Gone Medieval - Viking Raid on Lindisfarne

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

1228 years ago, on June 8 793, Vikings attacked a monastic settlement on the island of Lindisfarne. This raid had such an impact across Europe that despite there being no archaeological evidence for it, only literary sources, it is still remembered today. In this episode, Cat speaks to Dr David Petts from Durham University. They discuss why the Vikings chose to raid Lindisfarne, the community that they would have found there, and how the attack impacted upon Northumbrian Christendom and the wider world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and today we're going to be talking about an event that took place on this very day exactly 1,228 years ago. On the 8th of June 793, a devastating attack on the Church of St. Cuthbert on Lindisfarne sent shockwaves through Europe and, so the story goes, kickstarted what we now call the Viking Age. But why there? What was so special about Lindisfarne to make the heathen raiders from the north attack it? And why has this, technically not the first recorded Viking attack on England at all, been given so much attention? While this Viking raid is a familiar story to

many, I want to dig a little deeper into Lindisfarne, also known as the Holy Island, to find out more about its background and what happened next. So, to tell me all about it, I've invited Dr David Pets, a senior lecturer in archaeology from the University of Durham. Not only is David a specialist in the early medieval archaeology of Northern England, but he also leads a new research project at Lindisfarne, excavating the early medieval site to resolve some unanswered questions about its history. And we're going to be hearing exactly what he's discovered so far in a moment. So thank you so much for joining me here on Gone Medieval David. It's a pleasure to be here.

So I'm really dying to hear more about your ongoing excavations and what you've found so far, But I wanted to just go back to the start, really, with that event in 793, because obviously this is the anniversary of it. So I was hoping, can you tell me what exactly happened on that day in 793? And how do we know? Well, we've got no archaeological evidence that anything happened. All our evidence for the Viking attack comes from historical sources. And so you've got to remember that immediately these are sources,

which have been recorded by people for particular reasons. So this isn't reporting, as we'd understand it, the modern news report. So what we do know is that on June 8th, 793, the well-established, majorly important early medieval monastic site on Holy Island is attacked by what's described as wretched heathen men who attack the church and the wider monastic establishment. it causes kind of shockwaves across not just Britain, but it's heard about in Europe. And it's, as you say, I think it has its importance as one of the first examples of a Viking raid on Britain.

And it gets its particular importance because of Lindisfan's own significance. This is not just a random attack on a random settlement. This is an attack on the heart of Northumbrian Christendom. So can you tell us a little bit about that context then? What was there before and why was that so important? And, you know, what's going on in Northumbria at the time? Well, there's been a monastery on Lindisfarne since AD 635. So the monastery's been there for 150 years or so.

So it's a well-established institution. The kingdom of Northumbria in this period is one of the most powerful of the many early medieval kingdoms in Britain. Northumbria kind of sits in the middle of Britain. and it's a central British kingdom. So it looks southwards to the big kingdoms of the south like Mercia, but also within its world are the Picts to the north, the Scots in Western Scotland, the British kingdoms of Strathclyde. It kind of sits on a kind of cultural fault zone

between the Anglo-Saxons to the south and other groups to the north. So it's an incredibly important kingdom. And Lindisfarne is the most important of its monasteries. It was founded by one of the kings of Northumbria, It retained royal patronage. And by this point, it's become the focus for a major pilgrimage cult to St Cuthbert, who was Abbott there and then died and was buried and became a saint. And in this time, it has acquired huge amounts of wealth.

It has lots and lots of land, huge blocks of land, both in the immediate area, up into Scotland, down south of the Tyne. And it would have been probably the biggest population centre in Northumbria, certainly north of York. So it's a really important place. So it's likely then that there are a lot of riches there that were ripe for picking for a Viking army. Yeah, I mean absolutely. You can imagine monasteries like this.

Northumbria isn't a kingdom which has a huge amount of coin use, certainly not in the more northern parts of the kingdom north of Yorkshire. But places like monasteries would have been where you found a lot of portable wealth, things you could smash and grab and carry away. So you can imagine crosses, relicaries, shrines, covers from books, personal dress items. So we can imagine Anglo-Saxon abbots wearing gold crosses, marks of office. So there's a huge amount of material which could be taken very, very quickly. And I think importantly, somewhere like Lindisfarne would have been well known as a centre of exchange on a regional and possibly even international scale in this period.

