8 June 793
Lindisfarne, 793
The first Viking attack on England recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comes in 789, when three ships of Northmen from Hordaland land on Portland in Wessex. Beaduheard, the king’s reeve from Dorchester, goes to identify them as foreign merchants, and they kill him. By 792 King Offa of Mercia already requires the churches of Kent to serve against seaborne pirates.
Grave marker from Lindisfarne of the early 9th century, carved with a file of warriors raising swords and axesWikimedia Commons, Schillerwein, CC0 (Viking Raider Doomsday Stone front.jpg)
On 8 June 793 raiders land on Lindisfarne, the island monastery of St Cuthbert off the coast of Northumbria. They kill monks, drown some in the sea, carry others off as slaves and strip the church of its treasures. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts the raid in January, which Michael Swanton reads as an error for 8 June, the date in the Annals of Lindisfarne.
Alcuin, centre, with his pupil Rabanus Maurus, who presents a book to Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, a Fulda manuscript of the 9th centuryWikimedia Commons, Fulda, Public domain (Raban-Maur Alcuin Otgar.jpg)
Alcuin of York, a Northumbrian scholar at the court of Charlemagne, writes about the raid to King Æthelred I of Northumbria, to Bishop Hygbald of Lindisfarne and to Archbishop Æthelhard of Canterbury, and composes a poem on the destruction of the monastery. His letters are the only significant contemporary account. "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race," he writes.
Ruins of Lindisfarne Priory, refounded after the Norman Conquest, beside the parish church of St MaryWikimedia Commons, Russ Hamer, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Lindisfarne Abbey and St Marys.JPG)
In 794 raiders sack the monastery at Jarrow. They meet more resistance than they expect: their leaders are killed, their ships are beached at Tynemouth and the local people kill the crews. The next recorded raid on England comes about 40 years later, on the Isle of Sheppey in 835, and in the meantime the raiders turn to Scotland and Ireland.
Sources
- Michael Swanton (trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (2000), years 789 to 794.
- Alcuin, letters to King Æthelred I of Northumbria and Bishop Hygbald of Lindisfarne, 793.
- John Marsden, The Fury of the Northmen: Saints, Shrines and Sea-raiders in the Viking Age (1993).
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