 On Monday we were looking at Gildas, the mid-6th century British writer who describes the Germanic invasions of Britain in the 5th century and the condition of Britain in his own day, all in some apocalyptic terms. We looked at his Latinity, at the likely literary and cultural background from which he came, at the likelihood of some kind of halfway house between the classical grammatical school and the monastery, as the background of his intellectual life, and above all the way in which he uses scripture. Oddly flexible about the text of scripture he is at the same time determined to show that the history of the British people is a re-inscription of the history of Israel, not because the British as such are a chosen people, but because the British as a baptised nation naturally share the historical dynamic under which gods people live in the old and the new dispensation. And at the end of the earlier lecture I noted that one of the things which Bede does in the early 8th century is to turn this picture upside down, to present the Germanic settlers themselves as the chosen people, and the British not even as unfaithful Israel, but as virtually non-Christian, non-Jewish pagans. However, to understand some of the background of that we once again have to look at Bede's own formation and at Bede's own library. And in contrast to the extremely obscure question of Gildes's background in education, we know really rather a lot about Bede's background and indeed about Bede's library. Simply because Bede was such a ceaselessly prolific writer, he has left a lot of quotations which allow us to gauge the extent of his scholarship. We know for example that the library in the monasteries of Weymouth and Jarrow in his day included many works by St Ambrose, a great deal of the corpus of Jarom's work and the histories of Raphynus. Jarom and Raphynus we've already seen in Gildes's library. But in addition of course by this time we have the work of Pope Gregory the Great, we have some of the work of Tyconius and Augustine. We have the encyclopedic work of Isidore of Seville, the etymologies, and we have once again echoing but enlarging what we find in the case of Gildes, a small but significant body of secular classical literature. Virgil unsurprisingly surfaces once again. No library was complete in the early middle ages without Virgil as indeed no library should be complete now without Virgil. But we also find Macrobius and Pliny, Pliny's natural histories being a text that Bede will refer to several times. But one of the things which differentiates Bede's library from whatever library Gildes was able to use, somewhere in western Britain sometime in the mid sixth century, is the quality and the focus, the intellectual focus of the biblical text he was using. And this is where of course in Bede's case we have one of the most substantial pieces of material evidence that we could have in the shape of the Codex Amyotinus. One of the three great manuscripts of the Vulgate, the by now official western Latin translation of the Bible, one of the three great manuscripts of the Vulgate commissioned and executed at the Tyneside Monastery, taken by Abbot Sholfrith on his last pilgrimage to Rome. The Abbot dying in Gaul seems to have left the manuscript to his colleagues to dispose of and by a very complicated story it ended up in an Italian monastery hence Amyotinus and Amiata, only recognized in the 19th century for what it was. That is one of those three great gift books prepared in the monastery and that's not just a matter of the production of literary luxury goods in Northumbria. It has to do with the definitive establishing of a text of the Vulgate that could be referred to as authoritative in the monastery and more widely. In contrast to Gildas's rather laid-back approach to the biblical text quoting from the old Latin or the Vulgate or memory as suited him. This time we have a fixed text, a definitively orthodox version of scripture and Rosalind Love in her work on this has pointed out that it's a text which insists very strongly on its Romaness, its Romanitas. The illustration of the text is famously executed in a subclassical style and in the very well known illumination showing the scribe Ezra at work in his library we see not only the figure of someone scribbling notes on a pad on his knee but a large cupboard containing a number of codices laid flat on its shelves. The sheer physical space of the library is delineated there and it's evidently a late Roman library working library. So the Codex Amiotinus is a sign both of the need for an authoritative single text of scripture and the need and of the need to associate that with Romaness with that profoundly important identity which Bede insists on throughout his ecclesiastical history for the English Church its Roman parentage and Roman orthodoxy. But we shouldn't of course run away with the idea that the library at Weymouth Jarrow consisted entirely of massive unwieldy codices. Christa Hamill in his wonderful new book on manuscripts notes that the Codex Amiotinus weighs as much as a 12 year old child. There were smaller handbooks available and as it happens we have a tiny fragment of one of them our text on vellum which contains a small fragment of the first book of Maccabees. So in addition to the great formal public versions of the biblical text there were also it would be ambitious to say pocket bibles but certainly smaller codices containing perhaps selections of relevant