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

by Michael Pye

High winds tore up the dunes and made the sea wild in the first days of January 1647. The sand was forced out of the way to show something in the subsoil that should never have been there: stone. There is no stone at all on the coast near Domburg; there is only sand, peat, clay. So someone must have brought the blocks on the foreshore from far away – from seven hundred kilometres away in the quarries of northern France as we now know – and moving it must have been serious business; one stone weighed two tons and no machine in 1647 could shift it. An excited letter to Amsterdam, which went into print as a newsletter, reported: ‘About a fortnight ago some great stones of white limestone appeared on the beach near the sea.’8

Three years later there was a storm so violent that in the morning there were bodies on the beach: ancient bodies, each in a coffin of wood a couple of centimetres thick. The skulls all faced west. The coffins were full of sand. There were slim, ornate chains around the necks with coins hanging on them; one skeleton had a goblet stacked on its chest, another had a silver dagger at its side. Christians were not supposed to bury goods with the dead, so the graves must have been made before the coast started to turn Christian round 700 – or after Christians had been beaten inland a century and a half later by Viking raiders. For a few days the past was as solid as a coffin, unexplained like a ghost; and then the waters swept back and hid the dead before anyone could find out who they were.

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.

There was a time when nobody could imagine going further: the northern sea was the very edge of the world. In 16 CE the Roman Drusus Germanicus tried to take his fleet north and was beaten back by storms; the poet Albinovanus Pedo was with him and wrote that the gods were calling them back to stop them seeing the very end of everything. Pedo wondered why their ships were violating these foreign seas and stirring up the quiet homes of the gods. For the northern sea was not just, as the Arab geographer Al Idrisi wrote, ‘the sea of perpetual gloom’,14 it was the place where the oceans clashed, where the tides were made as the waters rushed in and out of bottomless caves and the waters fell away into ‘primordial and first matter, that was in the beginning of the world … called the “abyss”’.

the early-twelfth-century Book of the Icelanders says that when the Norsemen first began to settle Iceland around 870, they found priests already living there, but the priests refused to live with heathens and they went away, leaving ‘Irish books and bells and croziers from which one could know that they were Irishmen’.23 So for all Dicuil’s other stories of men born with horse’s feet, others with ears large enough to cover their whole bodies, and elks whose upper lip hangs down so much they can eat only if they walk backwards, not to mention the difficulty of trapping unicorns because they make so much noise, there is fact here: the fact of constant, eager movement on the sea.

‘Forgetting history or even getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added: ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger.’

The rediscovery of the great Saxon poem Heliand, the Gospels retold in the ninth century in the manner of some North Sea epic, produced a number of fits of fantasy: in the nineteenth century August Vilmar took it to show ‘all that is great and beautiful, with all that the German nation, its heart and life, were able to provide’. It celebrated all sorts of things he reckoned to be especially German, like ‘the lively joy of the Germans in moveable wealth’. He somehow deduced that the Christian conversion of all German lands was proof that Germany was a single nation, ‘clean and resolute, its inner unity and its unity to itself transferred by the poet … onto the persons with his holy story’.35 The Saxon detail and thinking of Heliand became a pan-German myth: Jesus lining up with Bismarck. Vilmar was delighted by the rude remarks throughout the text about the ‘sluggish’ people of the South, who were mostly Jews, and the obvious superiority of the ‘Germanic’ disciples. His ideas persisted. At the time of the First World War the Gospels, told in Saxon verse, had somehow become ‘a pithy story of German manhood’.

In pursuit of a criminal idea of race, the SS was to become a perfect, almost mystical bunch of Nordic thugs, not only identified by type and shape of head but also bound into a carefully chosen past. With absolutely no irony at all there were posters in wartime Norway which showed a Viking standing most approvingly behind an SS man, freelance freebooters and a foreign state police oddly united against Nazism’s mirror, Bolshevism.38

The English have a story every schoolchild knows, how Anglo-Saxons stormed the coast of Britain some time in the fifth century and pushed out or even exterminated the British and Celtic natives and changed the island for ever; we became Germanic, and we started to speak a kind of English. We became Christians in a world still pagan. We qualified to be a separate nation, six centuries before that meant much, and we had what every nation needs: a story about its origins.

For a long time, silver wasn’t mined; it was circulated, passed hand to hand. Only in the 960s were veins of silver discovered in Saxony, and suddenly there were new riches in Germany, enough to buy furs from Scandinavia and make money worth something again in England.

