The name itself is Norse: from Old Norse lundi, meaning puffin. Three islands in Iceland are called Lundey for the same reason. The Orkneyinga saga calls Lundy by its current name in the twelfth century. The puffins are still here, though only just — a colony that crashed to a handful of breeding pairs in the late twentieth century has been clawing its way back since the eradication of rats from the island in 2004. The black rats and brown rats had been here for centuries, descended from shipwreck stowaways, and they had been eating puffin eggs and chicks at a rate that no seabird colony could sustain. The eradication project removed them entirely. The Manx shearwaters, which also nest in burrows here, have exploded in numbers since. The puffins are following more slowly, but they are following. The island that was named for them is again worth their name.

In 1235 William de Marisco was implicated in the murder of Henry Clement, a royal messenger of Henry III. Three years later, an attempt was made to assassinate the king himself. The would-be assassin confessed under interrogation that he was an agent of the Marisco family. William fled to Lundy and ruled it for years as a virtual king. He built a stronghold at what is now Bull's Paradise with walls nine feet thick. Henry III's officers eventually caught him; he was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1242. But the Marisco precedent — a powerful family using Lundy as a personal fortress beyond easy reach of royal authority — set the pattern for centuries. The island's geography did the rest. The Bristol Channel funnels merchant traffic past Lundy's cliffs, and the channel's tidal range of twenty-seven feet — one of the greatest in the world — forces ships into a predictable lane. Anyone holding Lundy held a tollbooth on the sea.

In 1627 a band of Barbary corsairs from the Republic of Salé, in what is now Morocco, occupied Lundy and held it for five years. Their commander was a Dutch convert to Islam named Jan Janszoon. They flew an Ottoman flag from the island. From this base they ran slaving raids along the South West coast of England and Ireland — capturing villagers, sailors, anyone they could seize from coastal hamlets — and held the prisoners on Lundy before shipping them to Salé and Algiers, where they were sold into the Barbary slave trade. The English government took years to recover the island. Even after the Barbary occupation ended, French, Basque, Spanish and English privateers continued to use Lundy as a base of operations against Bristol-bound shipping into the late seventeenth century. The Cornish coast has its smugglers in folklore; Lundy actually was a pirate state, twice, by two different sets of pirates.

Thomas Benson was a Member of Parliament for Barnstaple in 1747 and Sheriff of Devon — a respectable man, on paper. He leased Lundy from the Earl Gower and contracted with the government to transport a shipload of convicts to Virginia. Instead, Benson diverted the ship to Lundy and used the convicts as his own enslaved workforce, holding them on the island and forcing them to dig caves and warehouses. He then orchestrated an insurance fraud: he insured the ship Nightingale and loaded her with valuable cargo of pewter and linen, sailed her from the mainland to Lundy where the cargo was secretly offloaded into the convict-dug caves, then sailed her on, set her on fire, and scuttled her — claiming the insurance for total loss. The crew were rescued by a passing ship that took them to Clovelly. The fraud was eventually discovered. Benson fled to Portugal in 1754, where he died in 1772. The convicts he had enslaved on the island are anonymous to history.

Two German Heinkel He 111 bombers crash-landed on Lundy during the Second World War. The first was on the 3rd of March 1941: the entire crew survived and was taken prisoner. The second was on the 1st of April 1941: the pilot was killed and the other crew members were captured. The second aircraft had attacked a British ship, taken anti-aircraft damage to one engine, and limped onto Lundy because nothing else was reachable. Allegedly, to avoid reprisals against German civilians, the surviving crew told their British captors that they had merely been on a reconnaissance flight. Most of the wreckage was salvaged. A few twisted fragments still rest where the planes came down. The crews who survived were sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Britain or Canada for the duration of the war. They had crash-landed on an island whose owner, Martin Harman, had been fined for trying to print his own coins eleven years earlier.

Martin Harman's son Albion died in 1968. The family put Lundy up for sale in 1969. Jack Hayward, a British millionaire who had made his money in transportation and property in the Bahamas, bought it for one hundred and fifty thousand pounds and immediately gave it to the National Trust. The Landmark Trust took on day-to-day management, and has run the island as a heritage conservation project ever since. Twenty-three holiday cottages, the Marisco Tavern, twenty-eight permanent residents in 2007, twenty thousand day-trippers a year by boat from Bideford and Ilfracombe. In 2010 the surrounding waters became Britain's first Marine Conservation Zone — protecting a unique habitat of cold-water corals, sponges and rare seaweeds. The island still issues its puffin postage stamps, now legal as local-carriage labels for mail leaving the island, collected by philatelists worldwide. The coins, alas, remain illegal.