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Bede

Bede (Bēda ; 672/3 –26 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable (Beda Venerabilis), was an English monk, author and scholar. He was one of the greatest teachers and writers during the Early Middle Ages, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, gained him the title "The Father of English History". He served at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles.

Born on lands belonging to the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow in present-day Tyne and Wear, England, Bede was sent to Monkwearmouth at the age of seven and later joined Abbot Ceolfrith at Jarrow. Both of them survived a plague that struck in 686 and killed the majority of the population there. While Bede spent most of his life in the monastery, he travelled to several abbeys and monasteries across the British Isles, even visiting the archbishop of York and King Ceolwulf of Northumbria.

His ecumenical writings were extensive and included a number of Biblical commentaries and other theological works of exegetical erudition. Another important area of study for Bede was the academic discipline of computus, otherwise known to his contemporaries as the science of calculating calendar dates. One of the more important dates Bede tried to compute was Easter, an effort that was mired in controversy. He also helped popularize the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ (Anno Domini—in the year of our Lord), a practice which eventually became commonplace in medieval Europe. He is considered by many historians to be the most important scholar of antiquity for the period between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.

In 1899, Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. He is the only native of Great Britain to achieve this designation. Bede was moreover a skilled linguist and translator, and his work made the Latin and Greek writings of the early Church Fathers much more accessible to his fellow Anglo-Saxons, which contributed significantly to English Christianity. Bede's monastery had access to an impressive library which included works by Eusebius, Orosius, and many others.

Life

Almost everything that is known of Bede's life is contained in the last chapter of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a history of the church in England. It was completed in about 731, and Bede implies that he was then in his fifty-ninth year, which would give a birth date in 672 or 673. A minor source of information is the letter by his disciple Cuthbert (not to be confused with the saint, Cuthbert, who is mentioned in Bede's work) which relates Bede's death. Bede, in the Historia, gives his birthplace as "on the lands of this monastery". He is referring to the twin monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, in modern-day Wearside and Tyneside respectively. There is also a tradition that he was born at Monkton, two miles from the site where the monastery at Jarrow was later built. Bede says nothing of his origins, but his connections with men of noble ancestry suggest that his own family was well-to-do. Bede's first abbot was Benedict Biscop, and the names "Biscop" and "Beda" both appear in a list of the kings of Lindsey from around 800, further suggesting that Bede came from a noble family.

Bede's name reflects West Saxon Bīeda (Anglian Bēda). It is an Old English short name formed on the root of bēodan "to bid, command". The name also occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 501, as Bieda, one of the sons of the Saxon founder of Portsmouth. The Liber Vitae of Durham Cathedral names two priests with this name, one of whom is presumably Bede himself. Some manuscripts of the Life of Cuthbert, one of Bede's works, mention that Cuthbert's own priest was named Bede; it is possible that this priest is the other name listed in the Liber Vitae.

At the age of seven, Bede was sent as a puer oblatus to the monastery of Monkwearmouth by his family to be educated by Benedict Biscop and later by Ceolfrith. Bede does not say whether it was already intended at that point that he would be a monk. It was fairly common in Ireland at this time for young boys, particularly those of noble birth, to be fostered out as an oblate; the practice was also likely to have been common among the Germanic peoples in England. Monkwearmouth's sister monastery at Jarrow was founded by Ceolfrith in 682, and Bede probably transferred to Jarrow with Ceolfrith that year.

The dedication stone for the church has survived ; it is dated 23 April 685, and as Bede would have been required to assist with menial tasks in his day-to-day life it is possible that he helped in building the original church. In 686, plague broke out at Jarrow. The Life of Ceolfrith, written in about 710, records that only two surviving monks were capable of singing the full offices; one was Ceolfrith and the other a young boy, who according to the anonymous writer had been taught by Ceolfrith. The two managed to do the entire service of the liturgy until others could be trained. The young boy was almost certainly Bede, who would have been about 14.

When Bede was about 17 years old, Adomnán, the abbot of Iona Abbey, visited Monkwearmouth and Jarrow. Bede would probably have met the abbot during this visit, and it may be that Adomnán sparked Bede's interest in the Easter dating controversy. In about 692, in Bede's nineteenth year, Bede was ordained a deacon by his diocesan bishop, John, who was bishop of Hexham. The canonical age for the ordination of a deacon was 25; Bede's early ordination may mean that his abilities were considered exceptional, but it is also possible that the minimum age requirement was often disregarded. There might have been minor orders ranking below a deacon; but there is no record of whether Bede held any of these offices. In Bede's thirtieth year (about 702), he became a priest, with the ordination again performed by Bishop John.

In about 701 Bede wrote his first works, the De Arte Metrica and De Schematibus et Tropis; both were intended for use in the classroom. He continued to write for the rest of his life, eventually completing over 60 books, most of which have survived. Not all his output can be easily dated, and Bede may have worked on some texts over a period of many years. His last surviving work is a letter to Ecgbert of York, a former student, written in 734. A 6th-century Greek and Latin manuscript of Acts of the Apostles that is believed to have been used by Bede survives and is now in the Bodleian Library at University of Oxford. It is known as the Codex Laudianus.

Bede may have worked on some of the Latin Bibles that were copied at Jarrow, one of which, the Codex Amiatinus, is now held by the Laurentian Library in Florence. Bede was a teacher as well as a writer; he enjoyed music and was said to be accomplished as a singer and as a reciter of poetry in the vernacular. It is possible that he suffered a speech impediment, but this depends on a phrase in the introduction to his verse life of St Cuthbert. Translations of this phrase differ, and it is uncertain whether Bede intended to say that he was cured of a speech problem, or merely that he was inspired by the saint's works.

In 708, some monks at Hexham accused Bede of having committed heresy in his work De Temporibus. The standard theological view of world history at the time was known as the Six Ages of the World; in his book, Bede calculated the age of the world for himself, rather than accepting the authority of Isidore of Seville, and came to the conclusion that Christ had been born 3,952 years after the creation of the world, rather than the figure of over 5,000 years that was commonly accepted by theologians. The accusation occurred in front of the bishop of Hexham, Wilfrid, who was present at a feast when some drunken monks made the accusation. Wilfrid did not respond to the accusation, but a monk present relayed the episode to Bede, who replied within a few days to the monk, writing a letter setting forth his defence and asking that the letter also be read to Wilfrid. Bede had another brush with Wilfrid, for the historian says that he met Wilfrid sometime between 706 and 709 and discussed Æthelthryth, the abbess of Ely. Wilfrid had been present at the exhumation of her body in 695, and Bede questioned the bishop about the exact circumstances of the body and asked for more details of her life, as Wilfrid had been her advisor.

In 733, Bede travelled to York to visit Ecgbert, who was then bishop of York. The See of York was elevated to an archbishopric in 735, and it is likely that Bede and Ecgbert discussed the proposal for the elevation during his visit. Bede hoped to visit Ecgbert again in 734 but was too ill to make the journey. Bede also travelled to the monastery of Lindisfarne and at some point visited the otherwise unknown monastery of a monk named Wicthed [sic], a visit that is mentioned in a letter to that monk. Because of his widespread correspondence with others throughout the British Isles, and because many of the letters imply that Bede had met his correspondents, it is likely that Bede travelled to some other places, although nothing further about timing or locations can be guessed.

It seems certain that he did not visit Rome, however, as he did not mention it in the autobiographical chapter of his Historia Ecclesiastica. Nothhelm, a correspondent of Bede's who assisted him by finding documents for him in Rome, is known to have visited Bede, though the date cannot be determined beyond the fact that it was after Nothhelm's visit to Rome. Except for a few visits to other monasteries, his life was spent in a round of prayer, observance of the monastic discipline and study of the Sacred Scriptures. He was considered the most learned man of his time.

Bede died on the Feast of the Ascension, Thursday, 26 May 735, on the floor of his cell, singing "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit" and was buried at Jarrow. Cuthbert, a disciple of Bede's, wrote a letter to a Cuthwin (of whom nothing else is known), describing Bede's last days and his death. According to Cuthbert, Bede fell ill, "with frequent attacks of breathlessness but almost without pain", before Easter. On the Tuesday, two days before Bede died, his breathing became worse and his feet swelled. He continued to dictate to a scribe, however, and despite spending the night awake in prayer he dictated again the following day.

