Bede himself never became so deeply immersed in works of scholarship as to be forgetful of the end to which it was devoted, or of the need for evangelists among the ordinary people. This was why he would give English translations of the Credo and the Pater Noster to priests and why, on his deathbed, he was translating St John's Gospel into English. But for him as for other churchmen of earlier ages, the task of establishing a new Christian literature in the place held by old pagan beliefs and philosophies can hardly have seemed an easy one. Two generations after Bede's death another Northumbrian scholar, Alcuin, wrote in the year 797 to the bishop of Lindisfarne whose monastery had suffered four years earlier from the first of the Viking attacks against the Northumbrian coast. ‘When priests dine together’, he wrote, ‘let the words of God be read. At such a time it is fitting to listen to the reader, not to the harpist. What has Ingeld to do with Christ? Strait is the house and it will not be able to hold them both. The king of heaven will have no dealings with so-called kings who are heathen and damned, for this eternal king reigns in heaven while that pagan king who is damned groans in hell.