2 - Preserving the Past at Chester-le-Street, c.882–995

Summary

The year 793 marked a watershed in the history of St Cuthbert's cult and community. Having steadily grown in prosperity and influence for over 150 years since its foundation in 635, on 7 June 793, the monastery on Lindisfarne was attacked by a group of what Symeon, writing over 300 years later, described as ‘heathen men from northern parts’ (‘pagani ab aquilonali climate’). Symeon recognised this event as a decisive moment in the history of the community. This is evident in his dramatic preamble to the events featured in the Libellus de exordio, which echoes the vivid imagery featured in the near-contemporary accounts of the event in versions ‘E’ and ‘F’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

In the seven hundredth and ninety-third year from Our Lord's Incarnation, the hundred and seventh from the passing of father Cuthbert, the eleventh of the pontificate of Higbald, and the fifth of the reign of the most impious King Æthelred, the church of Lindisfarne was destroyed almost to the point of extermination by a most lamentable devastation, abounding in blood and rapine … Horrendous thunderbolts and dragons hurling fiery missiles and flying through the air were seen, presaging the destruction of the island and the approaching deaths of many holy men.

Although it is impossible to know exactly what happened during the course of this raid, the surviving sources all emphasise its sudden and brutal nature. Shortly after the event, Alcuin of York wrote from the court of Charlemagne to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne, apparently in an effort to offer consolation and a possible explanation of how God and his saints could have failed to protect their people. He cannot have witnessed the events first hand, but Alcuin's letter provides a vivid contemporary reaction to this attack, lamenting the ‘tragic sufferings’ of the community, and describing how:

the pagans desecrated the sanctuaries of God, and poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste to the house of our hope, trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the street.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries record that the monastery had been subjected to ‘looting and slaughter’.