I

n 793AD medieval Europe was hit by a bolt from the blue, an event that had as wide an impact as the 9/11 attacks did in our world. The event was the Lindisfarne raid. Simon of Durham wrote: “And they came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug up altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church.”

The raid on Lindisfarne came to be considered an attack on civilization itself, basically because Lindisfarne was a major center of Christian learning. The Viking Age had begun and no longer did monks sleep soundly in their beds.