extracts for various purposes in preaching. It was a library which contained probably a good 200 volumes. They'd been assembled in the foregoing decades partly by the initiative of those great figures to whom Bede looks in his recent past Abbott Benedict Biskup and Abbott Chalfrith. Two compulsive book collectors whose travels on the continent especially those of Biskups had led to an accumulation of codices from Gaul and Italy including probably some volumes in Greek as well as very likely some volumes from Ireland. We do see an interesting representation of Greek fathers in Latin translation in Bede's quotations but it's quite likely that there were at least some fragments or some smaller volumes which were actually in Greek. All of this makes sense because Bede himself was a theologian at an exegete in a way that Gildus never was. Gildus you might say is happier using scripture as a weapon to beat his fellow countrymen with than as a field in which you can ramble in order to edify yourself and your audience. And yet Bede in the ecclesiastical history certainly is as much a theologian of history and a polemical theologian of history as Gildus is. And I want this evening to explore some of the sources and some of the themes in Bede's theology of history and theology of the chosen people because to explore those issues gives us some rather unexpected insights into the less well-known corners of Bede's reading. As I said at the beginning we have good evidence about the sort of thing generally Bede is quoting and there have been a number of excellent articles on Bede's library listing the works he almost certainly had access to. Recent scholarship and I'll come back to this in a moment has suggested that some of the earlier estimates of the amount of Saint Augustine that was available to him in the library at Jarrow might be a little modest that perhaps there was rather more that he used but to turn now to the question of his theology of history. Gildus had of course castigated the British for their sins. He had told them that like ancient Israel they had been brought into the covenant of God and had betrayed it and so earned punishment but by enduring their punishment patiently and by responding with repentance they would find their way back to grace. Bede as I've said sees the British as barely Christian at all and one odd feature of his narrative in the ecclesiastical history is that he will implicitly treat the Germanic settlers the Anglians and the Saxons as if there were some kind of chosen people some kind of reflection of Israel even before they're converted. So at the very end of book one of the ecclesiastical history chapter 34 Bede mentions the ravages of King Athelfrith of Northumbria who established his dominion over an unprecedented number of British territories kingdoms one imagines who slaughtered a large number of the indigenous inhabitants of the nation and who in this respect says Bede somewhat eyebrow-raisingly resembled King Saul in the Old Testament. Saul liberates his people from the Philistines he destroys Philistine cities and reduces the Philistines to subjection. The Philistines foreigners and idolaters are destined to be subject to the chosen people and so here Athelfrith the new Saul by his record slaughtering of British and submission of British territory earns his place as in inverted commas a king of Israel. It's probably also true that Bede uses this typology to imply that Edwin slightly later King of Northumbria who is the first Christian monarch of the territory Edwin is a new King David but that's another matter. The odd and interesting thing is how the Anglo-Saxons appear already to be Israelites thereby of course casting the British in the role of Canaanites Philistines idolaters the natural victims and the natural subjects of God's chosen an unhappy adumbration of the rhetoric of Afrikaners in South Africa and indeed a good many other colonial powers but that's another story. Bede actually seems to have got more annoyed about the British rather than less as he got older. He had made some rather sidelong and indirect remarks on the subject rather earlier when writing his commentary on the Song of Songs a slightly unusual place you might say to find polemic of this kind but Bede's commentary on the Song of Songs is explicitly designed as a counter to popular heresies especially the heresies he associates in particular with British people Pelagianism especially to which I'll come back in a moment but what he does in the commentary on the Song of Songs is to speak about the necessary unity of the Catholic Church the danger posed to the true church by the synagogue that is by a kind of Jewish mentality persisting into Christian times which resists sharing the good news with people who are of different ethnic background just as Jewish Christians in the New Testament on Bede's reading do not want to see Gentiles becoming Christians so there are those in the church now who do not want to convert the pagans but want to keep themselves to themselves and since one of his most frequent complaints about the British church is that they failed to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons it's not very difficult to see who he's talking about here so at this phase of his writing Bede seems to think that the British church and the British people are so to speak Jewish old covenant people as opposed to truly Christian New Covenant people they are the synagogue but by the time he