So I think the Vikings would have known what they were after, and it's clear that they deliberately targeted Lindisfar. They knew about it before they got there. And some of these sources now, I know, as you rightly pointed out, right at the beginning, we have to take them, perhaps with a pinch of salt, or at least consider why they were written down. But they do describe this as something very unexpected, something very new.

And does that imply that there was no defence, that this was literally just open, that the locals would essentially not expect anyone to do something like this? I think it's pretty clear from all the sources that it was entirely unexpected. Obviously, once the impact of Viking raiding becomes more established, I think people become more aware of the potential. But you've really got to remember this really is, apart from one other example down on the south coast of England,

this was really out of the blue. There'd never really been anything like it before. So that first attack, I think it's just that shocker that anybody would dream of, particularly attacking a monastic site. Early medieval Northumbria, it wasn't a peaceful place. I mean, there's plenty of conflict going on. But the idea of attacking and sacking a monastery was something qualitatively different to the other kinds of battles and warfare that was endemic in this period. And do we know what happened afterwards? I mean, was this, obviously, has that got so significant that we know about it, so it's so a long time afterwards.

But does it mean that the activity there stopped? I think some of the sources suggest that some of the monks were taken away, a slave or killed, but did it continue? Yeah, I mean, one of the things we need to remember is this is a very, very early attack. And the tempo of Viking attacks kind of increases progressively over the 9th century. And certainly for lots of sites, they're attacked by, very attacked by Vikings, But that doesn't deal a death blow. And we know that the monastery on Lindisfarne continues to be there. Well, the traditional story is until 875.

And that is, in histories written by later monks from the same community once they were in Durham, that's the point they say that the relics of Cuthbert and the other saints were taken away from Lindisfarne. And then there's this story how the community from the monastery, they go to various other places in Northern England, before finally ending up in Durham in AD 995. and that's why there's a cathedral in Durham and that's why Cusbert's relics are in Durham. That's a direct descendant.

That's the traditional story but I think it's increasingly people are realising that even if the abbots and the relics and the main body of the monastery left that there was a continued presence even after that date. One thing is people have been starting to re-look at the early medieval sculpture.

There's quite a bit of early medieval Anglo-Saxon crosses and that kind of thing. And a lot of that, our current understanding of a dating seems to date after the point everyone's been to the left, which is a bit of a challenge. And that means that there must have been people who were, first all, people who wanted to put crosses up, people who knew how to make them, people who knew how to design them, people who were able to pay for them. So there's clearly some kind of continued focus, and there's been some really interesting reassessment of the historical sources pointing out

that actually there are records of the island still being attacked, actually by Scots rather than Vikings, and people continuing to go there after the 875 date. So it's pretty clear that there's some kind of continuity on the island. And that's one of the things we're trying to understand ourselves with our own excavations. Brilliant. So thinking then about in 793, what was actually there. So obviously you said already that there's no evidence of the actual attack, so we don't have a ruined building or anything like that, which makes sense again if it's being reused for such a long time. But what was there? If you were Viking on that raid, what would you likely have seen when you arrived by your boat? Well, I think like a lot of early medieval monasteries,

obviously the heart of the monastery would have been the churches. Big early medieval monastery would have multiple, multiple churches. So I think we can certainly imagine, we know that there's early medieval fabric beneath the later medieval monastery there as well. So we've got a possible earlier church beneath that and the bits of the parish church which are next to it also has some probable early medieval bits in it. So certainly they'd probably see two churches in a line, which is a very frankish actually way of laying out churches. There would have been lots of wooden buildings. Anglo-Saxon early medieval monasteries more generally, but not like later medieval monasteries like you might go and see within the National Trust

or anything. They don't have lots of stone buildings. You don't have a formal stone cloister. Most buildings would have been wooden. The whole site would actually just been very, very big, but with probably with fields and paddocks and agricultural areas and workshops. So in that respect, some ways, it wouldn't have looked massively unfamiliar. I think it's only the stone buildings, which would have looked really different. And then also we can imagine stone crosses placed around the site. There would have been multiple stones. cemeteries. We know probably two or three separate locations where there's burials. So it would have been big, kind of multi-centred, sprawling settlements with mainly wooden buildings, but these stone churches

right at the centre. And so who was there then? Are we only talking about monks? Or if you're talking about that, you've got animals and things like that, could there be families living there, women and children as well? Or is it purely monks? Well, one of the things we've been excavating is a cemetery which seems to date to this period. And it's very clear from our cemetery that the people buried in it are from a wide variety of backgrounds. We've got adult men and women, but we've got children. Now, you could be a monk at the age of seven, but we've also got babies. We've got at least two examples of women being buried with babies. So it's clear we've got a community certainly being buried in that cemetery, which represents a normal kind of social group. And one of our questions is

whether these are people who also lived on the island. It's big enough to have more than just the monks on the island. It's not absolutely tiny. Or whether these are people from the mainland or whether these are pilgrims and visitors who've come across from maybe longer distances attracted to the potential for Cuthbert's relics to perform amazing miracles.

