St. Bede

Bede was born about the year 673 on lands belonging to the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and at seven was given to the abbot to be raised. He remained in that house all his life, ordained deacon at nineteen and priest at thirty, and by his own account found his chief delight in learning, teaching and writing.

He wrote commentaries on most of the books of Scripture, drawing the Fathers together for readers who had no libraries, and it is chiefly through these that his voice reaches the commentary of the later Church. He also wrote on chronology, and the reckoning of the years from the Incarnation, which he did much to establish, is largely his doing.

His Ecclesiastical History of the English People traced the coming of the Gospel to the English from the mission St Gregory the Great had sent. He took pains over his sources, naming the men who told him what he could not himself have known, which is why the book is trusted where much else of that age is not.

He reposed on the twenty-sixth of May in the year 735, having finished dictating a translation of the Gospel of St John into English on the last evening of his life. He is the only Englishman among the Fathers whom the whole Church receives, and the title Venerable has been attached to his name since not long after his death.