comes to write the ecclesiastical history the situation is even worse the British church and the British people are not even the synagogue they are the Canaanites and the Philistines so Bede's attempt to construct a history of the English church and people Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum is one which requires him so he believes to reconfigure the story of who and where God's people are in Britain God's people are the ugly they are the Germanic settlers brought over by divine providence from continental Europe to chastise the infidelity and the apostasy of the British Bede is able to use quite a lot of Gildas to reinforce this Gildas's castigation of the British of his own day becomes in Bede's hands a means of confirming that conviction that the British are wicked heretical cowardly and all the rest of it Gildas I think would have been slightly alarmed at the use made of what he says because as you well know anti-welsh jokes can only be told by Welsh people and it would be rather an unhappy consequence if the kind of anecdote I grew up on in South Wales about people in Cardiganshire would be could be relayed to people in England as if it truly and accurately described the admirable citizens of that county but Bede is delighted to find in Gildas about as much information as he needs to portray the British as a lost cause but there's more to it the British are not only wicked cowardly and all the rest of it they are also crucially absolutely crucially heretical and this is where the next stage of Bede's investigation and Bede's argument opens as I've said Bede is extremely interested in the particular heresy he associates with Britain that is Pelagianism he records boldly in his chronicle that in a certain year Pelagius the Britain attacked the grace of God the history of Pelagius his own work and the details of his theology are beyond the remit of these lectures but it's worth saying very simply and very briefly that Pelagius was almost certainly a lawyer by training with some smatterings of stoic philosophy we don't know whether he was educated in Britain or outside Britain but his British origins are beyond doubt his protest against what he saw as an extreme doctrine of grace associated with the name of the African Bishop Augustine of Hippo led him to develop in a number of letters and also biblical commentaries a distinctive doctrine of how grace and human freedom intersect a doctrine in which he insisted with great consistency on the power of human free will as something which was not destroyed or affected by the fall of Adam every human individual retains the capacity to respond in freedom to God's gift of salvation and grace therefore is something earned by our efforts not simply given as Augustine wanted to argue from above this doctrine was largely repudiated in the fifth century not only by Augustine but by the ecclesiastical establishment around the Mediterranean at the same time there were many critics of Augustine's view who regarded it as unduly emphasizing the power and liberty of God at the expense of the power and liberty of humanity those like Faustus of Rie whom I mentioned on Monday the British born Abbott of Leher and later Bishop who criticized both Augustine and Pelagius in his really rather impressive treaties on grace in the middle of the fifth century but for bead pelagianism is the golden or rather not very golden thread which connects together all the weaknesses of British Christianity and in every book of the ecclesiastical history bead takes care to remind us that the British church almost from its beginnings has been weak vulnerable to corruption and in need of help from abroad this help frequently offered is regularly refused so when the British refuse both the help of the Roman mission at the end of the sixth century and the task of evangelizing the Germanic settlers it's pretty much what you'd expect given their record and part of the argument part of the narrative of the ecclesiastical history is to show exactly this from the beginning the British have been proud and arrogant and incompetent altogether their pride and arrogance make them refuse the remedy for their incompetence and the result is disaster spiritual disaster a disaster which reduces them to the level of being Philistines or Canaanites now exactly how much of a problem pelagianism really was in Britain in the fifth century remains a topic of some considerable debate I've argued myself that it's been vastly exaggerated for a number of reasons which I'll come to in a moment but it's also true that bead in writing about this seems to exhibit a very limited knowledge of the primary literature of the theological controversy he never directly quotes Augustine on the subject which is surprising he does quote directly from one of Pelagius's own works but ascribes it to the wrong author so he's familiar only in a rather confused way with where the controversy actually began and that's in fact not so surprising by the time bead wrote the controversy about Pelagius's teachings in degustians had raged in Gaul for a century and a half off and on and in Gaul it had become customary and some of you may recognize this as a trend in ecclesiastical controversy it had become customary in Gaul to assume that anybody who disagreed with Augustine's more extreme positions must be a pelagian that is if you disagree with somebody's version of orthodoxy you couldn't be orthodox at all in any sense so anything less than