The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Michael Pye

  THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

  Contents

  Maps

  Introduction

  1.The invention of money

  2.The book trade

  3.Making enemies

  4.Settling

  5.Fashion

  6.Writing the law

  7.Overseeing nature

  8.Science and money

  9.Dealers rule

  10.Love and capital

  11.The plague laws

  12.The city and the world

  References

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Introduction

  Cecil Warburton went to the seaside in the summer of 1700: two weeks at Scarborough on the east coast of England, north of Hull and south of Newcastle. He was not at all impressed.

  He was a northern gentleman, son of a Cheshire baronet, and he did what gentlemen do at a spa: he drank down five pints of the famous waters almost every day, waters that smelled of ink and tasted of acid, and his system was duly flushed. He refused the full cure his companions took, which was four quarts a day. He wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘I was in hopes I might here have met with something would have made my letter diverting to you, but I find myself disappointed for I yet can see nothing but coarse hooks and drying fish which is all the furniture of both in and out side of their streets and houses.’ The streets were littered with ‘garbage of fish and Cods Heads … I wish you find no ungreatful smell inclosed, for I think it impossible any thing can go hence free from it.’1

  He’d chosen the town where the idea of seaside was starting, where the first changing huts were about to appear on the beach, where people came to flirt and be seen; he did not want reminders of all the uses of the working sea. People, ‘Nobility, Quality and Gentry’ according to the guide for 1733, were flocking to Scarborough: earls and baronets, misses and marchionesses. They drank and ate and drank, knowing the waters would wash them out and keep them well. They went swimming in the cold sea and horse racing on the long, wide sands and dancing in the evening.2

  They chose to see the spa and not the working town, not the castle that had fired on enemy ships only fifty years earlier when the Dutch and English were at war, not the fishing fleet of maybe three hundred boats or the harbour, the only practical refuge in foul weather between the River Tyne to the north and the River Humber to the south. The town was a reminder of the web of connections over the water: food, trade, war and all kinds of arrivals and invasions, including the invasions of ideas.

  Cecil Warburton, like millions after him, had no interest in all that. He had more immediate worries; as he complained in a letter to his sister: ‘am still as fat as ever …’3

  This new idea of seaside came between us and the story of the sea.4 The seaside was becoming a destination, not a harbour on the way to somewhere else over the water; and it was a playground, not a place of work and war. It was hard to imagine that there had once been a world that centred on the sea itself. Over the years even the coastline was fixed in place as it never used to be when high winds could make a storm out of the sand, and high tides could break deep into the land. Stone and then concrete made sea walls, promenades, esplanades, a definite squared-off boundary between man and sea. Behind them, seafront hotels and villas could stare out with perfect indifference at the sea, which had made them so desirable in the first place.

  That was just beginning in Warburton’s time. In Scarborough, a whole catalogue of grand persons paid their five shillings and signed the book to use the two rooms built on the beach for drinks and company and dressing and undressing. They came north from London by the York coach, or else by way of Cambridge for the sights, but only if they could tolerate the country inns. Otherwise they paid a guinea for passage from the docks at Billingsgate to Scarborough on one of the coal boats going back empty from London to the Tyne.

  The women bathed discreetly with the help of guides. A local poet complained that ‘A spreading Vest the nymph secures / And every prying glance defies’. The men could either ‘retire and undress at some distance from the company, or … push a little off the beach in boats’ and then ‘jump in naked directly’. The sea was considered safe enough for brisk exercise or medicinal baths. Indeed, the anonymous author of A Journey from London to Scarborough insisted: ‘What Virtues our Physicians ascribe to Cold Baths in general are much more effectual by the additional Weight of Salt in Sea water, an Advantage which no Spaw in England can boast of but Scarborough.’

  Seawater, like spa water, was meant to cure sickness. Doctors were immediately and deeply worried; water was a rival to the chemical medicines they prescribed. There was an obvious need for ‘more careful analysis of spa water’, as Dr Simpson wrote in 1669, a ‘chymical anatomy’ to show what chemical medicines it happened to contain; only then could the sea be approved and annexed by the medical men. When the analysis was done, in the 1730s, it became a matter of civic pride and general interest, something important about the friendly trivia of the seaside: Scarborough, tourists and residents, all went to public lectures about exactly what they were drinking.5

  Now waters had once been a matter of another kind of faith: holy waters, holy springs and wells, found by saints and other amateur hopefuls. Scarborough’s spring was first found, or so a Dr Wittie wrote in 1667, by a Mrs Farrow, who was walking on the beach in the 1620s and noticed that stones had been turned russet by a noisy, bubbling spring at the foot of ‘an exceedingly high cliffe’. She liked the taste of the waters. She thought they would do people good.

