Once more, on Christmas eve in 986, the famous monastery of Hy, ever rising on its own ashes, was attacked and destroyed by the successors of these old Danes, and this time the abbot and fifteen monks were put to a violent death. From Orkney and Shetland, and the coasts of Caithness and the Hebrides the hardy Norsemen swooped down upon Eastern Scotland as well as upon the English and Irish seaboards, until at length they made themselves for a time masters of a great part of the country. How they went to work may be gathered from their own records. For example: Harold Fairhair’s saga, c. 22, says, “They ravaged in Scotland and took possession of Katanes (Caithness) and Sudrland (Sutherland) as far as Ekkjalsbakki. Sigurd slew the Scotch Jarl, Melbrigdi, and tied his head to his saddle-straps; the tooth which protruded from the Jarl’s head wounded the calf of Sigurd’s leg, which swelled and he died therefrom; he is mounded at Ekkjalsbakki.” From these details it will be seen that they had much of the Vandal and the rough buccaneer in their composition. Monasteries were favourite objects of attack. They contained the richest plunder, and from their nature, as religious centres, offered the least resistance. And not content with merely carrying off the loot, the rovers mingled blood with their depredations. Hence the peculiar fitness of the introduction into the Litany of the significant petition: “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us.” And this coarse grain in their character accounts for their reckless conduct in other directions. They seem to have had a special aversion to monks and clerics and learning. They made short work of the books and bells of monasteries. We have contemporary evidence of their vandalism towards literature in a remarkable book of the period entitled, _Wars of the Gael with the Gaill_ (Northmen). It is in Gaelic, and appears in the Book of Leinster, copied about 1150. The author may have been an eye-witness of many of the scenes, and particularly of the battle of Clontarf, which he so realistically describes. His accuracy on matters of fact has been fully attested. We can, therefore, credit his statement when he affirms regarding the few men of learning who had survived the Viking ordeal that “their writings and their books in every church and in every sanctuary where they were, were burnt and thrown into water by the plunderers from beginning to end” (of the Norse invasion). Countless numbers of the illuminated books of the men of Erin and Alba thus perished. It was a mania with these illiterate rovers to destroy all learning. Eloquent testimony to this is borne by the historian Keating also. “It was not allowed,” he says, “to give instruction in letters.... No scholars, no clerics, no books, no holy relics were left in church or monastery through dread of them. Neither bard nor philosopher nor musician pursued his wonted profession in the land.”