St. Bede & Caedmon’s Hymn

Contents -St. Bede- life and works -Caedmon- life and ascribed works -Caedmon’s Hymn- an alliterative vernacular praise poem

St. Bade- life and works Bede, also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, or Beda (from Latin), was a Benedictine monk at the Northunbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Wearmouth. His scholarship and importance to Catholicism were recognized in 1899 when he was declared a Doctor of the Church as St. Bede the Venerable.

Life Very little is known about Bede’s life- the only historical evidence is a notice made by himself in his work- Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People)-he was placed in the monastery at Wearmouth at the age of seven, then he became a deacon in his nineteenth year, and priest in his thirtieth, remaining a priest for the rest of his life. He implies that he finished the Historia at the age of 59, and since the work was finished around 731, he mast have been born in 672/3. He died on Wednesday 25 th May 735. It is not clear whether he was of noble birth. He was trained by the abbots Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid, and probably accompanied the latter to Wearmouth’s sister monastery of Jarrow in 682. There he spent his life, prominent activities evidently being teaching and writing. There he died and was buried, but his bones were, toward the beginning of the eleventh century, removed to Durham Cathedral.

Work Bede’s writings are classed as scientific, historical and theological, reflecting the range of his writings from music and metrics to Scripture commentaries. The most important and best known of his works is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, giving in five books and 400 pages the history of England, ecclesiastical and political, from the time of Ceaser to the date of its completion. The first twenty- one chapters, treating of the period before the mission of Augustaine of Canterbury, are complied from earlier writers such as Orosius, Gildas, Prosper of Aquitaine,the letters of Pope Gregory I and others, with the insertion of legends and traditions. After 596, documentary sources, which Bede took pains to obtain throughout England and Rome, are used, as well as oral testimony, which he employed with critical consideration of its value. He cited his references and was very concerned about the sources of all his sources, which created an important historical chain.

There are, it has been estimated, in England and on the Continent, in all about 140 manuscripts of ‘ Ecclesiastical History’. Of these, four date from the eighth century. Researchers state that two of them point to a common original which cannot be far removed from Bede’s autograph. Various translations have been made throughout the years. We may trace a division of historical subjects or periods roughly analogous to the division into books. Book I contains the long introduction, the sending of the Roman mission, and the foundation of the Church; Books II and III, the period of missionary activity and the establishment of Christianity throughout the land. Book IV may be said to describe the period of organization. In Book V the English Church itself becomes a missionary centre, planting the faith in Germany, and drawing the Celtic Churches into conformity with Rome.

Bede’s scientific writings A historian of science- George Satron- called the eighth century ‘ The age of Bede’, Clearly Bede must be considered as an important scientific figure. He wrote several major works: a work On Time, providing an introduction to the principles of Eastern computus (calculation of the Easter date); and longer work on the same subject; On the reckoning of Time, which became the cornerstone of clerical scientific education during the so called Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century. He also wrote several short letters and essays discussing specific aspects of computus and a treatise on grammar and on figures of speech. His works were so influential that late in the ninth century Notker the Stammerer, a monk of the monastery St. Gall in Switzerland, wrote that ‘ God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the forth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the word has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole world’.

Caedmon Caedmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known. His only known surviving work is Caedmon Hymn- a nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of God he supposedly learned to sing in his initial dream.The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is one of the candidates for the earliest attested examples of Old English poetry.

Life The sole source of original information about Caedmon’s life and work is Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica- Book IV. For most of his life Caedmon worked in an animal husbandry for a monastery, living with the non-religious, and reporting to the reeve, a steward who supervised abbess’ estate. When the workers routinely ate together in a hall at a table, they entertained each other by singing lyrics to a hand-held harp, passed around. Before Caedmon’s turn to sing came, he left for the stable where he kept the livestock overnight. One time when his turn came to sleep with the animals, he had a dream. In it a man called him by name and told him to sing. When Caedmon explained that he could not sing to the others, the man asked him to sing to him instead.

When Caedmon said that he did not know what to sing about, the man told him, ‘the Creation of all things’. In the dream, Caedmon did so, with verses he had never heard before. Awaking, he remembered his dream and the song, and added more to it.

The religious to whom Caedmon performed his song later attributed his singing as a gift by God’s grace. He mast have seemed to them like one of the disciples in the gospels whom Jesus had called by name to God’s service. Creativity in making songs, to them, happened when a greater power took over the poet and made him its voice. However, the monastic brothers were wrong about Caedmon’s ‘gift’. The man in his dream gave him, not the verses, but the subject matter. Caedmon, and only he, composed the verses. What astonished the monastery scholars was the immediacy of his composition. The verses came out without work or prompting of memory. Caedmon does not say that he created his song after waking up, but that he remembered it. Bede clearly explains that one of Caedmon’s abilities was to store up what he was taught in his memory.

Later on Caedmon was ordered to take monastic vows. The abbess ordered her scholars to teach him sacred history and doctrine. After a long and pious life, Caedmon died like a saint: receiving a premonition of death, he asked to be moved to the abbey’s hospice where, having gathered his friends around him, he expired just before nocturns.

Caedmon’s Hymn Caedmon’s poetry is said to have been exclusively religious. Bede reports that Caedmon ‘ could never compose any foolish or trivial poem, but only those which were concerned with devotion’ And his list of Caedmon’s output includes work on religious subjects only: accounts of Creation, translations from the Old and New Testaments, and songs about the ‘ terrors of future judgement, horrors of hell, …joys of the heavenly kingdom,… and divine mercies and judgements.’ Of this corpus, only the opening lines of his first poem survived- The Hymn.

Now let me praise the keeper of Heaven's kingdom, the might of the Creator, and his thought, the work of the Father of glory, how each of wonders the Eternal Lord established in the beginning. He first created for the sons of men Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator, then Middle-earth the keeper of mankind, the Eternal Lord, afterwards made, the earth for men, the Almighty Lord.

The Hymn has by far the most complicated known textual history of any surviving Anglo- Saxon poem. It is found in two dialects and five distinct recensions. Each Old English line has two balanced phrases with four stressed syllables, three of which alliterative. Each half line if uttered musically, in time to the plucking of a harp, would fit nicely into our memory. Caedmon’s hymn has just two sentences, which can be summarized: ‘ Let me now praise God the Creator’ – lines 1-4, and ‘God created Heaven, earth and man’ – lines 5-9.

Things to remember: Note that Bede, who wrote in Latin, is not the ‘author’ of Caedmon’s poem, which he translates into Latin and incorporates into the Ecclesiastical History. Caedmon’s Hymn was composed orally in Old English alliterative verse by an illiterate cowherd named Caedmon sometime between 658 and 860- possibly before Bede’s birth, and long before Bede wrote the Ecclesiastical History (completed 731). Note that Old English was not a written language: poetry was composed in an oral- formulaic style and recited aloud, from memory, to an illiterate public.