Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Bede entered the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow as a boy and spent his life there. He finished the History in 731, when by his own account he was in his fifty-ninth year. He names his informants in the preface, among them Abbot Albinus of Canterbury and the priest Nothelm, who brought him copies of letters from the papal archive in Rome, and he quotes many of those letters in full, especially those of Pope Gregory the Great.

For his own lifetime in Northumbria Bede is a contemporary. For the arrival of Augustine in 597 and the conversions that followed he writes more than a century later, from documents and from what the churches of Kent and Northumbria remembered. He is careful about dates, and his use of years counted from the birth of Christ did much to spread that system. His sympathies are plain. The dispute over the date of Easter runs through the work, and Bede takes the Roman side in it; he is severe on the British church and warmer towards the Irish missionaries, whose way of life he admired. Miracles are reported as his sources gave them.