793 AD: The Massacre Of Lindisfarne Explained | The Lost Realm

an island at the edge of a kingdom prophecy Superstition and [Music] fear wolves from the sea Terror from the north a Haven of solitude a beacon for pilgrims a place of worship a sanctu but at high tide the Saints turn their backs the attack on Linda 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 what ruins were left behind by the first Viking rid on Linda's father 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 rained now the winds have turned the dawn of a new age the DOR of the Viking age [Music] from the late 8th to the mid 11th centuries the Scandinavian peoples burst from their Frontiers 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 Newland most of all they voyaged to Europe to Germany France Ireland and Britain they came trading and they came raiding or Bing for centuries they were regarded as barbaric the civilization was lost yet Echoes remain down the ages of the ons called the northmen through archaeology now we can 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 north umbrian Monas history of lindis they killed looted and Enslaved the peaceful monks it was an outrage that sent shock waves through Anglo-Saxon Britain and also across Christian Europe never before had such an atrocity happened against the house of God and his children it was just the beginning in the decades after more raids followed and over the next two centuries Scandinavian Kingdoms in Europe had grown far from their Homeland they're known to is now as Vikings and their influence is 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 into the Wilds um setting forth across the sea um to find Fortune people who would die for Honor uh people who would die to save their reputations uh they 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 enjoy themselves to the maximum and then just disappear and sail into the sunset even for historians and archaeologists it's still these 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 as 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 um something that I think ought to worry us more than it does their violence their cruelty the the 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 about them dismissed as they were for many years as mere barbarians to find out how the Viking World began what can we discover of that one fed day on the North umbrian Coast when a new page in history was created for good or bad after the first Viking raid on lindis Far after the attack on lindes Anglo-Saxon monks wondered why such horror had befallen their brothers in the year 793 in this year dire portents appeared in the sky over North Umbria and sorely frightened the people they consisted of immense whirlwind and flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air of This calamity in unusual happenings or strange conduct what is the meaning of the bloody rain which we saw in Lent in the city of York in the Church of St Peter falling in a clear sky menacingly from the top that punishment by Blood was coming from the north upon these people its Beginnings may be seen in the blow which recently fell upon the house of God bloody rain and Dragons aside there were real portance that a clash of cultures was going to happen the year 789 at Portland on Britain's South Coast Three unknown craft made landfall there came for the first time three ships of North men the reev rode out to meet them and tried to force them to go to the king's residence for he did not know what they were and they slew him these were the first ships of the northmen which came to the lands of the English just a few years later in 792 Offa ruler of the powerful Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia ordered the strengthening of Defense es along the coast of Kent it seems someone already knew there was a threat out there around 200 mil 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 lindis fan has hardly changed [Music] the holy island is on Northeastern 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 twice a day it's reachable only from the sea a ologist Tim southernland has worked on digs across Europe but never yet on lindis F it's an incredibly remote place but when you get to this part of the causeway it's just it's just Sky there's very little around you it's endless amounts of sea and sky it's such a stunningly beautiful place he's excavated Mass Graves from later medieval battlefields but so far not from Viking or Saxon timeses is's here to discover what might remain of the people who were here at the time of that first raid who lived and worshiped on lindis Farm 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 [Music] as the name suggests holy Island was a hugely important religious center for the Anglo-Saxons of North Umbria 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 Aiden Aiden 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 Aiden was continuing a tradition that was already widespread in the monastic communities of Britain and Ireland it also became a center of learning most notably in the form of the lindis Von gospels which were produced in the early 700s the gospels were so finally rendered that later generations assumed that they must have been crafted By Angels for more than 150 years Christian monks had lived and worshiped on the island of lindes far 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 or had to sell their wees 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 lindis F was also a prestigious jewel in the north umbrian Crown since Aiden many of its Abbotts had also been canonized as Saints the early Christian church had a weakness for silver and gold the richness of lindis Van's Chapel would have been famous along the coastline of Britain and Beyond archaeologist and writer Max Adams has researched the situation in North Umbria 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 Scandinavian Raiders turned their heads Vikings then didn't just appear out of nowhere at lindis Fan 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 lindis van 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 treasure is guarded by dragons can only be won by Deep cunning bravery and any attempt to to Steel treasure will be met with the Vengeance of of a god unlike Scandinavian treasure the treasures held by the monks that treasure is not guarded by Dragons It's guarded by prematurely baling men dressed in Monks habits not carrying swords with no combat training at all there certainly were no Pagan dragons nor even armed guards here holy Islands monks trusted