Free Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 by John Haywood Page A

with precious stones. The monastery would inevitably have attracted merchants and craftsmen to cater for the monks’ needs for food, clothing, vellum for writing, and precious objects for display. And all this was completely undefended. No wonder it was attractive to the Vikings. Perhaps most valuable of all were the many healthy, well-fed, unarmed monks who they could be confident would fetch a good price at the slave market.
    Divine retribution
    It is difficult today to understand exactly how shocking this attack was: even the reaction to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, which robbed Americans of their sense of invulnerability, falls short as a comparison. Americans may trust in God but they do not make Him responsible for their defence policy: early medieval Christians did. Belief in the power of the saints to intercede with God to protect their holy places was absolute. All over Europe monasteries were completely undefended and, certainly, no Christian would have dared risk divine retribution by violating them. The monks of Lindisfarne must have been aware of the danger of Viking attack. About four years earlier three ships from Hordaland in western Norway attacked the port of Portland in the south of England, killing a royal official called Beaduheard, the earliest known casualty of a Viking raid. It is likely that there had been other, unrecorded raids on England too, because the powerful Mercian king Offa ordered the preparation of coast defences for Kent in 792. Yet such was their confidence in God’s protection that still they took no precautions. Of course, as pagans, the Vikings felt no qualms about attacking monasteries, that was the kind of behaviour to be expected of barbarians, but why had God not punished them for their sacrilegious act? This, more than the raid itself, was what really frightened Christians. ‘What assurance can the churches of Britain have,’ asked Alcuin, ‘if St Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own?’ Alcuin felt defenceless.
    In reality Alcuin was in no immediate physical danger – he was teaching in the school at the Frankish emperor Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen in Germany – but like all medieval Christians he believed that even the mightiest empires existed only as long as they enjoyed the favour of God. This was what was understood to have been the fate of the Roman Empire. God had permitted its creation to make the spread of Christianity easier but it was a sinful state and when it had served its purpose, God allowed it to fall. Alcuin’s response was, therefore, not to see the Viking raid as a military problem but as a moral problem. When God allowed bad things to happen to His followers it was His just chastisement for their sins. Alcuin wrote to the survivors of the raid urging them to examine their own conduct. Wealth, he thought, might have led the monks to relax monastic discipline by eating and drinking to excess, wearing fine clothes and neglecting to care for the poor. Northumbria’s king Æthelred also came in for even harsher criticism for allowing injustice and immorality to flourish under his rule. ‘A country has no better protection,’ Alcuin said, ‘than the justice and goodness of its leaders and the prayers of the servants of God.’ He reminded Æthelred that just one prayer from the good and just Hebrew king Hezekiah secured the destruction of 185,000 Assyrians in a single night. If Æthelred would just reform his ways, and those of his subjects, God would surely smite the Vikings in the same way.
    The next year, Vikings attacked another prestigious Northumbrian monastery, Jarrow, once home to the Venerable Bede (d. 735), England’s earliest historian. This time the Vikings were not so lucky: local forces captured and killed their leader and a storm wrecked their fleet as it tried to escape. Those survivors who made it ashore were quickly slaughtered by the angry locals. A just punishment, gloated the