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Yeavering Archive: Front Cover from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People
This manuscript page is the front cover from the History of the English Church and People, which was completed
by Bede, a Northumbrian monk and scholar, in 731. The work is our primary historical reference for this period,
and Chapter 14 describes the site at Yeavering in particular. You can view chapter 14 with
an interactive mouseover translation.
Bede lived from about 673-735 and was a monk at Jarrow in Northumbria. It is thanks to Bede that we have accounts of
the baptism at Yeavering and descriptions of Edwin and his reign as well as Paulinus and how he looked.
The manuscript itself dates from the mid 8th century and is known as the 'Cotton Tiberius A', now in the British
Museum. It has this curious name because it was once owned by Robert Cotton (1571-1631), an early collector who
donated his library to the British Museum. All of Cotton's manuscripts were kept on shelves divided into sections
that were identified by the bust of a Roman emperor; the Bede manuscript was kept in the 'Tiberius' section.
Robert Cotton's library is probably the most important collection of early manuscripts, and also contained the
Lindisfarne Gospels, two of the four surviving original texts of Magna Carta, and the only surviving manuscript of
'Beowulf'.
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