Forbidden History - Blood on Holy Island: The Viking Raid on Lindisfarne

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Little did the monks at the monastery on Lindisfarne Island suspect on a cold Northumbrian morning in 793 that they were to become the first victims of a new breed of raiders whose plunder would usher in a new age soon to dominate Europe. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist and Host Max Adams: Archaeologist and Author Richard Carlton: Archaeologist Keith Cooper: Artist John Haywood: Historian and Author Dr. Ian Kille: Geologist Dr. Chris Monk: Anglo-Saxon Historian Dr. David Petts: Archaeologist Prof. Neil Price: Archaeologist Jessica Turner: Historic and Built Environment Officer Lisa Westcott Wilkins: Archaeologist and Co-Founder of DigVentures Brendon Wilkins: Co-Founder of DigVentures Graeme Young: Archaeologist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. An island at the edge of a kingdom, prophecy, superstition, and fear. Wolves from the sea, terror from the north. A haven of solitude, a beacon for pilgrim. a place of worship, a sanctuary.

But at high tide, the saints turned their backs. The attack on Linders farm was an atrocity. A new peril to the followers of Christ. If you think about it, they could have rung the bell all day and no help was coming. Predators, slavers, plunderers. Why would anybody not have a dragon to guard their treasure? treasure. What ruins were left behind by the first Viking raid on Lindisfarne? They didn't care that these were holy men. They didn't care that this was a peaceful place.

From rubble and bones, the evidence is now emerging of a time when all of Europe was about to change. 300 years peace had reigned. Now the winds had turned. The dawn of a new age. The dawn of the Viking age. From the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, the Scandinavian peoples burst from their frontiers to almost wherever the seas could take them. They ranged north to Greenland and the Baltic, eastwards to Russia, Constantinople, and the Middle East, westwards across the Atlantic, to Newfoundland. Most of all, they voyaged to Europe, to Germany, France, Ireland, and Britain. They came trading and they came raiding, or Viking.

For centuries they were regarded as barbaric. Their civilization was lost, yet echoes remain down the ages of the ones called the Northman. Through archaeology, we can now explore the world of Viking life by understanding the realm of the Viking dead. The era we know as the Viking Age began on a remote island off the coast of Northern Britain. Scandinavian raiders attacked the Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarm. They killed, looted, and enslaved the peaceful monks. It was an outrage that sent shockwaves through Anglo-Saxon Britain and also across Christian Europe.

Never before had such an atrocity happened against the House of God and his children. This was just the beginning. In the decades after, more raids followed, and over the next two centuries, Scandinavian kingdoms in Europe had grown far beyond their homeland. They're known to us now as Vikings, and their influences are still familiar today. What is it about these people and their period in history

that fascinates us? I think the romance of heading out there into the the wilds, setting forth across the sea to find fortune. People who would die for honour, people who would die to save their reputations, they had a system of values which is very different to our own. Here are these people that come around, do what they want, take what they want, and join themselves to the maximum, and then just disappear and sail into the sunset. Even for historians and archaeologists, it's still these stereotypes,

stereotypes that tend to draw us to the Vikings. We know there was much more to their society and everyday life. Yet they still embody something to us in a way that virtually no other group of people in history does. Where does this deep appeal lie? I think it's partly that they embody qualities that we might like to have. They're supposed to be adventurous. They travel a lot.

They're curious. They have a great imagination. And yet also behind that is a much darker reality, something that I think ought to worry us more than it does. Their violence, their cruelty, the very grim fatalism of their world. They are like us and yet not. Not people to admire, in my view, but my goodness they're interesting. How did this extraordinary culture come about? And what can we learn from them?

dismissed as they were for many years as mere barbarians. What can we discover of that one fated day on the Northumbrian coast when a new page in history was created for good or for bad after the first Viking raid on Lindisfarne? After the attack on Lindisfarne, Anglo-Saxon monks wondered why such horror had befallen their brothers in the year 793. Bloody rain and dragons aside,

there were real portents that a clash of cultures was going to happen. The year 789. At Portland on Britain's south coast, three unknown craft made landfall. Just a few years later, in 792, Arthur, ruler of the powerful Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia, ordered the strengthening of defenses along the coast of Kent. It seemed someone already knew there was a threat out there. Around 200 miles north of Kent, there was no such rebuilding of defenses. In fact, the next year, when the Scandinavians attacked, there were no defenses at all.