Augustine's extremely austere doctrine that some people might be predestined to damnation anything short of that was regarded as pelagian and is still sometimes in rather unhelpful textbooks described as semi pelagian it isn't of course semi anything it's simply the denial of Augustine on a rather bad day but there were powerful voices in mid fifth century Gaul which insisted on that standard of orthodoxy and the lives of various great figures of fifth century Gaul as well as the controversial literature of the period demonstrate how that map of the ecclesiastical territory was constructed prominent among those is the life written by the monk Constantius of Germanus of Augzer Germanus a very great bishop and teacher who had before his conversion and ordination been a prominent military man in late Roman Gaul Germanus visited Britain in the early fifth century at least once and quite possibly as the life suggests twice in Constantius's life this is represented as a case of Germanus visiting Britain at the request of the British church and also at the request of a synod in Gaul or possibly a papal decree another source suggests that in order to root out pelagianism broken down into its details it's fairly clear that we can have no certainty at all this was ever the case Germanus undoubtedly visited Britain and it may very well have been in connection with the son of a Gaulish bishop who had taken refuge in Britain after ecclesiastical condemnation in Gaul quite possibly for in inverted commas pelagianism but that doesn't quite add up to the epidemic of rampant heresy which Constantius supposed to have existed in Britain requiring foreign intervention however the life of Constantius is exactly the kind of volume that bead will take from his shelves in order to prove his point that this is exactly once again what you would expect from the British church the life of Germanus is an authoritative text the life of a very great saint bead reproduces a number of significant anecdotes from that text and constructs his story around it of a fifth century British church buckling under the weight of heretical misapprehension in need once again of foreign assistance receiving it somewhat grudgingly and only temporarily as soon as Germanus's back is turned you might say the British revert to their old ways in spite of the fact that the pelagians in Britain have been confounded in public debate by Germanus not only by words but by deeds because Germanus performs miracles in order to prove the rightness of his theological case so in the very first book of the ecclesiastical history one of the volumes of beads library that is prayed in aid most directly is a text which sets the scene for the remaining four books of the history in terms of the what you might call the invalidation of the British claim to be part of the chosen people and the true Catholic church refusing this assistance from abroad they become either a synagogue of a recalcitrant unbelieving Jews the typology is as I say to be found in the commentary on the song of songs or worse than that the British have said no to the dispensation of grace at least once in every one of the books of the history as I've said bead returns to this theme or to something closely related to it and towards the end of the history in the long letter which he quotes addressed to the king of the Picts over the signature of abat chulfrith though probably drafted by bead the point recurs in a very complex and recondite way in connection with the existing debate with the British church over the date of Easter bead ingeniously manages to argue that the way the British calculate the date of Easter makes them heretical because they refuse the computers which bead uses and which the rest of the western church by that time is using to decide the date of Easter they are in danger of celebrating Easter before the first new moon after the spring equinox that means they are anticipating the light of Christ dawning on the world they believe that they have reached says bead perfecta justitia perfect righteousness before the grace of God has completed its work so to celebrate the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ before the paschal new moon has fully risen is to show yourself a pelagian heretic resistant to the grace of God as I've said it's a very ingenious argument it takes several pages to unfold I don't recommend you read it straight away but it's a fascinating piece of polemic I mentioned in passing just because it interests me he beads use of the phrase perfecta justitia their perfect righteousness and I have argued elsewhere that there must be a case in that event for supposing that bead might at least have known some bits of augustin's treatise day perfectsione justitia on the perfection of righteousness not least because in that text as elsewhere augustin uses a phrase about the christian life running rightly running in the right direction which bead himself uses in the commentary on the song of songs where he discusses some of these issues about grace and freedom so I suspect that there may have been a copy of augustin on the perfection of righteousness somewhere in weymouth jarrow as well as augustin's other works speculative but I would be prepared to defend it it's a very annihilating judgment on the British church as well as the British people and of course bead doesn't distinguish particularly between the two because oddly as much as gildus he assumes that the British are