Bede's ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’

Summary

The Venerable Bede (672/3–735), a monk at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria, finished his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in 731. It was concerned with the development of Christianity in England from the arrival of the missionary St Augustine in Kent in 597 to Bede's own day. The work was widely read all over Europe, and its general approach, by which it recounted the story of a people in parallel with the ecclesiastical events which bore upon their social and ethnic history, was emulated by later chroniclers and historians. The work contains only a few accounts of apparitions of the dead to the living, and these tend to follow the hagiographic model of earlier saints’ lives, whereby the spirits of the dead are emissaries from heaven, sent to convey the divine will to the living. Thus, in the first of the stories which follow, the nun Tortgith, whom Bede describes as having suffered from sickness for many years, has a vision which she links with the death of her abbess Ethelberga. When, three years later, Tortgith is herself close to death, Ethelberga appears to her, and the spirit of the dead abbess and the dying nun negotiate the exact timing of Tortgith's release from her painful existence. In the second story, the spirit of the dead monk Boisil takes a keen interest in the itinerary of a missionary expedition, insisting through an intermediary that the preacher Egbert should go to ‘the monasteries of Columba’ in Ireland rather than to Germany. Perhaps significantly, the returning spirits in both stories are presented as having been, during their lifetime, the administrative superiors of those to whom they appear.

The Visions of Tortgith

Book IV, Chap. IX

Going out of her chamber one night, just at the first dawn of the day, Tortgith plainly saw as it were a human body, which was brighter than the sun, wrapped up in a sheet and lifted up on high, being taken out of the house in which the sisters used to reside. Then looking earnestly to see what it was that drew the glorious body which she beheld, she perceived it was drawn up as though by cords brighter than gold, until, entering into the open heavens, it could no longer be seen by her.