793Viking raiders fall on the monks of Lindisfarne
Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the coast of Northumberland, had been one of the great holy places of Anglo-Saxon England since the monk Aidan came from Iona in 635 to found a monastery there. It was the home of St Cuthbert, whose shrine drew pilgrims, and it was there, around 700, that the magnificent illuminated book now known as the Lindisfarne Gospels was made. Its wealth lay unguarded on the edge of the North Sea.
In 793 seaborne raiders from Scandinavia landed, killed some of the monks, carried others off and stripped the church of its treasures. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that heathen men destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne ‘with plunder and slaughter’; one copy gives a January date, but 8 June is generally accepted as the true day. The scholar Alcuin, writing from Charlemagne’s court, was appalled. The raid is often taken as the start of the Viking Age in Britain.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: English Heritage: The Viking raid on Lindisfarne ↗
632The Prophet Muhammad dies in Medina
Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and, according to Islamic tradition, began to receive the revelations later gathered in the Qur’an when he was about 40. Opposition in Mecca drove him and his followers to Medina in 622, the migration known as the Hijrah, from which the Islamic calendar is counted. Over the following decade he built a community there that came to dominate much of Arabia, and in 630 he returned to Mecca in triumph.
Early in 632 he led what became known as the Farewell Pilgrimage to Mecca. Back in Medina he fell ill, and he died there on 8 June 632, by the usual reckoning, in the house of his wife Aisha. He was buried where he died, a spot now enclosed within the Prophet’s Mosque. His companion Abu Bakr was chosen to lead the community as the first caliph, and within a century Islam had spread from Spain to Central Asia.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Muhammad ↗
1783The Laki fissure tears open in Iceland
On 8 June 1783 the ground split open near the mountain of Laki in southern Iceland, and a line of craters began to pour out lava and gas. The eruption went on for eight months, until February 1784, and produced the largest lava flow of historical times, burying farms and river valleys in the district around Kirkjubæjarklaustur.
The gases did even more harm than the lava. Fluorine settled on the grass, and around half of Iceland’s livestock died after eating it. In the famine that followed, roughly a fifth of the island’s people perished. A sulphurous haze drifted across Europe that summer, and Laki has been linked to deaths in Britain and to crop failures and hardship much further afield.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: U.S. Geological Survey: Volcano Watch, Laki and Eldgjá ↗
1924Mallory and Irvine vanish high on Everest
In 1924 a British expedition made its second full attempt to climb Mount Everest from the Tibetan side. George Mallory, a schoolmaster who had been on both earlier expeditions, chose as his partner for the final push Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford student with a gift for fixing the expedition’s oxygen sets. On the morning of 8 June they set out from the highest camp on the north-east ridge.
Their teammate Noel Odell, climbing in support below, glimpsed two small figures moving up the ridge in the early afternoon before cloud closed over them. They were never seen alive again. Mallory’s body was found on the north face in 1999, but Irvine has never been found, and no one knows whether they reached the summit before they died. The first confirmed ascent came in 1953.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Merton College, Oxford: Mallory and Irvine disappear ↗
1987New Zealand writes its nuclear-free stance into law
In the early 1980s opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear testing in the Pacific ran deep in New Zealand. The Labour government of David Lange, elected in 1984, refused to let nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered warships visit its ports, and in 1985 turned away an American destroyer when the United States would not say whether it carried nuclear weapons. The row strained New Zealand’s alliance with the United States.
The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act became law on 8 June 1987. It banned nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships from New Zealand’s land, air and waters, and also covered biological weapons. The United States had already suspended its defence commitments to New Zealand under the ANZUS treaty, but the policy won lasting support at home and became part of the country’s sense of itself.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NZ History: New Zealand goes nuclear-free ↗