I think what's pretty clear is the monks owned so much land that there's no way they could have farmed it all themselves. So they must have had tenants who weren't monks who were working their land for them. So I'm pretty happy there would have been more than just monks there. And going on to a bit more than your research, as you've given us some tantalizing clues there already, what exactly is that you're looking for? What sort of questions are you trying to answer in your current project? Well, we started off with a very basic question of actually where is the Anglo-Saxon monastery.

I think we've always known there's a monastery on the island because BEDRIZE, writes about it and it's mentioned in early medieval, early medieval documentary sources. But we were never absolutely sure where it was. It was probably where we found it under the main village, but no one had ever really carried out any substantial excavation. So that was our basic question, just to find out where it is. And once we'd located areas of occupation of the right period, we're trying to understand what life was like. For me, I'm interested in the daily life of the monks. So I'm interested in things in the craft and the industry. We're interested in what they were eating. We're interested in how they lived, what was life like on an

island. So we've been, yeah, we're trying to get a sense of rather than seeing these as, as kind of special places with special holy people and somehow isolated from the world. I'm really interested in actually seeing how they actually embed into the wider world. That's what I think We're really after. Okay, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds. Go. Right, so Dan's given me a few seconds to sell The Ancients podcast. What is the ancients, I hear you say? Well, it's like Dan's show, except just ancient history.

We've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries. This seems to be the oldest known-dated depiction of the animal world, as far as we can tell, anywhere in the world. We've got the big names. It's one of those of great things, Pompey. It's kind of forever rising from. the dead and from destruction. We've got the big topics. The man destroys seven legions in a day. No one in history has done that. Subscribe to the ancients from history hit wherever you get to your podcast from. Oh and Russell Crowe, if you're listening, we would love to have you on the ancients.

Spread the word, people. Spread the word. And you've got some new excavations coming up later on this year, I believe? Yes, fingers crossed. Myself and my collaborators, Dig Ventures, will be out in September. Obviously, we were able to get out last year, so we were lucky. And that will be our sixth season investigating our site. And what we've got, we've got an area, we've got the cemetery, we've already talked about that. But we've also got what's increasingly looking like an area of metal working, quite substantial.

We're still having to be still just nibbling into the edge of that. We've got remains of animal bones, so that's telling us about diet on the island. So there's a lot to unpick. and then we've got a PhD student exploring the wider landscape of the island because that's got a lot of big story to tell of its own. That's really exciting. I can't wait to see the results of it. But if we go back to the sort of area around Northumber, there's some other sites around there as well that are quite significant.

Places like Bambrough, for example, it's not far off. Can you tell us something about those sites as well? Yeah, in Bambrah, a lot of people will know Bambrah through things like The Last Kingdom and it's a very famous castle. so many people he's often used for TV films. And it sits on a really impressive rocky crag overlooking the North Sea. And you can see it straight across from Lindisfarne. It's only a couple of miles as a crow flies from Lindisfarne.

And Bamber is really important because it was a major palace, it's probably the best term to use, of the kings of Northumbria. They would have had, I mean, early medieval kings were constantly moving around. So they would have had multiple homes. But this is certainly one of their major ones. and we know that Oswald, for example, who founded Lindisfarne, he was also resident at Bambra, and that's been excavated by a fantastic research project going on for the last 10 or so years, but probably a bit longer than that.

And they've been also excavating stuff, which is exactly contemporary with what we've been finding. And I think it's really important to understand that proximity between Lindisfan and Bambra because sometimes people have the idea that because Lindersand's an island is that it's all about being really remote. moat. And actually, I think that's a wrong way of looking at. I think actually the important relationship is the fact that you're only four miles away from one of the most important royal sites in Northumbria. This is a high status landscape. And this is a period where people are moving around by sea, a huge amount, because it's just quicker and easier than walking or going on horseback. So justing out into the North Sea is not jutting out into something which is deserted. You're

actually jutting out into the shipping lanes. So, and I think this is probably why the Vikings know about it, because people are using the North Sea. This is a period when the North Sea trading networks are really emerging. So people would have known about it, and it's about, it's quite an ostentatious site. If they wanted remoteness, they could have found lots of other places to be remote. This is about making a statement. And you can imagine someone like Oswald being on the palisade of his palace at Bambra, just pointing across to his massive monastery, which he founded. So that's a really important relationship.

