It was the shrill and outraged gibbering of priests, like the writer of this passage from The War of the Irish and the Foreigners, which gave the Vikings their reputation for being bloodthirsty savages. Clerics in holy orders were almost the only people who could write in those days, so not only did they give the Vikings an extremely bad press, they also exaggerated their Satanic nature in order to make moral propaganda: the Viking onslaught was to be seen as a divine retribution for sins, requiring repentance and, no doubt, additional offerings to the church.