SPECULUM 55,1 (1980)

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae By Roger Ray

Toward the end of the epistolary preface to the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede asked that none blame him should the narrative contain errors, for he had tried to instruct posterity by setting down, according to what he calls "vera lex historiae, things collected from common report:

Lectoremque suppliciter obsecro ut, siqua in his quae scripsimus aliter quam se veritas habet posita reppererit, non hoc nobis inputet, qui, quod vera lex historiae est, simpliciter ea quae fama vulgante collegimus ad instructionem posteritatis litteris mandare studuimus.1

Until 1947, when Charles W. Jones published Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England, no one had questioned the view that this "true law of history" was evidence of critical scholarship, of "the transparent good faith," as Charles Plummer wrote, with which Bede used hearsay sources.2 Nor had much more been said about it, except to note that in Bede's writings the words vera lex historiae first appear in the commentary on Luke. There Bede explains that the Evangelist, "opinionem vulgi exprimens, quae vera historiae lex est," spoke in 2.33-34 as if Joseph were the natural father of Jesus.3

Plummer and Wilhelm Levison quoted this passage from In Lucam but gave no estimate of its possible importance for the preface of the HE.4 For Jones the comment on Luke 2 lay at the heart of Bede's historiography.5 He found that the vera lex historiae of In Lucam came verbatim frorn Jerome's Adversus Helvidium. In this tract Bede learned, said Jones, that "the true law of history" led the Evangelists to teach theology and morals through popular information whose factual truth was unimportant. The New Testament narrators, when they spoke as though Jesus had a human father, even made heretical opinio vulgi serve a didactic purpose. Thus the vera lex historiae of the HE, "in consonance with the Gospels, is to express the common view - to use ac- cepted symbols for attaining the ideal end, though the words may not be

1 Bede, Ilistoria ecclesiastica Praef., ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 6. This edition hereafter cited as HE.

2 See Venerabilis Bedae opera historica, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1896), 1 :xliv-xlv, n. 3; and 2:3-4, where Plummer cites the similar views of Theodor E. Mommsen, "Die Papstbriefe bei Beda," Neues Archiv 17 (1892), 389. In this vein see also Wilhelm Levison, "Bede the Historian," in Alexander H. Thompson, ed., Bede, His Life, Times, and Writings (1935; repr., New York, 1966), pp. 140-141.

3 Bede, In Evangelium Lucae expositio 2, lines 1908 -1911, CCSL 120. 4Opera historica, ed. Plummer, 2:3-4; Levison, "Bede," p. 141, n. 1. Charles W. Jones, Saints' Lives and Chronicles in Early England (1947; repr., New York, 1968),

pp. 80-93, esp. 83.

2 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

factually true."6 All this Jones wrote to correct the assumption that Bede pursued factual accuracy because of "the true law of history." The truth is, Jones thought, that the principle caused Bede to turn deliberately away from a standard of literal fact and to write history "for no other than theological reasons."7

This sharp revision, especially the claim that Bede had little interest in factual history, has not won general acceptance. It was quickly criticized by Bertram Colgrave; in the recent book of Giosue Musca it has again come into question.8 An uncontested part of the thesis is that the vera lex historiae of the HE came, via In Lucam, entirely from Jerome's A dversus Helvidium. This is one of the opinions that still prevents an adequate interpretation of Bede's view. Another, held alike by Plummer and Jones, is that in the preface of the HE, as in the commentary on Luke, the words vera lex historiae are a kind of technical term signifying for Bede the chief principle of history.9 Elsewhere I endorsed these assumptions; here I shall register some second thoughts.'0

First I want to show that Jerome, when he spoke of vera historiae lex, was citing a rhetorical rule to which he accorded only minor and rare importance in interpreting the Gospel narratives. It was only "a true law of history," certainly not the main principle of all historiography. The words themselves were not technical but polemical - contrived to embarrass Helvidius for failing to recognize the textbook rule that explains why the Evangelists momentarily departed from the actual facts about Joseph. Then, in a second section, I shall argue that Bede knew enough about rhetorical theory to understand Jerome's meaning. A final part proposes that Bede's own vera lex historiae (the one in the HE) was also nothing more than "a true law of history," yet in all but words it was different from Jerome's. It expressed certain historiographical ideas that, on the one hand, authorized the use of oral traditions whose factual worth Bede could not himself fully judge and, on the other, left all responsibility for the literal truth to thisfama vulgans. The words

6 Ibid., p. 88. 7Ibid., p. 90. 8 See Colgrave's review of Saints'Lives in The American Historical Review 53 (1947-48), 528-529;

Giosu6 Musca, Il Venerabile Beda (Bari, 1973), pp. 256-258. 9 See, in addition to the literature cited above in notes 2, 5, and 8, James Campbell, "Bede," in

T. A. Dorey, ed., Latin Historians (New York, 1966), pp. 182-183; W. F. Bolton, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 597-1066, 1: 597-740 (Princeton, 1967), pp. -173-174; Peter Hunter Blair, "The Historical Writings of Bede," in La storiografia altomedievale, Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo 17, 1969 (Spoleto, 1970), 1:202; idem, The World of Bede (London, 1970), pp. 78, 303; Robert A. Markus, Bede and the Tradition of Ecclesiastiwal Historiog- raphy, Jarrow Lecture, 1975 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, n. d.), pp. 11-12; Paul Meyvaert, "Bede the Scholar," in Gerald Bonner, ed., Famulus Christi, Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede (London, 1976), p. 67, n. 65; and Calvin B. Kendall, "Bede's Historia ecclesiastica: The Rhetoric of Faith," in James J. Murphy, ed., Medieval Eloquence (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 150-152.

10 Roger Ray, "Bede, the Exegete, as Historian," in Bonner, ed., Famulus Christi, pp. 129-130, 135. What follows below I have summarized in a brief section of my Forschungsbericht on Bede forthcoming in the series Aufstieg und Niedergang der r6mischen Welt.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 3 vera lex historiae undoubtedly came from Adversus Helvidium, and clearly Bede realized that they were not a technical term but words that one might employ to signify any true law of history. Like Jerome, he wrote them for rhetorical emphasis, apparently to offset with striking language certain things said by Isidore of Seville.

Written in the 380s,Adversus Helvidium de Mariae virginitate perpetua attacked an obscure layman of Rome who in a recent work had defended the parity of the married and celibate lives by calling to account the central pro-celibacy argument that Mary was always a virgin." It is one of Jerome's most self- conscious rhetorical exhibitions. At the outset, after having implied that his opponent's method had been nothing more than forensic posturing, Jerome proposes to make his own case not by artful pleading but by a superior knowledge of the Bible. 12 This turns out to be an empty promise, for throughout the work Jerome misses no rhetorical chance. Toward the end he admits it: "I have become rhetorical and conducted myself somewhat in the manner of a declaimer." And this too he blames on Helvidius.13

Adversus Helvidium "smells of the rhetorical school, Harald Hagendahl once complained; J. N. D. Kelly has recently said worse, that Jerome "traves- ties" Helvidius's views.14 The especially annoying feature of the tract is that Jerome likes to scorn the literacy of Helvidius - to laugh, for example, at the artlessness of a "ridiculous exordium."'5 The campaign of derision suffuses everything, even Jerome's use of the words vera historiae lex. From the follow- ing sentence Bede took this term and other language for his comment on Luke 2.33-34:

Denique excepto Joseph, et Elisabeth, et ipsa Maria, paucisque admodum, si quos ab his audisse possumus aestimare, omnesJesum filium aestimabant Joseph; intantum, ut etiam Evangelistae opinionem vulgi experimentes, quae vera historiae lex est, patrem eum dixerint Salvatoris....16

This statement supports one of Jerome's main arguments. Helvidius did not question the virgin birth, but Jerome contends that by understanding what the Gospel writers are doing when they call Joseph the father of Jesus, one sees what it means when they speak as if Jesus had natural brothers, or as -if Mary were not a perpetual virgin.17

II PL 23:183-206. On this treatise and Helvidius, see J. N. D. Kelly,Jerome, His Life, Writings, and Controversies (London, 1975), pp. 104-107. Helvidius's book is lost, aside from the tortured excerpts from it given in Adversus Helvidium.

