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Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Bede, The Venerable

ca 673 - 26 May 735

The Venerable Bede is known as ‘the father of history’ and is included in CHH as he was probably the first person to mention any place in what became Hampshire. In his The Ecclesiastical History of England, written in about 731, he described the foundation of the diocese of the West Saxons, and later the diocese of Winchester, an act that influenced much of the subsequent history of the county. Bede’s main source seems to have been Daniel, bishop of Winchester c.705-744, termed elsewhere an ‘intimate friend’. He was, of course, writing at a time when neither the county of Hampshire nor the kingdom of England existed. Daniel was one of ‘the venerable men’ who consecrated Tatwine the Archbishop of Canterbury in 731.

Bede tells how the Roman missionary Birinus came to Britain and in 634 and was granted permission by two Saxon kings to found a see for the Gewissae, or West Saxons, at ’Dorcic’ (Dorchester-on-Thames). Birinus spent the rest of his life in the town, where he was buried in ca 650, though his remains were ‘many years after’ translated to ‘the church of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul in Winchester [Wintancestir]. In about 660 the West Saxons lost Dorchester-on-Thames to Mercia, and Winchester became their diocesan centre, with Wine as its first bishop. However, the record is confusing: although the Winchester diocese came to the fore when Dorchester was lost, it may never have been part of the diocese of Birinus (Barbara Yorke, pers. comm.). Wine was followed as bishop by Leuthere and then Haedde, who died in c.705, after which Winchester lost its western part to a new diocese centred on Sherborne. In 909 more territory, in the north-west of the Winchester see, was ceded to Ramsbury. Today both Sherborne and Ramsbury are within the Diocese of Salisbury. The diocese of Winchester, of course, underwent many later changes, not relevant to this entry.

Bede also records that ‘the province of the South Saxons, which … then belonged to the diocese of the city of Winchester, where Daniel then presided’ was given its own see at Selsey [in the late 7th century].