“Homilies on the Gospel: two books” (HE, V. 24); Beda, Opera homiletica, CCSL 122, pp. 1–378; Bede, Homilies on the Gospels, trans. Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst (1991).

It is not only bishops, presbyters, deacons, and even those who govern monasteries, who are to be understood as pastors, but also all the faithful, who keep watch over the little ones of their house, are properly called “pastors,” insofar as they preside with solicitous watchfulness over their own house. And the office of pastor should [be acknowledged] in anyone of you who presides over even just one or two brothers by daily guidance, since he is ordered to feed them with a banquet of the word insofar as he is able. Moreover, every single one of you, brothers, who is believed to live as a private person holds the office of pastor, and feeds a spiritual flock, and keeps watch by night over it, if, gathering a multitude of good acts and pure thoughts to himself, he tries to govern them with just control, to nourish them with the heavenly pastures of the scriptures, and by vigilant shrewdness to keep [them safe] against the snares of evil spirits. As Alan Thacker notes, “Bede was thus concerned with a group whose qualifications were not primarily institutional, and indeed he deliberately refrained from identifying his doctores and praedicatores with the ordained hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons … He even envisaged women as preachers.”