At three o'clock, according to Cuthbert, he asked for a box of his to be brought and distributed among the priests of the monastery "a few treasures" of his: "some pepper, and napkins, and some incense". That night he dictated a final sentence to the scribe, a boy named Wilberht, and died soon afterwards. The account of Cuthbert does not make entirely clear whether Bede died before midnight or after. However, by the reckoning of Bede's time, passage from the old day to the new occurred at sunset, not midnight, and Cuthbert is clear that he died after sunset. Thus, while his box was brought at three o'clock Wednesday afternoon of 25 May, by the time of the final dictation it was considered 26 May, although it might still have been 25 May in modern usage.

Cuthbert's letter also relates a five-line poem in the vernacular that Bede composed on his deathbed, known as "Bede's Death Song". It is the most-widely copied Old English poem and appears in 45 manuscripts, but its attribution to Bede is not certain—not all manuscripts name Bede as the author, and the ones that do are of later origin than those that do not. Bede's remains may have been transferred to Durham Cathedral in the 11th century; his tomb there was looted in 1541, but the contents were probably re-interred in the Galilee chapel at the cathedral.

One further oddity in his writings is that in one of his works, the Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, he writes in a manner that gives the impression he was married. The section in question is the only one in that work that is written in first-person view. Bede says: "Prayers are hindered by the conjugal duty because as often as I perform what is due to my wife I am not able to pray." Another passage, in the Commentary on Luke, also mentions a wife in the first person: "Formerly I possessed a wife in the lustful passion of desire and now I possess her in honourable sanctification and true love of Christ." The historian Benedicta Ward argued that these passages are Bede employing a rhetorical device.

Works
Bede wrote scientific, historical and theological works, reflecting the range of his writings from music and metrics to exegetical Scripture commentaries. He knew patristic literature, as well as Pliny the Elder, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace and other classical writers. He knew some Greek. Bede's scriptural commentaries employed the allegorical method of interpretation, and his history includes accounts of miracles, which to modern historians has seemed at odds with his critical approach to the materials in his history. Modern studies have shown the important role such concepts played in the world-view of Early Medieval scholars. Although Bede is mainly studied as a historian now, in his time his works on grammar, chronology, and biblical studies were as important as his historical and hagiographical works. The non-historical works contributed greatly to the Carolingian Renaissance. He has been credited with writing a penitential, though his authorship of this work is disputed.

Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Bede's best-known work is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in about 731. Bede was aided in writing this book by Albinus, abbot of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury. The first of the five books begins with some geographical background and then sketches the history of England, beginning with Caesar's invasion in 55 BC. A brief account of Christianity in Roman Britain, including the martyrdom of St Alban, is followed by the story of Augustine's mission to England in 597, which brought Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons.

The second book begins with the death of Gregory the Great in 604 and follows the further progress of Christianity in Kent and the first attempts to evangelise Northumbria. These ended in disaster when Penda, the pagan king of Mercia, killed the newly Christian Edwin of Northumbria at the Battle of Hatfield Chase in about 632. The setback was temporary, and the third book recounts the growth of Christianity in Northumbria under kings Oswald of Northumbria and Oswy. The climax of the third book is the account of the Council of Whitby, traditionally seen as a major turning point in English history. The fourth book begins with the consecration of Theodore as Archbishop of Canterbury and recounts Wilfrid's efforts to bring Christianity to the Kingdom of Sussex.

The fifth book brings the story up to Bede's day and includes an account of missionary work in Frisia and of the conflict with the British church over the correct dating of Easter. Bede wrote a preface for the work, in which he dedicates it to Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria. The preface mentions that Ceolwulf received an earlier draft of the book; presumably Ceolwulf knew enough Latin to understand it, and he may even have been able to read it. The preface makes it clear that Ceolwulf had requested the earlier copy, and Bede had asked for Ceolwulf's approval; this correspondence with the king indicates that Bede's monastery had connections among the Northumbrian nobility.

Models and style
Bede's stylistic models included some of the same authors from whom he drew the material for the earlier parts of his history. His introduction imitates the work of Orosius, and his title is an echo of Eusebius's Historia Ecclesiastica. Bede also followed Eusebius in taking the Acts of the Apostles as the model for the overall work: where Eusebius used the Acts as the theme for his description of the development of the church, Bede made it the model for his history of the Anglo-Saxon church. Bede quoted his sources at length in his narrative, as Eusebius had done. Bede also appears to have taken quotes directly from his correspondents at times. For example, he almost always uses the terms "Australes" and "Occidentales" for the South and West Saxons respectively, but in a passage in the first book he uses "Meridiani" and "Occidui" instead, as perhaps his informant had done. At the end of the work, Bede adds a brief autobiographical note; this was an idea taken from Gregory of Tours' earlier History of the Franks.

Bede's work as a hagiographer and his detailed attention to dating were both useful preparations for the task of writing the Historia Ecclesiastica. His interest in computus, the science of calculating the date of Easter, was also useful in the account he gives of the controversy between the British and Anglo-Saxon church over the correct method of obtaining the Easter date.

Bede is described by Michael Lapidge as "without question the most accomplished Latinist produced in these islands in the Anglo-Saxon period". His Latin has been praised for its clarity, but his style in the Historia Ecclesiastica is not simple. He knew rhetoric and often used figures of speech and rhetorical forms which cannot easily be reproduced in translation, depending as they often do on the connotations of the Latin words. However, unlike contemporaries such as Aldhelm, whose Latin is full of difficulties, Bede's own text is easy to read. In the words of Charles Plummer, one of the best-known editors of the Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede's Latin is "clear and limpid ... it is very seldom that we have to pause to think of the meaning of a sentence ... Alcuin rightly praises Bede for his unpretending style."

Intent
Bede's primary intention in writing the Historia Ecclesiastica was to show the growth of the united church throughout England. The native Britons, whose Christian church survived the departure of the Romans, earn Bede's ire for refusing to help convert the Anglo-Saxons; by the end of the Historia the English, and their church, are dominant over the Britons. This goal, of showing the movement towards unity, explains Bede's animosity towards the British method of calculating Easter: much of the Historia is devoted to a history of the dispute, including the final resolution at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Bede is also concerned to show the unity of the English, despite the disparate kingdoms that still existed when he was writing. He also wants to instruct the reader by spiritual example and to entertain, and to the latter end he adds stories about many of the places and people about which he wrote.

N. J. Higham argues that Bede designed his work to promote his reform agenda to Ceolwulf, the Northumbrian king. Bede painted a highly optimistic picture of the current situation in the Church, as opposed to the more pessimistic picture found in his private letters.

Bede's extensive use of miracles can prove difficult for readers who consider him a more or less reliable historian but do not accept the possibility of miracles. Yet both reflect an inseparable integrity and regard for accuracy and truth, expressed in terms both of historical events and of a tradition of Christian faith that continues. Bede, like Gregory the Great whom Bede quotes on the subject in the Historia, felt that faith brought about by miracles was a stepping stone to a higher, truer faith, and that as a result miracles had their place in a work designed to instruct.

Omissions and biases
Bede is somewhat reticent about the career of Wilfrid, a contemporary and one of the most prominent clerics of his day. This may be because Wilfrid's opulent lifestyle was uncongenial to Bede's monastic mind; it may also be that the events of Wilfrid's life, divisive and controversial as they were, simply did not fit with Bede's theme of the progression to a unified and harmonious church.

Bede's account of the early migrations of the Angles and Saxons to England omits any mention of a movement of those peoples across the English Channel from Britain to Brittany described by Procopius, who was writing in the sixth century. Frank Stenton describes this omission as "a scholar's dislike of the indefinite"; traditional material that could not be dated or used for Bede's didactic purposes had no interest for him.

Bede was a Northumbrian, and this tinged his work with a local bias. The sources to which he had access gave him less information about the west of England than for other areas. He says relatively little about the achievements of Mercia and Wessex, omitting, for example, any mention of Boniface, a West Saxon missionary to the continent of some renown and of whom Bede had almost certainly heard, though Bede does discuss Northumbrian missionaries to the continent. He is also parsimonious in his praise for Aldhelm, a West Saxon who had done much to convert the native Britons to the Roman form of Christianity. He lists seven kings of the Anglo-Saxons whom he regards as having held imperium, or overlordship; only one king of Wessex, Ceawlin, is listed as Bretwalda, and none from Mercia, though elsewhere he acknowledges the secular power several of the Mercians held. Historian Robin Fleming states that he was so hostile to Mercia because Northumbria had been diminished by Mercian power that he consulted no Mercian informants and included no stories about its saints.

