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

by Michael Pye

  Consider what had to change after the end of the Roman Empire in order to take us to the start of the cities, states and habits that we now know: our law, our idea of love, our way of business and our need for an enemy in order to define ourselves. Traders brought coins and money, and with them an abstract idea of value that made mathematics and modern science possible. 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.

  Humans changed the landscape and, in the course of learning to manage the damage to the natural world, they also spread the idea of being free and having rights. Travel around the sea made fashion possible, and visible, and desirable; we have not yet escaped. Women’s choices, including celibacy or pregnancy on their own terms or else marriage, changed the economic life of the North Sea in quite unexpected ways.

  Law changed from the local customs everybody knew to a language and a set of texts that needed lawyers: professions were born, first priests, who had to stay out of the secular world, then lawyers, who made law into a kind of religion, then doctors and all the rest. Without that, we would have no idea of a middle class: people whose power came from being experts. Plague began to separate the poor into the worthy and the unworthy, to allow authorities to regulate the intimate stuff of life – how to raise children and where to live – and eventually to put up barriers between cities and nations; all of which was, of course, for our own good, just like airport security or constant surveillance. Co-operating to save the land from flooding, to send out a ship with many cargoes or insure it, to organize cash when taking fish to the Baltic and grain back to Amsterdam: on this we built, eventually, capitalism. And all this time facts and information were becoming one more commodity, just as they are today.

  All this happened in the times that most of us don’t really know: the millennium and more between what we all think we know of imperial Rome – armies, straight roads, villas, temples, central heating and snails for dinner – and what we think we know of Amsterdam in all its seventeenth-century imperial glory – fleets, herring, gold, gin, paintings, gables and clean, swept streets. Between these two visions, between roughly 700 and 1700 CE, lie times that we still unthinkingly call the ‘Dark Ages’ and then the ‘Middle Ages’, which, as we all know, consist entirely of castles, damsels, knights and lovely illuminated manuscripts. It is as though we imagine human invention and perversity and will were suspended for centuries, as though life turned into decor.

  Documents do get lost or burned or rotted, of course; the written record is bound to be imperfect. Documents keep best when some long-lived institution needs them in a building like the cathedrals which can survive a thousand years or so. A letter about planting crops or buying shirts may disappear along with love letters and old court records; but a charter for land belonging to the Church is very likely to survive. Only bits of life are written down and kept, and they are recorded for very particular reasons and only from some special viewpoint – judge or bishop or king or abbot. They leave out what everyone knew at the time, what nobody wanted mentioned at the time. Even written histories with great authority, based on all the written histories before them, are best treated only as clues to the past.

  We have great good luck, though. We now have a whole new kind of evidence to fill some of the gaps, and watch as our view of history changes almost beyond recognition. Archaeology uncovers and reveals, just like the sea at Domburg; but unlike the sea, it does so systematically, providing evidence to set alongside the written record. The picture is suddenly wider; we see life and connections. Sometimes what’s dug up will be a flat contradiction of familiar texts and the archives we would like to trust because they are what we have. Sometimes, it will be hard to interpret because each pile of objects grubbed out of the ground makes sense only when it is put into context, and deciding on the context means we have to rely on what we think we already know from other finds in other places.

  Bring the words and the objects together, though, and the new story is much more convincingly human. Life no longer stops dead when Rome falls and the empire collapses and the tradition of classical Latin writing comes to an end, not even when the Saxons and Vandals and Goths and Huns make their various pushes to the west. Human beings didn’t lose their ability to connect, trade, fight wars and generally move about to change their lives just because there are so few surviving documents; indeed, they didn’t lose their ability to write and read those documents. Life goes on; we just need different tools to find and describe it.

  Roman towns sometimes survived, but they changed. Roman roads still worked, as did the old Roman system of posthouses where you could rest on a long journey, change horses and ride on. Useful ploughs and workshop tools didn’t disappear from the land because historians decreed a change of era; indeed, some rather advanced devices like horizontal watermills were built centuries before we can trace them in documents. The technology of travel – from the hogging trusses that ran the length of a boat to make it seaworthy by tightening bow and stern, to the sun compasses which allowed navigation out of sight of the shore – was always developing; people wanted to move and were thinking hard about how to do it. The very shape of the world and its limits were shifting in people’s minds.