12 PL 23:185. 13 PL 23:206. 14Harald Hagendahl, The Latin Fathers and the Classics (Goteborg, 1958), p. 284; Kelly,Jerome, p.

107. 15 PL 23:200. 16 PL 23:187. 17PL 23:188.

4 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae Obviously Jerome did not believe that the chief function of history is to

express the vulgar opinion. It would have been heresy to think such a thing of the biblical histories. Aside from this, "having long fancied himself a histo- rian,"18 Jerome knew very well the correct rules of historiography. For him the first law of history was to tell the actual truth, and Bede would have known this from Jerome's preface to his translation and continuation of Eusebius of Caesarea's Chronicon. There Jerome promises that in a future work he will report the times of Gratian and Theodosius, and he postpones this projected history of the recent past not because he fears to write "freely and truly" of the living - "for the fear of God drives out the fear of man" - but because for the moment the barbarians have made everything so confusing.'9 This is a Christian adaptation of the long standing Greco-Roman ideal of historical truth. For Jerome the words vera historiae lex, as he uses them in Adversus Helvidium, could not have conveyed the thought that Bedan scholarship has attached to their appearance in the preface of the HE.

The idea behind Jerome's words, though not the words themselves, came from the rhetorical doctrine of probability. All his writings show that Jerome was a great master of rhetoric. He learned his lessons from such works as Cicero's De inventione and Marius Victorinus's Explanationes in Ciceronis rhetoricam, a fourth-century commentary on De inventione.20 Both rhetors taught that a forensic speech usually contains a narrative of the facts in question and that this narratio must possess the "virtues" of brevity, clarity, and probability.2' An adequately "probable" narrative makes everything in the story seem congruous, fitting, timely, coherent. It requires sufficient information about persons, places, times, causes, and so on. It demands as well some accommodation of public opinion, of what people think is true.22 On this score the Neoplatonist Victorinus was especially strong, concerned as he was with the epistemological distinction between knowledge and opinion.23 At any rate, both he and Cicero make it plain that the rhetorical relevance of popular belief does not spring from its objective truth but strictly from its tactical value.24 The narrator may momentarily state erroneous common opinion if it is somehow congruous with other elements of his story.

18 These are Kelly's words, from Jerome, p. 170. 19Die Chronik des Hieronymus, ed. Rudolf Helm, in Eusebius' Werke, 7, pt. 1, Die griechischen

christliche Schriftsteller der ersten drei jahrhunderte 24 (Leipzig, 1913), p. 7. 20 On Jerome's rhetorical education, see Kelly, Jerome, pp. 10-16. 21 Cicero, De inventione 1.19.27-1.21.30; Victorinus, Explanationes in Ciceronis rhetoricam 1.19-

1.21, ed. Charles Halm, Rhetores latini minores (Leipzig, 1863), pp. 201-208. For the "virtues of narrative" in other rhetors, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 1 (Munich, 1960), 168-184.

22 Cicero, De inventione 1.21.29: "Probabilis erit narratio, si in ea videbuntur inesse ea quae solent apparere in veritate . . . si res et ad eorum qui agent naturam et ad vulgi morem et ad eorum qui audient opinionem accommodabitur."

23 See Lausberg, Handbuch, 1: 182 -183; and Pierre Hadot, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1971), pp. 47-58.

24 Victorinus, Explanationes 1.21, in Halm, ed., Rhetores, p. 207. Cf. Cicero's definition of probability (De inventione 1.29.46): "Probabile ... est id quod fere solet fieri aut quod in opinione positum est aut quod in se ad haec quandam similitudinem, sive id falsum est sive verum." Victorinus's view of narratio probabilis rests on this understanding of the probable.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 5 The passage at issue in Adversus Helvidium rests on this assumption.25

Jerome took for granted that the Evangelists had remained alert to the climate of opinion at the various stages of the unfolding drama. In the early period none but a few were aware that Mary had conceived of the Holy Spirit. The rest went on thinking the usual thing, that a woman who gives birth has lain with a man. Among the Judean crowd the suggestion that Joseph was not the father of Jesus would have brought Mary's morals into question. So the insiders kept quiet. If the Gospel writers, for their part, had not written the common view, they would have made their readers wonder about the reputa- tion of Mary. Since her public image was in fact good, it would have been incongruous not to record the opinio vulgi about Joseph. Hence the Evangelists followed the relevant rhetorical principle: they said not what was actually true but what fitted within the narrative context. "Expressing the vulgar opinion, which is a true law of history," they spoke as though Joseph were the father of Jesus, and in like manner they elsewhere made it seem that Mary had other children. This vera historiae lex represents an exception to the main rule of history. It authorizes a brief strategic departure from the normal goal of factual truth.

The "virtues of narratives" were used alike by ancient lawyers and histo- rians. In his tract on writing history, Lucian assumed that the historian would give his work these qualities by the usual means.26 Victorinus observed that the "virtues" prevailed in narratives other than those used to plead cases, and his one example was history: "In exposition history ought to be brief, clear, and probable."27 In thinking that historians must respect the conditions of forensic narrative, Jerome was on good ground indeed. But I daresay that Adversus Helvidium is the only ancient text in which it is suggested that expres- sing vulgar opinion is "a true law of history." Moreover, the oldest manuscript of the tract does not include the clause "quae vera historiae lex est," which makes one wonder whether Jerome himself wrote it. There can be little doubt that the clause appeared in the text known to Bede.28 If Jerome was the author of these rather excessive words, then he must have set them down without any thought of a formal and recognized list of leges historiae. Cicero

25 For what follows see PL 23:187-188. 26 Lucian, How to Write History 43, trans. Kenneth Kilburn, in Lucian, 6, Loeb (Cambridge,

Mass., 1959). 27 Victorinus, Explanationes 1.20, in Halm, ed., Rhetores, p. 203. 28 The PL edition of the treatise reproduces D. Vallarsi's edition of 1734-1742, printed at

Verona. In a footnote (PL 23:187, n. 2) Vallarsi writes: "Isthaec, quae vera Historiae lex est, in Veronensi ms. non habentur unde subdubito ex alio quam Hieronymi calamo profecisse." The manuscript here alluded to is Verona, Bibl. Capit. MS XVII(15), of the sixth century. Paul Meyvaert, who has a microfilm of this manuscript, has confirmed Vallarsi's observation. For a list of other manuscripts with this treatise, see B. Lambert, Bibliotheca Hieronyma Manuscripta, 2 (The Hague, 1969), 367-376. On p. 367 Lambert lists all the pre-tenth-century manuscripts, of which there are ten, including the Verona manuscript. Paul Meyvaert reports to me that at least seven of these manuscripts have the phrase about vera lex historiae. This suggests that the phrase was added at a very early date - possibly as a result of Jerome's revising his own text - and that the manuscript used by Bede in all likelihood already contained it. It is apparent from this informa- tion that a new critical edition of the Adversus Helvidium is needed.

6 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

spoke of "laws of history," but he had in mind the few principles that worked for impartial truth and certainly not the rhetorical license that sometimes permitted narrators to make a tactical use of erroneous vulgar opinion.29

Clearly the clause "quae vera historiae lex est" was meant above all for rhetorical impact, to taunt Helvidius again for not having learned his lessons in the higher education. A self-respecting graduate of the rhetorical school would have taken umbrage if someone had presumed to remind him of something so routinely taught as the rules of rhetorical probability. It would have stung all the more to be told pompously that this theory applied to history. The affront would have been great for a writer like Helvidius, who had just published a tract dealing in part with the rhetoric of biblical narrative. Thus when Jerome "explains" a rule of history, his intention is not even civil, let alone edifying. It is as if he had said that the Evangelists accommodated their story to opinio vulgi because, as any schoolboy knows, all good narrators do.