Bede relates the story of Augustine's mission from Rome, and tells how the British clergy refused to assist Augustine in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. This, combined with Gildas's negative assessment of the British church at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, led Bede to a very critical view of the native church. However, Bede ignores the fact that at the time of Augustine's mission, the history between the two was one of warfare and conquest, which, in the words of Barbara Yorke, would have naturally "curbed any missionary impulses towards the Anglo-Saxons from the British clergy."

Use of Anno Domini
At the time Bede wrote the Historia Ecclesiastica, there were two common ways of referring to dates. One was to use indictions, which were 15-year cycles, counting from 312 AD. There were three different varieties of indiction, each starting on a different day of the year. The other approach was to use regnal years—the reigning Roman emperor, for example, or the ruler of whichever kingdom was under discussion. This meant that in discussing conflicts between kingdoms, the date would have to be given in the regnal years of all the kings involved. Bede used both these approaches on occasion but adopted a third method as his main approach to dating: the Anno Domini method invented by Dionysius Exiguus. Although Bede did not invent this method, his adoption of it and his promulgation of it in De Temporum Ratione, his work on chronology, is the main reason it is now so widely used. Bede's Easter table, contained in De Temporum Ratione, was developed from Dionysius Exiguus' Easter table.

Assessment
The Historia Ecclesiastica was copied often in the Middle Ages, and about 160 manuscripts containing it survive. About half of those are located on the European continent, rather than in the British Isles. Most of the 8th- and 9th-century texts of Bede's Historia come from the northern parts of the Carolingian Empire. This total does not include manuscripts with only a part of the work, of which another 100 or so survive. It was printed for the first time between 1474 and 1482, probably at Strasbourg.

Modern historians have studied the Historia extensively, and several editions have been produced. For many years, early Anglo-Saxon history was essentially a retelling of the Historia, but recent scholarship has focused as much on what Bede did not write as what he did. The belief that the Historia was the culmination of Bede's works, the aim of all his scholarship, was a belief common among historians in the past but is no longer accepted by most scholars.

Modern historians and editors of Bede have been lavish in their praise of his achievement in the Historia Ecclesiastica. Stenton regards it as one of the "small class of books which transcend all but the most fundamental conditions of time and place", and regards its quality as dependent on Bede's "astonishing power of co-ordinating the fragments of information which came to him through tradition, the relation of friends, or documentary evidence ... In an age where little was attempted beyond the registration of fact, he had reached the conception of history." Patrick Wormald describes him as "the first and greatest of England's historians".

The Historia Ecclesiastica has given Bede a high reputation, but his concerns were different from those of a modern writer of history. His focus on the history of the organisation of the English church, and on heresies and the efforts made to root them out, led him to exclude the secular history of kings and kingdoms except where a moral lesson could be drawn or where they illuminated events in the church. Besides the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the medieval writers William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth used his works as sources and inspirations. Early modern writers, such as Polydore Vergil and Matthew Parker, the Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, also utilised the Historia, and his works were used by both Protestant and Catholic sides in the wars of religion.

Some historians have questioned the reliability of some of Bede's accounts. One historian, Charlotte Behr, thinks that the Historia's account of the arrival of the Germanic invaders in Kent should not be considered to relate what actually happened, but rather relates myths that were current in Kent during Bede's time.

It is likely that Bede's work, because it was so widely copied, discouraged others from writing histories and may even have led to the disappearance of manuscripts containing older historical works.

Chronicles
As Chapter 66 of his On the Reckoning of Time, in 725 Bede wrote the Greater Chronicle (chronica maiora), which sometimes circulated as a separate work. For recent events the Chronicle, like his Ecclesiastical History, relied upon Gildas, upon a version of the Liber Pontificalis current at least to the papacy of Pope Sergius I (687–701), and other sources. For earlier events he drew on Eusebius's Chronikoi Kanones. The dating of events in the Chronicle is inconsistent with his other works, using the era of creation, the Anno Mundi.

Hagiography
His other historical works included lives of the abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, as well as verse and prose lives of St Cuthbert, an adaptation of Paulinus of Nola's Life of St Felix, and a translation of the Greek Passion of St Anastasius. He also created a listing of saints, the Martyrology.

Theological works
In his own time, Bede was as well known for his biblical commentaries, and for his exegetical and other theological works. The majority of his writings were of this type and covered the Old Testament and the New Testament. Most survived the Middle Ages, but a few were lost. It was for his theological writings that he earned the title of Doctor Anglorum and why he was declared a saint.

Bede synthesised and transmitted the learning from his predecessors, as well as made careful, judicious innovation in knowledge (such as recalculating the age of the Earth—for which he was censured before surviving the heresy accusations and eventually having his views championed by Archbishop Ussher in the sixteenth century—see below) that had theological implications. In order to do this, he learned Greek and attempted to learn Hebrew. He spent time reading and rereading both the Old and the New Testaments. He mentions that he studied from a text of Jerome's Vulgate, which itself was from the Hebrew text.

He also studied both the Latin and the Greek Fathers of the Church. In the monastic library at Jarrow were numerous books by theologians, including works by Basil, Cassian, John Chrysostom, Isidore of Seville, Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Pope Gregory I, Ambrose of Milan, Cassiodorus, and Cyprian. He used these, in conjunction with the Biblical texts themselves, to write his commentaries and other theological works.

He had a Latin translation by Evagrius of Athanasius's Life of Antony and a copy of Sulpicius Severus' Life of St Martin. He also used lesser known writers, such as Fulgentius, Julian of Eclanum, Tyconius, and Prosper of Aquitaine. Bede was the first to refer to Jerome, Augustine, Pope Gregory and Ambrose as the four Latin Fathers of the Church. It is clear from Bede's own comments that he felt his calling was to explain to his students and readers the theology and thoughts of the Church Fathers.

Bede also wrote homilies, works written to explain theology used in worship services. He wrote homilies on the major Christian seasons such as Advent, Lent, or Easter, as well as on other subjects such as anniversaries of significant events.

Both types of Bede's theological works circulated widely in the Middle Ages. Several of his biblical commentaries were incorporated into the Glossa Ordinaria, an 11th-century collection of biblical commentaries. Some of Bede's homilies were collected by Paul the Deacon, and they were used in that form in the Monastic Office. Boniface used Bede's homilies in his missionary efforts on the continent.

Bede sometimes included in his theological books an acknowledgement of the predecessors on whose works he drew. In two cases he left instructions that his marginal notes, which gave the details of his sources, should be preserved by the copyist, and he may have originally added marginal comments about his sources to others of his works. Where he does not specify, it is still possible to identify books to which he must have had access by quotations that he uses. A full catalogue of the library available to Bede in the monastery cannot be reconstructed, but it is possible to tell, for example, that Bede was very familiar with the works of Virgil.

There is little evidence that he had access to any other of the pagan Latin writers—he quotes many of these writers, but the quotes are almost always found in the Latin grammars that were common in his day, one or more of which would certainly have been at the monastery. Another difficulty is that manuscripts of early writers were often incomplete: it is apparent that Bede had access to Pliny's Encyclopaedia, for example, but it seems that the version he had was missing book xviii, since he did not quote from it in his De temporum ratione.Bede's works included Commentary on Revelation, Commentary on the Catholic Epistles, Commentary on Acts, Reconsideration on the Books of Acts, On the Gospel of Mark, On the Gospel of Luke, and Homilies on the Gospels. At the time of his death he was working on a translation of the Gospel of John into English. He did this for the last 40 days of his life. When the last passage had been translated he said: "All is finished." The works dealing with the Old Testament included Commentary on Samuel, Commentary on Genesis, Commentaries on Ezra and Nehemiah, On the Temple, On the Tabernacle, Commentaries on Tobit, Commentaries on Proverbs, Commentaries on the Song of Songs, Commentaries on the Canticle of Habakkuk. The works on Ezra, the tabernacle and the temple were especially influenced by Gregory the Great's writings.

Historical and astronomical chronology
De temporibus, or On Time, written in about 703, provides an introduction to the principles of Easter computus. This was based on parts of Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, and Bede also included a chronology of the world which was derived from Eusebius, with some revisions based on Jerome's translation of the Bible. In about 723, Bede wrote a longer work on the same subject, On the Reckoning of Time, which was influential throughout the Middle Ages. He also wrote several shorter letters and essays discussing specific aspects of computus.