  Word spread.

  Dr Wittie wrote a little book to make sure that it was doctors who prescribed them. He already believed in bathing because that was what the English did at spas: they drank the waters, but they also bathed in them, unlike the Europeans, who thought drinking was quite enough. He told men with a taste for port wine to go swimming in the sea because that was how he had cured his own gout, ‘frequent bathing in the Sea-water cold, in Summer time … after which I take a Sweat in a warm bed’. The summer months were the best; Dr Wittie was quite shocked that ‘in German spas, they drink in winter’.

  He knew that ‘many go to the spaws not for necessity but for pleasure, to withdraw themselves a while from their serious imployments and solace with their friends’. But pleasure, too, was going to be the business of doctors: a modern profession staking claims on as much of life as possible. Swimming itself was no longer simple exercise. Dr Robert White wrote on the ‘Use and Abuse of Sea Water’ in 1775 to warn that ‘they who are in full health and strength should not sport with such recreations so freely’. They could perhaps bathe early in the day, but the more nervous cases should wait until ‘a little before noon’; ‘nobody should continue above a minute in the water’. Seawater might be less of a shock than the stone cold of spring water, but even so Dr White felt obliged to warn of the ‘Fatal Effects of Bathing in Healthy Persons’. He told how ‘a man, about 40 years of age, who had lived a sober and temperate life, was induced to bathe in the sea’. The man didn’t think of himself as a patient so he went into the water without being bled and without being purged, and without a doctor’s say-so; the consequence, so Dr White says, was ‘violent pain which shot through his head, great dizziness and a fatal Apoplectic fit’.

  The sea was ‘useful’ against leprosy, he thought, ‘of great use’ against epilepsy, and able to take away jaundice. The sea could also cure gonorrhoea, which might be a comforting thought for randy gentlemen but no consolation at all for the next person they bedded.
Even so, he reckoned people were not careful enough with ‘so general and popular a Medicine’ because ‘the Stomach and Bowels are kept in constant agitation’ by it. He recorded ‘the propensity which people of all ranks have discovered towards Sea Bathing’.

  It was not only the English. The Dutch went walking on the beach in the seventeenth century, the boys throwing the girls in the sea at Scheveningen every spring, everyone drinking. Their prince-like stadhouder had a sand yacht with sails and wheels to bowl along the strand. The spas brought people to the seaside, but the seaside took on a life of its own: there were beaches that did not need a doctor’s licence, a new kind of resort like Norderney on the German North Sea coast, like Ostend and Boulogne, like Doberan on the Baltic, places you went simply for pleasure. Anyone could flirt with the water, visit and go home when they wanted. They turned the waves and currents into a backdrop for very urban ideas of how to be well, stay fit, look good and be amused. The old business of the sea was hidden away and the new business was holiday. The harbour at Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, had been famous and hustling for a thousand years, but in the nineteenth century the town faced only stagnation and oblivion unless it installed a bathing station, a place for bathers to change clothes and take a drink; or so the promoters of the bathing station claimed.6

  Reality was screened off behind the bathing huts and seafront attractions and later the piers and donkey rides and fish and chip shops, behind archery stalls and bowling greens (as at Blackpool) and music halls and bright electric lights. The secret was secure. By the late nineteenth century Mr Baedeker’s Handbooks for Travellers, usually so meticulous on artworks and the cost of transport, did not seem to notice what was missing. His guide to the Netherlands gets after a while to Middelburg in the coastal region of Zeeland, and all the excursions possible from there.7 He noted the omnibus which ran twice daily to a ‘small bathing place’ called Domburg, ‘frequented by Germans, Dutchmen and Belgians’; he mentioned ‘pleasant walks in the neighbourhood’. He tells you the price of a two-horse carriage to get there, and full board at the Bad-Hôtel.

  He does not mention what happened at Domburg, even though people still alive remembered. It was at that ‘small bathing place’, on a lovely beach, that the sea gave back its secret: its history.

  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

  There was also what looked like ‘a little house with the base of columns’. There were half-erased images on the stones, prayers to a goddess called Nehalennia, thanking her for success, for the welfare of a son, for the safe passage of goods across the sea. That made it likely that the ‘little house’ was some kind of temple. The remains of trees, petrified and salted, suggested the kind of grove that was often planted around temples. The newsletter was sure that what the sea uncovered was ‘a monument of greatest antiquity’.

