Ecclesiastical History of the English People
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A monk with a good library and no travel writes the English into a single people with a single history, and dates events from the Incarnation so consistently that the convention sticks.
- named sources and informants set out in a preface
- Anno Domini dating applied consistently and thereby made standard
- separate kingdoms narrated as one people's history
- correction invited from the reader as a stated principle
Bede's five books run from Caesar's landing to his own day, built from documents he names, letters he had copied from Rome, and informants he identifies, with an explicit preface listing his sources and inviting correction. That apparatus is unusual for the period. His adoption of Anno Domini reckoning, taken from Dionysius Exiguus and applied consistently through a widely copied work, is why the convention became standard. He also wrote on time-reckoning, orthography and scripture, and finished a translation into English on the day he died.
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