Back to the Anglo-Saxons calendar
It was in this year that a warrior tribe of people called Vikings landed at Lindisfarne and destroyed the monastery, took away all its treasure and killed some of the monks. This was the year that historians usually use as the start of the Viking period of English history. However, at this time and for the next 40 years, these Vikings contented themselves with raids on the coast of the United Kingdom.
You may wonder why historians call them Vikings. Until now it has all been very obvious. Stone Age people used stone, Bronze Age people used bronze and Iron Age people used Iron. The Romans came from Rome, the Saxons from Saxony and the Jutes from Jutland but the Vikings did not come from Vikeland. In fact they came from what we now call Norway, Sweden and Denmark and were not one tribe but a mixture of many. The word Viking comes from the language known as Old Norse and means a pirate raid. And at this time, these people were doing just that. Oh and they didn't have horns on their helmets but some of them did have red hair.
The very first recorded attack by Vikings happened in Dorset four years earlier. The mayor of Dorchester went to greet them as they landed, as he would with any trading merchants, and they killed him. Not that friendly really and pretty good proof that they were not friendly merchants.
The advantage of raiding a monastery like Lindisfarne was that the Vikings knew they would find great treasure, capture slaves to trade and it was extremely unlikely that the monastery would be defended by soldiers, much less an army of any sort. Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxons had no navy to protect them.
Now you may be asking why a place where religious people lived a simple life of sleeping, eating (simple food), writing and praying would have such wealth and I would ask the same thing and, as you will see a lot later, so did Henry VIII. The fact is that these monasteries held many gold ornaments and chalices and plates, some used in worship.
If you remember, before the Christian life came along, people would bury their chiefs with possessions like swords, bracelets etc. and would also leave valuable gifts for their gods in rivers and streams. Christianity wasn’t much different except there was only one god, he was worshipped in a chapel or church and you would find these gold objects on the altar and used in the services. The Vikings knew this and so though they also did kill many people in these raids, I think their primary aim at this time was wealth. The monks and others just got in the way.
A religious man, Alcuin of York, wrote a letter to King Ethelred of Northumbria, the land in which Lindisfarne was situated, and said 'Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples ...'
I think he may have conveniently forgotten that over the last 300 years the Anglo-Saxons had been fighting and killing each other all the time. The reason this raid was so important, or looked at with so much horror, was that it happened in a major Christian centre.