It’s hard to overstate just how radical this idea was going to be. It wasn’t just that money made two quite different things into equivalents: a barge full of timber equal to a barge full of salt, say, at least in value. You could take that abstraction, put it down on a small bit of parchment or a tally stick and work with it: calculate, estimate, add, divide and subtract, and, if you were lucky, multiply. Buyer and seller had to have the same idea about what money means: a measure and a concept of value more than a thing of value in itself. Merchants found that out later under Charlemagne when coins were clipped and adulterated and were still supposed to be worth the same. There had to be a way to say how one thing was equal to something quite different and then make calculations: so buying a fish or a glass meant using a kind of equation. A new way of thinking became possible.

Irish scribes had a way of gossiping and complaining in the margins: ‘I am very cold’ or ‘That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it’ or ‘Oh that a glass of good old wine were at my side.’ Their notes may have been for people working alongside them, because sometimes a team of four or more would work together on a single manuscript;19 but some were entirely personal, as when a scribe writes out the scene of Judas Iscariot betraying Christ with a kiss and adds in the margin: ‘Wretch!’

He saw the moon riding higher in the sky than the sun and asked how that was possible when everyone knew the moon was closer to the Earth. His explanation was an elegant experiment in thought: he asked his readers to imagine they were walking at night into an immense church, all brightly lit for some saint’s day and with two particularly brilliant lamps: one hanging high at the far end, one hanging lower but closer. As you walked into the church the lamp that’s closer would seem to be hanging higher than the lamp in the distance and as you walked forward it would seem to move higher and higher still until you were directly under it and the truth was obvious: it seemed higher precisely because it was closer.

He took what the Irish already understood, the connection between the stages of the moon and the force and height of the tides, and he brought that to everyone’s attention. He also refined it. He understood that the moon rising later each day was linked to the tide rising later each day, a pattern he could never have recognized without knowing that the Earth was round.

when Patrick arrived to convert Ireland in the fifth century, he had a head start. He was preaching the faith of the Book, carrying with him books of the law and the Gospels, and the Irish had their own habit of writing and reading already. They knew something about the technology. There are clues in the Irish law tracts written later, in the seventh century, which lay down that a contract can be proved by, among other things, ‘a godly old writing’, and witnesses can make a dead man’s agreement stand but only if they are not contradicted by relevant texts cut onto stones. Writing settles deep into Irish law.37 Much more remarkably, in his life of Patrick, the seventh-century monk Muirchú tells how the missionary found himself in a contest of magic with King Lóeguire’s druid. The king told the two to pitch their books into the water, and they’d see which god was worth adoring. The druid said he’d rather not because he knew about baptism and Patrick’s God was obviously a water god. It’s true that Muirchú was writing two hundred years later, and maybe he took for granted that the Irish had always had books because he had them himself, but the more likely story is literal: druids had some form of book, perhaps metal leaves, perhaps wood or stone, which could rival the Book. Patrick taught some men their alphabet to make them priests and bishops, but not all men needed the lessons.38

One eighth-century boy called Gerald was told to stop reading when he had worked through the Psalms and it was time for him to study more serious matters like archery, riding to hounds, and flying hawks and falcons. He did go back to books, but only because ‘For a long time he was so covered in small spots that it was thought he could not be cured. So his mother and father decided he should be put more closely to the study of letters.’ In Gerald’s case, remarkably, ‘even when he became strong, he continued to study’.

There is a cultural difference here, a willingness to be unsettled: men trapped by long winters, barely scratching a living out of narrow lands, found the sea their obvious escape. They had no great riches to defend at home, no neighbour enemies. They had every reason to move on and on.

Paul the Deacon, writing in the eighth century, says the North is such a healthy place that the people breed and breed; Germania got its name from all that ‘germination’. He says: ‘That is why countless troops of slaves are so often driven away from this populous Germania and sold to the southern people.’

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.

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.

The Arab merchant Ibn Fadlān said he met them in a Bulghar encampment on the Volga, far east of Kiev. He was there on a mission: to make proper, settled Muslims of a people with shamans, horses and a tendency to wander about the place. He was startled and impressed when the Rūs, the Vikings living in the East, arrived to do business. ‘I have never seen bodies more perfect than theirs. They were like palm trees,’ he wrote. They were tattooed all over with intricate designs in dark green. They were dirty, they hardly washed except in filthy communal bowls, they were ‘like wandering asses’; they had companionable sex with their slave girls in full view of all their companions, and if a buyer arrived at such an inconvenient moment, ‘the man does not get up off her until he has satisfied himself’. Naturally, they drank; and what they drank was probably mead, although it may have been fermented mare’s milk.