On the Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione) included an introduction to the traditional ancient and medieval view of the cosmos, including an explanation of how the spherical Earth influenced the changing length of daylight, of how the seasonal motion of the Sun and Moon influenced the changing appearance of the new moon at evening twilight. Bede also records the effect of the moon on tides. He shows that the twice-daily timing of tides is related to the Moon and that the lunar monthly cycle of spring and neap tides is also related to the Moon's position. He goes on to note that the times of tides vary along the same coast and that the water movements cause low tide at one place when there is high tide elsewhere. Since the focus of his book was the computus, Bede gave instructions for computing the date of Easter from the date of the Paschal full moon, for calculating the motion of the Sun and Moon through the zodiac, and for many other calculations related to the calendar. He gives some information about the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar.

Any codex of Bede's Easter table is normally found together with a codex of his De temporum ratione. His Easter table, being an exact extension of Dionysius Exiguus' Paschal table and covering the time interval AD 532–1063, contains a 532-year Paschal cycle based on the so-called classical Alexandrian 19-year lunar cycle, being the close variant of bishop Theophilus' 19-year lunar cycle proposed by Annianus and adopted by bishop Cyril of Alexandria around AD 425. The ultimate similar (but rather different) predecessor of this Metonic 19-year lunar cycle is the one invented by Anatolius around AD 260.

For calendric purposes, Bede made a new calculation of the age of the world since the creation, which he dated as 3952 BC. Because of his innovations in computing the age of the world, he was accused of heresy at the table of Bishop Wilfrid, his chronology being contrary to accepted calculations. Once informed of the accusations of these "lewd rustics", Bede refuted them in his Letter to Plegwin.

In addition to these works on astronomical timekeeping, he also wrote De natura rerum, or On the Nature of Things, modelled in part after the work of the same title by Isidore of Seville. His works were so influential that late in the ninth century Notker the Stammerer, a monk of the Monastery of St Gall in Switzerland, wrote that "God, the orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the sixth day of the world has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth".

Educational works
Bede wrote some works designed to help teach grammar in the abbey school. One of these was De arte metrica, a discussion of the composition of Latin verse, drawing on previous grammarians' work. It was based on Donatus's De pedibus and Servius's De finalibus and used examples from Christian poets as well as Virgil. It became a standard text for the teaching of Latin verse during the next few centuries. Bede dedicated this work to Cuthbert, apparently a student, for he is named "beloved son" in the dedication, and Bede says "I have laboured to educate you in divine letters and ecclesiastical statutes." De orthographia is a work on orthography, designed to help a medieval reader of Latin with unfamiliar abbreviations and words from classical Latin works. Although it could serve as a textbook, it appears to have been mainly intended as a reference work. The date of composition for both of these works is unknown.

De schematibus et tropis sacrae scripturae discusses the Bible's use of rhetoric. Bede was familiar with pagan authors such as Virgil, but it was not considered appropriate to teach biblical grammar from such texts, and Bede argues for the superiority of Christian texts in understanding Christian literature. Similarly, his text on poetic metre uses only Christian poetry for examples.

Latin poetry
A number of poems have been attributed to Bede. His poetic output has been systematically surveyed and edited by Michael Lapidge, who concluded that the following works belong to Bede: the Versus de die iudicii ("verses on the day of Judgement", found complete in 33 manuscripts and fragmentarily in 10); the metrical Vita Sancti Cudbercti ("Life of St Cuthbert"); and two collections of verse mentioned in the Historia ecclesiastica V.24.2. Bede names the first of these collections as "librum epigrammatum heroico metro siue elegiaco" ("a book of epigrams in the heroic or elegiac metre"), and much of its content has been reconstructed by Lapidge from scattered attestations under the title Liber epigrammatum. The second is named as "liber hymnorum diuerso metro siue rythmo" ("a book of hymns, diverse in metre or rhythm"); this has been reconstructed by Lapidge as containing ten liturgical hymns, one paraliturgical hymn (for the Feast of St Æthelthryth), and four other hymn-like compositions.

Vernacular poetry
According to his disciple Cuthbert, Bede was doctus in nostris carminibus ("learned in our songs"). Cuthbert's letter on Bede's death, the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae, moreover, commonly is understood to indicate that Bede composed a five-line vernacular poem known to modern scholars as Bede's Death Song "And he used to repeat that sentence from St Paul 'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,' and many other verses of Scripture, urging us thereby to awake from the slumber of the soul by thinking in good time of our last hour. And in our own language—for he was familiar with English poetry—speaking of the soul's dread departure from the body:"

As Opland notes, however, it is not entirely clear that Cuthbert is attributing this text to Bede: most manuscripts of the latter do not use a finite verb to describe Bede's presentation of the song, and the theme was relatively common in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. The fact that Cuthbert's description places the performance of the Old English poem in the context of a series of quoted passages from Sacred Scripture might be taken as evidence simply that Bede also cited analogous vernacular texts.

On the other hand, the inclusion of the Old English text of the poem in Cuthbert's Latin letter, the observation that Bede "was learned in our song," and the fact that Bede composed a Latin poem on the same subject all point to the possibility of his having written it. By citing the poem directly, Cuthbert seems to imply that its particular wording was somehow important, either since it was a vernacular poem endorsed by a scholar who evidently frowned upon secular entertainment or because it is a direct quotation of Bede's last original composition.

Veneration

There is no evidence for cult being paid to Bede in England in the 8th century. One reason for this may be that he died on the feast day of Augustine of Canterbury. Later, when he was venerated in England, he was either commemorated after Augustine on 26 May, or his feast was moved to 27 May. However, he was venerated outside England, mainly through the efforts of Boniface and Alcuin, both of whom promoted the cult on the continent. Boniface wrote repeatedly back to England during his missionary efforts, requesting copies of Bede's theological works.

Alcuin, who was taught at the school set up in York by Bede's pupil Ecgbert, praised Bede as an example for monks to follow and was instrumental in disseminating Bede's works to all of Alcuin's friends. Bede's cult became prominent in England during the 10th-century revival of monasticism and by the 14th century had spread to many of the cathedrals of England. Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester was a particular devotee of Bede's, dedicating a church to him in 1062, which was Wulfstan's first undertaking after his consecration as bishop.

His body was 'translated' (the ecclesiastical term for relocation of relics) from Jarrow to Durham Cathedral around 1020, where it was placed in the same tomb with St Cuthbert. Later Bede's remains were moved to a shrine in the Galilee Chapel at Durham Cathedral in 1370. The shrine was destroyed during the English Reformation, but the bones were reburied in the chapel. In 1831 the bones were dug up and then reburied in a new tomb, which is still there. Other relics were claimed by York, Glastonbury and Fulda.

His scholarship and importance to Catholicism were recognised in 1899 when the Vatican declared him a Doctor of the Church. He is the only Englishman named a Doctor of the Church. He is also the only Englishman in Dante's Paradise (Paradiso X.130), mentioned among theologians and doctors of the church in the same canto as Isidore of Seville and the Scot Richard of St Victor.

His feast day was included in the General Roman Calendar in 1899, for celebration on 27 May rather than on his date of death, 26 May, which was then the feast day of St Augustine of Canterbury. He is venerated in the Catholic Church, in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church (United States) on 25 May, and in the Eastern Orthodox Church, with a feast day on 27 May (Βεδέα του Ομολογητού).

Bede became known as Venerable Bede (Latin: Beda Venerabilis) by the 9th century because of his holiness, but this was not linked to consideration for sainthood by the Catholic Church. According to a legend, the epithet was miraculously supplied by angels, thus completing his unfinished epitaph. It is first utilised in connection with Bede in the 9th century, where Bede was grouped with others who were called "venerable" at two ecclesiastical councils held at Aachen in 816 and 836. Paul the Deacon then referred to him as venerable consistently. By the 11th and 12th century, it had become commonplace.

Modern legacy
Bede's reputation as a historian, based mostly on the Historia Ecclesiastica, remains strong. Thomas Carlyle called him "the greatest historical writer since Herodotus". Walter Goffart says of Bede that he "holds a privileged and unrivalled place among first historians of Christian Europe". He is patron of Beda College in Rome which prepares older men for the Roman Catholic priesthood. His life and work have been celebrated with the annual Jarrow Lecture, held at St Paul's Church, Jarrow, since 1958. Bede has been described as a progressive scholar, who made Latin and Greek teachings accessible to his fellow Anglo-Saxons.

