Two entries which strictly belong to the eighth century have been reserved for this place, because they are rather foreshadowings of what was to befal in the years after 800, than characteristic of what was happening in the years preceding it. At some unnamed date in the reign of Beorhtric, King of Wessex, but probably about the year 790, the Chronicle tells us that “first came three ships of Northmen.[114] And then the reeve rode thereto and would fain drive them to the king’s vill, for he knew not what [manner of men] they were and there they slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of the English race.” This short but ominous entry is a tocsin ringing in 300 years of strife. The words of the Chronicle and of its copyist Ethelweard seem to suggest that the ships’ crews came with peaceful intent; that the king’s reeve--a man whose office was something like that of steward or bailiff--tried to exact some payment from them, and for that purpose to force them to enter some royal settlement, but found to his cost that these were no sheep that would stand quiet for his shearing, but fierce war-wolves, capable of turning upon him with hungry teeth and rending him in pieces. This first affray with the Danes evidently took place in Wessex; and, if we may believe the historian Ethelweard, the royal vill where the reeve resided was Dorchester. But the Scandinavians having seen, as the Saxons did before them, “the nothingness of the natives,” of course came again, and this time (793) to Northumbria. Dire presentiments had already cowed the hearts of the people; hurricanes blew and lightnings flashed, and (if we like to trust the chronicler) fiery flying serpents hurtled through the air. Then came a great famine, and then (June 8) “the heathen men” [Danes] “miserably destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne with rapine and slaughter”. The desecration of so holy a place shed horror through western Christendom. “It is now,” wrote Alcuin to the Northumbrian King Ethelred, “about 350 years that we and our fathers have dwelt in this most beautiful country, and never before has such a terrible thing befallen Britain as that which we have now suffered from the pagans. Nor was it, in fact, thought possible that a voyage of that kind could ever have been made”--a strange illustration of the lost seamanship of the Anglo-Saxons. “Lo now the church of St. Cuthbert is stained with the blood of the priests of God. It is despoiled of all its ornaments. The most venerable place in Britain has been given to pagan nations for a prey.”