Modern history... High Petergate in the city of York, with its mediaeval gatehouse. York was the capital of Ceolwulf’s Northumbria, but these walls are ‘late’, dating mostly from the 12th to the 14th century.
I WARMLY welcome the genuine eagerness with which you not only apply yourself to listen most attentively to the words of Scripture, but also make the effort to acquaint yourself in detail with the sayings and doings of earlier generations, and particularly the famous men of our own nation.*
For if history relates good things about good men, the attentive listener is stirred to imitate what is good; whereas if it records the evil done by wicked men, the listener or reader who is of a religious and devout disposition, keeping his distance from whatever is harmful and corrupting, will himself be all aflame to pursue, more skilfully than before, those things which he knows are good and worthy in God’s eyes.
That is, the Kingdom of Northumbria, at its height a kingdom reaching from the what would now be Hull in the south to Edinburgh in the north. See A map of the Kingdom of Northumbria ca. 700. As a very young child, Bede was sent by his well-to-do parents (they lived on Church land) to study at the Benedictine monastery of St Peter in Monkwearmouth, a few miles northeast of Durham just across the River Wear from what is now Sunderland. He subsequently moved to the monastery’s sister house of St Paul at Jarrow, today a suburb of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Précis
St Bede wrote to Ceolwulf, the King of Northumbria, in 731 to explain the purpose of his History of the English Church and People. After commending the King for taking an interest in Scripture and in Northumbrian history, he assured him that the examples set by history’s heroes and villains would inpire him to choose rightly between good and evil. (59 / 60 words)
