7.8.1 Viking attacks in Britain and Ireland The exact reasons why the Vikings began their movement out from their homelands is unknown. However, it seems certain to have been a combination of the pressures of growing populations, a lack of arable lands, fighting among the different groups and an awareness of the availability of the wealth of foreign lands. Combined with their skill in shipbuilding, this allowed for an expansion into other lands. The early raids late in the eighth century were focused on the short trip from Scandinavia across the North Sea and were concentrated in Northern England, Scotland and Ireland. 7.8.2 Vikings raid the monasteries The first recorded Viking attacks on Britain started in the coastal regions at the monasteries in the north of England and Scotland in the late eighth century and resumed by the mid ninth. Notable raids included Lindisfarne in Northumbria in 793 CE and Iona off Scotland in 795. Vikings conducted hit-and-run raids, seizing valuable church goods, art, icons and slaves, leaving dead or injured monks behind. Their longships were ideal for these coastal attacks and swift escapes.
SkillBuilder discussion Using historical sources 1. Read SOURCE3 .What group of people were likely to have created this source? 2. How would this impact the way they portrayed the information? 3. What techniques of warfare can you identify in the source?
SOURCE2 Illustration of a Viking attack from the twelfth-century Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund
SOURCE3 A description of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne in History of the Church of Durham by the monk Simeon
On the seventh of the ides of June, they reached the church of Lindisfarne and there they miserably ravaged and pillaged everything; they trod the holy things under their polluted feet, they dug down the altars and plundered all the treasures of the church. Some of the brethren they slew, some they carried off with them in chains, the greater number they stripped naked, insulted and cast out of doors and some they drowned in the sea.
180 Jacaranda Humanities Alive 8 Victorian Curriculum Third Edition
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