Once, when Bede was still a boy, a fearful plague swept the land, “killing and destroying a great multitude of men.”  In the monastery of Jarrow all who could read, or preach, or sing were killed by it.  Only the Abbot himself and a little lad were left.  The Abbot loved services and the praises of the church.  His heart was heavy with grief and mourning for the loss of his friends; it was heavy, too, with the thought that the services of his church could no longer be made beautiful with song.

For a few days the Abbot read the services all alone, but at the end of a week he could no longer bear the lack of singing, so calling the little lad he bade him to help him and to chant the responses.

The story calls up to us a strange picture.  There stands the great monastery, all its rooms empty.  Along its stone-flagged passages the footsteps of the man and boy echo strangely.  They reach the chapel vast and dim, and there, before the great altar with its gleaming lights, the Abbot in his robes chants the services, but where the voices of choir and people were wont to join, there sounds only the clear high voice of one little boy.

That little boy was Bede.

And thus night and morning the sound of prayer and praise rose from the deserted chapel until the force of the plague had spent itself, and it was once more possible to find men to take the places of those singers who had died.

So the years passed on until, when Bede was thirty years of age, he became a priest.  He might have been made an abbot had he wished.  But he refused to be taken away from his beloved books.  “The office,” he said, “demands household care, and household care brings with it distraction of mind, hindering the pursuit of learning."*

H.  Morley, English Writers.

Bede wrote many books, but it is by his Ecclesiastical History (that is Church history) that we remember him best.  As Caedmon is called the Father of English Poetry, Bede is called the Father of English History.  But it is well to remember that Caedmon wrote in Anglo-Saxon and Bede in Latin.

There were others who wrote history before Bede, but he was perhaps the first who wrote history in the right spirit.  He did not write in order to make a good minstrel’s tale.  He tried to tell the truth.  He was careful as to where he got his facts, and careful how he used them.  So those who came after him could trust him.  Bede’s History, you remember, was one of the books which Layamon used when he wrote his Brut, and in it we find many of the stories of early British history which have grown familiar to us.

It is in this book that we find the story of how Gregory saw the pretty children in the Roman slave market, and of how, for love of their fair faces, he sent Augustine to teach the heathen Saxons about Christ.  There are, too, many stories in it of how the Saxons became Christian.  One of the most interesting, perhaps, is about Edwin, King of Northumbria.  Edwin had married a Christian princess, Ethelberga, sister of Eadbald, King of Kent.  Eadbald was, at first, unwilling that his sister should marry a pagan king.  But Edwin promised that he would not try to turn her from her religion, and that she and all who came with her should be allowed to worship what god they chose.