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

monkish chroniclers, but this impressive manifestation of the power of the saints did not deter the Vikings. In 795, Vikings plundered in Scotland and Ireland, sacking Iona and another monastery on the island of Rechru off the Irish coast. In 799, Vikings extended their activities to the Frankish Empire for the first time. It would be more than 200 years before the people of Western Europe could look out to sea and see a sail on the horizon without at least a frisson of fear. Was that a Viking longship?
    In the short term, however, life on Lindisfarne soon returned to normal. Many monks, including the bishop Higbald, survived the attack, so too did the monastery’s precious relics and many of its other treasures, such as the magnificent intricately ornamented Lindisfarne Gospels , now displayed in the British Library in London. It is likely that the monks had at least some warning of the attack and managed to hide many of the monastery’s valuables – a small rocky hill nearby, now occupied by a castle, would have made a fine look-out point. As Alcuin makes no mention of burning or wanton destruction, the monastic buildings may have escaped undamaged and the community was re-established within the year. It is even possible that the kidnapped monks eventually made it home. Alcuin wrote to Higbald to tell that him that Charlemagne would try to ransom the captured monks: we don’t know if he succeeded. After the failure of the attack on Jarrow, no further Viking raids against England are recorded for over thirty years. That does not mean that there weren’t any. In 804, the monks of Lyminge in Kent, a few miles inland from the Channel coast, took the precaution of acquiring a refuge in the relative security of nearby Canterbury. Five years later, Vikings audaciously captured the papal legate Ealdwulf at sea while returning to the Continent from a mission to Northumbria. Recognising that they had captured someone of importance, the Vikings immediately took Ealdwulf back to England where the Mercian king Coenwulf paid his ransom. However, a few small-scale raids around the coast were trivial affairs compared to the many battles recorded in this period between the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. The rivalry was most intense between Mercia and Wessex, each of which aspired to be recognised as the dominant kingdom of Britain. Their rivalry culminated in 825 with the great battle of Ellandun in Wiltshire, at which King Egbert of Wessex defeated King Beornwulf of Mercia and became recognised as Bretwalda , an ill-defined title probably signifying ‘overlord of Britain’.
    The raids intensify
    The 830s saw a step-change in the nature of the Viking threat to England. The attack on Portland in 789 involved just three ships and was a classic example of what the Vikings called strandhögg , ‘hit and run’. It is likely that this was typical of early Viking raids. Then, in 836, a fleet of twenty-five or thirty-five Danish ships (sources disagree about the number) arrived in the west of England. King Egbert gathered an army and met them in battle at Carhampton in Somerset. Both sides fought hard but in the end it was the Anglo-Saxons who broke and, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it, ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’. The Anglo-Saxons soon had the opportunity for revenge. In 838 a Danish fleet arrived in Cornwall, which at that time was an independent Celtic kingdom. Egbert had devoted much of his reign to trying to conquer the Cornish, so, not surprisingly, they welcomed the Danes as allies and together they planned to attack Wessex. Egbert moved fast, however, and attacked first, defeating the alliance at the Battle of Hingston Down. It was Egbert’s last victory. He died the next year, having made Wessex the leading Anglo-Saxon kingdom and set a precedent of effective resistance to the Vikings that his successors would exploit.
    In 850 there came another escalation