On the technical level Jerome's vera historiae lex was an appeal to a recog- nized feature of realistic iiarrative and, more generally, to the acknowledged interconnection of rhetoric and history. It was, however, plainly not a techni- cal term, understood as tied always to a single meaning. The words themselves sprang entirely from scorn, from the desire to bury Helvidius under a weight of emphatic language. They were a contrivance that would have served equally well to stress any other legitimate principle of history, and because of this adaptability they appear in the preface of the HE. In any case, Adversus Helvidium does not teach that "it was the chief function of history to record what ordinary people believe," nor does it plead for "a truth which denies the literal statement or uses the literal statement to achieve an image in which the literal statement is itself incongruous. "30

II Bede wrote In Lucam long before the HE.31 For his comment on 2.33 -34 he

took material both from Jerome and from Augustine's De consensu Evangelis- tarum, a mainstay of his patristic library. In De consensu Augustine also ob- serves, without any reference to narrative theory, that common opinion caused the New Testament writers to speak as though Mary were not a virgin. Yet he especially stresses that since Joseph adopted the son of his only wife, instead of the child of some other woman, he was Jesus's father in more than an adoptive sense. This point Bede linked to what he got from Jerome.32 The

29 Cicero, Epistulae adfamiliares 5.12.3. 30 The first quotation is from Hunter Blair, "The Historical Writings of the Venerable Bede,"

p. 202, the second from Jones, Saints' Lives, p. 83. 31 Between 709 and 716; the HE was apparently finished in 731, except perhaps for the preface

and the autobiographical conclusion. See M. L. W. Laistner, A Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts (Ithaca, N.Y., 1943), pp. 44, 94.

32 Augustine, De consensu Evangelistarum 2.1.2-3, CSEL 43. Cf. Bede, In Lucam 1, lines 1911- 1918.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 7

great part of Bede's brief exposition came from Adversus Helvidium. "Patrem salvatoris appellat [Evangelista] loseph non quo vere iuxta Fotinianos pater fuerit eius sed quo ad famam Mariae conservandam pater sit ab omnibus aestimatus."33 In Adversus Helvidium the same thought, in much the same words but without the mention of the Photinians,34 lies several sentences beyond the statement from which Bede drew the crux of his next observation: "Neque enim oblitus evangelista quod eam spiritu sancto concepisse et vir- ginem peperisse narrarit sed opinionem vulgi exprimens quae vera historiae lex est patrem loseph nuncupat Christi." From "opinionem" onward the words are basically Jerome's.35

Did Bede understand them? I have no doubt that he possessed the full text of Adversus Helvidium, notjust excerpts that might have caused him to miss the full force of Jerome's rhetorical campaign. In his Expositio Actuum Apostolorum, which was completed some years before the work on Luke, Bede skillfully compressed an argument that runs through more than three columns of the Patrologia Latina edition of Jerome's polemic.36 One of his Christmas sermons is fairly full of Adversus Helvidium.37 In general Bede was not a passive copyist; several studies now show that it was his career-long habit to appropriate secondhand material only after having understood it.38 An intelligent reading of Adversus Helvidium would have required comprehension of the section which contains Jerome's vera historiae lex. One of the work's major arguments begins there, and on a late page Jerome refers back to this place on the assumption that the reader will long since have gotten a central point.39 Bede's commrent on Luke 2.33-34 joins the two sentences that catch the nub of Jerome's rhetorical argument. He seems to have known exactly where the main ideas lay.

Bede could not have thought that the great rule of biblical history was to record the vulgar view, nor that such an idea ever crossed Jerome's mind. But I am sure too that Bede had enough rhetorical sophistication to grasp the true meaning of Jerome's vera historiae lex. One passage from the Expositio Actuum Apostolorum - in which work, as I have noted, he used Adversus Helvidium - will suffice to show it. In this place Bede expounds part of a courtroom narrative, the recital of Hebrew history that takes up nearly all of Stephen's speech before the Jerusalem council of scribes and elders who were

33In Lucam 1, lines 1905-1908. 34 PL 23: 188. 35 In Lucam 1, lines 1908 -1911. Cf. PL 23:187. 36 Bede, Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et retractatio, ed. M. L. W. Laistner (Cambridge, Mass.,

1939), p. 11. Cf. Adversus Helvidium, PL 23:195-198. 37 Bedae Venerabilis homeliarum Evangelii libri duo 1.5, CCSL 122. The editor, David Hurst,

ascribes only a few lines toAdversus Helvidium, but from line 14 onward the ideas and much of the language show that Bede wrote the sermon with Jerome's work in his hands.

38 Robert B. Palmer, "Bede as a Textbook Writer: A Study of his De arte metrica," SPECULUM 34 (1959), 573-584; Charles,W. Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus (Cambridge, Mass., 1943), pp. 125-129; idem, "Some Introductory Remarks on Bede's Commentary on Genesis," Sacris erudiri 19 (1969-70), 115-198; Paul Meyvaert, "Bede the Scholar," pp. 42-44.

39 PL 23:201.

8 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

trying him for blasphemy against the holy place and the law.40 In the Retrac- tatio in Actus Apostolorum, written about thirty years after the Expositio, Bede praises in general Stephen's "ars loquendi," his or-atorical skill. He says in particular that the martyr was shrewd to have begun in a moderate vein, so as to prepare the audience to listen at some length.4' This remark continues a line of rhetorical thought established long before in the Expositio, in the comment on Acts 7.16. The verse contained a factual detail that was irrecon- cilable with certain texts in Genesis. Stephen gave the wrong burial place for Jacob; he used information from Genesis 33.19, which has nothing to do with the question, instead of the clear testimony of 23.3-20 and 49.29-33. Since it would have been unthinkable to attribute the error to Stephen or Luke, Bede laid the blame on "opinio vulgi":

Verum beatus Stephanus vulgo loquens vulgi magis in dicendo sequitur opinionem; duas enim pariter narrationes coniungens, non tam ordinem circumstantis historiae quam causam de qua agebatur intendit. Qui enim insimulabatur adversus locum sanctum et legem docuisse, pergit ostendere quomodo lesus Christus ex lege monstretur esse promissus et quod ipsi nec tunc Moysi nec domino nunc servire maluerint.42

The language - "causam de qua agebatur," "insimulabatur," "ostendere," "monstretur" - fits the courtroom. The members of the Jerusalem council are said to be vulgar presumably because their knowledge of Scripture was not entirely erudite. In any case, Bede argues that Stephen did what the oratorical occasion demanded. The martyr kept in mind two narratives, his own and one that was fixed in opinion. His purpose was not to correct incidental details that had no material bearing on the main purpose of the speech. To risk offending the audience on the wrong point, on a question far smaller than the one really at issue, would have been poor strategy. When on minor matters the two narratives diverged, there was no sense in preferring the actual "ordo his- toriae" if the truth itself might have caused a bog of factual doubt in the midst of the discourse. Hence, since Stephen was after all speaking to the "vulgar," he followed "with all the more reason" (magis) the common opinion about the momentary topic of Jacob's grave site and hastened on undeterred to sound the full thunder of his major claim. The error was actually the audience's, and Stephen repeated it for benign rhetorical reasons.

Not entirely satisfied with this solution to the factual problem, Bede wrote: "This I have said as best I can without prejudice for a better opinion, should one come along."43 This uneasy remark makes it certain that he fashioned the exegesis of Acts 7.16 on his own, from his own knowledge of the possible place of opinio in a forensic narrative. From Adversus Helvidium Bede could have

40Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et retractatio, pp. 32-33. 41 Ibid., p. 118. 42 Ibid., pp. 32-33. 43 "Haec, ut potui, dixi, non praeiudicans sententiae meliori si adsit." Ibid., p. 33. The Retrac-

tatio (see p. 131) shows that a better opinion never arrived.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 9

extrapolated the principle that a truthful narrator may sometimes make a tactical use of vulgar opinion even if it is false. But no amount of inference from Jerome's vera historiae lex could have equipped him to manipulate this trait of "probable" narrative in a forensic way. He handled the courtroom language and rhetorical theory with aplomb, as if he had learned it from literature that directly deals in it.

