Bede never quite made it to the sainthood. Like Bono, Stendhal and Svengali, he has the distinction of being known by just a single name, but he differs from these others in that his mononym is preceded by the honorific title "Venerable".
Bede lived nearly all his life at Jarrow monastery in the north of England, and it was from there that he exerted his enormous influence on the thinking of medieval Europe. It was there, too, that he died 1,263 years ago yesterday on May 26th, AD735.
It is largely thanks to Bede himself that we should describe the date of his demise in such a way. He popularised the Anno Domini system, the numbering of the years consecutively from the birth of Christ. The idea was first mooted in the 6th century by the quaintly named Dionysius Exiguus, or "Little Denis", but no one took much notice of it until it was advocated 200 years later by the highly respected Venerable Bede.
Bede was primarily a church historian. His magnum opus, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, provided a vivid description of the Dark Ages in England, and was based on careful research which skilfully separated fact from hearsay and tradition.
But he also dabbled in the world of science. Among his works was a learned treatise on meteorology, somewhat vaguely entitled De Natura Rerum (On the Nature of Things).
This clever cleric's meteorology, however, unlike his history and theology, was not entirely free of error; he claimed, for example, that thunder with a west wind signified a "very bad pestilence".
And his explanation for the rainbow reflected Aristotle a great deal more than it anticipated Newton: "The rainbow taketh colour from the four Elements; of fire he taketh the red colour in the overmost part; and of earth, green in the nethermost; and of the air a manner of brown colour; and of water some deal of blue in the middle."
He also recounts approvingly the somewhat farfetched advice given by a certain bishop that he knew to those about to undertake a voyage: "I know that when you go abroad you will meet with a storm and contrary winds; but remember to cast this oil I give you on to the sea, and then the wind shall cease immediately."
The Venerable Bede is also widely credited with another noteworthy accomplishment, although his reputation in this respect must be said to be apocryphal: he is reputed to have been the first person to be able to read without having to move his lips.