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

by Michael Pye

  The marshes weren’t barren, of course. There were sedges and rushes, and enough grass to make haystacks; obstinate pagans went out to cut hay on a fine, still Sunday when the saintly Anskar was preaching and missioning, and saw their disrespectful work go up in spontaneous fire as punishment.20 The hides from their cattle became leather and, conveniently, sea lavender grew on the marsh, its root used for tanning. The salt peat made sod for the walls of houses. There was common grasswrack, the sea grass whose ashes produce a salt to preserve meat and whose stems, up to a metre and a half long, had a dozen uses: stuffing mattresses, making the seats for chairs, thatching houses, lining ditches, even as a kind of woven fence that would keep back the drifting sands. It made excellent litter for the animals in the byre and, dug into the ground of the terpen afterwards, it fertilized the gardens. Turnips grew there alongside broad beans and oilseed rape, barley and a few oats.21

  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. They also needed timber for the roof frames of their sod houses. So they had to do business to get necessities: to send out anything they could produce from animals – parchment and bone, leather and wool, cloth woven from the wool – in order to buy what they couldn’t grow. They already knew all about adding value to their basic products, starting a kind of Frisian brand; one farm close to modern Wilhelmshaven kept two different breeds of sheep for two different kinds of wool so as to make all kinds of fine cloth.22

  The terpen must have worked a little like islands, holding people’s fierce local loyalties. They seem isolated but they are often full of sailors who have been away to everywhere. Frisians became famous for travelling, and for their women who waited behind and their constancy. There is a ninth-century poem in The Exeter Book that turns Frisian marriage on the terpen into a moral example, and perhaps a report of a loving ritual. ‘He’s so very welcome, so dear to his Frisian wife when his boat is back,’ the poem says. ‘He’s the one who provides for her, and she welcomes him, washes his clothes dirtied by the sea and gives him clean ones. She gives him on dry ground all that his love could wish: the wife will be faithful to her husband.’

  The poet’s realistic; he knows some women are constant, and some want novelty, the available stranger when the husband is away; indeed the laws of Frisia that Charlemagne codified suggest a tolerance for brisk infanticide to dispose of the evidence of indiscretion.23 But he remembers the sailor, too. ‘He’s at sea a long time, always thinking of the one he loves, patiently waiting out the journey he can’t hurry. When his luck turns again he comes back home – unless he is sick, or the sea holds him back or the ocean has him in its power.’24

  The sea could kill, and yet it was the easy route: the connection, not the barrier. The network of Roman roads survived, but they were broken and rutted and hard work for a loaded waggon in many months of the year. The Roman system of posthouses was in place so you could change horses on a long ride, but it was a cumbersome business compared with going by sea or river; and it was slower, and often less safe than the water. It is true there were pirates, but the reason pirates went on working the North Sea from Roman times to the seventeenth century was that they knew civilians were always willing to risk being raided for the ease of a sea crossing. There were also storms, but there were prayers and saints to calm them: the lives of saints tell so many stories of miracles at sea that they tend to prove the general terror of foul weather. Believers clung to the Church as sailors cling to a ship, and ships came to be signs of faith.

  Even saints knew that no voyage was ever quite certain. Willibrord was a missionary, the first Bishop of Utrecht, and he had thirty convert boys to ship down from Denmark to Frisia. He made sure to baptize them all before setting out, because of the ‘dangers of such a long sailing and the attacks of the ferocious natives of those parts’ and the awful possibility that they might drown and be eternally damned despite all his good work.25 The prefect Grippo, returning from a diplomatic mission to some kings in England, faced the violence of the storm and learned it was best to let the ship drift until there was calm. He suffered a night of furious wind and crashing waves, shipping water, and he had to wait for the sun to rise before he could see the old-fashioned lighthouse up ahead, probably the Roman tower at Boulogne that Charlemagne had rebuilt. Only then did he hoist again the sail that must have been lowered hours before.26

  All this was a gloriously alarming muddle of the practical and the fearful. On one hand fresh water was supposed to be Godly and good, renewing and refreshing life itself, while salt water was a desert, a cliff off which ships could fall; it was an abyss where Leviathan lived with other terrible creatures, ‘a king over all the children of pride’, according to the Book of Job, ‘made without fear’ and able to make ‘the deep boil like a pot’, with terrible teeth, breath to kindle coals and the power to lay a trail of phosphorescent light behind him on the water.27 On the other hand, you could always hunt the smaller terrible creatures and eat them; St Bridget of Kildare fed her guests fresh seal, the same St Cuthbert who was famously kind to ducks sometimes existed on the flesh of beached dolphins, and St Columba prophesied the coming of a gigantic whale off the island of Iona but said God would protect his fellow monks from its terrible teeth. He did nothing to save the whale.28