The general scholarly view is that the library at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow held no rhetorical manual other than Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, Book Two. Perhaps the abbey owned a copy of the Institutiones of Cassiodorus, but this is far from certain.44 At any rate, neither work explains the function of "opinion" in narratio probabilis. The recent critical edition of Bede's De orthographia, De schematibus et tropis, and De arte metrica shows that he consulted at first hand more than twenty grammars and grammarians.45 If in all their apparent zeal to multiply grammars Benedict Biscop and Ceolfrid, the great builders of the abbey library, bothered to collect from all their travels to the continent not one rhetor other than Isidore, one certainly wonders why. A generation after Bede Cicero's De inventione seems to have been vigorously studied at York.46 Bede's exegesis of Acts 7.16 amply illustrates that monastic scholars could put some aspects of forensic rhetoric to good use indeed. The comments on this text and on Luke 2.33-34 involved major doctrinal issues: on the one hand, the reliability of scriptural history; on the other, the virgin birth of Jesus. Surely Bede gave his own students an introduction to the rhetorical thought necessary to protect the faith.

A passage from Bede's commentary on Samuel suggests that his library contained pagan works that were, as we might say, classified materials, in- tended only for the eyes of authorized persons and not for general reading. The eruditus might profit from them in his own private study, discuss them cautiously in the classroom, or apply things from them in his works, probably without quotations or citations, but he would not have allowed unattended persons to inspect these books, for fear of seeing them confused by, for example, the "Ciceronianism" that once put Jerome in peril of his soul. In the treatise on Samuel, reflecting on Jerome's Letter 22 and in fact quoting the famous words - "non christianus, sed Ciceronianus" - of the dream it re- lates, Bede entered the usual Christian demurrers about the heathen litera- ture but immediately added that the highly learned may use it to avoid error

44 Laistner's list of the books known to Bede still reflects the prevailing view of his rhetorical reading: see "The Library of the Venerable Bede," in his The Intellectual Heritage of the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1957), pp. 117-159, which first appeared in Thompson, ed., Bede pp. 237- 266. In the first volume of a new edition of Bede's school treatises, Charles Jones, the principal editor, states that Cassiodorus's Institutiones was "probably" at Wearmouth and Jarrow; see Bede, Opera didascalica, 1, CCSL 123A, p. 2. But if a work so congenial to Bede's purposes had been in the abbey library, would it not have left unmistakable traces in his writings?

45 Opera didascalica, 1:2, Here Jones gives his list of grammatical literature "certainly" or "almost certainly" known to Bede; another eight items are said to have been "probably" or "possibly" available.

46 Peter Hunter Blair, "From Bede to Alcuin," in Bonner, ed., Famulus Christi, p. 253.

10 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

(as he did in the comment on Acts 7.16). Indeed the teacher who effectively rules his pupils "believes that he must sometimes be helped by the arguments and opinions [argumentis sive sententiis] of the gentiles."47 What were these dangerous but valuable pagan works? The nature of Jerome's letter and Bede's reference to "arguments and opinions" suggest the rhetors.

Direct quotations are not the only index to Bede's knowledge of classical literature. His practice of pagan argumenta sive sententiae is certainly another, though it may not always lead to a specific text. If his works contain no firsthand borrowings from, say, Cicero's De inventione, his unmistakable appli- cation of a forensic principle in the comment on Acts 7.16 proves that he was not entirely cut off from ancient rhetorical thought. I am sure that fairly early in his career, before he wrote the exposition of Acts, not to mention In Lucam, Bede knew the correct rhetorical role of vulgar opinion. When he excerpted Adversus Helvidium for his interpretation of Luke 2.33 -34, he learned nothing new about what Jerome calls vera historiae lex. He copied these words into In Lucam without explanatory remark or the mention of his patristic authority. Apparently he assumed that their rhetorical meaning would come readily to the reader's mind - which says something about the monastic curriculum.

From all his biblical studies Bede would have concluded that historians ought to write from the best sources. In his comment on Luke 1.1-4 he emphasizes that the Evangelists, unlike the writers of apocrypha, spoke "ver- itas historiae" not only because of their inspiration but also because of eyewit- ness information.48 He realized that the sacred historians practiced their craft with some didactic freedom.49 Throughout his work as an exegete, however, Bede took for granted that the biblical narrators gave actual facts on good authority. In the rare instances when details were clearly wrong, it was always because the scriptural authors had reason to express the vulgar opinion.50 It was, of course, imperative to know why the writers occasionally departed from the truth of history in this way. Yet for both Jerome and Bede the rhetorical rule that caused the biblical narrators to take the mistaken popular view was a seldom practiced and altogether minor principle of biblical history. It could not have become the major premise of the HE.

III The truth is that when Bede used the term vera lex historiae in the commen-

tary on Luke and then again in the preface of the HE, nothing remained in the second instance but the words. The meaning had completely changed. He was still talking about a true law of history, but there was no thought of rhetorical probability. In the preface the true law of history respected the factual basis of edifying narrative. It was in fact the antithesis of Jerome's vera historiae lex,

47 Bede, In primam partem Samuhelis libri quattuor 2, lines 2173-2196, CCSL 119. 48 Bede, In Lucam 1, lines 12-56. 49 See Ray, "Bede," pp. 129-132. 50In Lucam 2, lines 1905-1911; Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et retractatio, pp. 32-33, 57-58,

131 -132.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 11

which authorized the momentary strategic use of information known to be patently false. As for Bede's own vera lex historiae, which appears only in the HE, it contained historiographical ideas that were exemplified in several available works, one of them pagan. Bede wrote the words, it seems, with Isidore of Seville mainly on his mind, not Jerome, though he surely took the term itself from Adversus Helvidium.

The preface is built upon the exordial topoi that came into Christian historiography from classical literature.51 In the conventional way Bede first addresses a friendly reader, King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, and tries to put him in a docile mood.52 Within this commonplace he sets another, that of the moral utility of history.53 At the end of the address to Ceolwulf, Bede turns to a larger audience and develops at length the topos of sources.54 It affirms his own credibility, and for exactly this reason subsumes his vera lex historiae. Then he finishes the preface with the topical statement of authorial modesty, asking prayers that God take pity on "the weaknesses both of mind and body" in which he has worked.55 To an earlier book of historia, the separate prose life of St. Cuthbert, Bede affixed a preface written, as he remarks, "iuxta morem."56 Whatever may have been his literary models, he practiced the Latin exordial mores rather well. The preface of the HE is a skillful web of long-standing commonplaces, and they all function in the traditional way.

There is genuine sentiment in them. Clearly Bede hoped that Ceolwulf would measure himself by "the famous men of our nation," especially the godly Northumbrian kings of the seventh century.57 The statement of humil- ity reflects life - when he wrote the preface, Bede was an old and perhaps sick man.58 The sheer size of the discussion of sources is an idiosyncracy. If

51 For the prefatory commonplaces of ancient and medieval historiography, see the helpful surveys of Elmar Herkommer, Die Topoi in den Proomien der rbmischen Geschichtswerke (Tubingen, 1968), and Gertrud Simon, "Untersuchungen zur Topik der Widmungsbriefe mittelalterlicher Geschichtsschreiber bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts,"ArchivfiirDiplomatik 4 (1958), 52-119, and continued in 5-6 (1959-60), 73-153.

52 HE Praef., p. 2: "Gloriosissimo regi Ceoluulfo Beda famulus Christi ...," etc. Herkommer, Die Topoi, pp. 22-34; Simon, "Untersuchungen," pt. 1, pp. 54-86.

53 HE Praef., P. 2: "Sive enim historia de bonis bona referat ...," etc. Herkommer, Die Topoi, pp. 128-135; Simon, "Untersuchungen," pt. 2, pp. 94-112.