  Take away the idea of dark times and ruin and you begin to hear other voices. Women were not always silent, or without the power to make choices – we may just have been listening in the wrong places; the erudite and holy Hildegard of Bingen lived out most of the twelfth century as a nun, had visions, was a mystic, wrote music appropriate for her convent life, but she also wrote letters all round Europe at the heart of a learnèd conversation. She knew how to make contraception work, and she wrote about that, too.

  To find this story means burrowing through libraries and staring at ploughed fields, both. It means close attention to what people recorded of the stones on the beach at Domburg and then imagining all the connections that the story contains: human beings in movement, along with anything they can make, think or believe. Nothing is ever quite new, or settled, or empty. Frontiers shift. Languages change. Peoples migrate. The Romans built a temple to send their merchant ships out to the sea, then merchants made a trading town whose name we’ve lost, then the Vikings who were famous for raiding and pillaging settled down here; this one beach holds the story of a world always changing, always on the move. There are also the weapons that invading Frankish soldiers left behind around 800 CE. Armies travelled and power shifted; but sometimes the biggest changes came when peoples travelled, and not always when and why the schoolbooks told us. Identity became a matter of where you were and where you last came from, not some abstract notion of race; peoples were not separated sharply as they were by nineteenth-century frontiers, venturing out only to conquer or be conquered. Indeed, quite often they ventured out to change sides.

  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.

  To be clear: none of this is at all modern, because it belongs to a time of quite different thinking and behaviour. Distance wasn’t the same, the maps of the world were not the same, the institutions may have similar names but they were quite different from the ones we know. The necessary conditions of the world we know could have grown into a quite different world. But if we can tease out what happened, and why, then we can begin to see how our modern ways and times became possible – from the calendar to a futures market, from the first publishers of holy manuscripts to
experimental science.

  There is one more complication in this story: how we tell it, usually. We see the glories of our past through the screen of the Southern Renaissance, when civilization was rediscovered, they say, on the shores of the Mediterranean in pages that had been written a thousand years earlier around the same sea. The law that started to order societies in a way we find more familiar is called Roman law. The Church across Northern Europe was organized from Rome. It seems downright obvious that the North was just waiting to be civilized from the South; after all, Christianity came from there. As early as 723 a bishop called Daniel was telling a saint called Boniface that his best argument against Northern pagans was to point out that the world was becoming Christian and their gods were doing nothing at all about it; ‘the Christians possess lands rich in oil and wine and abounding in other resources, they have left to the pagans lands stiff with cold where their gods, driven out of the world, are falsely supposed to rule’.12

  When we talk of ‘Dark Ages’ we emphasize war, invasion, raids and conquests, even genocide; but we have all that at home, in our own time, and we still live our lives. Until quite recently it was possible to write of ‘mass exterminations’ when the Anglo-Saxons crossed the North Sea to take power over Britons and Britain, a wiping away of one people by another, even though the evidence suggests a far longer, gentler and more friendly process.13 We were in danger of forgetting what really happened around the sea, in its zone of trade and faith, which stretched at least from Dublin to Gdansk, from Bergen to Dover. Around the Mediterranean we take for granted links and influences, back and forth: the biblical stories, the epic voyages in Homer and Hesiod, the trade routes from east to west and back again. The North Sea had most of those things, and the consequences were remarkable.

  I mean to tell that story as best I can find it in the sources and in the work of scholars round the sea. This is not a chauvinist exercise; the South is no less important because we remember what happened in the North. This is an attempt to paint a fuller, more colourful and more precise picture of where we come from.

  The seaside mob never went very far beyond the comforts of the shore. We’re going out further, even if it means going out of our depth.

