Lindisfarne, 793 AD_ The Violent Raid That Birthed The Viking Age.mp4

I've come to the beautiful coast of Northumberland. Today, surely one of the most peaceful, one of the most spiritual places in Britain. But it wasn't always like that. In the year 793, dreadful forewarnings came over the land of Northumbria, terrifying the people most woefully. They were immense sheets of light rushing through the air and whirlwinds and fiery dragons flying across the firmament, soon followed by a great hunger. And soon after, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the Church of God in Lindisfarne by fierce robbery and slaughter. That is how one medieval chronicler described the events of the year 793 AD. When the place I'm visiting became one of the first places in Britain to experience the wrath of a Viking raid. Lindisfarne lies just off the coast of the north-east of England. It can still only be reached at certain times a day across a tidal causeway. In the 8th century, this special place was a key religious centre of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Lindisfarne was just a few miles north of the royal power base at Banborough. The tide's just gone out enough now to allow me to drive across the causeway to Lindisfarne. It's the only way of getting to and from this island by road. You can only do it at certain times a day. And it's a reminder that even in our modern world, this still feels like a very cut-off, very remote place. A thousand years ago, this would have been very isolated. You could risk the journey across the treacherous sands, or it's a boat. There's been a religious institution here for 1,400 years, starting when the king of Northumbria, Oswald, invited Celtic monks from Iona in Scotland to create a new monastery here on Lindisfarne. It was a thriving monastic community, over 30 monks cut off from the distractions of the mainland, famous for producing beautiful manuscripts and supported by the money of visiting pilgrims. The person who drew all those pilgrims here is first believed to have been buried somewhere round about here. The original Anglo-Saxon church is long since gone, destroyed in part by the Vikings, but this was its east end. This is where the saint could be laid to rest and venerated. The saint was Cuthbert. He'd been a monk and bishop of Lindisfarne in the 670s and 680s. He'd earned a reputation as a seer and a healer. After his death and burial in 687AD, miracles were soon reported. The gravesite became a shrine. Cuthbert became a revered saint in the prosperous kingdom of Northumbria. Lindisfarne may have kept itself apart from the rest of the world, but that didn't stop it being a place of extraordinary talent and learning. The monks of Lindisfarne created one of the greatest works of Anglo-Saxon art and devotion, the Lindisfarne Gospels. Glorious, illuminated manuscripts, faith portrayed in words and pictures, painstakingly made in the early 8th century, just a few decades after St Cuthbert's death. The early monastery of St Cuthbert at Lindisfarne was nowhere near as large as the later buildings we see today. English heritage guide Alexander has explored its early history. Alexander, what would this place have looked like in the early medieval period? So you have to imagine, without all the stone, it actually would have been built out of wood. Primarily they had reeds as well for the roofs, but later on they added lead instead. And it wouldn't have been as grand. There was fewer buildings, they were focused a lot more on their job and kind of focusing on the great artworks they were producing, like the Gospels. So you basically had maybe a couple of churches, the same pattern you have today. They didn't have great guest houses, it was really simplistic and focused more on their job to spread the word around Northumberland. But there would have been a scriptorium? Yes, there would have been, where they made the Gospels. Now it would probably be one of the buildings either adjacent to the church or possibly part of it as well. To give an idea of the monastic atmosphere of 8th century Lindisfarne, I'm travelling 60 miles down the Northumbrian coast to Jarrow, where parts of their ancient abbey still stands. Still in use today as St Paul's Church. Part of it dates back to 685 AD. Stepping in here takes you back nearly 1300 years to the height of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, a world before the Vikings struck the monasteries. If you want to get a sense of what Lindisfarne was like, perhaps the best place to do so is here, a few miles to the south, at St Paul's in Jarrow on the south bank of the Tyne. Lindisfarne and Jarrow were both dynamic monastic settlements. Lindisfarne had wooden buildings, this one was made of stone. It's wonderful to think this part of the church is well over 1,000 years old. Here you get a sense of what life was like. Priests in silent contemplation, writing, studying the scriptures. And the most famous monk to live and work here was Bede. He was a theologian, he was a leader of this community, he was an advisor to kings and he was a historian. He produced huge numbers of works. And from that work you get a sense of life in Northumbria, the foremost of the English kingdoms. And after centuries of conquest, war, chaos and paganism, you get a sense of a period of relative peace, stability and the blessings of Christianity. Bede's best-known work was his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Using the resources of the large monastery library, he set out the story of Christianity in England. Next door to the church, Jarrow Hall has recreations of buildings from the same period. I'm meeting Catherine Robertson in a replica Anglo-Saxon hall. I always think it might be strange for some people, given what happened later in history, that