54 HE Praef., p. 2: "Ut autem in his quae scripsi vel tibi vel ceteris auditoribus sive lectoribus huius historiae occasionem dubitandi subtraham . . .," etc. Herkommer, Die Topoi, pp. 86-102; Simon, "Untersuchungen," pt. 2, pp. 89-94 and pt. 1, pp. 87-98.

55 HE Praef., p. 6: "Praeterea omnes .. . legentes sive audientes suppliciter precor, ut pro meis infirmitatibus et mentis et corporis . . .," etc. Herkommer, Die Topoi, pp. 52-59; Simon, "Unter- suchungen," pt. 1, pp. 109-117.

56 Vita Sancti Cuthberti auctore Beda Praef., ed. Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (1939; repr., New York, 1969), p. 142.

57 See J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, "Gregory of Tours and Bede: Their Views on the Personal Qualities of Kings," Friihmittelalterliche Studien 2 (1968), 31-44; repr., idem, Early Medieval History (London, 1976), pp. 96-1114.

58 The preface was written at some time after the narrative, which ends in 731, was finished, as is clear from HE Praef., p. 2. Bede was too ill to travel in the autumn of 734 (see his Epistola ad Ecgbertum, ed. Plummer, Opera historica, 1:405) and died the next year.

12 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

one can judge from published surveys of the exordial rhetoric in ancient and medieval historiography, the HE is highly unusual in the amount of space and detail it gives to this commonplace.59 For most Latin writers a few sentences of general comment were enough. In the latest edition of the HE the topos fills two pages with impressively specific and comprehensive information about sources. Bede did not go to all this trouble "iuxta morem." A more immediate purpose must have prompted him.

Beginning with his information about the English church below the Humber, Bede emphasizes that all his southern materials, including what he calls "traditio seniorum" and "traditio priorum," came to him through the mediation of good and sometimes erudite ecclesiastical helpers.60 He men- tions them, some by name. Abbot Albinus of Canterbury, a man "most learned in all things," had been the preeminent source, "auctor ante omnes." Through his aid Bede had even been able to study Kentish Christianity in the days of the Gregorian missionaries partly, though indirectly, from "monimenta litterarum," reliable written information. A priest of London named Nothelm, under the guidance of Albinus, had gone abroad to search the papal archives for Roman sources relevant to Augustine's mission. Bede cites others who had put him in touch with the South - Bishop Daniel of Winchester, an East Anglian abbot called Esi, the monks of Lastingham, Bishop Cynibert of Lindsey, and "other faithful men." The point is that the southern information was responsibly, even officially, gathered.

For the history of the North there were "innumerable faithful witnesses" who either knew from actual experience or somehow remembered the facts. Overseeing the northern research was an eruditus, Bede himself; for the region above the Humber he played the role that Albinus had performed for the South. Of course Bede followed his own personal knowledge of North- umbria, things "which I myself have been able to learn." The life of St. Cuthbert, a great desideratum, he took mainly from the authorized Lindis- farne vita. He read it, as he says, "simpliciter fidem historiae ... accomodans," as if the volume were unalterably true. Bede explains that he had augmented it, as before in the separate prose life of the saint, from his own knowledge or the testimony of trustworthy people.

On the whole the long topos of sources says more by far about reliable informants and respectable written information than about common report. It reflects, indeed displays, an awareness of the kinds of sources that historians were supposed to prefer. Yet Bede does not leave the impression that his narrative rests in the main on eyewitness accounts and credible writings whose truth he could personally recognize. In a deeply felt statement he concludes the topos with the acknowledgment that a large part of his source material - no doubt including most of what he got from Albinus and the other identified contributors - was "fama vulgans," oral tradition the factual

59 See the literature cited above, note 54. 60 For the following see HE Praef., pp. 2-6.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 13

quality of which he was himself in a poor position to judge. I offer the following revision of Colgrave's translation:

I humbly implore the reader that he not impute it to me if in what I have written he finds anything other than the truth. For, in accordance with a true law of history, I have tried to set down in a simple style what I have collected from common report, for the instruction of posterity.6'

This vera lex historiae cannot mean "the true law of history," for it is clearly subordinate to veritas, the governing ideal of the topos of sources. It is equally clear that this "truth" respects factual accuracy and that the disclaimer lodged in his vera lex historiae applies to factual error. Bede would never have thought that a veteran Christian teacher might disown theological and moral errors repeated even innocently in a written work. When he published the HE, he was confident that in one sense it was true throughout - true to the Catholic faith, Roman obedience, and the practice of the Christian life. It makes no difference that Bede wanted his narrative to edify, nor that he loved to record miracle stories. In a long tradition of historical writing, he thought that one gives moral lessons only from events that really took place, and he believed, based on a Christian conception of historical reality, that saintly wonders are undoubtedly among the things that actually happen.62 History was, by definition, a narrative of "literal" deeds and words, events reported "secun- dum litteram."63 For Bede, as for Jerome, the true law of history was to write instructive factual narrative, whether of kings or of saints.

His vera lex historiae was a related but different rule. It recognized that Bede had no choice but to work from sources that he could not always, or even very often, personally appraise. Eyewitness testimony was but a small part of his materials; besides, the closer he came to his own day, when firsthand witnesses would have been most helpful, the less he wrote. Of written sources he seems to have had short supply: some regnal and episcopal lists, a few letters, certain conciliar documents, a small number of hagiographical vitae, perhaps annals written on Easter tables, a half dozen or so works of largely peripheral interest, like Orosius's Historiae, and little else.64 Through most of his narra-

61 Ibid., pp. 6-7. 62 From a broad knowledge of Bede's works, Jan Davidse, Beda Venerabilis' interpretatie van de

historische werkelijkheid (Groningen, 1976), pp. 22-54, has argued that a Christian view of historical reality, quite apart from shifting attention away from concrete experience, reinforced an interest in actual facts. Central to Bede's notion of history, Davidse says, is the assumption that a useful exemplum is one that depicts events that really took place. For if worthy deeds once happened, they could, through imitation, happen again. Secularized, this belief was familiar to classical practition- ers of "exemplary" historiography. Bede's most vigorous affirmation of factual history lies in the preface to his separate prose life of St. Cuthbert; see Vita Sancti Cuthberti Praef., ed. Colgrave, Two Lives, pp. 142-146.

63 Bede, De tabernaculo 1, lines 784-785, CCSL 119A: "Historia namque est cum res aliqua quomodo secundum litteram facta sive dicta sit plano sermone refertur...." The factual basis of history, as I shall presently show, was rigorously stressed by Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 1.41.1- 2, 1.44.4-5. For him narrative that lacked factual substance was fabula. or argumentum.

64 See Colgrave's summary of Bede's written sources in HE, pp. xxxi-xxxiv.

14 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

tive Bede wrote fama vulgante because there was no other way. Some of his common report was more than a century old; the whole body of it was seldom if ever verifiable.65 Bede believed, as the last paragraph of the preface em- phasizes, that thefama was "worthy of memory" and accepted as true in its native regions.66 As I shall stress again in a moment, he was satisfied that the common report was trustworthy so far as responsible ecclesiastical men could say. Shaped without internal change into a larger narrative design, the tradi- tions were acceptable to give the English people some first lessons in their ecclesiastical history. By the standards of Latin historiography, however, Bede could not himself pretend to know whether thefama was fully true to fact. To confirm it there were neither eyewitnesses nor sober works. Bede would not have written from common report if there had not been good precedent for doing so. He felt sure that the received genre of history authorized the use of unprovable oral traditions, better sources failing, so long as he made no personal commitment to their factual truth. This was his, though not Jerome's, vera lex historiae. Within the topos of sources, it permitted him to embrace unverifiable popular information without calling into question his own respect for the ideal of truth.

