A handsome, large-format paperback edition set in elegant type with generous margins. The venerable Bede (AD 672-735) was not the first historian of the British Isles, but he was the first to to list and master his documentary and oral sources. For a man who travelled little, he showed a great depth of understanding about the outside world, informing himself by commissioning others to copy documents in the Papal Regista and various episcopal and monastic archives.