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, and towns free from bishops and lords could start a new kind of trade. That created a community of people who did business, strong enough and self-conscious enough to go to war with royal and political powers: our world of tension between money and every other power.

Instead of the dark mistakes about pure blood, racial identity, homogeneous nations with their own soul and spirit and distinct nature, we have something far more exciting: the story of people making choices, not always freely, sometimes under fearsome pressure, but still choosing and inventing and making lives for themselves. The idea of ‘darkness’ is our mistake. What our forefathers lived could better be called the ‘long morning’ of our world.

This is loaded stuff, and a little confusing. For a start, Bede was not just on the Saxon side; he seems to be on the pagan side against Christians. He had to believe that Christianity had somehow gone wrong in Britain, that the Britons deserved everything they got for being sinful, drunk and arrogant, including the plague he says was so sudden and violent there was nobody alive to bury the dead.

all the connections across Europe, the links that crossed religious and official and language frontiers, can also be celebrated in very dubious ways. The Vikings are hailed as the first Europeans, at least by some French scholars, breaking cultural divisions as well as breaking heads,47 and made into a foundation myth for our flabby, neo-liberal Europe. In this version of history Charlemagne, autocratic, imperial, a tycoon of the slave trade and aggressively brutal to his neighbours, becomes the patron saint of a fairly quiet customs union because at least he tried to rule both North and South. I do not think he would be flattered.

Tribes who poured into Eastern Europe in the sixth century blocked the old trading links between Scandinavia and Byzantium, the river routes that tracked across what is now Russia. Any goods that Scandinavians wanted had to come by some other route and from some other source, and so they came up from Frisia; in the two centuries before the Viking times began around 800 CE, everything that we know reached Scandinavia came by way of Frisian traders.15

they had to build their own land. They heaped up hillocks on the marshes, built on them, and the hillocks became permanent settlements all the year round: the terpen. They owned the land outright as peasants never could in the feudal systems around them, and they were settled and at home; you can tell because houses were rebuilt again and again, twice or more in a century, but always on exactly the same site.17 They also had to co-operate, house to house, terp to terp, if only because finding sweet water was never easy, not even when wells replaced the old clay-lined reservoirs for collecting rainwater; the supply of water to drink depended on the discipline of the community.18 Co-operation, not always within the law, was a Frisian habit.

The people on the terpen couldn’t produce everything they wanted, not even everything they needed. They couldn’t make wine and they couldn’t produce much grain, but they wanted both; they were prepared to ship out down the rivers to Alsace for wine and as far as Strasbourg for grain.

It was easy for Scandinavians to be in York, Frisians in Ipswich, Saxons in London, and the fact was so unremarkable that it is hardly recorded. You didn’t need a harbour to land because you could beach a flat-bottomed boat on any stretch of sand; so the great customs ports like Quentovic were tucked into estuaries or else, like Dorestad, upstream on the Rhine. More, going off to sea did not always mean building a huge ship and recruiting a large crew, although having more men who could fight off raiders was often a good idea; there was no need, on the coastal runs, to share the costs and risks because they were not that high; an individual could do it for himself.

The men who sailed out were professional merchants and mariners now, not farmers with boats who sometimes went away on business. They were a class of persons to be watched. Charlemagne approved of true pilgrims, he said in a letter to the Saxon king, Offa of Mercia, who carried with them all the things they needed for their journey; but ‘we have found there are some men who mix fraudulently with the pilgrims for the sake of business, chasing profit and not serving religion’.51

In the Baltic in the eleventh century the Frisian guild at Sigtuna put up stones to the memory of members who had distinctly un-Frisian names, as though by the eleventh century ‘Frisian’ meant simply merchant and ‘guild’ meant something very close to Chamber of Commerce.57

Irish language. The ogam alphabet grew out of the marks made on wooden tally sticks to count sheep and cattle, but its other purpose may have been to mystify the Roman functionaries and merchants, who knew only their own letters.

The Arab world was suddenly desperate for people to work. Plague had wasted the population, and labour was in short supply. A time of peace didn’t help; war had been the usual way to bring in prisoners. Their slave labourers from Africa were alarmingly restive and then rebellious. They were forced to go to the slave markets – as far north and west as Utrecht as well as busy Venice – and they were ready to pay very well; so a slave was worth two or three times the Northern price when she or he had crossed the Mediterranean going east.22 The numbers were enough for the church council at Meaux in 845 to take notice of the merchants of Charlemagne’s empire moving columns of human property through so many cities of the faithful ‘into the hands of the faithless and our most brutal enemies’. The issue was not just the miserable life the slaves faced; ‘they are swelling the vast numbers of enemies of the kingdom’ the council complained, and ‘increasing the enemy strength’. The council wanted to make sure men were sold inside Christendom, which they said was for the sake of their immortal souls.23

So when trouble starts, expect the Vikings to loot, to pillage, but more than anything else: to kidnap. For as long as the Eastern markets needed labour, the Norsemen were shipping out human cargo. In doing so, they helped break up all the frontiers, genetic and cultural and political, of the North.

Around Dublin thickets of hazel trees were planted and tended in order to supply the flexible branches that were woven to make the walls of houses – simple buildings, one storey tall, the roofs thatched. To get to them, you walked streets of small stones and gravel, which mostly followed some natural contour like the crest of a hill. The houses stood end-on to the street, which is a pattern familiar from the warehouses along the water at Northern ports;18 so when you found the entrance to the plot you wanted, you had to walk straight through the first house on the plot if you were looking for someone in a house that lay behind it. There must have been a careful etiquette for asking for access, which means some sort of civility.