The Venerable Bede (c. 672–735) spent all his life from the age of seven at the monastery of Jarrow, part of the twinned institution of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria. This was at the time the most powerful of the independent Anglo- Saxon kingdoms, with kings willing and able to endow great centres of faith and learning. Wearmouth-Jarrow became one of the most important in the Christian West, largely owing to Bede. Ælfric of Eynsham, whose own works dominated a later period of Anglo-Saxon England (see p. 4), was to call Bede ‘the wise teacher of the English people’. The range of his writings was immense: biblical exegesis, history, hagiography (writings about saints), grammar, poetry, natural science and computus (astronomical and chronological calculation). His works, which define for us the first great period of cultural development in Anglo-Saxon England, were in demand on the Continent also, both in Bede's own lifetime and throughout the Middle Ages. The thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante afforded him the rare privilege of a place among the blessed souls inhabiting ‘the heaven of the sun’ in his Paradiso (part of the Divina Commedia).

The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’) was Bede's greatest achievement. In five books, it tells the story of his country from Julius Caesar's attempted invasion of Britain in 55 BC to the year in which Bede finished writing, AD 731.