Northumbria in this period, it's probably the most important kingdom in the British Isles. Yes, it was certainly very strong. Once the two kingdoms united into Northumbria with powerful kings, it was certainly one of the most prosperous and powerful. Especially near Jarrow, it's a very good quality of life. Is Christianity important to the success of that kingdom? The monks are kind of driving economic development, we might say today. Yes, certainly, and certainly trade as well. The things that Benedict Biscop brought over to found the monastery here at Jarrow, we've got glaciers from France. The actual sand to make the glass is coming from Syria. What? Yeah, the lapis lazuli to put in the scriptorium and the books, that's coming from Afghanistan. Bede, when he died, it's said that he had pepper in his belongings. So for a small area of Northumbria, there's a lot of trade and international connections going on already. Before the Viking raids, we're well used to people from different areas here at Jarrow. So you're looking at a kingdom that's quite settled, it's got international trade, it can feed itself, and it's got this kind of dynamic intellectual, cultural sector, you might say. It has. We had one of the largest, if not the largest, library in Northumbria, not the country, here at Jarrow, thanks to Benedict bringing over the books from Rome. So it was definitely trying to emulate the Roman style right here in Northumbria and bring things over and make it a centre of learning. Bede didn't travel very much. He went up to Lindisfarne to study St Cuthbert and he went down to York, but he got all his knowledge from the library that was here. He had the Anglo-Saxon internet at his fingers, so it's nice that it was a powerhouse of information here as well as a powerhouse of wealth, yeah. Like Jarrow, Lindisfarne was vital to the strength and reputation of Northumbria. It was renowned as one of the primary religious sites in the British Isles. In recent years, Dig Ventures, a crowdfunded civic archaeology organisation, has been working with Durham University on excavations at Lindisfarne to find out more about the site over 1,000 years ago. They've focused on a burial ground just next to Lindisfarne's priory. Harriet is leading the field archaeology today. Well, we're digging here because we're trying to find the earliest iteration of this monastery community that was here in the 7th, 8th, 9th century. So we started coming here about seven years ago. We do a couple of weeks of excavation each year and what we've found each year is cemetery. We've got lots and lots of burials here. So we should imagine the old, little old Anglo-Saxon church and then just burials around outside it, as you'd expect to find at a parish church now, is that the idea? Yeah, it's similar. One of the questions that we had when we first started digging here was whether or not this is a monastic community, whether or not it's a lay community of people who are on the island to produce food and things like that who are just living here, not part of the religious community, or whether or not it's people coming to the monastery, perhaps for medical treatment, things like that. What we've seen certainly is that we've got a massive mix of people. So we've got women, we've got children, we've got neonatal burials, we have infants, teenagers, it's a huge mix of people here. I've timed my arrival well. There's a really elaborate burial emerging from the ground right now. It's not like the others, which are quite plain and simple. So most of the burials that we have are people without any kind of lining to the grave. We think they're actually shrouded, so they're wrapped in material nice and tightly, keeps their hands and their legs firmly together and then they're placed directly into the ground. This is really quite different because we have these lines of stones on both sides. We have these big stones that are being taken off the top here as well. So something quite different going on here. Nobody found yet, though? Nobody found yet, no. We're still trying to find the skeleton in here. This is very unusual because we think this is a stone-lined grave. So that's not something that we get very often in this graveyard at all. So, again, may well suggest that this is someone of higher status. A king of Northumbria, maybe? OK, I'm jumping ahead here. Or a bishop. I'm getting too overexcited. Suddenly, things start to emerge from the ground. So while we've been sitting here, these brilliant people have just found some bone, the first bit of bone. I think that could be some leg bone. That's how we find them. Just taking it down very carefully, and then all of a sudden you just spot something a bit different from the soil, and there it is. And you've switched to wooden tools because of the damage that the metal would cause? That's right. So bone is really soft. And if you use metal tools, it will scratch against the bone and you can lose some of the information that can help tell us about whether or not that person was male, female, how old they were, whether they had any disease showing up in the bones. So wood is more or less the same density as bone, so it means when you rub up against it with wood, you don't do that same damage, so you preserve that information on the bones. And there's more emerging now, which is hopeful, that it isn't just a random fragment, but there might be the... Yeah. So what we need to do is keep following this bone and see whether it's articulated with other bones. So that looks like it's a long bone of some kind. And it's quite small by the look of it. That's very exciting, isn't it? It's really exciting, yeah. Even though you're digging in a burial site, you don't get... There's never any boredom when new bones are found. No, cos every burial is different, and