This impressive manuscript contains the four gospels, as well as their canon tables and prefaces. Together with the Book of Kells, it is considered a masterpiece of Insular or Hiberno-Saxon art, i.e., the art that flourished in the British Isles after the Roman era in the period between the 7th and 12th centuries. This style combines mainly Anglo-Saxon and Celtic elements, but it also includes Mediterranean elements. It differs from the art produced during the same period in continental Europe.

In fact, the Lindisfarne Gospels is the most complete surviving insular manuscript. It was written between 687 and 721 by and for the religious community of the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne - particularly famous due to the Viking attack it endured on 8 June 793, a key event that is now often taken as the beginning of the Viking Age.

Actually, its original binding, which was covered with jewels and metals, was looted by the Vikings.
250 years later, in the 10th century, a monk named Aldred added an Old English translation between the lines of the Latin text.

In Aldred’s colophon, Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, was credited with writing the manuscript; Ethelwald was credited with binding it; Billfrith, an anchorite, was credited with ornamenting the manuscript; and finally, Aldred lists himself as the person who glossed it in Anglo-Saxon (Old English).

The Lindisfarne Gospels were moved to Durham Cathedral, but they had to be removed from there in the mid-16th century with the dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry VIII. Following this, they resurfaced again in the early 17th century when Sir Robert Cotton acquired them from a parliamentarian, Robert Bowyer. Finally, in the 18th century the Cotton library and its contents became part of the British Museum, and then the British Library.