Vikings Lindisfarne raid

This Viking raid regarding the island of Lindisfarne, simply off the Northumbrian coast, was not the first in The united kingdomt. A couple of years prior to, in 789, ‘three boats of northmen’ had landed from the coastline of Wessex, and killed the king’s reeve who was simply delivered to deliver the strangers into western Saxon courtroom.

However the attack on Lindisfarne ended up being various because it attacked the sacred heart associated with Northumbrian kingdom, desecrating ‘the really destination where in fact the Christian religion began within nation’. It was where Cuthbert (d. 687) have been bishop, and in which their human body was today revered as compared to a saint.

News for the raid quickly achieved Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar living far-away when you look at the Frankish kingdom, in which he was tutor toward kids of popular King Charlemagne. Alcuin had been aghast as of this unprecedented atrocity:

The church of St Cuthbert is spattered because of the blood for the priests of Jesus, stripped of all its decorating, subjected to the plundering of pagans,