Drunken monks accused Bede of heresy for doing his own arithmetic
Bede worked out for himself how old the world was and put the birth of Christ 3,952 years after creation, well short of the accepted figure of over 5,000. At a feast in 708, some tipsy monks at Hexham called that heresy. Bede fired back a written defence within days.
Nearly everything known about Bede comes from a short autobiographical note at the end of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished around 731. It implies he was born in 672 or 673 on lands belonging to the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria. At seven his family handed him over to be schooled by the abbot Benedict Biscop, and he probably moved to the new house at Jarrow with Ceolfrith in 682. His connections hint at a well-off, perhaps noble, family.
Plague swept Jarrow in 686. A near-contemporary life of Ceolfrith says only two survivors could still sing the full round of daily services: the abbot and a boy of about fourteen, almost certainly Bede, who kept the prayers going until others were trained. He was made deacon around 692, years below the usual minimum age of 25, and priest about 702.
From roughly 701 he wrote steadily, eventually finishing more than 60 books, most of which survive: classroom texts on metre and rhetoric, Bible commentaries, and works of computus, the science of calendar dating, above all the disputed reckoning of Easter. He helped spread the habit of counting years from the birth of Christ. He may have worked on Bibles copied at Jarrow, including the Codex Amiatinus now in Florence, and was said to be a fine singer and reciter of English verse. A couple of first-person passages mentioning a wife puzzle readers; Benedicta Ward treats them as a rhetorical device.
Bede rarely left the monastery, though he visited Lindisfarne and York and apparently never saw Rome. He died on 26 May 735. His History earned him the title Father of English History, and many historians rank him the foremost scholar of the two centuries from Pope Gregory I's death in 604 to Charlemagne's crowning in 800. His remains were moved to Durham Cathedral in 1020, and in 1899 Pope Leo XIII made him a Doctor of the Church, the first native of Great Britain so honoured.
Source: Bede