More than a thousand years later, Lindisfarne has hardly changed. Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, is on England's Northumberland coast. It's separated from the mainland by just over a mile. of Sandy Causeway. Even today it's only crossable at low tide. Twice a day you can cross, and twice a day it's reachable only from the sea. Archaeologist Tim Sutherland has worked on digs across Europe, but never yet on Lindisfarne. It's an incredible remote place. There's very little around you and it's endless amounts of sea and sky. It's a stunningly beautiful place.

He's excavated mass graves from later medieval battlefields, but so far not from Viking or Saxon times. Tim's come to discover what might remain of the people who were here at the time of that first raid who lived and worshipped on Lindisfarne. I think the whole reason people would come here would be for isolation, because you are nearly always cut off. It's something that always sticks in your mind is that you are right on the periphery of life out here. As the name suggests, Holy Island was a hugely important religious centre for the Anglo-Saxons of Northumbria. You can still see the route laid out for pilgrims to cross the causeway in later centuries.

A monastery was established on the island in the year 634 by the Irish monk and later Saint Aden. Aden had been a part of the monastic community at Iona on the western coast of Scotland. By founding his monastery on a remote part of the coast, Aidan was continuing a tradition that was already in the monastic communities of Britain and Ireland. It also became a center of learning, most notably in the form of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were produced in the early 700s. The Gospels were so finely rendered that later Giacs generations assumed that they must have been crafted by angels. For more than 150 years, Christian monks had lived and worshipped on the island of Lindisfarne.

The Holy Island may have been a monastic site, but it was far from being a closed community. It had workshops and farms, which had to be supplied in order to sell their wares. Quantities of vellum, inks and pigments to produce gospels. ivory, silver, and other precious metals to decorate their covers. Traders and merchants would have been frequent visitors to the isolated site. Lindisfarne was also a prestigious jewel in the Northumbrian crown, since Aden, and many of its abbots, had also been canonized as saints. The early Christian church had a weakness for silver and gold.

The richness of Lindisfarne's chapel would have been famous along the coastline of Britain and beyond. Archaeologist and writer Max Adams has researched the situation in Northumbria at the time of the first Viking raid. Any monastery sitting on the east coast of Britain is a cash machine waiting to be emptied. No wonder then that the Scandinavian raiders turn their heads. Vikings didn't just appear out of nowhere at Lindisfarne. Foreign travelers and traders, including Scandinavians, would have been very familiar. They've been wrecking Britain for so long. They know where everything is, and actually now is the time to start going and cashing in on all that knowledge.

We don't know why the Scandinavians began raiding. Apparently all of a sudden at the end of the 8th century. It could be that Lindisfarne was just the first major raid that we know about. And in the centuries preceding the Viking Age, questing for treasure was already a part of a storytelling culture. culture. Treasure is guarded by dragons can only be one by deep cunning, bravery, and any attempt to steal treasure will be met with the vengeance of a god. Unlike Scandinavian treasure, the treasures held by the monks, that treasure is not guarded by dragons. It's guarded by prematurely

balding men dressed in monks' habits, not carrying swords with no combat training at all. There certainly were no pagan dragons, nor even armed guards. Holy Islands monks trusted only to the protection of their saints. Imagine the Scandinavian raiders' point of view. Why would anybody not have a dragon to guard their treasure? Word of the outrage spread fast among the monasteries of Europe. We know hints of what happened from a letter written from a monk named Alquin, who wrote to Higbald, the abbot of Lindisfarne. of Lindisfarne, who survived. Alquin himself wasn't present during the raid, but he clearly

heard the news from either Higbald or from others who survived. The only other account we have is more than 200 years later from Simeon of Durham's chronicle Historia Regum. These few written fragments are all we have describing what happened. But what other evidence might exist? Could archaeology tell us anything about the attack on Lindisfarne? Abandoned after the Reformation in the 16th century, the building replaced the original priory that the Vikings supposedly damaged or destroyed. Those original remains have been lost and forgotten for centuries, and now archaeologists are doing their best to find them again. As soon as you read about the Viking period, we're drawn straight into Lindisfarne.

But archeologically, this is such an undiscovered place. There are archaeological excavations in this iconic place that will really lead us into the way forward in terms of our research into the Viking period. There's nothing left on the surface now from the Anglo-Saxon Priory. Yet over the years, some clues have been found. All that remain of the lives of the people who lived a millennium ago are grave markers. of the Anglo-Saxon people, perhaps even some of the monks who lived here around the time the Vikings came. But there's one stone that's different.

It was found in the early 20th century, and it seems to carry an echo of the terrible events at Lindisfarne in 793. It seems to depict Viking warriors clad in armor, carrying axes and swords, and it became known as the Doomsday Stone. You see these warriors with araxies. It's so easy to interpret that as the Viking raid on Lindisfarne. But you can't carbon date stone, and the context of its finding is lost. So it's not known if it's from the time of the raid. It could be earlier or later.