  For Christians, as you can see in the vivid pages of some Psalters designed on Frisian territory, the land was almost Heaven and the sea was Hell, full of beasts and tortures and also temptations to sin; the coastline was a kind of battleground between the two, and inland was where good people could get on with their industrious and virtuous lives.29 Sea was where holy men might go and put away the rudder and trust to God, knowing they were at risk. The sea, after all, was where pagan heroes went, where unfamiliar and unholy things abounded. But it was also the Frisians’ workplace, and they saw no reason to rush conversion to Christian attitudes. They were used to working together on their boats so they held to the old view that shipping out implied all sorts of virtues: loyalty, trust and competence.

  They used anchors on their boats, as the Romans did, with heavy chains to pull them up and let them down in shallow water or on the sands. Once the anchor was raised, their flat-bottomed boats might still be settled in the sand, so they carried a gaff in the shape of a metal V at the end of a wooden pole to push themselves clear.30 The main power was muscle power, rowers sitting on sea chests, which was the kind of power a captain could control; but there were also sails to help out the oarsmen, and since nobody could yet tack into a headwind, each journey had to wait for the right wind to blow the ship forwards. Boniface shipped out from England on his mission to convert the Frisians in 716, clambered up the side of a quick ship with the sailors bustling about and had to wait for the great sail to be puffed out with the right winds;31 or so Willibald says in his life of the saint. Willibald refers to the sail as ‘carbasa’ in the Latin, which more usually is a word for linens, even though we know most sails were sewn from lengths of woven wool. When Boniface’s body was shipped over the Aelmere on a more ordinary ship with ‘swelling sails’, the word used this time was ‘vela’, the more common word.32 Did fast ships need a different kind of sail?

  Since the sea was not a barrier like the land, the world had a different shape. We would find it hard to recognize.

  Suppose you crossed from Domburg to the trading port at Ipswich on the east coast of England, newly opened in the seventh century; your cargo might be pots from the Rhineland or glass or the hefty lava quernstones used for grinding grain in mills.33 Stand on the banks of the River Orwell and look out at the world. If you think in terms of the time it takes to get to places, then Bergen in Norway is closer than York in England, even if your boat to Bergen depends on the muscle power of rowers; but York is only 340 km away by road on modern maps while Bergen i
s 510 km by sea. The coast of Jutland is closer, and better connected, than an English Midlands city like Worcester. You could be over the water and in the port of Quentovic, on the border between modern France and modern Belgium, in half the time it took to get to London overland; and if you had a faster ship, under sail, you could be in Jutland sooner than London. Travel by land had none of the sea’s advantages, such as the prevailing summer winds that virtually blow a Norseman home from around Calais; and at sea, despite the habit of clinging to the shore for the sake of navigation and being able to sleep on dry land at night, it was actually safer out in the open, away from the shoals and currents of the English coast.34

  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.

  A sea change, if you like, was coming.

  All through the seventh and even the eighth centuries, much of the business across the sea looked like ceremony, a way of moving around all those luxurious goods that a king, chief or emperor needed to ensure alliances, make friends and keep his men loyal. Traders were more escorts than dealers, transporting bribes and rewards, moving goods so someone else could give them away. Again, the Frisians were different. They had their own tastes and they moved goods to satisfy themselves. From the sixth century, they were buying pots for their own use from the Frankish kingdom to their south, simply because they liked them.35 They bought jewellery from England and Scandinavia, and they got their weaving battens made out of whalebone from Norway. They may even have kept souvenirs: among their stashes of useful coins are pretty cowrie shells from the Red Sea.36

  Their kind of business required money: not a heap of gold and silver wealth that would go well in your grave, but live money, coins to use in trade. All through Gaul the only point of coins was an easy way to ship gold about. In England it took two hundred years after the Romans left before coins were used as money again. There were no mints at all east of the Rhine until Regensburg, and that mint produced very little.37 It was the Frisians who reinvented useful money, and taught their ideas to the Franks under Charlemagne.

