political,
  from the time of Ceaser to the date of its
  completion. The first twenty- one chapters,
  treating of the period before the mission of
  Augustaine of Canterbury, are complied from
  earlier writers such as Orosius, Gildas, Prosper
  of Aquitaine,the letters of Pope Gregory I and
  others, with the insertion of legends and
  traditions.
• After 596, documentary sources, which Bede
  took pains to obtain throughout England and Rome,
  are used, as well as oral testimony, which he
  employed with critical consideration of its
  value. He cited his references and was very
  concerned about the sources of all his sources,
  which created an important historical chain.

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• There are, it has been estimated, in England
  and on the Continent, in all about 140
  manuscripts of Ecclesiastical History. Of
  these, four date from the eighth century.
  Researchers state that two of them point to a
  common original which cannot be far removed from
  Bedes autograph. Various translations have been
  made throughout the years.
• We may trace a division of historical subjects
  or periods roughly analogous to the division into
  books. Book I contains the long introduction, the
  sending of the Roman mission, and the foundation
  of the Church Books II and III, the period of
  missionary activity and the establishment of
  Christianity throughout the land. Book IV may be
  said to describe the period of organization. In
  Book V the English Church itself becomes a
  missionary centre, planting the faith in Germany,
  and drawing the Celtic Churches into conformity
  with Rome.

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Bedes scientific writings

• A historian of science- George Satron-
  called the eighth century The age of Bede,
  Clearly Bede must be considered as an important
  scientific figure. He wrote several major works
  a work On Time, providing an introduction to the
  principles of Eastern computus (calculation of
  the Easter date) and longer work on the same
  subject On the reckoning of Time, which became
  the cornerstone of clerical scientific education
  during the so called Carolingian renaissance of
  the ninth century. He also wrote several short
  letters and essays discussing specific aspects of
  computus and a treatise on grammar and on figures
  of speech .
• His works were so influential that late in
  the ninth century Notker the Stammerer, a monk of
  the monastery St. Gall in Switzerland, wrote that
  God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun
  from the East on the forth day of Creation, in
  the sixth day of the word has made Bede rise from
  the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole
  world.

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Caedmon

• Caedmon is the earliest English poet whose
  name is known. His only known surviving work is
  Caedmon Hymn- a nine-line alliterative vernacular
  praise poem in honour of God he supposedly
  learned to sing in his initial dream.The poem is
  one of the earliest attested examples of Old
  English and is one of the candidates for the
  earliest attested examples of Old English poetry.

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Life

• The sole source of original information about
  Caedmons life and work is Bedes Historia
  ecclesiastica- Book IV. For most of his life
  Caedmon worked in an animal husbandry for a
  monastery, living with the non-religious, and
  reporting to the reeve, a steward who supervised
  abbess estate. When the workers routinely ate
  together in a hall at a table, they entertained
  each other by singing lyrics to a hand-held harp,
  passed around. Before Caedmons turn to sing
  came, he left for the stable where he kept the
  livestock overnight. One time when his turn came
  to sleep with the animals, he had a dream. In it
  a man called him by name and told him to sing.
  When Caedmon explained that he could not sing to
  the others, the man asked him to sing to him
  instead.

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• When Caedmon said that he did not know what
  to sing about, the man told him, the Creation of
  all things. In the dream, Caedmon did so, with
  verses he had never heard before. Awaking, he
  remembered his dream and the song, and added more
  to it.

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• The religious to whom Caedmon performed his
  song later attributed his singing as a gift by
  Gods grace. He mast have seemed to them like one
  of the disciples in the gospels whom Jesus had
  called by name to Gods service. Creativity in
  making songs, to them, happened when a greater
  power took over the poet and made him its voice.
  However, the monastic brothers were wrong about
  Caedmons gift. The man in his dream gave him,
  not the verses, but the subject matter. Caedmon,
  and only he, composed the verses. What astonished
  the monastery scholars was the immediacy of his
  composition. The verses came out without work or
  prompting of memory.
• Caedmon does not say that he created his song
  after waking up, but that he remembered it. Bede
  clearly explains that one of Caedmons abilities
  was to store up what he was taught in his memory.
  

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• Later on Caedmon was ordered to take monastic
  vows. The abbess ordered her scholars to teach
  him sacred history and doctrine.
• After a long and pious life, Caedmon died
  like a saint receiving a premonition of death,
  he asked to be moved to the abbeys hospice
  where, having gathered his friends around him, he
  expired just before nocturns.

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Caedmons Hymn

• Caedmons poetry is said to have been
  exclusively religious. Bede reports that Caedmon
  could never compose any foolish or trivial
  poem, but only those which were concerned with
  devotion And his list of Caedmons output
  includes work on religious subjects only
  accounts of Creation, translations from the Old
  and New Testaments, and songs about the terrors
  of future judgement, horrors of hell, joys of
  the heavenly kingdom, and divine mercies and
  judgements. Of this corpus, only the opening
  lines of his first poem survived- The Hymn.

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•  Now let me praise the keeper of
  Heaven's kingdom,
•         the might of the Creator, and
  his thought,
•         the work of the Father of glory,
  how each of wonders
•         the Eternal Lord established in
  the beginning.
•          He first created for the sons of
  men
• Heaven as a roof, the holy
  Creator,
•    then Middle-earth the keeper of
  mankind,
•           the Eternal Lord, afterwards
  made,
•           the earth for men, the Almighty
  Lord.

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• The Hymn has by far the most complicated
  known textual history of any surviving Anglo-
  Saxon poem. It is found in two dialects and five
  distinct recensions.
• Each Old English line has two balanced
  phrases with four stressed syllables, three of
  which alliterative. Each half line if uttered
  musically, in time to the plucking of a harp,
  would fit nicely into our memory.
• Caedmons hymn has just two sentences, which
  can be summarized Let me now praise God the
  Creator lines 1-4, and God created Heaven,
  earth and man lines 5-9.

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Things to remember

• Note that Bede, who wrote in Latin, is not
  the author of Caedmons poem, which he
  translates into Latin and incorporates into the
  Ecclesiastical History. Caedmons Hymn was
  composed orally in Old English alliterative verse
  by an illiterate cowherd named Caedmon sometime
  between 658 and 860- possibly before Bedes
  birth, and long before Bede wrote the
  Ecclesiastical History (completed 731). Note that
  Old English was not a written language poetry
  was composed in an oral- formulaic style and
  recited aloud, from memory, to an illiterate
  public.