If one of the Vikings fell sick, he was put out in a tent far away from the others and left alone; he was welcome back, if he happened to survive. If he died, and he was poor, the Rūs built him a boat and burned him in it; if he was rich, they made sure he was known to be rich and a Viking in their own way, which meant a ceremony of fire, sex and murder.

it seems the Vikings followed the rules of the sea: the best sex is available sex. They certainly had the half-joshing insults to go with the habit: the great god Thor was dressed up in women’s clothes to steal back a magic hammer, of all things, and terribly afraid he’d be thought a ‘cock-craver’; a rude ogress in the song of Helgi Hjörvardson tells the princeling Atli that ‘though you have a stallion’s voice’ his heart is in his arse.

A daughter could choose to count as a son, and act as a son, if her father had no sons to compete with her. In Icelandic tradition, Hervör grows up playing well with weapons, robbing people while dressed as a man, and captaining an otherwise male band of Vikings. All this begins because of a slight to her honour: a slave who dared to say her father was a slave. She wants to fight with the family sword, and she argues with her father’s ghost for the right to use it. The sagas say her father agreed, and wished her very well: ‘I wish you twelve men’s lives.’ Storytellers, guardians of tradition, saw nothing very wrong at all with what Hervör wanted. She was unusual enough for a story, but what she did was thinkable.

Consider Charlemagne’s habits and you see the Vikings not as an assault but as another set of players in the same very violent game. Norsemen demanded tribute; Charlemagne demanded not just tribute but also tithes for the Church that was so closely allied with his power. Charlemagne raided across borders just as Vikings did, plundered if he couldn’t stay long enough to demand the regular payment of tribute, accepted tribute if he didn’t want to settle and occupy the land. The difference lay in the way the Vikings ruled and used the sea.

The missionary Anskar went north to save the souls of Scandinavia in the 820s and even his biographer Rimbert acknowledges he ‘distributed much money in the northern districts in order that he might win the souls of the people’. His first monks were bought in a slave market as boys: ‘he began also to buy Danish and Slav boys so that he might train them for God’s service.’ To Anskar’s fury, the boys ended up as servants to a grandee who got control of their monastery; they were never free. And when Rimbert himself went north to the Swedes Anskar gave him and his colleagues ‘whatever they needed to give away in order to secure friends’

Christian crosses quite often still had Thor’s great hammer on the back,

The Gospel according to Heliand,59 which means ‘Saviour’, is all four Gospels moved away from the Mediterranean to a Northern, colder world, where years are measured in winters, where there are deep forests and concealing woods rather than open deserts, where the disciples of Jesus are like the band of men a chieftain might assemble in the expectation of their personal loyalty. ‘That is what a thane chooses,’ Thomas tells the other disciples in a crisis: ‘to stand fast together with his lord to die with him at the moment of doom.’60 Old man Zacharias, astonished at the angel’s notion that he might still have a child at his advanced age, is not at all surprised by what later Christians might find astonishing: that the angel tells Zacharias to bring up the future John the Baptist in the virtue of absolute loyalty, treuwa, so he can be a ‘warrior-companion’ for Christ.

The poem is clearly not made for ordinary persons, and ordinary persons hardly feature. Mary becomes a ‘woman of the nobility’, Joseph is a nobleman and the herald angels ignore the shepherds and talk to his grooms and sentries at the stables. The baby Jesus wears not swaddling clothes but jewels. When he grows up and begins to bring together the disciples, they reckon him a generous man, free with the gold and gifts, and also with the drink, or at least the mead; he does as Saxon nobles do, as Anskar learned to do among the pagans he wanted to convert. For Jesus, the disciples become in turn ‘a powerful force of men from many peoples, a holy army’

The disciples ask to be taught the sacred runes, and they are given the Lord’s Prayer: a magic access to God. And when the wife of Pontius Pilate has nightmares about the consequences of Jesus’ death, the Heliand says the dreams were the work of the serpent devil, invisible under that staple of Germanic legend, the magic helmet.

