Before I get into that, let’s go back to my reject Penguins, the books at the bottom of the pile that I knew I would detest reading. Those that I left to the end of that particular pile. You remember how much I enjoyed reading Rothstein’s “History of the U.S.S.R.”? (No? Well, OK, it’s been two days) Now I am reporting on “A History of the English Church and People” by Bede, the Venerable Bede. I found it fascinating.

Of course, I don’t know what it would be like to read Bede in the original Church Latin. And I don’t know what it would be like to read Bede in the earliest translations into English. His English and my English have little in common. You know how hard it is to understand Chaucer’s English? That’s because Chaucer wrote in the 14th Century, almost 700 years ago. You think that’s a long time ago? Well, get this! Bede wrote over 600 years before that, dying in the year 740.

That brings me to writing and, in this case, to translation. The translator (presumably from the Latin) of the edition of Bede that I read is a man named Leo Sherley-Price. I looked him up and the Internet tells me he is 111 years old. I assume(d) that was wrong, so I looked up a notice of his death. But I didn’t find one. So……..maybe?

At any rate, I loved this translation. I have no idea if it is accurate or not, but boy is it readable. It is clear, intelligible, without unnecessary verbiage, and without arcane words. Is this Bede, or Sherley-Price? That I don’t know. Maybe both.

So how does one write right? Obviously, styles vary greatly. I know my style, and I am sticking to it. In fact, if I was asked to vary it, I would refuse. Not because my style is the greatest. But because it’s the only style I have.

If I was asked to write a description of a room, I would probably say something like: “It was a large room, with light coming in the window from the south, lighting up the otherwise somber decor in the late afternoons.” Someone else would talk about shape, and colors, and furniture styles, and wainscotting, and window niches, and internal shutters, and hardwood floors, and even how many Muslim women wove the Kurdish carpet under the tea caddy. I just can’t do that.

I am very straightforward in my writing. And I write like I speak. In fact, as I write, I am speaking to the reader in a voice I can hear. And I don’t want to turn the reader away by using too many adjectives, or words he/she won’t understand, or complicated sentence structures.

I also can’t write fiction – I could never write a novel or a short story (not that I want to). I once knew someone who told me that, as she drove from appointment to appointment, she would write mysteries in her head, developing plots and characters, and that sometimes she would turn them later into prose. I was aghast. To me, a plot is something you build a house on.

As a lawyer, I never thought much of myself as an author of court filings – briefs, memoranda of law, etc. I wrote them. I am sure they weren’t bad. But I never thought I was ready for truly prime time. My organization of material – my style – didn’t really fit that model.

And perhaps I couldn’t be a journalist. Or a speechwriter. I understand those two professions to be closely related. People leave one to go to the other, and back again. When I first came to Washington and had a job as a Special Assistant to a HUD Assistant Secretary, my work for him was filtered through his Executive Assistant, who wrote most of his speeches, and who had been, for fifteen years or more, a journalist before coming to HUD.

It was torture. I would be asked to write a piece of some sort – normally a position paper, or perhaps a write up of some project I had a role in. I would put together what I thought was a good piece, and turn it over to the Executive Assistant. He would then rewrite it – almost every word. Not adding or subtracting from the substance. It was just that his style and my style were worlds (perhaps universes) apart.

He told me that I didn’t write like a journalist, and I should. That meant, as I understood it, that while I put together my paper by laying out the pieces and ending up with a whole, what I should be doing is leading with the whole, and then adding the pieces afterword, from big pieces to small pieces. I heard what he was saying – but I couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t my style.

So I went in to my boss, the Assistant Secretary and told him of my dilemma. I told him that I wrote the way I wrote, and that for me to write something and then have the Executive Assistant rewrite it from scratch was a waste of everyone’s time, and I thought that I should quit. He told me that I didn’t have to quit – that he had a better idea. His better idea was that I should ignore the Executive Assistant and pass my work directly to him.

From then on, everything went swimmingly. I learned the Assistant Secretary’s style and mine were, in fact, pretty much the same. As to my relationship with the Executive Assistant from then on…..that’s another story.

And my style carried me pretty well through 40 years of law practice. No one ever told me that I needed to change the way I wrote, that I should be more flowery or descriptive, or my conclusions should come at the top of the page, not the bottom. And that’s my style today – nothing has changed.

Oh, yes, the Venerable (i.e., one who is venerated) Bede. Who was he anyway, and why didn’t he have a real name? Well, I don’t know any more than you do about the name, but he was an 8th century monk in Northumberland, who liked to fiddle around in archives and decided that it would be nice to write something about the origins of the Catholic faith on what we now know as the British Isles. No one had done that before – written about what transpired after the Romans left Britain up until his present time a few hundred years later. It was Bede who searched out the kings and queens, the battles and alliances, the Christianizing of various pagan groups, and the paganizing of various Christian groups as the pendulum swept back and forth.

For this reason, Bede is known as the Father of English History. For without him, there would be gaps (and indeed there still are gaps, because the archives he searched did not tell him everything about everywhere).

So, a few takeaways that I took away:

(1) We are certainly not talking about a United Kingdom. There are native tribes, the Picts, the Gaels and others, who form the Celts. Then there are those Germanic tribes who moved in with, or just following, the Romans – the Angles, and the Saxons, say. And then tribes original from Gaul – the Britons. What about the Romans themselves? They seem to have all left. And what about the Vikings? Aha….they haven’t come yet.

(2) Among the these tribes, there was a lot of fighting, mainly over territory, and there were royal marriages meant to avoid further conflict, just as you might suspect. Boundaries went back and forth, bad kings followed good kings, kings got murdered, some renounced their thrones to live simpler lives and so forth. A lot was going on back then.

(3) Christianity in some places came slowly and in some places took hold quickly. At times, a Christian king would be replaced by his pagan son, or a pagan king would invade a Christian kingdom and destroy the churches and monasteries.

(4) There was, at least as far as I knew, a surprisingly close connection, even in these times, between the Roman papacy and the clergy on the British Isles. Rome would appoint bishops, would send letters of instruction as to dogma and ways of living, many of which are reproduced by Bede (and by no one else), and clergy in the British Isles would travel to and from Rome for advice or approvals.

(5) There were heresies afoot and questions as to how best to deal with them. Original sin – did it or did it not exist? When is the right time to celebrate Easter?

(6) There was an extraordinary amount of disease, and epidemics that took the pious as well as the impious. Yet some people recovered, and some were never affected. Some clergy referred to by Bede lived well into their 80s.

(7) Church and monastery building was constant, with funding usually from royal families who had become Christian.

(8) And finally, boy were there a lot of miracles. These parts of Bede’s writing, also taking from archival sources, are obviously not viewed as historic, except to the extent that they reflect legends that were believed, or at least cited, during those days. But miracle cures, portends of the future, evil people being struck down. These things occurred over and over.

I’ll stop here. But my advice? If anyone ever approaches you on the street and says “Read the Venerable Bede, or I will kill you”, don’t gamble with your life. Find a comfortable chair. And enjoy.