Letter 5

From: Bede, monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow and scholar To: Albinus, Abbot of Canterbury Date: ~731 AD Context: Bede writes to Albinus of Canterbury, his principal informant for the southern English history in the Ecclesiastical History, acknowledging his debt and requesting further sources. Bede, servant of Christ and priest, to the most reverend and learned Abbot Albinus, greetings. The Ecclesiastical History is complete, or at least I have completed it as fully as my sources allow — and here I must thank you, whose generosity in sharing the Canterbury archives has made a large part of the work possible. The history of the southern English church — the Augustinian mission, the archbishops of Canterbury, the councils and controversies of the seventh century — is documented in your archives in ways it is not documented anywhere in Northumbria. Without your assistance in providing copies of documents, narrative accounts from knowledgeable informants, and the episcopal lists that I needed for the chronology, I would have been writing the history of the north only and leaving the south as a shadow. What I still lack — and I write partly to acknowledge the gap and to ask whether anything can be done about it — is reliable documentation for certain events in the history of the East Anglian and Middle English churches. The informants I have consulted have been helpful but incomplete, and I am aware that what I have written about those regions is thinner than I would like. If you know of any further sources — letters, narrative accounts, episcopal records — that bear on those churches and that could be shared, I would be grateful to receive them even if the History is already complete. They could inform a revised edition if the work is widely enough copied to justify one. With all gratitude, Bede