Unarmed and rather empty to martial ways, they went in worry, in this way and that, seeking to save lots of the important relics and items of the monastery. What chance had they? The Vikings were bent on an orgy of eliminating and looting. Their swords pierced the monks' skin, while those bad war-axes separated brains from bodies and sometimes sliced through from the neck to the middle, making half-men of people who had after been God fearing human beings.

Nothing was sacred to these savage men. They dug up altars, trampled on expensive relics, desecrated the tomb of St. Cuthbert, the founder of the monastery in 635. They set hard, uncaring on the Viking axe  job the lovely Lindisfarne Gospels, prepared in equally Latin and Previous English, telling the reports of Matthew, Tag, Luke and John. Many monks were killed, while the others were put in restaurants and generated the vessels as slaves. 

However others were removed bare and chased to the shore where many drowned, whilst putting up with the primitive insults of those marauders. Some existed, nevertheless, returned to the monastery, and renewed it. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells us that before the assault on Lindisfarne, because same year, terrible portents were seen. Immense flashes of lightening, fiery dragons traveling in the air and subsequent these came a great famine in the land.

"Here Beorhtric AD 786-802 took Master Offa's girl Eadburh. And in his days there came for the very first time 3 boats; and then the reeve rode there and desired to compel them to attend the king's area, while he didn't know very well what they were; and they killed him. Those were the very first ships of the Danish men which sought out the area of the British race." So wrote the Anglo Saxon Chronic