Jarrow Hall (formerly Bede's World), in Jarrow, is a museum that celebrates the history of Bede and other parts of English heritage, on the site where he lived.

Bede Metro station, part of the Tyne and Wear Metro light rail network, is named after him.

title: Bede


text:
Talk:BCPL

Untitled
I would like to look over a 32K BCPL compiler. If you could record links to some of your findings here, It would be nice.

My 32KB compiler example is Acornsoft's BCPL for the Acorn Model B Microcomputer. It is proprietary, copyright, and only available in binary form. Alas. The 1980 Book (see head article) has the source for the compiler front end (lexer and syntax analyser).

Martin Richards has released a distribution of his BCPL compiler (compiling to CINTCODE I believe): http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/BCPL.html --drj

I'd be a bit surprised if a full BCPL would run in 16K, though maybe someone did a stripped down version that would. The early C compilers ran in about 12K. Dennis Ritchie has said that some BCPL features were left out of B and C because there just wasn't room. (Of course C has since grown.) That said, the Jargon file is usually very accurate and well researched, despite its dubious and often strange style. I would trust it much more than other more sober sources, simply because it was written by people who were there, and cared, and in many cases have otherwise unavailable evidence stored in their attic.

BCPL is a very simple language (you should read the book!). 16KB sounds _about_ right for a well written hand-crafted compiler. It might be multipass in that little memory. Certainly it should be easier to write a BCPL compiler than even an early C compiler. I'd just like to know which one. --drj

Two Things
1. I'd been taught BCPL stands for 'Boston Cambridge Programming Language'. 2. I seriously take offence you refer to code blocks as 'curly bracket programming'. BWK calls those brackets braces as I remember and it's just a REALLY DUMB MONIKER. A C preprocessor could effectively define away curly braces and the importance is not in the character but in the function - namely new automatic variables can be declared and they will only have scope within those curly braces. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.5.7.87 (talk) 23:59, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Another Thing
I'd heard that BCPL stood for "Bootstrap Cambridge Programming Language", and was an attempt at a low-level language that didn't require a (complicated) linker, but had higher level constructs that would make it usable for developing higher level languages, to wit the CPL (programming language). Having used it I find that more plausible than other definitions (K. Cameron) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.169.85.47 (talk) 08:21, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

I was sure it stands for Basic Combined Programming Language.

BCPL compiler mechanism
The BCPL compiler was always 2-pass - the first pass (Lex) turned the source into O-Code which was a virtual stack-based machine. The front end was of course portable. The back end read OCode and produced machine code (or sometimes assembler).

There was a clever porting mechanism using an interpretive code called INTCODE. Part of the compiler kit included a back end that converted O-code to INTCODE and you got a copy of several programs including the compiler already in INTCODE. You wrote an interpreter for INTCODE (it was very simple) in whatever language you liked say C or even BASIC. This was tested with the simpler programs and then with the INTCODE version of the compiler.

At this point you had a slow but functional compiler that enabled you to start writing the back end in BCPL, taking O-Code and converting it to machine code. You started at O-Code and not INTCODE because it allowed you to make better use of the target instruction set.

BCPL didn't use any sort of external linking: all variables and functions that were to be available in another module had to be declared as "Global" and allocated a number from 100 upwards. Numbers less than 100 were for library calls. When a BCPL program runs, the init sequence allocates a Global Vector (simple array) and if any functions are declared as global then code is generated in each module which will write the address of the function into the vector. This simple dynamic linking worked very well, and even allowed simple overlay mechanisms by using a library command called "LoadSeg" which loaded code and initialised the global vectors for the routines there. Once (say) the initialisation modules had run, you called UnLoadSeg to get rid of the code you don't need and call LoadSeg again on what you want next.

This also allowed Tripos/AmigaDOS to have CLI commands that were very small dynamically linked code LoadSeg'ed by the CLI.

- Dr Tim King

O-Code
So what was O-Code? It did exist, I have a document describing it. Was it an earlier intermediate code preceding INTCODE/CINTCODE?

This is what I have from the CORAL66 compiler documentation, which compiled to the same intermediate code and used BCPL's back end on the PDP-11:

"This document describes Ocode, the intermediate code of various compilers and codegenerators used at RMCS and elsewhere. Ocode is a simple intermediate code that forms the interface between front and back ends of a compiler. It is at a fairly low level, being largely linear, and with type mapping and address translation already performed. The version described here is a development of the Ocode designed by Martin Richards for the BCPL compiler.  Currently, compilers to Ocode exist for Algol60, BCPL, Coral66, Fortran, and RTL/2. There are codegenerators for many machines, including Intel 8080 and 8086, MC68000, DEC PDP-11 and VAX-11, CA LSI-2 and NM4, DG Nova, Interdata 7/16 and 8/32. Ocode is intended as an intermediate code between a compiler and a codegenerator.  It  is not  designed for interpretive execution, and to some extent is not suited to it.  Further discussion of possible compiler and codegenerator strategies may be found in the companion documents 'Programming the Ocode Machine' and 'Codegenerating Ocode'."

Added later... Here's what I found about OCODE and CINTCODE: http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/dev/lang/BCPL4Amiga.readme

By the way, 16K and 32K compilers were common for Acorn's BBC micro - both full ISO Pascal and a less than full C fitted into that much space (I QA tested the C compiler while I was learning C - the QA testing threw up a lot of problems that would only bite a beginner but never someone who actually knew the language!); the Pascal compiler (the only one for which I have personal knowlege of the innards) did it by tweaking the intermediate code to be as dense as possible, often at the expense of speed. One EPROM (16K) held the compiled compiler in intermediate code format; the other EPROM contained the interpreter (and a screen text editor throw in for good measure). I expect BCPL was implemented similarly. I wouldn't swear on it in court but I think it was an Arthur Norman production? (preceding the excellent NorCroft C compiler for the ARM, co-written with Alan Mycroft)

- Graham Toal (PS: Hi Tim, I remember you from Cambridge)

By way of information an INTCODE BCPL2 with 16bit word sizes occupies about 20K of INTCODE plus data. CINTCODE is supposed to be more compact so a 16K ROM holding the CINTCODE and the rest in RAM seems completely in order. The interpreter code is much more compact than native assembler in most cases. 86.11.47.92 (talk) 16:43, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

The BBC Micro implementation
The BCPL ROM and attendent tools were written by John Richards (brother to Martin, and who founded Richards Computer Products) and associates. The ROM was a classic BBC Micro ROM image containing a CINTCODE interpreter, command-line interface, and a few built-in commands. The compiler was not in the ROM but was run from disk, and was multi-pass. You could even run the compiler from cassette tape but I doubt anyone ever did without going mad; you would have to reload the entire program for each and every compilation. CINTCODE is loosely based in O-Code but was explictly designed to take up a little space as possible in disk or memory. I think John had written a CP/M port for the Z80 and this was used to bootstrap the 6502 version for the Beeb.

There were additional tools that permitted "standalone" versions of applications by binding a copy of the runtime with the compiled cintcode. Not very popular.

RCP also built 8086-based compilers for internal use but I don't think they were sold on. One was a 16-bit Cintcode compiler that was very effective for cross-compilation. The other was a 32-bit cintcode environment for DOS.

RCP can be found on the web at www.rcp.co.uk but I doubt there are many BCPL afficionados left...

Rob Burbidge (ne Seeman), former RCP employee

Just to reply to Rob, I too (Scott Earle) am a former RCP employee (Hi Rob!) who did some development work in BCPL, although all mine was in 1987. My memory tells me that the original implementation of BCPL was written by John Richards and another early RCP employee, who both also wrote the manual that accompanied the Acornsoft BCPL package.

