INTRODUCTION

Bede died in 735, at the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow near the modern Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he had been a monk since his childhood. He was an Anglo-Saxon, living in an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and will have spoken the local dialect of Old English. Shortly before his death, he completed his best-known work, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, by far the most important source for the early history of Christian Britain. Like the rest of his extensive oeuvre, it was in Latin. Bede's mastery of the language owed everything to the use he made of the astonishing library built up by the founder of his monastery, Benedict Biscop, during repeated visits to the Continent. What most influenced him were not classical texts, with the exception of Virgil, but the Latin Fathers and, it need hardly be said, the Bible.

Bede's narrative manner in the Ecclesiastical History is consistently grave and measured. But he follows his models, hagiographic as well as historiographic, in allowing direct speech to play a significant part. I propose in this contribution to make some observations on the style of passages where two of his characters are represented as conversing, usually in private but occasionally in public.

Such a topic seemed appropriate in a volume devoted to colloquial Latin. But in an author like Bede, the question of colloquialism is more than usually fraught. What could Bede know of conversational Latin? He had not (perhaps) read Terence, let alone Plautus or the letters of Cicero or Petronius.