it's just that anticipation of, you know, who is this and who were they, what did they do, what was their life like? It really makes you start considering, when you find someone's bones, all of those questions. The bones of this skeleton are very small. It raises a difficult question. I don't think it's neonatal, but it could be an infant. Julie, can I just come in very quickly and just check that? Sorry. Here comes the boss. No, I just want... That looks a bit scully. I think, yeah, I think this is a baby. A baby? Yeah. That's really interesting. We have had neonates buried on top of adults before, so that's possible. So we've got a baby here in a very grand grave. Apart from everything else, it does show as well, it's not just monks in this community. Yeah, exactly. We'd need to see more of this to see what sort of age this person is, but at the moment, it does look like someone very young. Such a grand burial. We've got this tiny, tiny burial in there. Monks weren't supposed to have families, were they? Not supposed to. OK, so... The excavation of this unusual burial will continue to reveal its secrets over the summer. More on this later in the film. The finds from the Dig Ventures excavations are all carefully analysed and recorded, gradually building up a picture of what life was like on Lindisfarne in Anglo-Saxon times. Joanna is in charge of the finds room. One fascinating set of discoveries have been fragments of namestones, probably grave markers. I can see some carvings here. Yes. Can we actually tell any names from these? We have two names. Well, we have one full name, that's actually this one, and it says Ithrith on it. Ithrith. Ithrith. This was actually the first mentioning of that name, so before we found this namestone, that name was never mentioned anywhere. And that's the name of someone from 1,300 years ago. Exactly, yes. Maybe a monk. The name Ithrith combines female and male elements, so it's hard to be certain about the gender of the person this commemorates. The stone has the shape of a large cross with a sun disc at the end of each arm. It dates from the earliest times of the monastery at Lindisfarne. Ithrith may even have known Oswald or Cuthbert. Other stones are also inscribed with runes. You can see two very clear runes here, and then also some here, but we don't have a translation for these yet. So I'm being very stupid. I thought runes were Viking, but there's Anglo-Saxon runes as well. Yes, there are Old English Anglo-Saxon runes. So often, as you say, people think runes, there must be Vikings, but... And runes are just symbols. Well, yeah, they are letters. They are symbols that basically have a translation of the letter in for us for today. We actually have something else with runes on them. That's this little bone comb, and it says E.D.E. on it. It's very hard to see, but we've had it analysed. Potentially a little knit comb with a very nice cable designed around the outside. So you comb out the knits. Yes, exactly. And it might have been, you know, this is my comb, this is my name, my comb, don't touch it. So... As someone who uses knit combs a lot on my kids, that really speaks to me. That's incredible to see one so old. So they are all between 700 and 1,000. Perhaps the most exceptional find is this intricate glass object, a playing piece from a popular pastime of the 8th century called taffel. So it's from a game that was played all over the North Atlantic. People here played it, people all over north of Europe played it, the Vikings would have played it, although this is not a Viking piece. And you can see that it's actually, it's blue glass. Want to hold it? Okay. For your star piece, be very careful. That's amazing. And that was in a grave? Well, it was in a disturbed context. So it was not, we don't think that it would have been a grave good, but it could have just been lost, fallen out of someone's pocket while they were walking over the graveyard or at some other time. What is definitely from a grave are these two rings. They are also coming from a disturbed context. We found the two rings on the finger bone and you can see the finger is, it's green, which is because of the copper, so the copper coloured the bone. And they were around the finger, so they would have been buried on the person. Amongst the finds, there are also clues about what people ate on Lindisfarne. They are whale bones. This is actually a whale vertebra and you can see that it has cut marks here, so butchery marks. Were they hunting these whales? We don't know. They might have, but it could also have been a beached whale that was scavenged. So we do know that they ate all sorts of things, so from just cattle, pigs, goats, to whale, to potentially seals as well, also lots of birds. So they had a whole industry for them to basically create food for themselves. So we come to Lindisfarne and you see the skeletal outline of the church and it can feel, I think it can feel a bit sterile, but these finds just inject the humanity back into it. Exactly. It shows us that people back then were just as us. They had the same worries, the same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams. They liked jewellery. They liked games. They weren't just praying and working. They were also, yeah, playing board games, taking care of themselves, brushing their hair, paying for things. So it just gives you that connection to the past and showing that people back then were just people like us. The finds paint a vibrant picture of Lindisfarne in the early medieval period. Its popularity as the shrine of St Cuthbert and a place of isolated pilgrimage meant Lindisfarne started to get rich and famous across Britain and beyond. But as Lindisfarne's reputation spread, it attracted less pious attention. News of Lindisfarne's wealth must have spread across