Did the Viking Age really begin with a raid on a holy island in 793?

The standard answer is yes, in England at least: the Viking attack of 8 June 793 on the monastery of Lindisfarne is regarded as the beginning of the Viking Age. Lindisfarne was a major centre of Christian learning in Northumbria, founded in 635 by Saint Aidan, on an island off the north-east coast of England. The raiders landed, killed monks, drowned them or carried them off as slaves, and plundered the church of its treasures.

The shock was enormous. The Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York wrote that never before in Britain had such a terror appeared, and the raid shook Christian Europe by shattering the idea that monasteries were safe sanctuaries. Contemporaries read it as divine punishment, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded portents before the attack, such as fiery dragons flying in the sky.

But was it really the first? Not necessarily. Judith Jesch has argued that the Viking Age began around 700 to 750, since Lindisfarne was unlikely to be the first attack and archaeology suggests earlier contacts between Scandinavia and the British Isles. Three Viking ships had already beached in Weymouth Bay in 789, although that visit may have been a trading expedition gone wrong rather than a raid.

Why did Scandinavians go overseas at all? They were drawn by wealthy towns and monasteries and by weak kingdoms, and may have been pushed by overpopulation, a lack of good farmland and political strife as Norway unified. Their clinker-built longships, suited to both deep and shallow water, made it possible. Lindisfarne is where the story gets its date, not necessarily where it began.