For Jerome and Bede the words "true law of history" meant different things, but on the rhetorical level both writers used them in the same way - to draw striking attention to historiographical notions that were ur- gently important. Bede's "law" was a combination of long-established prem- ises. The disclaimer fixed in it was a classical idea available to him in at least two places. The first, a late pagan work, was Julius Solinus's Collectanea rerum memorabilium, often called Polyhistor, which was a minor source for Bede's De temporum ratione (725) and the first book of the HE .67 The second was Jerome's version of Eusebius's Chronicon, which Bede used in many connections. Both Solinus and Eusebius take an attitude that was, according to Seneca, wide- spread among ancient historians. When they cannot be sure of their informa- tion, historians always say, wrote Seneca, "Liability for the truth shall lie with the sources."68 Clearly Bede's vera lex historiae leaves all responsibility for the factual truth to sources of which he could not be altogether sure. Now the writing of history from oral traditions was practiced by so many Christian authors familiar to Bede (Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours, to name just two) that it would hardly seem to have needed any defense. He gives his vera lex historiae without explanation or the mention of an authority, as if it

65 On the oral traditions see David P. Kirby, "Bede's Native Sources for the Historia Ecclesiastica," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 48 (1966), 341-371.

66 HE Praef., p. 6: ". . . qui de singulis provinciis sive locis sublimioribus, quae memoratu digna atque incolis grata credideram, diligenter adnotare curavi...."

67 Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus, pp. 239, 245; HE 1.1, note 1, p. 14. 68 Seneca, Naturales quaestiones 4.3.1: "Penes auctores fides erit." Cf. Solinus, Collectanea rerum

memorabilium Praef., ed. Theodor E. Mommsen (Berlin, 1895), p. 2: ". . . constantia veritatis penes eos est, quos secuti sumus." Eusebius leaves the reader to decide the truth of some of his informa- tion: "Verum utcumque quis volet, computet." See Die Chronik des Hieronymus, ed. Helm, p. 9. For further examples of this attitude, see Simon, "Untersuchungen," pt. 1, pp. 87-98.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 15

were well established. Yet he states it with emphatic and cautious words, as if the point were somehow in question. And it comes, as I have already noted, at the end of a topos that Bede took to extraordinary lengths, as if his own authorial truthfulness were under some threat. All this he does, I believe, because of what is said in Isidore's Etymologiae, which contains the only discus- sion of the genre of history certainly known to have been in the abbey library.

Commenting on historiography, Isidore affirms the ideal of factual truth with unprecedented rigor.69 Historia is unlikefabula, he says, because it nar- rates real events, or, as he remarks in a slightly later section, "true events that really happened."70 The word history comes from the Greek historein, which means to see and comprehend. Therefore history proper is a record of events literally within sight of the narrator himself. Apparently carried away with the etymology, and in a style that the following translation tries to preserve, Isidore explains:

For among the ancients no one wrote history except he who took part in and saw what he recorded. For it is better to discover by seeing than to collect by hearing. For things that are seen are published without lying.7'

On this showing any history but what one writes from personal experience is not worth the risk.

The "gaucherie" of the repeated "for" (enim) is only one thing that led Jacques Fontaine to decide that the stringent emphasis on autopsy was Isi- dore's own accent.72 I need hardly point out that the remark about the veteres shows how little Isidore knew about them. What would have astonished Bede is that even the biblical narratives do not always fit Isidore's definition of ideal history. It excludes, for that matter, nearly all the historiographical literature known to Bede. In any event, he knew that there was more to the genre of history than Isidore allows. On Isidore's strict terms, none of Bede's historical works (or Isidore's) could have been written. The HE would have been simply unthinkable.

There may well be an interplay between Isidore's discussion and Bede's sentence that contains vera lex historiae:

ISIDORE BEDE

Apud veteres enim nemo conscribebat Lectoremque suppliciter obsecro ut, historiam, nisi is qui interfuisset, et ea siqua in his quae scripsimus aliter quae conscribenda essent vidisset. quam se veritas habet posita rep- Melius enim oculis quae fiunt depre- pererit, non hoc nobis inputet, qui, hendimus, quam quae auditione col- quod vera lex historiae est, simpliciter legimus. Quae enim videntur, sine ea quae fama vulgante collegimus ad

69 Etymologiae 1.41.1-2. 70 Ibid., 1.44.5. 71 Ibid., 1.41.1-2. 72 Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Seville et la culture classique dans l'Espagne wisigothique, 1 (Paris, 1959),

180-183.

16 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

mendacio proferuntur. Haec disci- instructionem posteritatis litteris man- plina pertinet ad Grammaticam, quia dare studuimus.73 quidquid memoria dignum est litteris mandatur.

Isidore leaves the impression that oral sources of information are all but illegitimate, contrary to the rule of historical truth, and that anyone who writes from them is likely to be a liar. Bede asserts that the historian is not personally at fault if, "quod vera lex historiae est," he sets down edifying things from common report and in so doing unwittingly repeats errors con- cealed in his sources. Isidore's "quae [fiunt] auditione collegimus" functions to discourage what Bede's "ea quae fama vulgante collegimus" provisionally endorses, and the two authors use even more similar words, "litteris man- datur" and "litteris mandare," in connection with widely differing views of what is worthy of written record. The opposition of ideas makes the similarity of language and syntax all the more interesting.

However much Bede owed to him, he was many times at odds with Isidore, and the animus seems to have grown progressively stronger. Two of his earliest tracts, De temporibus and De natura rerum, were written partly to correct or replace things said by his Spanish forerunner, though Bede never names him. In two major works from the last decade of his life, Bede calls Isidore's name for the first times ever, and in each of these three instances it is to refute him, once with some scorn. At this stage he also continued to correct Isidore without mentioning him, as I believe he does in the letter to Ceolwulf.74 Then occasional criticism gave way to stern polemic in Bede's last days and weeks. Cuthbert, a former student who wrote what is generally accepted as an eyewitness account of Bede's final illness and death, reports that near the end his master was so set against certain contents of Isidore's De natura rerum that he used flagging energies to finish "quasdam exceptiones, dicens 'Nolo ut pueri mei mendacium legant, et in hoc post meum obitum sine fructu labo- rent'." The angry words ascribed to Bede - "I do not want my students to read a lie and to waste effort on this book after I am gone" - make it plain that Cuthbert took "exceptiones" in the classical sense, to mean exceptions, not excerpts, contrary to what scholars from Mabillon to Colgrave have thought.75 Cuthbert claims that Bede completed a Latin opusculum intended at least to steer his pupils away from the "lie" in Isidore's De natura rerum, if not

73 Etymologiae 1.41.1-2; HE Praef., p. 6. 74 For details about Bede's attitude toward Isidore, see Laistner, "The Library of the Venerable

Bede," pp. 138-139; Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus, pp. 131-132; and esp. Meyvaert, "Bede the Scholar," pp. 58-60. Bede criticizes Isidore by name twice in the Retractatio on Acts (Expositio Actuum Apostolorum et retractatio, pp. 96, 145) and once in De temporum ratione (ed. Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus, p. 247); in the last case the scorn comes out.

75 See Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae, most recently ed. Colgrave and printed as an appendix to HE, pp. 580-586; for the comment about Isidore, p. 582. The translation is mine. Meyvaert, in "Bede the Scholar," p. 59, was the first scholar to publish a correct reading of Cuthbert's words about Bede's polemic against Isidore. W. F. Bolton, "Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae: A Caveat," Mediaevalia ethumanistica, n. s. 1 (1970), 127-139, has argued that Cuthbert's letter is poor evidence for the biography of Bede. Bolton's case against the Epistola is not convincing.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 17

to quash the whole book. It is not surprising that this liber exceptionum is now lost, for Isidore's eighth-century reputation was almost that of an official Doctor of the Church. Bede attacked his errors precisely because his works were everywhere.

