While Bede, as he neared the end of his life, was worrying about the threat posed by personal immorality to the future of Christianity in Northumberland, commentators have noted that he never wrote anything about what many saw as perhaps a greater danger – the Islamic incursion into Spain which had begun a quarter of a century before his death.
Judging solely by his best known work, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, one would think Bede lived isolated on the very edge of civilisation with ‘only small sources of illumination like bonfires seen across a valley’; as Judith McClure & Roger Collins, who edited the World Classics edition noted, a map of places he mentions confirms this view. Their number & geographical concentration dwindle as one moves south with Rome as the most distant point.
But his Greater Chronicle shows a much wider range of interest & knowledge, extending across Spain, North Africa & the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire, with Rome at the centre, and his textbook on how to use your fingers as a calculator remained in use throughout Europe for half a millennium.
Threads run through history in a complicated braid or tapestry.
Over 1000 years after the age of Bede a young man, born, bred, & living in that very same Christian archdiocese of York, outraged perhaps in part by the personal immorality, particularly of women, that he saw around him, became a radicalised Islamist & imposed his own indiscriminate punishment on those of any religion or none who happened to be in London on 7 July 2005
