Written over a 30-year period by one of the leading authorities on the Early Middle Ages, this book is a collection of studies on Bede and early English Christian society. Its central concern is the establishment of a Christian community within a warrior society, and the way this was charted, not always sympathetically, by Bede and other writers of his time. A subsidiary theme is the emergence of a self-consciously English Church, which was in turn the foundation of an English state. The book will be welcomed for its systematic integration of the religious, intellectual, political and social history of the English in their first Christian centuries. It also includes the first map of all known or likely early Christian communities in England; and plans and illustrations of the finest early Christian church in England at Brixworth. An appendix considers Bede’s treatment of St. Hilda, the first great English female saint.