In 2017, an archaeological project set out to investigate Lindisfarne's lost religious buildings. enclosing the seaworth side of the monastic site is a natural embankment of Wimrock called the Heif. It's like a protective arm around Lindisfarne's Little Harbor. The whole area is now a nature reserve. The Heuf has always been really important from a safety point of view as a defensive point on the island,

but the whole of this rocky outcrop is important archaeologically. Archaeologists have always suspected there were buildings on the Heif, But what could they have been? We've always thought those buildings on the Huf. In fact, it's dotted with structure-like features that have come up in geophysics that have been done over the years. So we're really speculation that it's a church building. So this was a sort of evaluation to establish the size,

possible function and features and hopefully date. The dig was brought about by a trust that was formed to protect Lindisfarne, its heritage and natural environment. Many of its staff are local volunteers. It's a fantastic community project. You know, I think we've got volunteers from the wider community from all over Northumberland and Southern Scotland, right as far as Newcastle and beyond and up towards Edinburgh.

Some of these volunteers have dug with us for years. They're fantastic, they're extremely knowledgeable. They call us the professionals, but they know as much as us in many respects, and especially finding something like this, which is brand new to everyone, that there are very few experts in this sort of period. The dig has revealed a building that had very solid foundations. We've uncovered all of the stone foundations and found essentially an oblong building in two parts. We've certainly got a doorway at the west end, which is off centre to the north,

and we've got a doorway right at the west end of the south side of the building, and another possible doorway in the sort of middle of the north part of the nave. And regarding windows very little, but we've got a few of the south side of the building, little, but we've got a few very, very crudely dressed window heads and sills that came mostly from the east part of the building. It does seem very much like a chapel or small church. At each stage of the dig, they try to understand visually the structure that they're excavating. A small, thick-walled building with a separate room, perhaps a sanctuary.

It could be a church or chapel. The original priory might have had one or even separate. several chapels around the monastic enclosure. Could this building have been here at the time of the Viking raid? It may be the site of the very earliest church on Lindisfarne, but they could have been built any time throughout the later 7th century into the 8th, 9th or even early 10th centuries. I think all of those dates are feasible. Lindisfarne's founder, St. Aden, came here at the behest of the Northumbrian King, Oswald,

whose seat of power was just to cross the water at Bambra. Cuthbert continued his work here in the decades before the Vikings came. A chapel here on the Heuf would have looked down on the Priory area and would have been visible far out to see. A clue that supports this idea comes from analysis of the type of stone that was used. Certainly the initial look at the stones that we've got here, there seem to be two different types of stone, one which have been used to the foundation and a different type of stone which is not as hard as the foundation stones, which is more fulfilled.

but it's also this really rather bright whitish grey colour. It would make the church stand out on the horizon in combination with the fact that we're on top of a youth here of windstone and the combination of the two of those would give it an interesting stature. Over the decades, Cuthbert and the later monks built Lindisfarne into the renowned religious centre, which eventually became the object of Scandinavian envy. When we think of the term monk, we potentially have a certain view in our mind, but what

did they really do? How were they living, especially in this early Christian period in Britain? Just off the Lindisfarne shore is St. Cuthbert's Island. It's one of the places he lived in to seek seclusion. It said that his dwelling had walls so tall that all he could see was the sky. Chris Monk is an expert in Anglo-Saxon Christian religion. Obviously this place even today inspires people on some form of pilgrimage, whatever the motive is behind doing that. Even probably people that aren't particularly religious feel an affinity with a place like this.

Its very landscape draws you in, I think, and the sounds and the sounds of the seals and the birds. People from all kinds of backgrounds might have been part of this monastic community. In the decades after Cuthbert and before, the raid in 7-9-3. There were people that would retire to the monastic life. Life was busy for monks. They had various duties that they had to perform. The most important, of course, was God's work, Opus Dei,

which would involve them at various hours of the day, throughout the day, spending time in a religious service. They would be singing the Psalms, there'd be readings from the Bible. But they also had, and were expected each one, to carry out some kind of manual labour. So that might be milking the cows, making ale, maybe working in one of the workshops, metal work, for example.