only to the protection of the Saints imagine this the Scandinavian Raiders point of view why would anybody not have a dragon to guard their treasure on the 8th of January the raiding of heathen men miserable devastated God's Church in lindan Island by looting and Slaughter word of the outrage spread fast among the monasteries of Europe we know hints of what happened from a letter written by a monk named Alin who wrote to Hig bald Abbot of Lindon who survived your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow since the pagans have desecrated God's Sanctuary shed the blood of the Saints around the altar laid waste the house of Our Hope trample the bodies of the Saints like Dum in the street where is the god of the Christians Alin himself wasn't present during the raid but he clearly heard news from either Higg ball or from others who survived the only other account we have is more than 200 years later from Simeon of Durham's Chronicle Historia ream they came to the Church of lindis far laid everything waste with Grievous plundering trampled the holy places with polluted steps dug up the altars and seized all the Treasures of the holy church they killed some of the brothers took some of them away in fets many they drove out naked and loaded with insults some they Dred found in the sea these few written fragments are all we have about what happened but what other evidence might exist could archaeology tell us anything about the attack on lindis Farm the ruins you can still see today are those of the second prior [Music] abandoned after the Reformation in the 16th century this building replaced the original prior that the Vikings supposedly damaged or destroyed we don't know those original remains have been lost and forgotten for centuries now archaeologists are doing their best to find them again as soon as you read about the Viking period we're drawn straight into lindes fan but I ecologically this is such uh an Undiscovered place there are archeological 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 prior yet over the years some Clues have been found these are all that remain of the lives of people who lived a millennium ago 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 lindis Fan in 793 it seems to depict Viking warriors clad in armor carrying axes and swords and it became known as the Doomsday star you see these warriors with their axes it's so easy to interpret that as the Viking raid on Linda fan but you can't carbon dat 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 lindes Fan's lost religious buildings enclosing the seawood side of the monastic site is a natural embankment of wind rock called the Huth it's like a protective arm around lindes Fan's Little Harbor the whole area is now a nature reserve the hu that we're sitting on top um is it's always been really important uh from a safety point of view as a as a 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 Huth but what could they have been we've always thought there was buildings on the hu in fact it's dotted with uh structur like features that have come up in geophysics that have been done over over the years so already 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 Linda's F its Heritage and natural environment many of its staff are local volunteers it's a fantastic uh Community project you know I think uh we've got volunteers from the The Wider Community from all over North umberland and Southern Scotland right as far as Newcastle and Beyond and up towards Edinburgh um some of these volunteers have dug with us for years they're AB they're fantastic they're extremely knowledgeable they call us the professionals but they know as much as 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 center 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 um and regarding Windows very little but we've got a few um very very crudely dressed window heads and Sills um 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 I'm uh producing illustrations that show the site as it may have appeared at the time so I have to change the perspective maybe make it a bit more dramatic for kind of artistic purposes include the hills when you may or may not be able to see them from that view but they are there and they would be seen by somebody who's approaching from from the see a small thick walled building with a separate room perhaps a sanctuary it could be a church or Chapel the original prior might have had one or even 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 lindes fan but they could have been built anytime throughout the later 7th century into the e8th nth or even early 10th centuries I think all of those dates are feasible lindis Van's founder St Aiden came here at the behest of the North umbrian King oswal whose seat of power was just across the water at bambra St CET continued his work here in the decades before the Vikings came a chapel here on the Huth would have looked down on the prior area and would have been visible far out to sea a clue that supp thought 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 they seem 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 uh as the the foundation Stones which is more Phile but it's also this really rather uh bright whitish gray color it would um make the church stand out on on the horizon um and in combination with the fact that we're on on top of a uh hu here of of of Windstone um and the combination of the two of those would give it an interesting stature faced with pale Sandstone the walls of the chapel might have Shone with the morning sun the prior buildings would have been hidden by the Huth but high on top the chapel would certainly have been visible from bambra Over the decades Cuthbert and the later monks built lindis into that very renowned religious Center which event became the object of Scandinavian Envy when we think of the term monk we we potentially have a a certain view in our mind but what did they really do what were these people how were they living uh especially in this early Christian period in [Music] Britain just off the lindis V Shore is St ket's Island it's one of the places he lived to seek seclusion even here it said that his dwelling had walls so high that all he could see was the [Music] sky Chris monk is an expert in Anglo-Saxon Christian religion yeah I think when you you know just walking over here today when we saw some people walking barefoot across the stones and the and obviously this place even today inspires people on some form of pilgrimage whatever that the motive is behind doing that even probably