Bede omits the names of Sæberht's sons, but one name is given in the genealogy of MS Add.

Most now admit that Bede, Gildas, Nennius and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles cannot be the infallible guides to early English history that Guest, Freeman and Green thought them to be.

The historian Walter Goffart argues that Bede based the structure of the Historia on three works, using them as the framework around which the three main sections of the work were structured.

Once informed of the accusations of these " lewd rustics ," Bede refuted them in his Letter to Plegwin.

She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede ( 1859 ), The Mill on the Floss ( 1860 ), Silas Marner ( 1861 ), Middlemarch ( 1871 – 72 ), and Daniel Deronda ( 1876 ), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Oswald apparently controlled the Kingdom of Lindsey, given the evidence of a story told by Bede regarding the moving of Oswald's bones to a monastery there ; Bede says that the monks rejected the bones initially because Oswald had ruled over them as a foreign king.

In writing of one miracle associated with Oswald, Bede gives some indication of how Oswald was regarded in conquered lands: years later, when his niece Osthryth moved his bones to Bardney Abbey in Lindsey, its inmates initially refused to accept them, " though they knew him to be a holy man ", because " he was originally of another province, and had reigned over them as a foreign king ", and thus " they retained their ancient aversion to him, even after death ".

Others who wrote of Saint Ninian used the accounts of Bede, Ailred, or Ussher, or used derivatives of them in combination with information from various manuscripts.

However, Bede admits that it was Penda who freely allowed Christian missionaries from Lindisfarne into Mercia, and did not restrain them from preaching.

The Britons rejected all of these, and, adds Bede, refused to recognize Augustine's authority over them.

Bede reports that Augustine is said to have then delivered a prophecy that the British church's failure to proselytize the Saxons would bring them war and death at their hands.

Bede says that he decided to attack them because, although they were not armed, they were opposing him through their prayers.

Bede, writing in the 8th century, stated that Jutes settled in Kent, and in 457, led by brothers Hengist and Horsa, turned against the Britons who had invited them and defeated them at the Battle of Crecganford ( Crecganford is thought to be modern Crayford ) and the Britons fled to London in terror.

This may indicate that the brothers had become controversial figures: certainly Bede must have thought that his material about them would be of more than usual interest to the reader.

Bede says that the Irish monks gladly taught them and fed them, and even let them use their valuable books, without charge.

" Furthermore, Bede tells us that Cadwallon, " though he bore the name and professed himself a Christian, was so barbarous in his disposition and behaviour, that he neither spared the female sex, nor the innocent age of children, but with savage cruelty put them to tormenting deaths, ravaging all their country for a long time, and resolving to cut off all the race of the English within the borders of Britain.

Bede states that King Caedwalla of Wessex killed the pagan population " with merciless slaughter " and replaced them with his own Christian followers, dedicating a quarter of the Isle of Wight to Wilfrid and the Church.

The historian Walter Goffart argues that Bede based the structure of the Historia on three works, using them as the framework around which the three main sections of the work were structured.

It is possible that the courts were as different as their descriptions makes them appear but it is more likely that Bede omitted some of the violent reality.

Writing in the eighth century, the Venerable Bede comments that King Æthelberht, " beside all other benefits that he of wise policy bestowed upon his subjects, appointed them, with his council of wise men, judicial dooms according to the examples of the Romans.

In 1899, Bede was made a Doctor of the Church by Leo XIII, a position of theological significance ; he is the only native of Great Britain to achieve this designation ( Anselm of Canterbury, also a Doctor of the Church, was originally from Italy ).

Bede's first abbot was Benedict Biscop, and the names " Biscop " and " Beda " both appear in a king list of the kings of Lindsey from around 800, further suggesting that Bede came from a noble family.

The name probably derives from the Old English bēd, or prayer ; if Bede was given the name at his birth, then his family had probably always planned for him to enter the clergy.

