03/10/2026
I don’t normally hold with foreigners writing British history, but Edoardo Albert has nailed it. Good history creates new perspectives on the past and present, which he does to perfection.
Today Newcastle upon Tyne is known for ‘Newkie Brown’, decaying industrial infrastructure, dodgy ports and incomprehensible accents. During the early 700’s it was a beautiful and remote centre of north European learning.
In about 680 AD a young boy was given to the abbey of Jarrow, and he grew into one of the foremost scholars of his age. Bede became part of an extraordinary pan-European network of Christian intellectuals; if it took a couple of years to get a research query answered from Rome, then so be it. His physical travels took him only between the twin monasteries of St. Peter and St. Paul about six miles apart, but he wrote everything from mathematical treatises to a travel guide for the Holy Land. Almost all his works his works survived (despite the Vikings); his Ecclesiastical History of the English People is still in print and readable.
This author has a clear Christian faith, an interest in monasticism and the ability to explain thing like the problem of doing complex sums in Roman numerals (go on - try it). Well worth a read.
When the unlovely Andy Burnham created his Number Ten North, that action contained more than a nod to Bede.
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