The other early employee was Christopher Jobson, if you search Ebay you can still pick up copies of the user guide. (Zoë Jobson) — Preceding unsigned comment added by ZoeJobson (talk • contribs) 13:11, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

When developing software for production, we used to have tools to cross compile from an IBM PC (I used to use an IBM PC/XT 286 and an IBM PC/AT, as well as a BBC Master 128) to ROM images that were run from "sideways RAM" for testing on the target machine before being blown to EPROM for release. These images were copied to the target machine using ECONET. Interestingly, the ROM image contained the CINTCODE interpreter, that would run when the machine started - and also the compiled program. In this configuration, the CINTCODE interpreter was set up to automatically run the compiled program when it was started. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SWW (talk • contribs) 13:00, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Intro etc
I've tweaked the intro a bit, and the bit on AmigaOS. Kickstart is probably the only remaining part of AmigaOS in BCPL, but the earliest versions of the command-line interface and the disk operating system (prior to the Kickstart 2.0 distribution) were written in BCPL. There is more about this in the relevant article. --Tony Sidaway 20:15, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Hungarian Notation
I'm surprised to see the assertion that Hungarian notation was developed for BCPL. While it would be useful in any typeless language, I've always understood Hungarian notation to be developed for C by Simonyi at Microsoft; the pre-ANSI C compilers used in early/mid 1980s had a fairly weak type system. Would be interesting to verify if BCPL was the originator of Hungarian. Certainly the Richards & W-S book doesn't use Hungarian. 62.172.213.137 09:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

The wording could perhaps be clearer. Hungarian notation was developed by Charles Simonyi at Xerox when he was working in BCPL. So it was first used in BCPL, but it was certainly not ubiquitous in BCPL development. DuncanBooth 11:41, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Amiga
The article lies "significant parts of AmigaOS including Kickstart". I'm sorry but that is bullcrap. Kickstart is the ROM chip of the Amiga, which contains a whole lot more than the DOS, which is what was written in BCPL. --194.251.240.113 16:21, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I tend to agree with the above. The Amiga DOS came from TRIPOS which was written in BCPL. Kickstart, which was originally diskbased, and loaded at boot-up contained EXEC and other things necessary for the Amiga's multi-tasking OS. EXEC was most likely written in C, but could probably be confirmed by Carl Sassenrath the EXEC author. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.202.159.16 (talk) 00:50, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

LOL. I came here to point out the exact same thing. Only AmigaDOS was written in BCPL - not the other parts of the Kickstart ROM. Amazing that two years later no-one has bothered to correct the article, which again goes to show just how much Wikipedia sucks, with lousy arrogant stupid editors. Wikipedia ci w dupe! --88.194.248.157 (talk) 13:37, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

 * So fix it instead of just complaining here. Rlw (Talk) 15:47, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Early computers had a 16-bit word??
Does anyone have any evidence of this?

I used BCPL primarily on a DEC-10 - which had a 36 (yes, thirty-six) bit word - while working on Bartle's MUD. But then it had drum memory, and hard-wired transistor memory.

I think the PDP11 was 16 bit.

Qixil (talk) 00:28, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Word lengths were highly variable. Much of the development of BCPL was done on the Titan, which had a 48-bit word. It was the early minicomputers, like the PDP-8, that made the 16-bit word length popular.

Mhkay (talk) 11:27, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

No, the PDP-8 was 12 bit (and I've still got my old 8-L down in the junk room!) Bob aka Linuxlad (talk) 12:59, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

PDP11 was a standard 8bit addressable machine with 16bit instructions. It was that which lead in part to the move from B to C, because B inherited the BCPL notion of machine word sized objects which then had to be faked up on the 11 just as on the Amiga.

16bit was actually quite unusual until the IBM/360 settled things down. 36bits is a magic number because 36bits was the same precision as existing mechanical calculating tools, 86.11.47.92 (talk) 17:25, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Dennis Ritchie's preface
Dennis Ritchie's introduction to the BCPL Reference Manual expresses surprise that there should be two very similar versions of the manual produced on different typewriters. I would think it likely that it was not produced on a typewriter at all, but on a Friden Flexowriter. This was mechanically very similar to a typewriter, but was driven by paper tape. The master copy would have been edited on the Titan computer, output in paper tape form, and the tape then fed through the Flexowriter to produce hard copy. This was still the standard way of producing documents in Cambridge when I produced my PhD thesis in 1975, and I'm sure it had been around for a few years. The Flexowriter had a repertoire of punctuation characters that was different from the ASCII set we have become used to, and it certainly included the section symbol §. Mhkay (talk) 11:07, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

What's in a name?
This may or may not be a POV violation, but here goes anyway.....

I encountered BCPL at Sydney University in 1974 during lectures by a Dr Jan Hext and Dr Alan Bromley (not sure of either spelling as this was a long time ago). But I do remember clearly that Jan said that BCPL was an abbreviation of: "Before C Programming Language". For what that is worth.

What's in a name?
This may or may not be a POV violation, but here goes anyway.....

I encountered BCPL at Sydney University in 1974 during lectures by a Dr Jan Hext and Dr Alan Bromley (not sure of either spelling as this was a long time ago). But I do remember clearly that Jan said that BCPL was an abbreviation of: "Before C Programming Language". For what that is worth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Old wombat (talk • contribs) 08:26, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

anachronism
Whether a POV problem or not, this is an anachronism. BCPL pre-dates B which pre-dates C (I think it safe to assume that Hext was joking.) — Robert Greer (talk) 02:41, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

My recollection of Jan was that he had little or no sense of humour, but in any event, I'm going to let this go. Thanx for the repl, though. Old_Wombat (talk) 12:02, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Naming, again
I'm pretty certain that the "BCPL: The Language And its compiler" states that B stands for Basic, as in "Basic CPL". Frankly, that should be an end to the debate, since Martin Richards ought to know. I've also heard it described as "Britain's Crummiest Programming Language" but that was very much an in-joke among the enthusiasts of the language Rob Burbidge (talk) 20:20, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Canonical Syntax Page in Memorandum M-352 is missing
See Reference 2: "The BCPL Reference Manual'' (Memorandum M-352, Project MAC, Cambridge, July, 1967).

For some reason page 5 is missing from this pdf copy of the memorandum. Can anyone locate it? It is frustrating because it contains the (single page??) canonical syntax description (section 2.2 is clearly marked in the contents). Zteve (talk) 10:22, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Dennis Ritchie's Web site describes Karl Kleine's scan that you link to, and compares it with a different version of the same memo that DMR scanned. In other words, these are two scans of slightly different documents. DMR's version has section 2.2. On the other hand, Karl Kleine's version has the example programs.

Note that DMR has both TIFF and PDF formats. The PDF format is missing a few characters due to modern font problems. Dpeschel (talk) 02:31, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Is BCPL really a "curly bracket language"?
I couldn't find any historic reference that BCPL was a "curly bracket language".

The BCPL Reference Manual (July 21, 1967) define three type of "bracket delimiters": S, R and SECT. However a BCPL implementations could have a hardware representation were the bracket could be represented as characters or set of characters using preprocessor rules. At the time, common "bracket characters" were. The Revised BCPL Manual (1979) use  block delimiters.

Of course, BCPL could use curly bracket but as most of the era TTYs and terminal keyboards, especially the popular Teletype and "EBCDIC-apped" IBM ones, didn't always featured curlies, other characters were prefered.

So apparently BCPL never was an explicit "curly bracket language", use of curly brackets only seems to appear in later implementations. But by then curly brackets were already in use other languages, like B and C, which were explicitly using curly brackets and defined digraphs for non-ASCII compliant TTY/Keyboard (cf. http://www.thinkage.ca/gcos/expl/b/tuto/tuto.html#AppendixC, undated).

Is anyone have more information on the subject? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.57.177.102 (talk) 10:47, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Only some dialects and I believe an allowance was made in the standard. In Martin's standard doc $( and $) are used. In BBN BCPL they use {}, in Xerox BCPL [] is used. Essex BCPL used a pound sign instead of a dollar in their manual. In some circumstances this may have been due to character set issues.

For anyone delving into each version there is quite a lot of variation for the test command, boolean comparisons, floating point support and structures. BCPL seemed to be more a starting point that was tweaked for the site requirements, a bit like J2ME. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.52.120.79 (talk) 20:52, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

"Hello World"
If "Hello World" was really first implemented in BCPl, it might make sense to make "Hello World" the very first piece of BCPL code introduced in the article. Comiscuous (talk) 19:58, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

Confused mixture of tenses
The text jumps around a little in use of tense. It may be that this is correct, but I wonder if it is actually due to multiple editors taking different (and sometimes incorrect) approaches to the tense in use.