And this is a really interesting point that you made, actually, about all this contact and the fact that people are moving across the sea. And in the accounts on the reports, it seems very much like this is the first time these pagans come across. But are there other signs that there's contact with Scandinavians prior to 793? It's difficult to be absolutely sure about this. I mean, one of the troubles is some of the objects, the artefacts of the North Sea world, they're not always easy to locate to a particular place.

There's this kind of shared world where traders from York were meeting traders from Frisier, who were probably meeting traders from southern Scandinavia. They're all part of the shared world. So one of our nicest finds is we've got a beautiful gaming piece, a glass gaming piece, which is, I mean, whether it's from precisely before or after the... the Viking tax is hard to say, but it's broadly that period. And it's beautiful. It's got a fantastic parallel from a hill fort up in Scotland, a Pictish hill fort, and it's got great parallels from places like Dorstadt in the Netherlands, another major trading centre. So you've got this kind of

shared material culture, a shared material world. And Vikings would have been part of that. It wasn't everything about being a Viking, but they were aware of these trading routes. They were aware of this world where is all this trading going on. North North Sondbri is generally seen as being a little bit too far north to be involved directly in it. But I find it impossible to believe that if traders from a North Sea are making their way up the Humber to go to places like York, they weren't pushing up further up the coast and exploring these places and scouting them out. You don't just randomly hit Linda Svarn for accident. You've got to know it's there. And you've got to know what it is as well. So I think there's, even if the 7-9-3 attack is the first clear emergence of that

kind of Scandinavian connections, but they must have known about it. They must have been exploring those waters before they arrived. And going back to some of those sources again that you talked about at the beginning, there's one quite intriguing one, which these letters from Alquin of York, who you can probably tell me more about. Now he talks about the attack, but he's quite admonishing and he's sort of actually using this attack as a sign from God, as a sign that he's actually punishing the Northumbrians. Could you tell me something more about that? Yeah, I mean, early medieval historians,

they don't write about current affairs or history in an objective way. It's all about, particularly all the literature in this period as being created by monks. So they see everything in the world, all current affairs, all things happen in the past. They see that as the playing out of God's divine will or judgment. and, you know, he will always see everything that happens as a, basically God expressing an opinion about contemporary behaviour. So, yeah, the idea that something bad happens, bad things happen for a reason. Things happen because God is angry.

So you have this idea that these heathen Vikings, they're non-Christian, they're kind of culturally completely different, and that it's more than just bad luck. These attacks are driven by failures of the kings of Christendom to be good, good kings. And this idea of writing and complaining about Christian kings not being good enough, it has got a long tradition, it goes back to, you know, well before this period. But Alquin's really important because he's Northumbrian. He certainly, he has his origin to Northumbria. He certainly had a career in York.

but by the time of the Vikings, he has been head hunted, as it were, by Charlemagne, who is soon to be the Holy Roman Emperor. He is someone who is plugged right into the very kind of beating political heart of Europe. And the fact that what's happened in Northumbria is being transmitted to the Holy Roman Emperor and his court is really, really important. This isn't just something which happens on the edge of a known world. it's something which has profound impact on the continental mainland and of course soon we it's very easy to forget

when we talk about the Vikings in Britain we always tend to think of it as the kind of the Viking impact on Britain and Ireland and the North Atlantic the Viking impact on continental Europe and you know France and the low countries was incredibly profound so I think there's that sense that you know something nasty is coming coming our way because this part of Europe the Karelingian Empire, they are part of that North Sea trading world as well. So they are interested and worried about anything that might impact on it. Yeah, that's a really good point, I think.

There's this idea that it wasn't something just local, but those shockwaves that we mentioned at the beginning because suddenly something is changing, something is stepping up, and that this is why Lindisfarne is seen as so important in that whole history of the Viking Age, I suppose. So earlier, you talked about the different things that were taking place and that this was as a wider community. But I think most people think of these monasteries

as a very just religious affairs. But are there other things going on as well? Like trade, you're saying this as a part of those trading networks. Do you have any evidence for that? Well, yeah, we're getting increasing numbers of Northumbrian coins. So these are coins which are mainly minted down in York, which is right the other end of Northumbria. You know, a good hundred plus miles to the south.

