Even as he lay dying at Jarrow in 735, the Venerable Bede (see p. 69) was working and teaching, according to an account of the great scholar's last days given in a letter written by a pupil of his, Cuthbert. During this time, Bede, who was ‘well versed in our [i.e. English] poetry’, recited a poem ‘in our own language’ about death, for he was ‘skilled in the art of poetry in his own language’. Cuthbert gives us only a Latin paraphrase of the poem, but from at least the ninth century onwards copies of his letter were accompanied by an OE version too. More than thirty such copies survive, some made as late as the sixteenth century. A third of them (all apparently in manuscripts made on the Continent) have a text in the Northumbrian dialect; the rest are in a WS recension.

It is nice to think that Bede actually composed the song just before his death, but there can be no proof that he did not simply recite a poem already known to him. The theme is that favourite one of Christian writers, and one which Bede seems to have treated at length in a Latin poem, too – Judgement Day and the fate of the individual soul when it shall be called to account for its owner's conduct on earth.