people that aren't particularly religious feel an affinity with a place like [Music] this its very landscape draws you in I think and the sounds and the you know the sounds of the seals and the birds people from all kind of backgrounds might have been part of this monastic community in the decades after after cworth and before the the raid in 793 there were people that would uh retire to the monastic life um life was busy for monks uh they had various duties that they had to perform the most important of course was God's work Opus Dei um which would involve them at various hours of the day throughout the day um spending time uh in a religious service they' 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 labor so that might be uh milking the cows um making ale maybe working in one of the workshops metal work for example I can I can imagine the um the brothers helping out with the fishing and the cockling and helping with the Nets you could imagine that and uh really although all of the brothers were expected to engage to some degree in this kind of work uh 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 uh reproducing biblical texts working in the scriptorium and that would be their manual labor because it would it would have a physical aspect to it it's back breaking work eye straining work you know they may well be involved also in preparing the Vellum also the brothers were of all ages here 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 seven who were oblates that were brought by their parents to be dedicated to the monastic life and they would be trained up and eventually become novices and then become full-blown monks they'd learn to they'd learn Latin and they'd learn to write and uh 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 lindis hardworking learned Earnest people including children all of them defenseless [Music] another archaeological project hopes to explore where some of these people might still lie right here an initial dig in 2016 made some significant fins and on the very last day they found a suspected skeleton burial but they were out of time now in 2017 they're hoping to re open this trench and fully explore the burial what was good about the S here obviously is that they were finding skeletal remains and in theory these could be some of the earliest skeletons ever found on Linder Farm 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 on the island dig Ventures is on site here at Linda far with Durham University on year two of a 5-year project looking for the very early medieval Monastery that would have been established here by St Aiden and this year there's a new Digger on hand to help with the excavations so they tell me you're an archaeologist it has been known yes in a long time ago now though most of it oh how how long has it been since you actually did any digging though uh a couple of years so my knes are probably recovered by now so I should imagine if I do some it'll probably hurt well it's about time to get you out from behind your computer do you fancy a we scratch about definitely but I'm going to travel that's the problem an archaeologist who travels without a travel exactly that's the thing I say it's been a couple of years all right well you're going to have to use mine then I'm afraid right this is it is it well it's not going to get lost is it no well you know that's why I did it because people keep stealing my travel and you know I've had that problem in pass so that's a very good way Mak sure nobody steals your Trail all right well we've got just the spot for youc straight down ex after you so your mission should you choose to accept it is to help everybody here sort of picking off the rubble that we know is overlying the earlier phase we basically know that we've got two phases here and um this later phase is it a building are they Graves we're not really too sure but the potentially burials under here oh yes we believe so and there's lots of human loss of human bone 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 and that we work with members of the public we use crowdfunding and crowd sourcing and digital technology to just increase the range of opportunities for people to participate in archaeological research the reason why we do things so 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 fines that we discover and all the uh context records that we make get published instantly and they can share in the joy of Discovery just as we are in the trenches keep on scrolling cool we've seen many of the team recording out there using their smartphones or iPads of the sceletal remains that they're discovering well just as soon as that material is recorded on the iPad whether photos are taken on there or whether they've written little notes in there well that goes straight onto a dedicated website um on our main website a lindes micro site it's called digital dig Team um and in that you'll be able to see how those artifacts 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 what what it is that we've got almost as though they were holding it in their own [Music] hands back in the trench the team are making progress as the Dig goes on it's becoming more apparent how this part of of the prior grounds has changed over the centuries this would been probably Open Fields and uh there would have been very little Stone around and it might have been cultivated and then what happens is that they 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 near your structure your church or your chapel and then of course you need more burial ground so slowly move out into out into the fields and 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 insula and then eventually the the uh the monastic or the uh religious buildings need more space as well so they start moving out and of course eventually they they consume the burial area but then as the decades and centuries go by these buildings are in turn demolished and the area leveled and as it seems happened here it then reverted to use as Farmland the burials underneath it start getting Disturbed and then it so the tops of the burials start crumbling off and bits of Bones start poking out the surface and so at the at the surface it looks like a complete Mash of stone and Bone and all sorts of different things going on so you got to try and make some sort of sense of it slowly as you go down and down you get less and less Rubble less L and less Disturbed material and so you come down to the original structures the foundations and the original burials and these original burials are now