Saints and raiders

The story

In the south, Christianity is linked with the arrival of St Augustine’s mission from Rome in 597.² In the north, it came from Ireland. In 635 Oswald, king of Northumbria, summoned an Irish monk named Aidan from the monastery on Iona, and granted him and his companions the small tidal island of Lindisfarne to found a monastery.¹

Cuthbert and the Gospels

Lindisfarne’s most famous monk, Cuthbert, died in 687 and was buried in a stone coffin in the church. When the monks opened his tomb in 698, they were delighted to find that his body had not decayed: it was “incorrupt”. He became the island’s saint.¹ In the early 700s, the masterpiece we call the Lindisfarne Gospels was made here. It is now in the British Library in London.¹

8 June 793

On 8 June 793 Lindisfarne suffered a devastating raid by Viking pirates.¹ English Heritage calls it an attack that “sent a shockwave through Europe”.² The scholar Alcuin wrote:

“Pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar … What assurance can the churches of Britain have …”

Alcuin, 793, quoted by English Heritage¹

Leaving the island

The community lasted another eighty years. In 875 the monks decided to leave Lindisfarne for good, carrying Cuthbert’s coffin with them. After seven years of wandering they settled at Chester-le-Street, building a church inside the old Roman fort. In 995 his relics were moved again, and were finally enshrined at Durham, where they remain.¹

AfterwardsCenturies later a priory stood on the island again. In 1537 it was closed on the orders of Henry VIII’s commissioners.¹ The ruins you can visit are from that later priory.