as you might put it a post-christian rather than a pagan people that is they are christian apostates rather than straight pagans but that makes them for all practical purposes pagans and we've seen how bead uses his sources from outside Britain especially the life of st. germanus to make this point unwittingly and I think it is unwittingly drawing the ecclesiastical history of 5th century Britain into the politics of 5th century Gaul where they don't necessarily belong but he's also clearly got a rather bad conscience about some of this because he recognizes that some christians who refuse to abide by roman practice mainstream western christian practice are nonetheless exemplars of quite impressive christian life famously he is profoundly sympathetic to st. aiden and in general is quite kind to the irish missionaries who are at work in northern england and although those irish missionaries were themselves directly influenced by and often directly taught by teachers from western britain bead systematically ignores this in a way which allows him more or less to say that while the english are very good the irish are quite good if misguided and the british wholly bad but there is something about the non-roman indigenous christian tradition which evidently nagged at him a little and i want at this point to suggest another source for bead another part of his polemical library which has not been very much investigated and this is what i think comes into play right at the beginning of the second book of his history this is where the mission of augustin to britain is being described that is augustin of canterbury augustin sent by pope gregory to evangelize the ugly is given ecclesiastical authority over the church in the islands of britain no one however seems to have consulted the existing christian communities in britain about this and unsurprisingly augustin's encounter with the british bishops already at work in britain was not a very successful one bead story is quite well known the british bishops are summoned to a meeting with augustin like germanus and it's a story quite clearly modeled on the story of germanus like germanus augustin proves his point by a miracle a sick saxon is brought in and prayed over by the british bishops unsuccessfully augustin duly heals him the british bishops then admit that they were wrong but say they have to go back and explain all this to their congregations they're then follows a very strange episode the british bishops on their way to a second meeting stop off to discuss the matter with a holy hermit how will they know if augustin truly has spiritual authority over them the hermit replies if he's truly a man of god he will display humility towards you if he rises to greet you when you enter the hall you will know that he is a man of god the british bishops arrived at the meeting place augustin duly remained in his seat and the rest is history but before they walked out augustin pronounced a curse on them reminding them that they had failed to take the gospel to their new germanic neighbors that therefore they could expect disaster and sure enough just a couple of years later 1200 monks from the great monastery of banger on d not far from chester were killed by king athelfrith no less at the battle of chester their wicked hosts were destroyed by the angles and so their heresy as bead calls it was duly punished by the death of the body as well as the punishment designed for the soul it's a very strange chapter not just because i think it shows bead at his least attractive but also because of the very construction of the story there's the awkwardness of the imitation of the life of germanus there's the return of the bishops the british bishops to seek support in their congregations and there's the apparently perfectly sound advice given to them by the welsh hermit and augustin's failure to live up to a model of humility bead is a great admirer of humility in bishops it's one of the reasons that makes him love st aidan and dislikes and wilfred so much so what is going on the key is in the names we actually have here two names of british people involved in the narrative the leader of the delegation at the second meeting with augustin is a formidable welsh saint we're given to understand by the name of dinot known to later welsh tradition as saint dinaud connected in that tradition with saint daniel of the other north welsh banger banger in um canavans we're told also that at the battle of chester the british monks from banger on d were to be protected by detachment of soldiers led by a british commander called prochmal now bead never gives british names apart from this chapter there's only one other clearly british name in the historia where in passing he mentions presumably a british king in probably mid yorkshire so what are these two names doing here names which appear in impeccable sixth or seventh century welsh british orthography the simplest solution is that he has a british chronicle of some kind in front of him and the obvious candidate would be some kind of pascal chronicle from a monastic setting every monastery worth its salt in the early middle ages will have of course a table of easter dates including the marginal annotations which eventually turn into pascal chronicles this is the date of Easter for this year and incidentally in this year the following major events happened so it wouldn't be entirely surprising to find british monasteries producing pascal chronicles