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The 1722 Cambridge edition of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is credited to John Smith, a priest attached to Durham Cathedral, but it would not have come to press if not for the work of Smith’s son, George, who completed the work after his father’s death in 1715. However the work was shared, the two produced a much better text than had previously been available in print.

More details about our copy here.

Whereas earlier editions and translations of Bede were based on one family of manuscripts (the C texts, as grouped by Colgrave and Mynors), Smith’s edition represented a much fuller sampling of manuscripts.  These included the particularly important Moore MS., one of the earliest extant versions of the text, donated by George I to the library of Cambridge in 1715.

Earlier editions of the Ecclesiastical History had accumulated many errors, omissions and spurious additions.  In the Preface to the Cambridge edition, George Smith describes his father’s frustration at this state of affairs, which he hoped to correct by consulting as many manuscripts as possible. However, he soon found that the manuscripts themselves varied widely, so that he was in danger of producing an unmanageable multitude of variants in the text. He solved this problem by a rigorous test of priority, trimming away much of the material from later copies to arrive at a usable critical text. The passage on methodology ends with a nice maxim for the editor of medieval manuscripts, which might have been coined by either Smith, or both:  Remove readings found only in later manuscripts, restore the readings from the oldest .

While the Smiths had access to a number of early copies of Bede, the Moore manuscript is the star of this show, and George Smith transcribes the passage from the Moore MS. which demonstrates its age (no later than 737). More information about the text generally and the Smith edition in particular can be found in the Colgrave and Mynors edition published by Oxford in 1969: S41537

Fans of the Venerable Bede in search of an immersive experience should take note of Bede’s World, a museum at the site of the former monastery of Jarrow, which includes an Anglo-Saxon demonstration farm and the ongoing excavation of various medieval buildings.