Britain, an island in the Atlantic, formerly called Albion, lies to the north-west, facing, though at a considerable distance, the coasts of Germany, France, and Spain, which form the greatest part of Europe. The following text was adapted by Michael Newton from the edition of Sellar, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.

Bede built on Gildas’s condemnation of British chieftains, depicting the Angli as God’s new chosen people whose invasion into Britain served as punishment for the sins of the Britons.86 Bede thus acts as a strong advocate on behalf of the English and their interests. Bede mentions all of the major ethnic groups then in Britain: Britons, Picts, Gaels, and Anglo-Saxons (whom he lumps together as Angli, thus facilitating a unified identity) and draws upon a wide variety of sources and traditions. He is now often considered the father of English history for his book Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” which he finished in 731. Understanding Bede is a key to understanding British society in the present as well as the past.Bede (673-735) was an Anglo-Saxon monk based in Northumbria. The issues around these questions are not academic or antiquarian. The attraction and fascination of his work is partly in seeing the tension between the strategic use of wealth and political power for religious ends and the example of self-effacing service and simplicity of life offered by some of Bede's greatest Christian heroes. But Bede also wrestles with the difficult question of how the Church relates to and serves the political order.

Rowan Williams shows in his introduction how Bede works to create a sense of national destiny for the new English kingdoms of the seventh century, a sense that has helped to shape English self-awareness through the centuries, by using the imagery both of imperial Rome and of biblical Israel. Yet it is a key text for any student of English history. An introduction and selection by Rowan Williams & Benedicta Wardīede's best known work, An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, was written in Latin and is not immediately easy to understand and follow.

Bede an ecclesiastical history