Free Albion by Peter Ackroyd

“
antiqui Anglorum populi
,” and gives English annotations of Latin terms. His national instincts—one might almost describe them as an unacknowledged atavism—resemble those of the church builders and scribes who persisted with a recognisably insular tradition despite the presence and influence of continental models. So Bede charted the movements of the English sea and of the English seasons; he prepared an English translation of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer; he sang native songs. And yet his greatest contribution to national historiography was undoubtedly the
History
which he composed in Latin; he has been described as “the first Englishman who understood the past and could view it as a whole.” 2 In similar spirit he was the first Englishman to render the past intelligible and accessible, not only to his contemporaries but to all the generations of historians who have succeeded him. Some of those historians, like Gibbon and Trevelyan, have paid tribute to his powers, principally because he lent English history the coherence and consistency of art. His sources included calendars and chronicles, hagiographies and commentaries, annals and compilations, histories and even oral testimony, all of them purified and elevated by his rigorous style.
    Bede’s History is in five books, commencing with the topography of Britain and its earliest inhabitants but ending with a brief prayer to Jesus after its conclusion in 731. The “matter of Britain” is seen within the context of the Roman Empire and of European history, but this does not distract Bede’s attention from the manifold details of his own country; he alludes to Orosius and Pliny and Solinus but then mentions the defensive stakes along the Thames, “which can still be seen” seven hundred years after Caesar’s invasion, or interjects: “I heard this from a man still living.” He narrates the life and death of Alban, and relates them to the town of St. Albans where miraculous healings occur “to this day”; he refers to the “cities, forts, bridges and paved roads” of England and to the violent dynastic struggles of its rulers. There are dreams and battles, invasions and miracles, all manifested within the history of the salvation of a barbaric people.
    Like the monastic illuminators of his period he was always glimpsing the numinous background of human events; he seems obsessed with the precise date of Easter, the subject of one of the most perplexing debates of the period, but only because that day prefigures the resurrection and final judgement. In his narrative the human figures are seen in outline or in rhetorical attitudes, and the events are often couched in the form of allegory; the purpose of his book is moral and eschatological, for the English are the race chosen by God. This was one of Bede’s most enduring themes, and one of his most persuasive legacies. John Milton declared that England was the “Elect Nation,” a prophecy that William Blake endorsed in
Jerusalem
; the oratorios of Handel were celebrated in part because the history of the Hebrews was seen as a template of English history; in the psalm settings of William Byrd’s “Jerusalem” is also a synonym of England, while the dedication to the King James Bible refers to “our Sion.”
    The legacy of Bede, therefore, was a long one; a religious view of history prevailed until the end of the seventeenth century, while nineteenth-century historians such as Acton and Macaulay employed the secular religion of Whiggism to fashion their narratives. Bede promulgated the important lesson that only a defining vision can properly order an historical narrative, and that good histories can be formulated only by good writers. History is an art, in other words, and cannot be finally distinguished from drama or from fiction.
    Bede in part took his account of early Britain from the narratives of an earlier historian, Gildas, whose writing is suffused with biblical imagery and Christian