The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

Viking raids built as many towns as they ruined,

The idea of ‘darkness’ is our mistake. What our forefathers lived could better be called the ‘long morning’ of our world.

When the Book of Revelations promised that the sea would be no more, it was understood to mean the end of evil itself.

Dicuil quotes classical writers who knew about an island which in summer ‘shines both by day and by night under the rays of the sun’ and in winter has no day at all. He also writes that ‘clerics, who had lived on the island from the first of February to the first of August, told me that [around the days of the summer solstice] the setting sun hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no darkness in that very small space of time’. He says a man had enough light to pick the lice out of his shirt at night.

Yet the mystics of Germany and the Netherlands, who once used the sea as a symbol of hostile, purifying space, now start to use the desert as their metaphor instead. The sea is too busy, too practical; the desert is still pure and utterly strange. The sea was beginning to be known. When the mystic Hadewijch writes about water in the thirteenth century, she does not see it as the terrifying prospect it once was; the abyss is no longer a threat to life or the end of the world, for her it is a way to think about the tempestuous nature of God himself and the way you can be lost in love. Leviathan has, for the moment, gone away.

law in Iceland, where any polar bear at all was a rare sight on the floating ice, laid down that ‘if a man has a tame white bear then he is to handle it in the same way as a dog’.

They did something else which helped to shape our world: they reinvented money.

seeing the world in mathematical terms.

Anything to do with number had an element of holy mystery since as one Irish text has it ‘take number away and everything lapses into ruin’.

Books were also buried with the saintly dead as gifts to keep them company.

But in Bede’s time, and for centuries afterwards, monasteries and cathedrals also cared for the pagan leftovers of Rome. Long before the official Renaissance brought back classical culture and Latin texts, which would not have been possible if nobody had bothered to preserve them in the first place, the Irish were fussing with Virgil; when a seventh-century schoolmaster says he’s just had some valuable copies from ‘the Romans’ he might just possibly mean the ones in Rome, but more likely he means the Irish scholars influenced by Rome.

as the scribe says in Ælfric Bata’s eleventh-century instructional text, ‘Nothing is more dear to me than that you give me cash, since whoever has cash can acquire anything he wants.’

Gottschalk found this out. He was a monk, a poet, a bit of a wanderer who never wanted to settle in one house, and he had unconventional ideas: he was, roughly, a Calvinist seven hundred years before Calvin. He had come to think that all men were predestined either to Hell or to Heaven; that was God’s will, and no amount of good deeds or even bad ones could undo

He saw pasture for sheep and maybe some cattle, rich fishing, walrus to hunt for their tusks and the hide that made such good ropes. He also saw the emptiness of the land, just like Iceland, just like the Faroes. It would be two more centuries before the Inuit moved south into Greenland as the seas began to freeze, and began their challenge to the Europeans:

St Birgitta of Sweden went to extremes and announced that clothes were the cause of the plague, especially when fitted, cut, slashed and pieced together; as though the boats that brought ideas and styles had also brought disease, which would have been a more plausible argument.

Grosseteste did, but he insisted that ‘those who form their own opinion from their own experiences without any depth of reasoning will inevitably fall into wrong opinions’.

Fifty years later King Magnus Eriksson meant to do something about the situation, but he could do nothing because he needed credit from the Hansa to keep his economy moving.

There was a quarrel even over the word ‘beguine’: whether it came from benignitas, which is ‘goodness’, or as one Benedictine said from begun, meaning ‘dung’.12 Its most likely origin is a word for a mumbler, someone whose speech you can’t quite hear and can’t check or control. That was especially worrying when the speech was prayer, which was meant to be spoken loud and clear in a church; the beguine’s prayers were between her and God, not laid down or certified by authority. She could be telling God anything.

Show and debt and bluff: that, not Hobbes or Machiavelli, may be the true start of a modern politics.

In order to get to this nice bureaucratic solution, Stevin started as he always did, from mathematics. In the process, with the notion of making calculation easier and fractions more clear, he invented the first practical decimal system.

Merchants’. He showed how to write down numbers as decimals without awkward fractions, so it was easy to add or subtract or even find a square root simply by keeping the decimals lined up accurately; and he made the case for everyone using the same system, calculating on the basis of tens and not the sixties that were sometimes used.

Above all, the world is ready to be counted and engineered, to put mathematics at the heart of building a fort or a windmill, keeping the records of a business or laying out a town.

the Buddha found in the fields in Sweden from the eighth century begins to seem less strange when you realize the strength of these long, long trading runs.

Norsemen come south and they become the enemies that the Christian missions need to be sure of their own righteousness.

At the edge of the world, the law written in Rome never quite worked; instead law had to contend with custom, with habit, with the Northern way of life. In doing so it became more flexible and perhaps more humane, more able to handle a business dispute, more able to consider the state of mind of some broken man who had done murder.

We’ve seen how plague became the reason, just like terrorism today, for social regulation, for saying how children must behave, for taking away a worker’s right to choose what work he wanted, for deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels. Plague enforced frontiers that were otherwise wonderfully insecure, and made our movements and travels conditional.

It helped make the state a physical reality, and give it ambitions.