It should be (have been) written from the point of tense of a present-day accounting of historical fact, with consideration of relative tenses mainly where some feature in the language has been superseded. This is very difficult for me to explain clearly, not least because I am reading the content in order to learn about it: ie, I don't know how it should be written because I am not already in possession of the facts, and the text does not make these facts clear to me: someone with a proper understanding of correct use of past/present/future perfect/imperfect/etc tense AND also of the facts around the language (is that too much to ask?) could you please simply correct the use of tense (or else subtly clarify inline in the text, that the use of tense is appropriate) so that the article reads like an encyclopedic page should, and not like so much of the present-day awful television documentary world does, where the viewer is supposedly to be entranced and transported back in time to re-experience the horrors of the past (as if we have not enough of them today, as if the viewer has no interest in the content and must be hypnotised in order to benefit ... as if they have product to sell us and need stupid ignorant uninterested fools to keep watching for another 2 minutes until the ad. break.)

Thanks in advance, and thankyou for your patience anyone else who has wasted 6 minutes trying to parse this query in vain. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:44b8:4146:600:2e1:50ff:fe00:256 (talk) 14:24, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

NULL-terminated strings
I was reading the article page because BCPL is mentioned on the Null-terminated string page as having had these, and presumably since Ritchie in implementing C first used BCPL, it seems plausible that he learned about the idea there. Did BCPL in fact innovate this idea, or can an earlier (similar) implementation be found? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:44B8:4146:600:2E1:50FF:FE00:256 (talk) 14:39, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
 * No, BCPL did not use null-terminated strings. I worked with BCPL back in the 1980s, but if you need a printed source, this is from page 50 of my 1984 printing of "BCPL: the language and its compiler" - "By convention, byte 0 contains the number of characters in the string". -- John of Reading (talk) 18:08, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Σ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:14D:4780:6C0:F1A3:6FE8:2DE8:A46A (talk) 01:17, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:BCPL


text:
Bubble tea

Bubble tea (also known as pearl milk tea, bubble milk tea, tapioca milk tea, boba tea, or boba;, ) is a tea-based drink that originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s. Taiwanese immigrants brought it to the United States in the 1990s, initially in California through regions including Los Angeles County, but the drink has also spread to other countries where there is a large East Asian diaspora population.

Bubble tea most commonly consists of tea accompanied by chewy tapioca balls ("boba" or "pearls"), but it can be made with other toppings as well, such as grass jelly, aloe vera, red bean, and popping boba. It has many varieties and flavors, but the two most popular varieties are pearl black milk tea and pearl green milk tea ("pearl" for the tapioca balls at the bottom).

Description
Bubble teas fall under two categories: teas without milk and milk teas. Both varieties come with a choice of black, green, or oolong tea as the base. Milk teas usually include powdered or fresh milk, but may also use condensed milk, almond milk, soy milk, or coconut milk.

The oldest known bubble tea drink consisted of a mixture of hot Taiwanese black tea, tapioca pearls, condensed milk, and syrup (Chinese: 糖漿; pinyin: táng jiāng) or honey. Nowadays, bubble tea is most commonly served cold. The tapioca pearls that give bubble tea its name were originally made from the starch of the cassava, a tropical shrub known for its starchy roots which was introduced to Taiwan from South America during Japanese colonial rule. Larger pearls (Chinese: 波霸/黑珍珠; pinyin: bō bà/hēi zhēn zhū) quickly replaced these.

Today, there are some cafés that specialize in bubble tea production. While some cafés may serve bubble tea in a glass, most Taiwanese bubble tea shops serve the drink in a plastic cup and use a machine to seal the top of the cup with heated plastic cellophane. The method allows the tea to be shaken in the serving cup and makes it spill-free until a person is ready to drink it. The cellophane is then pierced with an oversized straw, now referred to as a boba straw, which is larger than a typical drinking straw to allow the toppings to pass through.

Due to its popularity, bubble tea has inspired a variety of bubble tea flavored snacks, such as bubble tea ice cream and bubble tea candy. The market size of bubble tea was valued at $2.4 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $4.3 billion by the end of 2027. Some of the largest global bubble tea chains include Chatime, CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice and Gong Cha.

Drink
Bubble tea comes in many variations which usually consist of black tea, green tea, oolong tea, and sometimes white tea. Another variation, yuenyeung, (Chinese: 鴛鴦, named after the Mandarin duck) originated in Hong Kong and consists of black tea, coffee, and milk.

Other varieties of the drink include blended tea drinks. These variations are often either blended using ice cream, or are smoothies that contain both tea and fruit. Boba ice cream bars have also been produced.

There are many popular flavours of bubble tea, such as taro, mango, coffee, and coconut. Flavouring ingredients such as a syrup or powder determines the flavour and usually the colour of the bubble tea, while other ingredients such as tea, milk and boba are the basis.

Toppings

Tapioca pearls (boba) are the most common ingredient, although there are other ways to make the chewy spheres found in bubble tea. The pearls vary in color according to the ingredients mixed in with the tapioca. Most pearls are black from brown sugar.

Jelly comes in different shapes: small cubes, stars, or rectangular strips, and flavors such as coconut jelly, konjac, lychee, grass jelly, mango, coffee and green tea. Azuki bean or mung bean paste, typical toppings for Taiwanese shaved ice desserts, give bubble tea an added subtle flavor as well as texture. Aloe, egg pudding (custard), and sago also can be found in many bubble tea shops. Popping boba, or spheres that have fruit juices or syrups inside them, are another popular bubble tea topping. Flavors include mango, strawberry, coconut, kiwi and honey melon.

Some shops offer milk or cheese foam on top of the drink, giving the drink a consistency similar to that of whipped cream, and a saltier flavor profile. One shop described the effect of the cheese foam as "neutraliz[ing] the bitterness of the tea...and as you drink it you taste the returning sweetness of the tea".

Ice and sugar level
Bubble tea shops often give customers the option of choosing the amount of ice or sugar in their drink. Sugar and ice levels are usually specified ordinally (e.g. no ice, less ice, normal ice, more ice), corresponding to quarterly intervals (0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%).

Packaging
In Southeast Asia, bubble tea is usually packaged in a plastic takeaway cup, sealed with plastic or a rounded cap. New entrants into the market have attempted to distinguish their products by packaging it in bottles and other shapes. Some have used sealed plastic bags. Nevertheless, the plastic takeaway cup with a sealed cap is still the most common packaging method.

Preparation method
The tea can be made in batches during the day or the night before. Brewing different types of teas take different amounts of time and temperature. For instance, green tea requires brewing at a lower temperature, typically between 176 – with a brewing time of 8–10 minutes to extract its optimal flavor. In contrast, black tea needs to be made with hotter water, usually around 203 – with a brewing of around 15–20 minutes to bring out its sweetness. A tea warmer dispenser allows the tea to remain heated for up to eight hours.

Pearls (boba) are made from tapioca starch. Most bubble tea stores buy packaged tapioca pearls in an uncooked stage. When the boba is uncooked and in the package, it is uncolored and hard. The boba doesn't turn chewy and dark until they are cooked and sugar is added to bring out its taste. Uncooked tapioca pearls in their package can be stored for around 9 to 12 months, once cooked, they can be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator. Despite this most bubble tea stores won’t sell their boba after 24 hours because it will start to harden and lose its chewyness.

The traditional preparation method is to mix the ingredients (sugar, powders and other flavorings) together using a bubble tea shaker cup, by hand. However, many present-day bubble tea shops use a bubble tea shaker machine. This eliminates the need for humans to shake the bubble tea by hand. It also reduces staffing needs as multiple cups of bubble tea may be prepared by a single barista.

History
Milk and sugar have been added to tea in Taiwan since the Dutch colonization of Taiwan in 1624–1662.

There are two competing stories for the discovery of bubble tea. One is associated with the Chun Shui Tang tea room (春水堂人文茶館) in Taichung. Its founder, Liu Han-Chieh, began serving Chinese tea cold after he observed coffee was served cold in Japan while on a visit in the 1980s. The new style of serving tea propelled his business, and multiple chains serving this tea were established. The company's product development manager, Lin Hsiu Hui, said she created the first bubble tea in 1988 when she poured tapioca balls into her tea during a staff meeting and encouraged others to drink it. The beverage was well received by everyone at the meeting, leading to its inclusion on the menu. It ultimately became the franchise's top-selling product.

Another claim for the invention of bubble tea comes from the Hanlin Tea Room (翰林茶館) in Tainan. It claims that bubble tea was invented in 1986 when teahouse owner Tu Tsong-he was inspired by white tapioca balls he saw in the local market of Ah-bó-liâu (鴨母寮, or Yāmǔliáo in Mandarin). He later made tea using these traditional Taiwanese snacks. This resulted in what is known as "pearl tea".