Bede wrote the HE during the same decade when his long-standing skepti- cism about Isidore sank into apparent bitterness. Hence if the preface veils a quarrel with the encyclopedist, this time about the genre of history, it certainly fits into an increasingly charged attitudinal context. No doubt some, probably many, of Bede's public had read the Etymologiae on historiography. The discussion would have been nearly unavoidable; it comes in the long section on grammar, the major discipline of the monastic liberal arts. The memorable distinction between oculis deprehendere and auditione collegere might have prompted a few to wonder whether the HE conformed to its genre or, worse, was a mendacious book. In the abbey school Bede must have openly criticized Isidore's ideas about historical writing, at least to defend the practices of authors like Luke. If in the preface of the HE he used Isidore's own words to state an anti-Isidoran position, the irony would not have been lost on his more alert students. Cuthbert would have caught it. Actually Cuthbert writes as if Bede's deathbed broadside against Isidore was part of the virtue that caused his teacher to die in the beauty of holiness.

At any rate, Bede found forceful language to brace his prefatory stance against any detractors. A great master supplied the rhetoric. Plainly Bede understood that Jerome's words vera historiae lex were a literary artifice, a polemical contrivance used to correct a misleading teacher, and that they might well be employed to stress any principle of history. Through them Bede expressed not the rhetorical premise that Helvidius had ignored but the specifically historiographical notions that another troublesome teacher had all but denied. In Bede's hands the words vera lex historiae, on the one side, appeal to the circumstances under which the historian, having no choice, is permitted to treat parts of his story from a low grade of source material, common report; on the other, they assign all liability for the factual truth to the fama vulgans itself. For all those who thought that the Etymologiae was a standard literary authority, the display of Jerome's language would have emphasized that the genre of history allowed Bede to do without lying what in the encyclopedia is said to be nearly impossible. The rest of the long topos of sources exhibits, as I have pointed out, proper respect for the kinds of information that were generally thought to be trustworthy. As a whole Bede's development of the topos is an effective counterweight to the Etymologiae.

In the preface Bede is cautious about hisfama vulgans, but in the main body of the work he proceeds as if it tells for the most part what really occurred. It is important to recognize that the common report is never called opinio vulgi, which for Bede was almost a technical term, used to designate erroneous popular beliefs about history.76 The folk traditions of the HE are said to be "traditio seniorum," "traditio priorum," "traditio malorum," "historia," and in

76 See, in addition to the places cited in note 50, Bede's Epistola ad Pleguinam, ed. Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus, pp. 313-3 14.

18 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae

the preface alone "fama vulgans."77 More typically Bede implies his oral information with verbs and locutions like "fertur," "perhibentur," and "ut aiunt." On rare occasions the single word "opinio" meanis common report, but the term opinio vulgi never appears in the HE.78 This pattern is too consistent to have been accidental. Bede's ecclesiastical intermediaries, Albinus and the -others, must have recommended their local traditions as true so far as could be told; this was surely his own judgment on the northernfama. Thus he did not write history from opinio vulgi but from oral traditions that respected people viewed with favor.

From another angle opinio vulgi and the common report of the HE were different. One was unmistakably false historical information, while the other was popular history the factual reliability of which Bede could neither fully affirm nor fully deny. If it would have seemed grotesque to write a long narrative from the one, it was worrying enough to think of trusting most of a book to the other. The unknown factual quality of fama vulgans concerned Bede in various ways. For example, though unwritten hagiographical lore sometimes achieved a certain fixity, less highly charged and precious material would have varied a good deal in the retelling. The anonymous Whitby vita of Gregory the Great illustrates something of the problem Bede faced. For an incident in the life of King Edwin of Northumbria, not of Pope Gregory, the author complains that different people reported different things.79 Bede found it difficult enough to gather the local traditions that finally came to him; it would have been impossible to collect and sort out all the variants on them. For his separate prose life of St. Cuthbert, Bede conducted what seems to have been a complicated program of research, consulting and consulting again with persons at Lindisfarne to make sure that no one would question the narrative.80 There was no possibility of doing the same thing for a work the size of the HE. Though Bede tried to get his oral traditions from responsible churchmen, he could not be sure that other knowledgeable persons would accept the traditions as they had been sent to him.

Then too it must have troubled Bede to think how much opinio vulgi was hiding in the fama vulgans, for there was little chance of detecting it. From bitter experience he knew how wrong unlettered folk could be when it came to historical truth. Long before he wrote the HE, some Hexham "rustics," as he calls them, accused him of heresy for having taught that there was less time between Adam and Christ than they were prepared to believe.81 They made the charge at table with no less than Bishop Wilfrid, Bede's diocesan. Bede

77 E.g., HE Praef., pp. 4-6; 2.1, p. 132; 4.2, p. 404; 5.24, p. 566. 78 On this practice see Plummer's detailed note, Opera historica, 1 :xliv-xlv, n. 3. For "opinio," HE

2.1, pp. 132-134. 79 The WhitbyLife survives in a single manuscript, St. Gall MS 567, pp.75-110. Itwas firstedited

by Francis A. Gasquet, A Life of Pope St. Gregory the Great (Westminster, 1904), and then (with translation and notes) by B. Colgrave, The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great by an Anonymous Monk of Whitby (Lawrence, Kans., 1968). The reference here is to chapter 16 (Colgrave, pp. 98-99).

80 Vita Sancti Cuthberti Praef., ed. Colgrave, Two Lives, pp. 142-144. 81 On this affair see Jones, Bedae opera de temporibus, pp. 132-135.

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 19

had formed his view from the study of Hebraica veritas, Jerome's translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. The other opinion was a millenarian chronology that had grown from the Latin version of the Septuagint and was apparently current in ecclesiastical instruction in Northumbria. Replying to the charge, Bede pronounced it "opinio vulgaris" and appealed angrily to the clear testimony of a better biblical text.82 The whole affair remained on his mind for many years. It must have made him ask, as he began to gather materials for the HE, whether common people could be right about English history when in the presence of bishops they might be inflexibly wrong about even the sacred past.

Folk traditions were not the ideal start for Latin historiography, and Bede knew it. His vera lex historiae, then, is partly a caveat, warning the reader that hisfama vulgans may contain factual errors. As such it concedes something to Isidore, though not much. Bede wrote the preface in the confidence that his authorial reputation was not at the mercy of the common report, for the genre of history both authorized its use and protected the historian himself against the "lies," factual errors, for which he could hardly be held responsi- ble. Hence he offered his vera lex historiae to assure his readers of all this especially, it seems, those who were closely familiar with Isidore's views of historical writing.

Nothing but circumstances made this "true law of history" a major premise of the HE. It was certainly not the key to Bede's understanding of the historian's office, nor did it govern the whole of the HE. The assumption that "the true law of history" rules the entire narrative may cause one to miss the appearance of other historiographical principles. Once, for example, Bede refers to himself as "verax historicus," and some have concluded that these words reflect his vera lex historiae, since "the true historian" obeys "the true law of history."83 The term comes in his account of Bishop Aidan of Lindis- farne.84 Concluding the section, Bede laments briefly the saintly prelate's failure to follow the Roman date of Easter. He gives Aidan the benefit of a doubt, allowing that "the authority of his people" (the force of opinio vulgi?) might have caused him to keep the Irish calendar, and takes comfort to observe that the bishop at least celebrated Easter on Sunday. Though Bede eventually remarks that he "detests" the error, there is never any malice. For the most part he had tried, as he says, to present Aidan ". . . quasi verax historicus simpliciter ea, quae de illo sive per illum sunt gesta, describens et quae laude sunt digna in eius actibus laudans, atque ad utilitatem legentium memoriae commendans...."85

According to Jones, these words "directly paraphrase" Bede's vera lex his- toriae.86 Their meaning does pertain to one of his exordial ideas, but not the

82 See the Epistola ad Pleguinam, in ibid., pp. 307, 313-3 15. 83 E.g., Markus, Bede, pp. 11-12. There are several others who hold this view. 84HE 3.17, pp. 264-266. 85 Ibid. 86 Saints' Lives, p. 85.