  Among the stones were altars to known gods – Neptune, of course, for the sea and sailors, and Hercules – but Nehalennia with her twenty-six altars had been unknown for more than a millennium. On the altars she sits under a shell-shaped canopy, which makes her a goddess of Heaven like Venus or Juno or Minerva, or she stands on the prow of a ship on an unquiet sea; she sometimes has a throne, often there is a basket of apples around, and there is always a fine-faced dog gazing up at her. Ships were not always just a means of transport; they have a curiously deep connection with fertility in people’s minds, especially Northerners’, so it seems she was the local goddess of good harvests, good luck at sea, even good connections like carts and roads.9 She had once been everything to the people around Domburg, and she had been entirely forgotten.

  There was huge excitement across learnèd Europe: something unknown had come out of the sea. Now the past began to come back and wash away and come back again as though history itself were a sea in motion. Peter de Buk, an old man from Domburg, remembered that in 1684, ‘during the very cold winter, when the ice piled up very high on the beach’, the immovable stone started to loosen and then shift and then ‘gradually it moved to the sea’. The ballplayers who had used the stone for years, so the local Minister said, had to find somewhere else to play.

  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.

  In 1715 a very low tide stretched the land out so far that there were the remains of wells to be seen, and the foundations of buildings. One more statue appeared: a great headless Victory, in the middle of what was certainly a temple of some sort, paved with round and square stones. Victory stayed stranded for years until she was carted bodily inland and parked in the local church. She survived, turning green now that she was out of the salt water and in the rains, but she was ruined when lightning brought down the church in 1848. The remains of this ancient Domburg were reduced to a few damaged pieces and two cubic metres of rubble dumped in the garden of the town clerk.

  The dead did not stay away. The cemetery was uncovered again in 1749 and in 1817: twenty rough and worm-eaten coffins held together with wooden pegs, no nails, and locked down in the sand by the sheer weight of the old dunes. There were round brooches on the right shoulder of each body, sometimes on the chest, which looked like money for a sea goddess to buy safety, maybe treasure for a new life. One corpse was buried with a sword. But the locals knew about buried things by now and what they might be worth, and they went through the coffins secretly and wouldn’t say exactly where they found what. They were busy selling to the Amsterdam collectors.

  The shoreline kept changing with the winds and tides, so when the low tide pulled back in 1832 it opened a quite different site, one that would be seen again and for the last time in 1866: the scattered outlines of houses, and a burial ground with the coffins laid out like a star on the sand. There were now three different stories under the rough water. There was a Roman temple to an unknown goddess which stood at the point where ships went out into the open sea and looked as though it was abandoned very suddenly. There were the remains of a settlement along the shore, a single road laid out east to west with wooden huts for storing and sorting goods and enough coins to prove it was a place of serious business. And there were graves that had to be un-Christian because they were rich with pretty bronzes decorated with animal masks, and a square-cut silver collar. These looked like Viking things.10

  The written record shows only faint traces of all the life that the money and altars and grave goods suggest. Nobody mentioned Domburg or anything like it in surviving Roman writings, but then Romans were deeply provincial at the heart of their empire and quite usually ignored their own rich provinces. When the scholar Alcuin came to write the life of St Willibrord, he told of the saint evangelizing on the island of Walcheren around 690 CE, in a town ‘where an idol of the old errors still stood
’; this is the site of Domburg, which was an island before man started reorganizing the coastline. Willibrord smashed the statue in front of its guardian, who in a fit of mad anger struck the saint on his head with a sword. ‘But,’ as Alcuin writes, ‘God looked after his servant.’ Magnanimously, the saint saved the pagan from those who wanted to punish him, and from the demon occupying his soul, but the man died anyway three days later, as persons who have been seized by angry crowds tend to do.11

  In the annals, the histories that monks kept for their own use, there are references to a brutal Viking raid in 837 on Domburg – ‘in insula quae Walacra dicitur’, on the island called Walcheren – in which many were killed, many women taken off, and ‘countless money of various kinds’ was shipped out, and the Norsemen were left with the power to organize regular payments of tribute. That single hidden street on one great dune was evidently a rich little place, worth pillaging.

  We read about raids and struggles, but the ground itself tells a rather different story. When modern archaeologists investigated sites around the beach, they found nothing much to suggest war, nothing burned or smashed or piled up: none of the bloody events that make up the usual kind of history, the events that people record. There were just centuries of life, and its slow, sad retreat as the sand blew inland, with nothing much of value left behind: except of course the dead.

  All that vigour got itself buried on a sandy bit of shore, where the bathers played and still play to this day.

  This book is about rediscovering that lost world, and what it means to us: the life around the North Sea in times when water was the easiest way to travel, when the sea connected and carried peoples, belief and ideas, as well as pots and wine and coal. This is not the usual story of muddled battles and various kings and the spread of Christianity. It is the story of how the constant exchanges over water, the half-knowledge that things could be done differently, began to change people’s minds profoundly. This cold, grey sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible.