The New Student's Reference Work/Bede

Bede or Beda, surnamed The Venerable, an English monk, scholar and church historian, was born in 673, in what now is the county of Durham, and died at Jarrow, at the monastery of St. Paul, in 735. He is said to have been the most learned Englishman of his day, and in the seclusion of his cell he wrote, besides his important Ecclesiastical History of England, which was translated from the Latin by King Alfred into Anglo-Saxon, a number of commentaries, homilies, hymns and lives of the saints.