Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

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David Starkey. Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

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Crown and Country

A History of England through the Monarchy

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The result was that this provincial monk, who never stirred more than a few dozen miles from his place of birth, became responsible for a remarkable series of scholarly innovations which changed the intellectual life of Europe.

He was particularly interested in chronology – that is, the ordering of events in time. This is the basic tool of the historian, and to help himself and others to date events accurately he wrote two handbooks. They listed world events from ancient times to his own day and – in place of the chaos of different eras used then and for long after – they popularized what has become our standard means of dating by the year bc or ad. He was also, since he was unusually scrupulous both about naming his sources and quoting from them accurately, one of the pioneers of the footnote and the bibliography. He had a clear understanding of causation, and wrote in a plain style which was refreshingly different from – say – Gildas’s excitable rhetoric. Finally, Bede invented the idea of England, or at least the idea of the English as a single people. And he applied all of this to his late masterpiece, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which he finished only four years before his death. If the writing of history is one of the glories of England as a country and of English as a language (as I think it to be) then Bede, though he wrote in Latin, deserves an honoured place as the founder of a national tradition.

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