Letter 1

From: Bede, monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow and scholar To: Egbert, Bishop of York Date: ~734 AD Context: Bede's famous letter to his former student Egbert of York [written less than a year before Bede's death in 735], one of the most important documents of the early Anglo-Saxon church, calling urgently for reform of the church in Northumbria. Bede, servant of Christ, to the most beloved Bishop Egbert, his student and his brother, greetings in Christ. I write with an urgency that I would not have felt earlier in my life but which the approach of death has made impossible to suppress: the church in Northumbria needs reform, and you are the person who must lead it. I have spent sixty years in this monastery reading the scriptures and the Fathers, and what I have come to understand — slowly, and with the help of the best teachers the tradition offers — is that the church's health depends on the quality of its shepherds. When the shepherds are ignorant, the flock suffers. When they are absent, the flock strays. When they are corrupt, the corruption spreads down through every level of Christian life in the territory they govern. What I observe in Northumbria, which you must know better than I do: dioceses so large that no bishop can properly shepherd them; clergy so poorly formed that they do not know the Lord's Prayer and the Creed in their own tongue; monasteries founded for the benefit of their founders rather than for the worship of God and the service of the poor; a laity that has received the form of Christianity without its substance. You have the authority to address this. You have the learning to know what needs to be done. You have, I believe, the will. Do not wait. Bede, your teacher who loves you