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The formation of the Great Heathen Army in 865 marked a turning point in the Vikings’ relationship with Britain. Just as Christian communities had feared, Lindisfarne heralded the beginning of further death and destruction, as Viking raids on Britain escalated over the following years.Ģ 865 – The Great Heathen Army lands in England

The stone, now kept in Lindisfarne’s museum, is known as the ‘Viking Domesday Stone’. In the ninth century, Lindisfarne’s Anglo-Saxon residents memorialised the violence by carving the scenes of bloodshed onto a stone grave marker. The scholar Alcuin argued that God, as vengeance on the immoral people of the kingdom of Northumbria, had sent the raiders. The shocking event spread fear and panic across Christian Europe. Yet the merciless raid on Lindisfarne’s monastery was different – it was an unprecedented brutal strike right at the heart of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. In 789 three ships of Norsemen had landed on the coast of the kingdom of Wessex and murdered one of the king’s officials. While they had largely come to trade peacefully, there had been sporadic violence.

Lindisfarne was not the first time Scandinavians had visited on the British Isles.