  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”’.15

  The seventh-century Isidore of Seville thought the known earth ‘was called orbis because it was like a wheel with the ocean flowing all around it’. This ocean had to be much smaller than the dry land, because the apocryphal Book of Esdras told God so: ‘on the third day, You ordered the waters to collect in a seventh part of the earth; the other six parts You made dry land.’ But it was also a formidable obstacle, a barricade around the continents; perhaps too wild, but more likely too shallow, too muddy, too full of weeds to be crossed. It might just be possible to pass through the hot and torrid zones to the south, but the frozen north was the very end of the world.16

  The barrier was not just physical. The sea was a place of evil, where lived the biblical Leviathan, monster of the deep. The Antichrist, the ‘man of pride’, rode backwards on the head of a sea dragon just as the Vikings rode on ships with snakes’ heads for prows.17 Genesis and the Book of Job confirmed what the geographers agreed: that the sea was unruly, that the dragon who lived there was the dragon of chaos, that the abyss lay in wait. When the Book of Revelations promised that the sea would be no more, it was understood to mean the end of evil itself.18

  This was a sea that was hardly known, waiting to be explored: a zone between Heaven and Earth, between the familiar coastline and whatever lay out in the waters. The Irish told extraordinary holy tales about sea voyages, called immrama,19 which means ‘rowing about’; they told how hermits took to the sea because they wanted to settle somewhere far away and entirely peaceful. Saints sailed off to find the promised land to the west, the islands of the blessed.

  These are fables full of wonders, but also very practical advice. In the eighth-century Voyage of St Brendan, a holy saga about going to Heaven and the gates of Hell, there are also instructions on how to make a boat for such a voyage, a coracle built of oxhide and oak bark on a wooden frame and then greased with animal fat. We are told that the saint and his fellow voyagers took along spare skins and extra fat.20 The sea was there to be used, even if it took a saint to make the attempt, and although some of the marvels are doubtful – like being stranded for months each year on the back of a highly complaisant whale – some of the ones that seem most fanciful are teasingly likely.

  The sailors see a high mountain rising out of the sea behind sheer black cliffs, its peak hidden in what looks like cloud but turns out to be smoke. The mountain vomits flames sky-high and then seems to suck them back. The rocks, right down to the sea, glow red like fire. Here Brendan and his crew find Judas Iscariot crouching on a bare rock, waves crashing over his head, which he says is a grateful respite; at night he goes back to the mountain, the home of the great Leviathan, where demons torture him for his sin and he burns ‘like a lump of molten lead in a crucible, day and night’.21

  The sinners and demons, the notion that the mountain welcomes damned souls with a joyful blast of flames, do not make a historical record, although they make a very powerful lesson for the faithful. But we’re told that when Brendan turns away from the mountain island he is heading south; that implies the island must lie far to the north. Far north of Ireland, where the Voyage was written, is volcanic Iceland, and seas where small islands do indeed suddenly come smoking up out of the water along one of the major fault lines of the Earth. Brendan’s voyage is a voyage to known places after all.

  The monk Dicuil wrote about all the islands to the north of Ireland: ‘Among these, I have lived in some, and have visited others; some I have only glimpsed while others I have read about.’22 Most likely he never got further than the Hebrides or maybe the Orkneys, but others went much further: as far as Thule, the half-mythical island to the very north of everything. 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.

  This Thule sounds very much like Iceland.

  More, 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.

  The sea was not yet criss-crossed with long established trade routes and war routes like the Mediterranean; in the North, the sea was still full of legend, so when men went sailing they knew they were testi
ng the edge of the world. Around 1075 the bishop Adam of Bremen wrote his dubious history of the previous archbishops of the northern German town of Bremen. He was writing from a seaport where he could listen to what sailors thought they knew about the sea. He reckoned the way north went through the seas around Orkney, water so thick with salt a ship needed strong winds to pass, and led on to Iceland with its black ice so old it would burn. ‘Beyond Norway, which is the farthermost northern country, you will find no human habitation, nothing but ocean, terrible to look upon and limitless, encircling the whole world.’ Black mist would come down here, the seas would go wild, and you would come to the point where all the tides of the sea are sucked into the deeps and then vomited back. If you still kept sailing, sailing, as King Harald Hardrada did, you would come to the ‘darksome bounds of a failing world’; ‘by retracing his step he barely escaped in safety the vast pit of the abyss’.24

  Men wanted to cross that abyss, to find what lay beyond. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth century, the anonymous author of the History of Norway thought he knew all about the dangers and the wonders of the north. He knew there were whirlpools and frozen headlands which send huge icebergs headlong into the sea; and sea monsters that swallow down sailors, horse-whales with spreading manes and giants without head or tail.25 He says that in living memory the sea came to boil and the earth gave out fire and a great mountain came up out of the waters; but he is a sophisticated man, and he doubts that this is any kind of evil omen. He says only that God understands it; and we don’t.