of this kind fairly sketchy but it's not i think too great a stretch of the imagination to think of one such text in which an entry like bishop denote and his brethren meet the bishop augustin and a small anecdote appended just as in any account of the massacre of the monks at the battle of chester one might imagine a similar little pericope added rock mile who should have defended them abandoned them to their fate at the hands of the gentiles one further small piece of evidence for some such british chronicle is in the account of the first arrival of the anglo saxons in britain it's the famous story of hengist and horser in gildes's version of the story they are invited to britain by someone who is simply called a superbos tyrannous a proud tyrant not necessarily a tyrant in the modern sense because tyrannous at that time essentially meant a self appointed monarch so that superbos tyrannous is more or less some jumped up usurper who convenes a council which disastrously invites the saxons into britain bead is the first to give this person a name as vortigan and the name appears both in the chronicle and in the ecclesiastical history the spelling in the two places is different vertiguernes in the chronicle is a slightly later way of spelling the name but in the history we have very scrupulously vertiguernes spelled in once again an impeccable sixth seventh century welsh british style and those three names vortigan denowed and rock mile are i would suggest the evidence we need to propose with some credibility that bead had access to a written british source where did he get it from after the defeat of the british irish party at the synod of whitby in the middle of the seventh century many houses monastic houses following the irish british rule with the indigenous form of the and the indigenous dating of easter and various other customs no doubt many such monasteries were taken over fairly forcibly by some of the more aggressive of the roman party not least st wilfred and wilfred's biographer steven of rippon tells us of wilfred's extirpation of Celtic custom in the monasteries and other churches of northumbria and yorkshire and presumably by this time also lancashire and cumbria which were now part of the northumbrian political area of influence quite clearly one of the things you would want to get rid of from any monastery would be a table of easter dates giving you the wrong dates for the festival it's quite possible i think that some of wilfred's colleagues with perhaps a little more scholarly conscience than wilfred himself might have thought i know somebody in jarrow who'd be interested in reading this so i believe that part of bead's library is in fact some kind of british chronicle very sketchy and very incoate but nonetheless representing a set of traditions and narratives which bead is prepared if not to accept without question at least to take seriously enough to incorporate into his own text his own narrative to add a little further dimensionality to it and as i've indicated i think the awkward platting together of what i would argue are two different versions of the story of augustin's meeting with the british bishops one written from the british one from the roman point of view does give you a clue to bead's scholarly conscience which although it didn't entirely rescue him from the sharp edged polemic with which that narrative ends does at least let us know that he was not a man dishonest enough to ignore primary material all of that is of course a matter of detail and you may think rather nitpicking detail but given that we know quite a lot about bead's latin and continental sources quite a bit about his use of gildas and of the history of erosius and the chronicle of osimus and the familiar documents that others of the time use it's not insignificant that he seems also to have had some access to indigenous documentation of the events he describes an indigenous documentation which if it doesn't exactly undermine or qualify very slightly shades the primary colors of his main narrative of british apostasy and english chosenness and so to return to the main theme he is consistently configuring the gen's anglorum the people of the angles as god's chosen but there's some irony here the ecclesiastical history ends on what's generally a positive note the british with their heresies their violence their stupidity and obstinacy are now largely confined to the western parts of the island and largely subject to anglian or saxton rule there are record numbers of vocations to monasteries in northumbria there's a moderate level of political stability in the eastern part of the island and yet not very long afterwards bead writes his lengthy letter to egbert about the problems of church and society in the 730s by this time things are a great deal less sunny there may be lots of vocations to monasteries but many of the monasteries are already deeply corrupt owned by lay people and regarded as something rather like holiday homes for members of the aristocracies families they have been redefined as something rather like a tax dodge give your land to a monastic foundation and you can reduce your level of taxation and you can do pretty much what you like with any monastery you choose to found on the land that's the picture that bead paints and there are many other problems that he spells out notably i'm dusting off gild us his own polemic against the british redirected towards his own people in two respects one of the