I can imagine the brothers helping out with the fishing and the cockling and helping with the nets. You could imagine that. And really, although all of the brothers were expected to engage to some degree in this kind of work, it would vary perhaps to do with their seniority. So a senior monk, one that had been in the monastery for some time, may well have some special duties perhaps to do with reproducing biblical, texts working in the scriptorium. And that would be their manual labour because it would have a physical aspect to it. It's back-breaking work, ice-draining work. You know, they may well

be involved also in preparing the vellum. Also, the brothers were of all ages. Yeah, one of the things that people often don't realize is that part of the monastic community were children. There were young children as young as young as seven who were obelates that were brought by their parents to be dedicated to the monastic life. And they would be be trained up and eventually become novices and then become full-blown monks. They'd learn Latin and they'd learn to write and they'd gradually develop the skills. These were the kinds of people who were present when the world turned upside down and the raiders came to Lindisfarne.

Hardworking, learned, earnest people, including children. All of them defenseless. Another archaeological project hopes to explore where some of these people might still lie. An initial dig in 2016 made some significant finds. On the very last day, they found a suspected skeleton burial, but they were out of time. Now they're hoping to reopen this trench and fully explore the burial site. What was good about the site here, obviously, is that they were finding skeletal remains. And in theory, these could be some of the earliest skeletons ever found on Linguistphalm.

Trying to find evidence of the archaeology of the Viking period is very rare, and they might have come across it in abundance here. What they're really after is the evidence of the raids in that Viking period, and that would be exceedingly rare. The project is a joint venture with a long-term aim for the island. Dig Ventures is on site here at Lindisfarne with Durham University on year two of a five-year project looking for the very early medieval monastery. that would have been established here by St. Aden.

The team have their own unique approach to archaeology, both in the field and in how the information is disseminated around the world. Our team is a little bit different than most archaeology teams you'll see out there, and we do community archaeology in that we work with members of the public. We use crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and digital technology to just increase the range of opportunities for people to participate in archaeological research. The reason why we do things so do things so do

differently here at Dig Ventures is because we're crowdfunded. And that means that about half of the people who support the dig have don't ever come to sight. They're based all over the world, some in the UK, many in the US, but all over Europe and even Australia. So it's vitally important that the material that we excavate, the finds that we discover, and all the context records that we make get published instantly and they can share in the joy of discovery just as we are in the trenches.

You've seen many of the team recording out there using their smartphones or iPads of the skeletal remains that they're discovering. Well just as soon as that material is recorded on the iPad, where the photos are taken on there, or whether they've written little notes in there, well that goes straight onto a dedicated website on our main website, the Lindisfan MicroSight, it's called Digital Dig Team. And in that you'll be able to see how those artefacts relate to other things that have been found and it means that we can also make 3D models as well so that people can see exactly what it is that we've got almost as though they were holding it in their own hands.

Back in the trench, the team are making progress. As the dig goes on, it's becoming more apparent how this part of the priory grounds has changed over the centuries. Tim Sutherland now explains the layout of the burial area. There would have been very little stone around and it might have been cultivated. And then what happens is that they have the monastic buildings behind or some religious structure and then they need a burial ground so you go and put the burials near your structure your church or your chapel and then of course you need more burial grounds so you slowly move out into the fields it's just like a lot of village chapels they start off as a very small area may even be something

very quite private or insular and then eventually the monastic or the religious buildings need more space as well, so they start moving out. And of course, eventually, they consume the burial area. But then as the decades and centuries go by, the buildings are in turn demolished and the area leveled, then reverted to use as farmland. The burials underneath it start getting disturbed, so the tops of the burials start crumbling off

and bits of bones start poking out the surface. And so at the surface, it looks like a complete mass. of stone and bone and all sorts of different things going on. So you're going to try and make some sort of sense of it. Slowly as you go down and down, you get less and less rubble, less and less disturbed material, until you come down to the original structures, the foundations and the original burials.

And these original burials are now starting to emerge. Everywhere we dig, we've got bits of human bones, so we've got skull, skull, long bones all over the place. So to actually find proper stuff skeleton, roughly the right alignment for a Christian burial is absolutely perfect. Just what we wanted. Couldn't ask some more right now. After we finished a dig last year, we got some carbon 14 dating on the bones we'd found. And we had three dates, and they all came back as early medieval period, not later. This is part of the early medieval cemetery, absolutely. There's no way to be certain

exactly when these people lived, but it's possible they were here in the earliest days of the monastery. Perhaps they even worshipped in the chapel up on the Heuf. These are probably the guys who were certainly familiar with the things like the creation of Lindisfan Gospels. These are guys who would have either, if they hadn't known Cuthbert in person, they would have known other people who would have known St. Cuthbert. These may have been the first people who saw Viking boats arriving across the seas coming out of the mist. So they are part of the period when Lindisfarne as an Anglo-Saxon monastery was absolutely at its height. Discovery of the skeletons has made the project a real success.

