June 8, 793 · Northumbria, England Theater
June 8, 793
On June 8, 793, longships appeared without warning off the coast of Holy Island and Norse warriors stormed the monastery of Lindisfarne — one of the most sacred sites in Christendom, home to the relics of Saint Cuthbert and the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels. The monks were killed, captured for slavery, or drowned. The church was stripped of its treasures. The attack was so sudden, so far outside the existing mental map of threats, that the scholar Alcuin of York wrote to King Æthelred of Northumbria in a state of theological bewilderment: 'Never before has such terror appeared in Britain. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments.'
Commanders