Pilgrim Ways

we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.” Bede died at Jarrow, seated on the floor of his cell, surrounded by the monastic community, having completed his translation of the Gospel of St.John. Lindisfarne had also blossomed into a centre of learning and study. In the little scriptorium master-scribes like Eadfrith - later Bishop of Lindisfarne - created Holy Island‟s most famous manuscript: the breathtaking Lindisfarne Gospels. He and the other scribes used vellum sheets of scraped and cured calfskin. Pens were cut from goose quills; ink was mixed from soot and the whites of birds‟ eggs; mineral pigments provided colouring; and a bronze or bone stylus would be used to sketch a design onto wax and to prick the design onto the vellum. The Lindisfarne Gospels are now on permanent display in an exhibition case at the British Library.

Viking Vicissitudes These beautiful manuscripts were very nearly lost when this golden age of learning came to a sudden and brutal end. The Vikings sacked Lindisfarne in 793 and again in 875. In 870 the community tried to flee to Ireland by boat and the story is told that when the ship was overwhelmed by a storm a copy of the Gospels fell overboard and sank into the sea. It is said that the monks received a vision and were told where to search at low tide. The gospels were duly found and appeared never to have been touched by water. Although the manuscript survived to remind us of this celebrated time, it was an era which was drawing to a tragic end.

Some historians argue that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle hyped the story of Norse/Viking barbarism, but even allowing for the distortions of propaganda, which doubtless occur in every generation, the writers describe the year 793 as a particularly harrowing time: “In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, which sorely affrighted the inhabitants: there were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying through the air. A great famine followed hard upon these signs; and a little later in the same year, on the 8th of June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God‟s church on Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.”

Two hundred and fifty years after the onslaught of the Viking a new monastic foundation was created on Lindisfarne. This survived until the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1537. Sir Walter Scott, in Canto II of his Marmion captures the totality of these devastating events: “In Saxon strength that abbey frown‟d With massive arches broad and round That rose alternate, row and row, On ponderous columns, short and low, Built ere the art was known, By pointed aisle, and shafted stalk, The arcades of an alley‟d walk To emulate in stone.

On the deep walls, the heavy Dane Had poured his impious rage in vain; And needful was such strength to these, Exposed to the tempestuous seas Scourged by the wind‟s eternal sway, Open to rovers fierce as they, Which could twelve hundred years withstand