things which gild us reverts to frequently and which bead himself has mentioned in the ecclesiastical history is the unwillingness of the british to defend themselves they don't have an effective policy against attack from outside they don't have the military skills and strategic resources to combat invasion and assault so it's not surprising if they lose all their battles and now in the 730s what do we find exactly the same problem in northumbria the anglion settlers are losing their military skills they are opening themselves to attack from outside it's a prophetic remark you might say because the first viking raids are just over the horizon of the north sea but it's an interesting echo of the way gild us configures his polemic and perhaps more significantly in the context of literary heritage and literary strategy bead does what gild us does he turns to the history of the chosen people in hebrew scripture and says just as the prophets castigated israel in the old days just as amos and isiah and zakari attacked the chosen people for their infidelity so now the clergy must rise up and castigate the gens anglorum so bead has arrived in the 730s pretty much at the place where gild us was in the 540s probably that is with a theology not simply of the gens anglorum as the chosen people but in a sense slightly closer to gild us his own usage a theology of the gens anglorum as part of the catholic church which is the present and true israel and which is therefore subject to prophetic denunciation and castigation at the hands of saints and prophets it's interesting that in this letter to egbert bead quotes the new testament rather more than gild us does and it's very typical i think of beads overall theological mentality that he is far less inclined than gild us to focus on that old testament history far more inclined to construe the present need for a critique of the english people through the lens of a saint paul rather than an amos or a zakari but having invented england in the ecclesiastical history invented england as the home of a chosen people a people specially graced and specially called by god having veered very close to a theology which sees the gens anglorum as already blessed and chosen even before they're baptized king athelfruth as king sol he's now towards the end of his life coming towards a position slightly more like that of gild us the chosenness is not about ethnic particularity as such to be part of the chosen people is to be part of a community established by god's grace therefore subject to god's law and judgment so bead leaves us with two not entirely reconciled theological models something that is at the end of the day quite close to gild us a use of scripture to retell the story of his own people as the story of yet another unfaithful baptized community but at the same time a somewhat more troubling story of a people chosen simply as a people recipients of exceptional grace merely in virtue of who they are and that combined with the conquest and displacement trope that we've looked at throughout this lecture means that there is in bead the seed of some of those profoundly ambivalent theologies of election and power which we do indeed find in the post reformation period and in modernity those in south africa who in recent years have complained about the use of the book of exodus in latin american liberation theology because it's based on a people coming into displace and other people would i think have found interesting material for discussion to put it mildly in bead but one of the key differences with gild us as i've already suggested is that for bead scripture is already a somewhat more fixed and final thing that massive and literally weighty codex implies both the new standardization of the biblical text and christa hamill mentions in passing of course that elements of the amyotinus text may themselves have been checked by beads own scholarship that he will have seen that text not only a new standardization of the biblical text and the scholarship it surrounds it but a new and authoritative glossing of the biblical text to establish the anglian identity an invention of england the welsh have always been reluctant to let the english have a last word in any argument and the deeply negative characterization of the western british by bead was not to go without challenge a hundred years later we find the response to bead constructed in the courts of north wales by scholars of the court of king mervin in the early ninth century a response a response which does not simply seek to reinscribe gild us which does not try to reread the biblical story but which turns to two flanking movements first of all describing the roots of british identity as going back far before the days of baptism and secondly by noting that for all beads complaints about the evangelistic inferiority of the british they have nonetheless produced and i look here to the relatively recent work of nick hyam of manchester they have produced both a moses and a joshua they have produced a saint patrick and a king arthur they have produced in a way which gild us and bead would both have been surprised at a giant of the giant of the spiritual life and a giant of military strategy out of the heart of the history of bretonum of the ninth century those two figures stand as their approach of the british to the english and the vindication of the british against both their own gild us and the anglisex bead more of that next week thank you