SOURCE: J. Campbell, "Bede," in Latin Historians, edited by T. A. Dorey, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1966, pp. 159-90.

In the following excerpt, Campbell emphasizes that Bede's main intention was to promote Christianity through his writings. He also considers Bede's sources and his occasional discrepancies on dates.

Bede was not only, or even primarily, a historian. He finished the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum only three or four years before his death in 735. He may have known that it would be the last of his major works, for he ended it with an almost elegiac sketch of his own life and a list of his writings. These were numerous. Bede devoted a fairly long life—he was born in 672 or 673—and formidable powers to become probably the most learned and certainly the productive of the European scholars of his day. His works include treatises on grammar, metric and chronology, lives...