20 Bede's Vera Lex Historiae one he calls "a true law of history." I have in mind the conventional statement about the moral value of the genre: "For if history relates good things of good men, the careful listener is stirred up to imitate the goQd; or if it mentions bad things of bad men, the devout and conscientious listener or reader, by fleeing what is hurtful and wrong, is himself nonetheless moved to follow more earnestly the things which he knows to be good and worthy to God."87 This makes it clear enough that one gives paradigmatic lessons from the lives of good men and cautionary instruction from the conduct of evil persons. It would therefore be at least odd to exemplify bad things from the biography of an unmistakably good man and no doubt stranger still to do the opposite. It would distort the genre. Aidan was more than a good man: he was a reputed saint. It was at best awkward ever to criticize a saint but especially fearful to do so in a book of Latin historiography. And Bede would have been keenly aware that in the HE Aidan was the first (and, as it turned out, the last) undoubtedly virtuous person about whom he had momentarily spoken ill. But Aidan's one flaw was too important to overlook; it. was the error that the Synod of Whitby had rejected, as Bede would relate farther on in Book Three. Hence Bede seems to have concluded that the reader's recognition of his habitual faithful- ness to genre would perhaps excuse his having mentioned this one bad thing about an otherwise exemplary bishop. After stating the demurrer somewhat stiffly, he asked the reader to remember that he, "like a true historian," had for the rest done the expected thing - both describing and praising Aidan's godly acts and giving account of them "for the benefit of reading." Thus his life of Aidan mainly had, in his view, the preferred moral value: it related good things of a good man, to stir up the reader to imitate the good. I might add that Bede does not turn his comment on Aidan's sin into an exemplum. It remains just a comment, not a portrayal of sin and its consequences. All the same, some English manuscripts omit it; for a few later scribes it was alien matter.88 The larger point is, in any case, that the verax historicus was for Bede someone who followed the generic lines of history, and it is plain that in the concluding remarks about Aidan the principle at stake is not his vera lex historiae.

The survival of more than two hundred manuscripts, most of them full copies, shows that the HE was in great demand all over Europe from the ninth century to the end of the Middle Ages.89 But Bede's vera lex historiae, as such, had very little afterlife, even though the ideas combined in it were well known. In a vita of the later ninth century, Hincmar of Reims quoted part of it, apparently from a florilegium, to justify the writing of history from common report; he did not give the crucial disclaimer of factual errors.90 Though more

87 HE Praef., p. 2. My translation. 88 For this see Plummer, Opera historica, 2:167. 89 See Laistner, Hand-List, pp. 93-112. Most of the listed MSS are continental. 90 Hincmar of Riems, Vita Remigii Episcopi Remensis, MGH SS 3:253. The clearly Bedan words

Hincmar recognizes only as an old saying, which suggests that in this case they had passed into florilegial anonymity. Two later authors quote the words from Hincmar: Vita Folquini Episcopi Morinensis auctore Folquino Abbate, MGH SS 15, 1:425, and the anonymous Vita Meingoldi Comitis,

Bede's Vera Lex Historiae 21

than fifty complete manuscripts of the HE were written in the twelfth century, perhaps no more than two historians, both English, made any clear use of the "true law of history." Far into the Historia Anglorum, Henry of Huntingdon employed it with no thought of fama or factual errors but to say that the section of his work taken from the HE was, like its source, meant to notify posterity about previous times.9' William of Malmesbury, who was devoted to classical learning, saw that Bede's term might easily signify any historio- graphical principle. In the fifth book of the Gesta regum Anglorum, just before mentioning his esteemed predecessor Bede, William remarks: ". . . ego enim, veram legem secutus historiae, nihil unquam posui nisi quod a fidelibus relatoribus vel scriptoribus addidici."92 William also liked the words verax historicus. In one place he observes that the "true historian" may set down local "opinion"; in another, that the "verax historicus" ought not believe everything he hears.93 His idiosyncratic use of these Bedan words is entirely true to the HE.

None of these authors, not even the hagiographer Hincmar, read Bede's vera lex historiae as the true law of history. In the HE his medieval readers seem to have found exemplary respect for the ideal of truth, surely because Bede does not claim that his narrative, on the factual level, is any better than its sources. Recently Musca has suggested that Bede was "the Herodotus of the Middle Ages."94 As a means of locating Bede within the history of medieval historiography, the comparison is apt - except in one important way. In the medieval period Bede, unlike Herodotus in the ancient world, was never known as a liar for apparently having endorsed the truth of oral traditions about which he could not have been personally sure.95

UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO

MGH SS 3:557. I owe these references to Marie Schulz, Die Lehre von der historischen Methode bei den Geschichtschreibern des Mittelalters, VI. -XIII. Jahrhundert (Berlin and Leipzig, 1909), pp. 36-38.

91 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum 4.14, RS 74:117. 92 William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum 5.445, RS 90,1:518. 93 William of Malmesbury, Historia novella 1.453, RS 90,2:530; Gesta regum Anglorum 2.148, RS

90,1:165. 94 Musca, II Venerabile Beda, pp. 269-276, a chapter entitled "Erodoto del Medioevo." 95 On the ancient critique of Herodotus, see Arnaldo Momigliano, "Herodotus in the History of

Historiography," in his Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), pp. 127-142. For their help at various stages of this study, I want to thank Christopher Holdsworth, Paul Meyvaert, and Ruth Morse.

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Issue Table of ContentsSpeculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, Vol. 55, No. 1 (1980) pp. 1-206Volume InformationFront MatterBede's Vera Lex Historiae [pp. 1-21]The Old English Canon of Byrhtferth of Ramsey [pp. 22-37]The Cecilia Legend as Chaucer Inherited It and Retold It: The Disappearance of an Augustinian Ideal [pp. 38-57]The Genre of William Dunbar's Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo [pp. 58-74]Notes and DocumentsThe Burning of Heorot [pp. 75-83]The Lament of the Friars of the Sack [pp. 84-90]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 91-92]Review: untitled [pp. 92-94]Review: untitled [pp. 95-97]Review: untitled [pp. 97-98]Review: untitled [pp. 98]Review: untitled [pp. 99-100]Review: untitled [pp. 100-102]Review: untitled [pp. 102-104]Review: untitled [pp. 104-106]Review: untitled [pp. 107-109]Review: untitled [pp. 109-110]Review: untitled [pp. 111-113]Review: untitled [pp. 113-114]Review: untitled [pp. 114-116]Review: untitled [pp. 116-117]Review: untitled [pp. 117-118]Review: untitled [pp. 118-119]Review: untitled [pp. 119-121]Review: untitled [pp. 121-122]Review: untitled [pp. 122-123]Review: untitled [pp. 123-124]Review: untitled [pp. 125-126]Review: untitled [pp. 126-127]Review: untitled [pp. 127-128]Review: untitled [pp. 129-131]Review: untitled [pp. 131-133]Review: untitled [pp. 133-134]Review: untitled [pp. 134-136]Review: untitled [pp. 136-137]Review: untitled [pp. 137-139]Review: untitled [pp. 139-140]Review: untitled [pp. 141]Review: untitled [pp. 142-143]Review: untitled [pp. 143-147]Review: untitled [pp. 147-148]Review: untitled [pp. 149-150]Review: untitled [pp. 151-153]Review: untitled [pp. 153-155]Review: untitled [pp. 155-156]Review: untitled [pp. 156-158]Review: untitled [pp. 158-159]Review: untitled [pp. 160-161]Review: untitled [pp. 161-164]Review: untitled [pp. 164-166]Review: untitled [pp. 166]Review: untitled [pp. 166-169]Review: untitled [pp. 169-172]Review: untitled [pp. 172-173]Review: untitled [pp. 173-174]Review: untitled [pp. 174-176]Review: untitled [pp. 176-178]Review: untitled [pp. 178-180]Review: untitled [pp. 181-183]

Brief Notices [pp. 184-194]Bibliography of Editions and Translations in Progress [pp. 195-202]Books Received [pp. 203-206]Back Matter