And that's really interesting because in these northern parts of Northumbria, where we are, the only places we're finding kind, of coins are really being found, apart from Bambra, are monastic sites. They don't seem to be using coins out in the wider country, but coinages are being used at monasteries. So it may be that these are centres for exchange, because it's on the coast. Also, this would have been probably the biggest population. So there's, you've got to imagine, lots of workshops,

farming going on, processing, drying corn, making beer, all sorts of, all sorts of things going on. There would have been a hive of activity. The number of people who would have been involved in making the Lindisfarang Gospel, to example, would have been tiny compared to the proportion of people who lived on the island and were basically spending all their time keeping themselves going and running the farms, running the estates and that kind of thing. So this is a big, bustling place of which the religious core is only a small part.

I think that really sums up why this was such a likely target for the fighting raid. first of all, they've got the information with so many people going, trade going on, as you rightly pointed out, that people would have known about it, even over across in Scandinavia. And then you have the riches and all those sort of valuables in the monastery,

but presumably also there's political significance, the fact that you can attack a site like that must also, to some degree, have had an importance, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, it would have been right under the nose of Bambra. I mean, when the Vikings arrive, you can see on that bit of sea the Bamberra and Lindershan are both really important landmarks

and they knew not to attack the defended hill fort they go straight for the monastery because they know that's where the wealth is and I think really crucially you said it's wealth you can it's wealth you can carry off you can't put 400 cows on a boat but you can put we can put monks slaves was probably one of the key things they're after as much as anything and the portable wealth that stuff you can smash and grab and go off with very, very quickly.

So is it quite likely that if you've got a big population there, that perhaps they took women and children slaves, other people slaves as well? Yeah, I mean, presumably you go for whatever you can grab. And, you know, these raids probably aren't very long because it wouldn't have taken more than, you know, a couple of hours and there would have been reinforcements from places like Bamberra. You go in, you grab what you can, and actually in sense you don't want to destroy it all

because you ought to be able to come back and raid it again so there's actually no real motivation for just completely killing the goose with a laser gold neck you grab what you can and then you kind of take it away and you come back later and start all over again clearly it was a very successful one seeing as it was so widely reported now in terms of your new excavations

just to round up is there anything that you're really hoping that you're going to discover this year What would your sort of dream discoveries be? Well, the area we're looking at the moment, we've got metalworking area, and we've got lots of metalworking slags and industrial residues and a couple of bits of crucible at the moment. So that's all very well and good. What I would really like to find are the moulds for casting things.

So, you know, we don't actually have much church metalwork in Britain from monastic sites because all the good stuff is in the graves from West Coast of Norway because the Vikings took it. But it would be great to actually, what we do find are the moulds. So the moulds in which they pour the molten copper alloy to make the relicaries

and make the shrines and that kind of thing. So if we found those, that would make me very pleased because, you know, they must, the shrine of something like Cuthbert would have been incredibly elaborate. For Lindisfar and Gospels

would have had an elaborate book cover on it. There would have been multiple other relicry is for all the other bits of saint which they had in the various churches there. So if we can find stuff like that, I think that's what would make me most happy. Amazing. Well, I really hope that you do find that, and then we can report back on that later in the year. And can people follow your excavations online? Do you have any sort of online presence for them? Yes, yes. If you Google Dig Ventures and Lindisfarne, you'll find the Lindisfarne website where we have lots and lots of social media so people can follow us during our excavations in September.

And also our project is crowdfunded. So if people follow that link, they find all of information about crowdfunding and how you can help us and how we can share back to you what we do on site. And hopefully by September, people will be able to actually come to the island

and visit and we're in a public part of the island. So stick your nose over and we're always happy to talk to you. Fantastic. Well, I'm definitely coming for a visit. So that's me booked in already. That's brilliant. Thank you so much for that. David, I can't wait to hear the rest of it. I was really good to hear the context as well so good luck with the excavations

and that was Dr David Petz from Durham University talking about Linda Svan on the anniversary of the Viking raid of 793 I really hope you enjoyed listening to this I am Dr Kat Jarman and this has been Gone Medieval from History Hit my co-host Matt Lewis will be back with another episode this coming Saturday

and in the meantime please subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes we have some really fantastic content coming up so please do subscribe and share with your friends and family and we can't wait to share the rest with you