Popularity
In the 1990s, bubble tea spread all over East and Southeast Asia with its ever-growing popularity. In regions like Hong Kong, Mainland China, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore, the bubble tea trend expanded rapidly among young people. In some popular shops, people would line up for more than thirty minutes to get a cup of the drink. In recent years, the popularity of bubble tea has gone beyond the beverage itself, with boba lovers inventing various bubble tea flavored-foods, including ice cream, pizza, toast, sushi, and ramen.

Taiwan
In Taiwan, bubble tea has become not just a beverage, but an enduring icon of the culture and food history for the nation. In 2020, the date April 30 was officially declared as National Bubble Tea Day in Taiwan. That same year, the image of bubble tea was proposed as an alternative cover design for Taiwan's passport. According to Al Jazeera, bubble tea has become synonymous with Taiwan and is an important symbol of Taiwanese identity both domestically and internationally. Bubble tea is used to represent Taiwan in the context of the Milk Tea Alliance.

Hong Kong
Hong Kong is famous for its traditional Hong Kong-style milk tea, which is made with brewed black tea and evaporated milk. While milk tea has long become integrated into people's daily life, the expansion of Taiwanese bubble tea chains, including Tiger Sugar, Youiccha, and Xing Fu Tang, into Hong Kong created a new wave for “boba tea”.

Mainland China
Since the idea of adding tapioca pearls into milk tea was introduced into China in the 1990s, bubble tea has increased in popularity. In 2020 it was estimated that the consumption of bubble tea was 5 times that of coffee in recent years. According to data from QianZhen Industry Research Institute, the value of the tea-related beverage market in China reached 53.7 billion yuan (about $7.63 billion) in 2018. In 2019, annual sales from bubble tea shops reached as high as 140.5 billion RMB (roughly US$20 billion). While bubble tea chains from Taiwan (e.g., Gong Cha and Coco) are still popular, more local brands, like Yi Dian Dian, Nayuki, Hey Tea, etc., are now dominating the market.

In China, young people's growing obsession with bubble tea shaped their way of social interaction. Buying someone a cup of bubble tea has become a new way of informally thanking someone. It is also a favored topic among friends and on social media.

Japan
Bubble tea first entered Japan by the late 1990s, but it failed to leave a lasting impression on the public markets. It was not until the 2010s when the bubble tea trend finally swept Japan. Shops from Taiwan, Korea, and China, as well as local brands, began to pop up in cities, and bubble tea has remained one of the hottest trends since then. Bubble tea has become so commonplace among teenagers that teenage girls in Japan invented slang for it: tapiru (タピる). The word is short for drinking tapioca tea in Japanese, and it won first place in a survey of "Japanese slang for middle school girls" in 2018. A bubble tea theme park was open for a limited time in 2019 in Harajuku, Tokyo.

Singapore
Known locally in Chinese as 泡泡茶 (Pinyin: pào pào chá), bubble tea is loved by many in Singapore. The drink was sold in Singapore as early as 1992 and became phenomenally popular among young people in 2001. This soon ended because of the intense competition and price wars among shops. As a result, most bubble tea shops closed and bubble tea lost its popularity by 2003. When Taiwanese chains like Koi and Gong Cha came to Singapore in 2007 and 2009, the beverage experienced only short resurgences in popularity. In 2018, the interest in bubble tea rose again at an unprecedented speed in Singapore, as new brands like The Alley and Tiger Sugar entered the market; social media also played an important role in driving this renaissance of bubble tea.

United States
In the 1990s, Taiwanese immigrants began to introduce bubble tea in Taiwanese restaurants in California. Some of the first stand-alone bubble tea shops can be traced to a food court in Arcadia, in Southern California, and Fantasia Coffee & Tea in Cupertino, in Northern California. Chains like Tapioca Express, Quickly, Lollicup and Happy Lemon emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, bringing the Taiwanese bubble tea trend to the US. Within the Asian American community, bubble tea is commonly known under its colloquial term "boba".

As the beverage gained popularity in the US, it gradually became more than a drink, but a cultural identity for Asian Americans. This phenomenon was referred to as “boba life” by Chinese-American brothers Andrew and David Fung in their music video, “Bobalife,” released in 2013. Boba symbolizes a subculture that Asian Americans as social minorities could define themselves as, and “boba life” is a reflection of their desire for both cultural and political recognition. It is also used disparagingly in the term boba liberal.

Other regions with large concentrations of bubble tea restaurants in the United States are the Northeast and Southwest. This is reflected in the coffeehouse-style teahouse chains that originate from the regions, such as Boba Tea Company from Albuquerque, New Mexico, No. 1 Boba Tea in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Kung Fu Tea from New York City. Albuquerque and Las Vegas have a large concentrations of boba tea restaurants, as the drink is popular especially among the Hispano, Navajo, Pueblo, and other Native American, Hispanic and Latino American communities in the Southwest.

A massive shipping and supply chain crisis on the U.S. West coast, coupled with the obstruction of the Suez Canal in March 2021, caused a shortage of tapioca pearls for bubble tea shops in the U.S. and Canada. Most of the tapioca consumed in the U.S. is imported from Asia, since the critical ingredient, tapioca starch, is mostly grown in Asia.

TikTok trends and the Korean Wave also fueled the popularity of bubble tea in the United States.

Australia
Individual bubble tea shops began to appear in Australia in the 1990s, along with other regional drinks like Eis Cendol. Chains of stores were established as early as 2002, when the Bubble Cup franchise opened its first store in Melbourne. Although originally associated with the rapid growth of immigration from Asia and the vast tertiary student cohort from Asia, in Melbourne and Sydney bubble tea has become popular across many communities. Many suburban shopping centres have a branch of a bubble tea franchise.

Mauritius
The first bubble tea shop in Mauritius opened in late 2012, and since then there have been bubble tea shops in most shopping malls on the island. Bubble tea shops have become a popular place for teenagers to hang out.

Cultural influence
In 2020, the Unicode Consortium released the bubble tea emoji as part of its version 13.0 update.

On 29 January 2023, Google celebrated Bubble Tea with a doodle.

Potential health concerns
In July 2019, Singapore's Mount Alvernia Hospital warned against the high sugar content of bubble tea since the drink had become extremely popular in Singapore. While it acknowledged the benefits of drinking green tea and black tea in reducing risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis and cancer, respectively, the hospital cautions that the addition of other ingredients like non-dairy creamer and toppings in the tea could raise the fat and sugar content of the tea and increase the risk of chronic diseases. Non-dairy creamer is a milk substitute that contains trans fat in the form of hydrogenated palm oil. The hospital warned that this oil has been strongly correlated with an increased risk of heart disease and stroke.

The other concern about bubble tea is its high calorie content, partially attributed to the high-carbohydrate tapioca pearls (or 珍珠 zhēn zhū), which can make up to half the calorie-count in a 500 ml serving of bubble tea.

title: Bubble tea


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Talk:British Nationality Law

Someone added to the list of ways British Citizenship could be acquired:
 * By descent from Sophia of Hanover and not practicing Catholicism (i.e. anyone in line for the throne of Great Britain)

This was the case, when 4 & 5 Ann. c. 16, "An Act for the Naturalisation of the Most Excellent Princess Sophia of Electress of Hanover and the Issue of her Body" was in force; but that act has been repealed. (I cannot remember which act does it, it may have been the British Nationality Act 1914 or the Naturalization Act 1870...)

Also, that act only ever applied to British subject status; not British citizenship. -- Simon J Kissane.

It appears that this act was repealed in 1948 and so only applies to those born before 1948. It was still in force and Prince Phillip of Greece was embarrassed when after marrying Elizabeth and applying for and receiving citizenship, it was found that others of his family could received it legally on the Sophia clause alone. Well, I presume he was embarrassed. Prince Ernst August of Hanover fought a court battle and received his citizenship in 1956 on the Sophia Naturalization Act. Also the In America that phrasing would mean citizenship but in England? --rmhermen

As I understand it "natural born subjects" would make them British subjects within the meaning of the 1914 Act, and hence (most likely) Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies within the meaning of the 1948 Act, and hence (most likely) British Citizens within the meaning of the 1981 Act. -- Simon J Kissane

title: Talk:British Nationality Law