the North Sea to Scandinavia, and while the island was remote, isolated from much of the rest of Britain, to experience sailors with the wind at their backs was all too accessible. This was a clash of two very different cultures, a settled community of Christians devoted to peaceful contemplation and books and a marauding war band, followers of Thor and Odin, hungry for slaves and gold. An older discovery here speaks of these turbulent times for Lindisfarne. The so-called Warrior Stone portrays violent figures, swords and axes held high. They're anything but pilgrims. In the 790s, Northumbria was already going through a period of turmoil as short-lived kings rose and fell in quick succession. Central authority crumbled and defences were weakened. And amid the chaos, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle paints its famous apocalyptic picture as the Vikings first struck Lindisfarne. In the year 793, dreadful Dar warnings came over the land of Northumbria. They were immense sheets of light rushing through the air and fiery dragons flying across the firmament, followed by a great hunger. And soon after, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the Church of God in Lindisfarne by fierce robbery and slaughter. But this wasn't the first time that Norsemen's sails had been seen around the coasts of Britain. Dr Jane Kershaw of Oxford University studies this early Viking period. Tell me, what is the first mention, the first hint of the Northmen in the English sources? Yeah, the first mention is not Lindisfarne. A few years before, in 789, there was an entry that a group of Northmen or Danes had attacked the south coast of England, Wessex, today identified as Portland in Dorset. There they had killed a king's reeve, so like an official sent by the king of Wessex to go and investigate these strangers who had rocked up. And that seems to be the very first evidence of an unfriendly Viking presence in England. What then is particular about the assault on Lindisfarne? Why is it so often said to herald a new era in British, even European, history? So one thing is that Lindisfarne is a really important place. It was where Cuthbert was bishop. It's the focus of his cult. Cuthbert is known very widely from the writings of Bede. So it's a very important holy place for the Anglo-Saxons. Cuthbert's relics are stored at Lindisfarne, so it's not just any other monastery. It's one of the holiest places in England. Nothing is off-limits to them. There's a real sense that they can just go and they're going up to the altar. They're spilling blood at the altar. As well as the dramatic entry in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, we know a lot about the attack on Lindisfarne from letters written by a Northumbrian cleric called Alquin, who was based overseas in Charlemagne's court. So Alquin writes to Aethelred, king of Northumbria, never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race. Nor was it thought that such an inroads 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 prey to pagan peoples. There's a really interesting bit in Alquin's letter to Higbold, who is the bishop of Lindisfarne, who survives the attack, and he writes at the end of his letter, when King Charles returns home, this is Charlemagne, because Alquin is at Charlemagne's court, I will go to him and we will see if there's any prophets regarding the youths who have been led into captivity by the pagans. So this is a hint that it's not just the ornaments that the Vikings have stolen, they've actually taken boys at the monasteries and they've been fed into the Viking slave trade. Alquin had an explanation for the horrors of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne. He blamed all sorts of immoral behaviour, including the king of Northumbria, Aethelred, allowing a noble called Sitka, who had committed suicide, to be buried on the Holy Island, contrary to Christian practice. Alquin might have been aware of this and might have been very critical of Aethelred, as well as the community at Lindisfarne itself, for allowing somebody like Sitka to be buried there, and that might be part of what he has in mind for why he thinks the monks at Lindisfarne, as well as wider society, actually carry some of the blame for this Viking attack. So already, right at the beginning of this Viking era, there's a sense they're the scourge of God, they're sent to punish the English for their own heresies. Absolutely, and Alquin is really specific about what these evils are. Don't tell me. Fornication? Adultery, fornication, and the nuns are at it. He goes on, it's not just fornication, adultery, it's also the dress. The way of wearing the hair, the luxurious habits of the princes and people. Look at your trimming of the beards and hair in which you have wished to resemble the pagans. So that's interesting for a couple of reasons. So Alquin is saying because of your hairstyle, the way you cut your beard, that's sort of not holy enough and that's part of the reason that you've sinned. But it's also suggesting that Aethelred and other Northumbrian princes are aware of the appearance of the Vikings, of the Scandinavians, and they want to emulate that. Beyond the pagan fashions, hard evidence suggests that trade had already been passing between Northern England and Scandinavia. Lead from English mines and black jet stone from Whitby have been discovered in Norway. Is there a possibility that... You've mentioned a lot of political turmoil in Northumbria. Were some of these merchants and traders with knowledge of the coast, with local contacts, realising there might be an opportunity? The English were a little bit weak up in the north-east at the moment, a bit rudderless. Would this be a time to ditch the trading mission for a second and pick up spears and shields and