The Viking Raid on Lindisfarne

On June 8, 793 Vikings from modern-day Norway plundered St Cuthbert's monastery on Lindisfarne Island.

"The Viking Raid on Lindisfarne

The devastating Viking attack on the church of St Cuthbert in 793 sent a shockwave through Europe. But a Christian community at Lindisfarne survived, and recorded the event on the famous ‘Domesday stone’.

WHIRLWINDS AND DRAGONS

The first few months of the year 793 were worrying times. Later Anglo-Saxon writers in northern England recalled how ‘immense whirlwinds, flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air’. They thought these aerial phenomena were portents of imminent disaster.

Sure enough, a great famine followed. But worse was to come. On 8 June,

'heathen men came and miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.'

HOLY ISLAND

This Viking raid on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the Northumbrian coast, was not the first in England. A few years before, in 789, ‘three ships of northmen’ had landed on the coast of Wessex, and killed the king’s reeve who had been sent to bring the strangers to the West Saxon court.

But the assault on Lindisfarne was different because it attacked the sacred heart of the Northumbrian kingdom, desecrating ‘the very place where the Christian religion began in our nation’. It was where Cuthbert (d. 687) had been bishop, and where his body was now revered as that of a saint.

News of the raid quickly reached Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar living far away in the Frankish kingdom, where he was tutor to the children of the renowned King Charlemagne. Alcuin was aghast at this unprecedented atrocity. As he wrote to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, ‘a place more sacred than any in Britain’:

'The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishing, exposed to the plundering of pagans.'"