When the biblical Christ in the garden accepts that the cup will not pass from him, that his fate is sealed, he drinks it down to show his acceptance. The poet has him drinking the wine to the honour of God. Acceptance would be too mild; instead he salutes his chieftain. Christ clears the moneychangers out of the Temple, but in Heliand the moneychangers are usurers and they are all of course Jews. Jews in Heliand are ‘a different kind of people’, and Christ tells them: ‘You Jewish people never show any respect for the house of God.’ The constant sense of Northern virtue, of the slinking, untrustworthy nature of Southerners, and Jews as people of the South, flickers into life all through the poem: the Jews who oppose Christ become ‘arrogant men’ and an ‘evil clan’. Christ is no longer a Jew, nor are his disciples; they are Northerners. Some abominable thoughts are being born.

The higher your rank, the less you suffered. The Church rulings were various, but the Council of Tribur in 895 laid down that greater men just needed twelve men to vouch for them by swearing oaths; servants, on the other hand, could suffer either the ordeal by cold water or the ordeal by hot iron.34 Priests were never tested with fire or water; monks and priests who were accused of crimes, maybe theft inside a monastery, were told to take the bread of the Mass in their mouths because a guilty man would choke on it. Knights were exempt from ordeals after 1119, unless they were accused of heresy, in which case they carried hot iron like everyone else. Nobility preferred duels in which God would make the better man win, a moral test that survived long after any other kind of ordeal; of course, nobles could always hire champions to do the actual dying for them. Social climbers wanted the same privileges as the grandees, and from the twelfth century the burghers of the newly flourishing towns were trying to insist on exemptions.

Virtue meant much more than an absence of sin. A cleric called Poppo, at the court of the Saxon king, Harold, around 963, kept arguing out loud at public banquets that there was only one God, and finally the king told him to prove it. The priest was arrested overnight and the next morning was shown the glowing piece of iron ‘of huge weight’ which he was to carry for the sake of the faith. He did so, without hesitation according to his biographers, ‘and carried it for as long as the king himself determined. He showed his unharmed hand to all; he made the faith credible to everyone.’

When Charlemagne divided up his kingdom in his will, he specified that ‘if there is any dispute over the limits and boundaries of the kingdom that the testimony of men cannot clarify or resolve, then we want the question put to the judgement of the Cross’. That meant his rival heirs standing in church during Mass, arms stretched out like crucified men, until one collapsed and the other won.

Between 1506 and 1509 there were terrible storm surges, enough to break the soft, vulnerable edges of the mires and merge the waters into lakes. Just south of Amsterdam a new lake was born, the Haarlemermeer,

The neat cleanliness of the province of Holland was notorious among travellers who did not always speak so kindly of the Dutch themselves. In 1517, the Italian Antonio de Beatis went round the Low Countries as chaplain to a cardinal, and what he most noticed were the doorstep cloths for wiping your feet, the floors that were sanded. In 1567 the Florentine Ludovico Guiccardini noticed ‘order and tidiness everywhere’. In the countryside foreigners reported that cattle and carts were not allowed on the streets. This passion for cleaning has connections with the moral pressures of Calvinism, but foreigners describe it even before Calvin was born, and when de Beatis went travelling Calvin was still only eight years old.

Butter has to be made in immaculate conditions, or else it spoils; it is not as forgiving as cheese. In England, butter was usually made for local markets, which was easier, but Holland was sending it out of the province and even out of the country. Dairy rooms had to be kept perfectly clean, and since often a family had only a pair of cows, the dairy was domestic, an extension of the house. When small farms began to be swallowed by larger landowners, when women and men moved from the countryside into all the new towns that were thriving, they naturally brought the habit of careful cleanliness with them. The burghers of Amsterdam hired girls to clean their houses who already knew what it took to make butter that would keep.11 Calvinism gave cleaning a spiritual dimension, but for Hollanders it was already a matter of faith.

A man who sells something for a profit, without carving or painting it like a craftsman, without making some material changes, is not within God’s law; the writer known as Fake Chrysostom said anyone who bought goods and sold them on for a profit, unaltered, was ‘the merchant who was thrown out of the temple’.60 The theologian Henry of Ghent was especially bothered by the man who bought at a low price and sold for a profit at once, because an object can’t change its value instantly; he implies that everything has a true value and a just price, something that should not be changed artificially.