head back as warriors? I think that's very possible. I think if you were used to trading at York, for instance, and you were sailing down the Northumbrian coast with some frequency before sailing into the Humber and reaching York that way, you would have passed these isolated, very coastal, open monastic communities with centres of population, centres of wealth and treasure, and at some point maybe the tide turns and you don't want to be trading any more in York. You think that there are easier pickings just by going ahead and raiding these places, which you can do because the population there isn't going to mount any sort of serious defence. Of course, one of the big questions is why did the Viking raids begin in this period? What drove Scandinavians to cross the sea on plundering missions? There are many theories, from population growth to revenge for Christian expansion in Europe. An economic explanation links the wealth of the Middle East, the thousands of miles away, across rivers, land and sea, to violent events at places like Lindisfarne. From around 800, we see the first signs of Islamic silver coins, known as dirhams, in Scandinavia. So these have been obtained through the rivers going down through Eastern Europe, reaching the Islamic caliphates with a centre at Baghdad. The silver is travelling up along the rivers, entering the Baltic Sea, and I think it's the arrival, the very start of this dirham flow, which grows into immense quantities later on, that might be the thing that sets raids off in the West. If you haven't got silver, you're losing out. Yes, and I think if you're in rural Western Norway, you're quite far removed from those trade networks that would link you to that Islamic silver, but you are fairly close to the coastline of Northumbria, which has rich pickings. Silver, gold and slaves from Northumbria could be traded in Scandinavia, and even as far as the Middle East. After 793, Viking raids increased, not just at Lindisfarne, but further down the coast at Jarum. But this time the outcome was very different. The locals were ready for them. Well, there's two different stories because they raided us at least twice. We actually got hit the year after Lindisfarne, so everyone who knows about Lindisfarne, the main information we have is from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It doesn't give us too much information. The Chronicle and other accounts record that the Vikings, or heathens as they call them, did plunder the monastery at Jarum. But then the locals, knowing what happened at Lindisfarne, managed to turn the tables on them. We had a slightly different narrative to what happens at Lindisfarne. Whether or not the information had gone viral for the Anglo-Saxon time, we heard about it and we actually managed to capture the head Viking and he was killed. The rest of the Vikings tried to get away. There's a massive storm in the River Tyne and they end up at Tyne Mouth where they're all killed. So for the first Viking raid, we actually managed to see them off. Your scully mask is slipping a bit here. You're still obviously very happy about this, I can tell. I am local from Jarum and it is a little bit of a source of pride. It's fascinating to look at the wider context of the first Viking raids, of the great resources and learning of places like Jarrow and Lindisfarne and the wider world that made them rich, but also drove others to seek out that wealth in precious metals and peoples that could be found here in Northumbria. The Dig Ventures excavations continue at Lindisfarne and they found out more about that extraordinary burial I witnessed being excavated. It appears that the neonatal burial that I saw was placed on top of a series of other burials. Key to this sequence was a skeleton that has been numbered SK2407. It's impossible to tell its gender for sure, but there was an extraordinary discovery. Small pieces of golden thread near to where its head would have rested. Possibly the remains of a headdress for a high-ranking person. The excavations also show the stone lining was actually added later, possibly to mark out this first important burial in the sequence. At some stage later, the baby's burial that I saw was added to this venerated location. Christianity endured on the Northumbrian coast. Despite further raids, the monastery continued to function deep into the 9th century. But now Viking raiders had become Viking armies. They were taking not just valuables, but the land itself. Eventually, the monks decided that they and their beloved St Cuthbert were no longer safe here, and it was time to go. The remains of St Cuthbert were moved to the mainland. They finally found a resting place at Durham, where a new cathedral was founded. Life did go on here in Lindisfarne, although it wasn't quite ever the same as it had been before the Viking raids. But then that changed when in the 12th century, England's new Norman rulers decided to start building this massive stone abbey here. Just look at this astonishing rainbow arch, once one of two interlocking arches that held up the mighty tower above. This is one of Norman England's most spectacular architectural achievements. Lindisfarne really epitomised the story of resilient Christianity, how those Christians first arrived here in the early medieval period, and they thrived in this isolated place of hermits and pilgrims. Lindisfarne was ravaged by the Vikings, but it re-emerges as a spiritual centre for the people of Northumbria and beyond. Lindisfarne remains a magical, timeless place, a gateway to a story of faith and the shifting tides of history that continues to reveal its centuries of secrets. Coming soon on History Hit, Eleanor Yarnager continues the dramatic story of the Vikings, discovering how the Northmen became the Normans. Thanks for watching.