starting to [Music] emerge and just here we're starting to get the bottom end of a skeleton so we've got pair of parallel leg bones just coming through then we've got our pelvis and it looks like the hands are crossed over the pelvis and that's really the first bit of um articulated skeleton we've got 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 skeleton roughly the right alignment for a Christian burial is is absolutely perfect just what we wanted couldn't ask some more right now after we finish 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 not later so I'm happy that everything we're getting now this is this is part of the early medieval Cemetery absolutely there's no way to be certain exactly when these people live but it's possible they were here in the earliest days of the monastery perhaps they even worshiped in the chapel upon the H the these are probably the guys who were certainly familiar with the things like the creation of lindan gospels these are guys who would have either if I hadn't known Cuba in person they would have known other people who would have known St cth but the these may have been the first the first people who saw Viking boats arriving uh across the seas coming out of the Mist so the part of the the period when lindan as a early as an anglosaxon 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 rign on lindis Farm or have known others who survived or they might have been unlucky enough to have borne witness themselves well it it is impossible to be on site here at Linda far without wondering as you look around the 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 irrev and the Viking age was about to kick off in in what is now England so you know we feel it constantly and particularly moments um like we're having on site where there's so much human remains come up what can we 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 North umbrian Fortress at bambra Just 4 mil away across the bay archaeologist Graeme 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 lindes Van anything other than a clear day so you have to come around via the South part of the island to get into the the harbor uh you would have been in plain sight of the Fortress throughout that that voyage presumbly initially thought of as an unusual Merchant set of vessels um probably it took most many hours to find out that there's anything un toward happening uh but it 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 Harbor of lindis far might have afforded protection from the elements in the sea but not from Raiders from the sea you can really see how much the landscape has changed around here down there we've got the old Harbor area and the raay beach and up here we've got the elevated piece of ground which has obviously been adding to over the years until we got this nice Plateau on which everything's been built early on before all this dried up 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 lindes fan they may be on their annual visit to lindes fan 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 be just a deal that goes wrong [Music] I think we must allow for all sorts of scenarios that morning or whatever it is that they they row up through the mist and and and row themselves into Linda faran Harbor uh and and the monks come down and and take the toe line from them and and bring them in what have you got for us well what have you got for us [Music] [Music] 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 aloin the monk suspected The Raid was due to the brothers of lindis fan becoming two lacks in their worship what security is there for the churches of Britain if St CET with so great a throng of saints will not defend his own NE this is the beginning of Greater grief for the sins of those who live there have brought it upon themselves with his deeply Christian mindset aloin saw the raid as God's wroth visited on his own people by the Heathen Vikings the heathens themselves though probably had a more pragmatic Outlook don't think the Vikings think like that at all it's easy money some other brothers if they were perhaps out and about may have rushed back to to the inner sanum to the church to the altar to to either protect what was there or to get protection for themselves as well and we know from what Alin writes that you blood was shed around the altar the the blood of the Saints was trampled on like manure he says I I imagine them perhaps running there maybe some of the children ran there too maybe one of the Masters took the the school Masters took the children there I think perhaps some of the individual monks might have that their past history their their their involvement in the world might have made them want to take up arms as it were you know some of them may well have wielded a sword in the past but you know monks are not meant to to do that you know they're meant to love their [Music] enemies it's known from the account that when the Vikings came they took away some of the people here either for ransom or for sale as slave very likely I'm among the most lucrative of these captives their children I think it must have been particularly terrifying for those young 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 Linda form 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 AR theology has been found which reveals traces of the awful events of the raid on mesan no evidence of burnt 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 I'm here 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 the curu you'd be know the sounds of uh of children terrified screams they're just not knowing what their future [Music] holds as all these horrendous sounds started to recede as the Vikings went away the brothers would be left with the 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 [Music] 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 Linda fan it was just the beginning because the Vikings were coming [Music] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 28,827

Keywords: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries, Hastings, Lindisfarne raid, Norse mythology, Scandinavian history, Vikings, ancient history revelations, beginnings of the Renaissance, collapse of the Roman Empire, conquests and exploration, cultural impact, heritage preservation, historical events, history unraveling mysteries., legendary battles, medieval architecture, medieval kingdoms, medieval warfare, medieval warfare tactics, transformative period, uncovering the past

Id: IG4U71nYMtM

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2024