The fleet came into Bergen each spring with the newcomers. Their first challenge was the ‘games’. The boys had to be men, and they had to be initiated. They were keel-hauled, tied up with rope and pulled right under a ship; they were held over barrels of burning, stinking stuff; they were hoisted up smoking chimneys to be cross-examined on nothing in particular while they choked. They were thrown three times into deep water and had to get back into the boat to stay alive while a congregation of older merchants beat them. They were given drink until they were drunk, stripped naked and blindfolded, and then whipped until they bled, with drums more or less covering their screams; after which they had to sing a comic song. They had their mouths and noses stuffed with dogshit and catshit, they were subject to ‘unclean shaves’; they went ‘eel treading’ and ‘pig scalding’. They learned to say nothing, never to complain, never to cry.

Then came the Emperor Frederick II, the wonder of the world, some said, and fiercely ambitious to rule Italy and keep down the Pope. He called his birthplace Bethlehem and his followers called him Messiah; the Pope called him Antichrist and felt obliged to excommunicate him four times.

Around Stockholm one winter the commander Master Hugo realized his ships were at the mercy of the enemy Danes. He cut trees, made a wooden wall around the ships and poured water over the wall; it soon froze. Just outside the wall, he cut the ice to make a moat for his ice fortress, and in the night the cold and a scatter of light snow hid what he had done. The Danes attacked, they did not notice the thin ice on the moat, men and machines tumbled down into the frigid waters. The pirates could wait in their stockade for warmer weather so they could sail on.

When you see a picture of a wedding in an Anglo-French manuscript, there will be a priest because marriage is a matter of the spirit. In Italy, there will be a notary, because of the contract.

This idea of ‘marital affection’ changed the structure of families and the shape of people’s lives in the North, which helped send ideas and technology across the continent and gave money quite surprisingly modern uses. The personal isn’t just political; it is economic.

Nobody knew quite what plague was. We don’t, either; there is room for debate about exactly what organisms, or what deadly marriage of organisms, caused the Black Death. We can agree, though, that rats matter, because they carry infected fleas and they move: slow, but persistent, always onwards.

Being poor was just wretched; an early-fourteenth-century poem, the Song of the Husbandman, suggests ‘we might as well die now as struggle on like this’. The poor were not even attractive; Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, had to confess he did not like the way they smelled. He prayed for forgiveness for his reaction, but still he found them distasteful.

All this was managed with one more new idea: summary punishment, no need to prove a case in court or even hold a trial. There had to be two witnesses to a refusal to serve, but once they had told their story anyone refusing work could be put in the stocks or taken off to jail, where they stayed until they agreed to labour. The new justices of labourers who made these laws work were kept quite furiously busy; those in Essex in 1352 handled thousands of cases, involving perhaps one in

seven of the adults in the county. When the justices were eliminated in the 1360s, and cases came first to justices of the peace and then to the King’s Bench, the records are sparse and sometimes missing altogether; but we know enough from the early years to see that the machinery of the law was mostly used against workers who wanted more money than employers wanted to pay. This is not surprising; if someone’s offence was refusing work there was nothing to discuss. They were judged on the spot and punished until they agreed to do what was wanted. There was no need to go to the kind of court that keeps records.

one man was hanged for concealing a case of plague in his house. Nobody could deal in old clothes or even remove them for washing. The city was cleaned and cleaned again, the streets swept and scrubbed, all vagrants expelled on pain of branding if they ignored the order and death if they came back, because the fear of death easily justified a social cleansing. ‘Timor mortis conturbat me,’ William Dunbar was writing, with reason: ‘I am troubled by the fear of death.’ One more gallows was built, like the one that already warned the lepers what would happen if they strayed, to show that the city was in earnest.19

For a start, there is a twelfth-century text all about using pressed oil to bind colours: Theophilus Presbyter’s Schedula diversarum artium. Vasari says van Eyck was the one who taught Antonello da Messina how to paint in oils; Pietro Summonte, writing from Naples, says it was a Naples master called Colantonio who had wanted to move to Flanders because he ‘looked to the work of Flemish painters’ but was kept at home by a king with the skill to ‘show him … how to mix and use these colours’.28 The point is that Italian painters looked at the life and brightness, the brilliance and the shadows, of the Flemish masters, and they were hugely impressed. They saw faces that could be alive, which suggested a new kind of portrait, and landscapes of a kind they had never yet tried, which could be used as details in their own paintings. Mona Lisa became imaginable, a woman whose name we still want to know in front of a landscape we still try to read. The Italians learned from the North in the way the Flemish went down to Rome to learn.