"To achieve the temper of a knight is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rodents and our other men as equals is just a magnificent act of a warrior's spirit. It requires power to do that." Carlos Castaneda
This short article describes England's first experience with the Vikings. How bad it should have been for the poor monks to own their peaceful, God-fearing lives made ugly before they also noticed what was happening, in an agony of demise and destruction. We can't help but assess it to 9/11, but on a significantly smaller scale.
The long boats instantly seemed as though from nowhere.
The monks, cradled safely, because they believed, in the enjoy and peace of Lord, stopped what they certainly were doing and peered curiously at these unusual craft. They found tough looking guys disgorging from the boats, brute-men in send byrnies and helms, with swords and axes. They didn't stop, but scaled the cliffs with a terrible function and created straight for poor people, peace-loving monks.
Unarmed and really unused to martial methods, they ran in stress, in this manner and that, seeking to save the important relics and items of the monastery. What opportunity had they? The Vikings were curved on an orgy of eliminating and looting.
Their swords pierced the monks' skin, while these terrible war-axes parted minds from figures and sometimes sliced through from the throat to the middle, making half-men of those who had after been Lord fearing individual beings.
Nothing was sacred to these savage men. They made up altars, trampled on invaluable relics, desecrated the tomb of St. Cuthbert, the founder of the monastery in 635. They set hard, uncaring hands on the beautiful Lindisfarne Gospels, published in equally Latin and Previous English, telling the stories of Matthew, Tag, Luke and John.
Many monks were killed, while the others were place in chains and led to the boats as slaves. However the others were stripped naked and chased to the shore where many drowned, whilst putting up with the primitive insults of these marauders. Some existed, nevertheless, returned to the monastery, and renewed it.
The Anglo Saxon Chronicle shows people that ahead of the strike on Lindisfarne, in that same year, bad portents were seen. Immense sensations of lightening, fiery dragons traveling in the air and subsequent these came a great famine in the land.
"Here Beorhtric [AD 786-802] needed King Offa's child Eadburh. And in his times there got for the very first time 3 ships; and then the reeve rode there and wished to compel them to go to the king's community, while he didn't know what they were; and they killed him. Those were the initial boats of the Danish men which sought out the area of the English race." Therefore wrote the Anglo Saxon Chronicle.
In later articles, we'll observe Alfred, the sole English master to be nicknamed "The Great," struggled the Vikings to a standstill at the Battle of Ethandun. The country was split then, the southwestern part being used by the Saxons. The Northeastern half, including London, used by the Danes.