Although the hard work of conservation and analysis is all still to come, some of the people buried here might have heard stories of that first raid on Lindisfarne, or have known others who survived, or they might have been unlucky enough to have borne witness themselves. Well, it is impossible to be on site here at Lindisfarne without wondering, as you look around the area, where was it? area, where was it? Where did they pull up their boats? You know, what would the place have been when the monks realized that their life was about to change irrevocably? And the Viking Age was about

to kick off in what is now England. What can we actually know about how the raid happened? The raiders must have come at high tide when they could get their boats right up to the island. And when the island was cut off from help, even from the major Northumbrian fortress at Bambra, just four miles away across the bay. Archaeologist Graham Young has spent more than a decade excavating and studying Bambra and its rich archaeology from Saxon and later Viking times. It's hard to imagine that you're going to get into the awkward harbor at Lindisfan

anything other than a clear day, so you have to come around via the south part of the island to get into the harbor. You'd have been in plain sight of the fortress throughout that voyage. I presumably initially I've thought of as an unusual merchant. A set of vessels, probably it took many hours to find out there's anything toward happening. But it would have happened and unfolded right in front of them, even if they weren't fully aware of what was happening initially. The natural harbour of Lindisfarne might have afforded protection from the elements and the ocean, but not from raiders from the sea.

Early on, you could have got ships very close inland, which means the raiders could have come straight into it, done their work, and been out and gone. before anybody really realized what had happened. Who knows how quickly the alarm was raised, if at all? We know from modern society that the people most likely to do you harm are people you already know. You let them in. There is a possibility that these people already have a relationship with Linda's Farn. They may be on their annual visit to Lindersfarn, for all we know, and it may be that they're trading, and the deal goes wrong. It's perfectly plausible. It may not be malice of forethought. It may not be malice of forethought. It might be maybe just a deal that goes wrong.

I think we must allow for all sorts of scenarios that morning or whatever it is that they row up through the mist and row themselves into Lindersfan Harbour. And the monks come down and take the tow line from them and bring them in. What have you got for us? Well, what have you got for us? Once you start ringing the bell, no help is coming.

You're completely cut off. And you might as well be on Mars, because the nearest help is over in Mambra, and they're too far away. Al Quinn, the monk, suspected the raid was due to the brothers of Lindisfarne becoming two lax in their worship. With his deeply Christian mindset, Alquin saw the raid as God's wrath visited on his own people by the heathen Vikings. The heathens themselves, though, probably had a more pragmatic outlook. I don't think the Vikings think like that at all. It's easy money.

Some of the brothers, if they were perhaps out and about, may have rushed back to the inner sanctum, to the church, to the altar, to either protect. what was there or to get protection for themselves as well. We know from what Alquin writes that blood was shed around the altar. The blood of the saints was trampled on like manure, he says. I imagine them perhaps running there, maybe some of the children ran there too. Maybe one of the masters took the school masters took the children there. I think perhaps some of the individual monks might have,

their past history, their involvement in the world might have made them want to take up arms, as it were. Some of them may have well have wielded a sword in the past. But monks are not meant to do that. They're meant to love their enemies. It's known from the accounts that when the Vikings came, they took away some of the people here, either for ransom or for sale as slaves. Very likely, among the most lucrative of these captives were the children.

I think it must have been particularly terrifying for those young boys. I mean, Alquin in his letter refers to young boys being taken captive. that day, taken prisoner. When you think about it, the attack on Lindisfarme was an atrocity. What shocked people was the fact that it must have felt in some way as if God had abandoned them. Still, no archaeology has been found which reveals traces of the awful events of the raid on Lindisfarne. No evidence of burned buildings. So far, no trauma on skeletons, which might show death from conflict. Only the written evidence of the monks betrays the deep scars that were inflicted by the outrage.

Standing in that place where that happened where those, you know, the sound of the sword going through somebody's body or the smell of blood and guts and the screams of children as they were carried off back to the boats. You probably wouldn't hear the sound of the seals anymore would you or the curlews, you'd be the sounds of children terrified screams. They're just not knowing what their future holds. As all these horrendous sounds started recede as the Vikings went away, the brothers would be left with the sounds as they were before, the sounds of the wind, the sounds of the birds, sounds of the seals, and they just left to cope with the aftermath. No one will ever know the fate of all those who were taken, nor how many died,

but in 793, a page in history had been turned, and a new age had begun. One thing's for certain, whatever happened here on that day in Lindisfarne, it was just the beginning. because the Vikings were coming. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you liked this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.