ABSTRACT
It is useful to make the assumption that the Norwegian raiders attacked England first and, only afterwards, Scotland and its Northern and Western Isles, and Ireland, in that order. There is a neatness to this scenario that recommends it, a geographical logic that is satisfied by seeing the Vikings working their way from the east coast of England, round the top of Scotland, and into the Irish Sea. The evident logic of the situation might tempt us to infer that a master strategy was at work here, that there were co-ordinated raiding missions, that the raiders were in close communication with one another, and that season by season, in a planned, systematic fashion, they exploited the coasts of the British Isles. We suffer in these considerations from a scarcity of sources for these early years. What unrecorded contacts there might have been before the event described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 789, no one knows. And no one knows if in fact the pattern which has been assumed was the actual pattern. It might be profitable to assemble
here the earliest known dates for these initial raids on the British Isles: between 786 and 793 Portland in Dorset, in 793 Lindisfarne, in 794 Jarrow, in 795 Iona and Lambay (an island near Dublin). Other attacks, no doubt, went unrecorded. The Western Isles probably served as the base for the attack on Lambay; and we may never know to what extent the Welsh coast was harassed or when the Vikings first raided the Irish mainland and the Isle of Man. The picture that does emerge is that in the last decade of the eighth century a number of Viking attacks with perhaps little coordination were made against the islands off the northwest coast of Europe.