Depiction of the Venerable Bede ( on CLVIIIv ) from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

Bede wrote scientific, historical and theological works, reflecting the range of his writings from music and metrics to exegetical Scripture commentaries.

Bede quotes from several classical authors, including Cicero, Plautus, and Terence, but he may have had access to their work via a Latin grammar rather than directly.

Bede also appears to have taken quotes directly from his correspondents at times.

At the end of the work, Bede added a brief autobiographical note ; this was an idea taken from Gregory of Tours ' earlier History of the Franks.

Bede relates the story of Augustine's mission from Rome, and tells how the British clergy refused to assist Augustine in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons.

However, Bede ignores the fact that at the time of Augustine's mission, the history between the two was one of warfare and conquest, which, in the words of Barbara Yorke, would have naturally " curbed any missionary impulses towards the Anglo-Saxons from the British clergy.

The Historia Ecclesiastica has given Bede a high reputation, but his concerns were different from those of a modern writer of history.

Another difficulty is that manuscripts of early writers were often incomplete: it is apparent that Bede had access to Pliny's Encyclopedia, for example, but it seems that the version he had was missing book xviii, as he would almost certainly have quoted from it in his De temporum ratione.

This was based on parts of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, and Bede also include a chronology of the world which was derived from Eusebius, with some revisions based on Jerome's translation of the bible.

His works were so influential that late in the 9th century Notker the Stammerer, a monk of the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, wrote that " God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the world has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth ".

Bede dedicated this work to Cuthbert, apparently a student, for he is named " beloved son " in the dedication, and Bede says " I have laboured to educate you in divine letters and ecclesiastical statutes " Another textbook of Bede's is the De orthographia, a work on orthography, designed to help a medieval reader of Latin with unfamiliar abbreviations and words from classical Latin works.

Bede was familiar with pagan authors such as Virgil, but it was not considered appropriate to teach biblical grammar from such texts, and in De schematibus ... Bede argues for the superiority of Christian texts in understanding Christian literature.

According to Bede, Æthelberht was descended directly from Hengist.

Bede, the earliest source to give dates, is thought to have drawn his information from correspondence with Albinus.

Augustine ’ s mission from Rome is known to have arrived in 597, and according to Bede, it was this mission that converted Æthelberht.

Bede says that Æthelberht received Bertha " from her parents ".

The Liber Vitae of Durham Cathedral includes a list of priests ; two are named Bede, and one of these is presumably Bede himself.

Bede wrote in Latin and never used the term and his list of kings holding imperium should be treated with caution, not least in that he overlooks kings such as Penda of Mercia, who clearly held some kind of dominance during his reign.

For some time the existence of the word bretwalda in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was based in part on the list given by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica, led historians to think that there was perhaps a ' title ' held by Anglo-Saxon overlords.

The fact that Bede never mentioned a special title for the kings in his list implies that he was unaware of one.

Rather than a conquest of the Picts, instead the idea of Pictish matrilineal succession, mentioned by Bede and apparently the only way to make sense of the list of Kings of the Picts found in the Pictish Chronicle, advanced the idea that Kenneth was a Gael, and a king of Dál Riata, who had inherited the throne of Pictland through a Pictish mother.

Peter the Deacon gives a list of some seventy books Desiderius had copied at Monte Cassino, including works of Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose, Saint Bede, Saint Basil, Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Cassian, the registers of Popes Felix and Leo, the histories of Josephus, Paul Warnfrid, Jordanes and Saint Gregory of Tours, the Institutes and Novels of Justinian, the works of Terence, Virgil and Seneca, Cicero's De natura deorum, and Ovid's Fasti.

The Rugini were only mentioned once, in a list of tribes still to be Christianised drawn up by the English monk Bede ( Beda venerabilis ) in his Historia ecclesiastica of the early 8th century.

Bede does not list him as one of the rulers who exercised imperium, but modern historians consider that the rise to primacy of the kingdom of Mercia began in his reign.