  For gold had always been about power, ceremony, buying support and paying taxes: the currency of politics. Romans used it that way, the great landowners paying into the state and a bit of subsidy flowing back (as usual) to the people who needed it least, the great landowners. In the sixth century, gold still flooded into state coffers – the ones belonging to the Frankish kings and no longer the Roman emperors – but it hardly even dribbled back out; it was money that did not circulate, fit only to be kept, counted, buried and, quite usually, stolen.38 Gold was often a gift, not always entirely voluntary, which showed how and where you fitted: who were your allies, who were your masters. You did not necessarily get anything in return: you couldn’t give gold to a church and expect a measure of salvation. You certainly didn’t get a load of grain or a shipful of amber or a posse of slaves for your gold; the return was wonderfully abstract, an idea of yourself. In early medieval epics, its commonest form is not even coins: it is small gold rings, against which the poets measured any other gifts in circulation, however substantial, and ultimately the value and standing of the people who got them and gave them.39

  When the big Roman estates folded and the diminished cities were no longer the focus of life, all of a sudden something smaller, less valuable, more flexible than gold was required: a currency of trade. It was not just the long-haul international trades which needed a token of value that made sense at both ends of the voyage and everywhere in between. Peasant farmers taking their goods into local markets needed some way to buy and sell with coins;40 they couldn’t simply go home with more of the same kind of grain or cabbage or beans they’d taken to market, even if that was what their neighbours had to sell; they needed a way to buy cloth or pots, things produced in other places and by other kinds of people, and in any case there was a limit to the beans or cabbage or grain that the cloth and pot merchants wanted.

  Silver worked: small, thick silver coins that were often minted locally. The Frisians minted them with the old god Wotan on one side, with spiked hair, a drooping moustache and eyes that stare out like goggles; and on the other side a serpentine kind of monster with clawed feet and a high tail. The Anglo-Saxons in England imitated the Frisians, and put a creature like a porcupine on their silver, or sometimes a king.41

  These silver deniers were scarce in all the wide Frankish territory until the Franks grabbed Frisia and its mints in the 730s. After that, mints were most common along the Frankish route into Frisia; even from around 700 CE there are deniers scattered about the stops on that trade run. The most commonly found ones were struck in Frisia, although it is not always easy to tell them from the Anglo-Saxon kind made across the water. The record buried in the ground suggests that Frisia was the centre if not the home of practical cash.42 But it wasn’t the countryside, the inland territory, which had money; it was the trading ports. The sands at Domburg gave up almost a thousand of the early pennies, the sceattas,43 and from there the coins went where merchants went: to the Frisians’ cousins and their trading partners in England, but also all the way up the run of the Rhine as well as south to Marseilles and the Mediterranean. In Aquitaine Frisian coins were much preferred to the debased money coming from what is now France.

  The silver had to come from somewhere else since there were no mines in Frisia. To be able to manufacture this money, the Frisians had to make money in the first place and they got it by selling to the Franks, who wanted slaves and furs and fish and Frisian cloth, especially cloth of many colours. The white, grey, red and blue kinds were expensive and much appreciated in the East – so Charlemagne thought when he gave some to the Caliph of Baghdad, along with fierce and agile dogs for catching lions and tigers.44 Frisian cloaks were mostly for the mass market, given away by the Emperor Louis the Pious to the lower orders in his court at Easter, while nobles got belts and silks, and the grooms, cooks and scullions got linen, wool and knives.45

  The Frisians were notorious for cashing in on style; in Gaul, when shorter tunics were in fashion, the Frisians sold them but at the price of the longer, old-fashioned kind, and the Emperor had to intervene.46 On the Rhine and round the Baltic they distributed tiny bronze ‘keys to Paradise’ with a round handle and a cross cut out of the metal, a Christian talisman; the Frisians may have resisted conversion manfully, but they worked out how to profit from it.47 With all the cash they raised, they could buy what the Franks had to offer, which was corn, wine, metal, pottery and glass; and the rest of the silver, whatever form it took, could be turned into their own coins. It was not just that trade gave coins a use; the Frisians would not have had the metal to make them in the first place without trade.

  In turn, the Franks had to get their silver from somewhere, and they found it in the East: the Middle East, in Byzantium and beyond. At the start of the eighth century, even the monks at Corbie in Picardy expected an allowance of exotic Eastern goods from the Frankish royal warehouses: pepper, cumin, cloves and cinnamon, dates and figs, rice and papyrus. Northern Europe liked drugs from the East, camphor in particular, to sort out various ailments that their local medicine did not seem to touch. The Franks had to trade to pay for that kind of luxury. They had little that the Middle East needed except bodies to labour, so they sold slaves, and they took back the silver dirhams from the caliphate in the East. Coins from Aleppo turn up all round the North Sea.

  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.48 By then, silver coins had gone from being a convenient way to carry a valuable metal to a symbol in their own right. Coins were value you could carry about, which other people recognized the same way you did. They didn’t need to be sheltered and fed like cattle, or ploughed and reaped like fields, and best of all they didn’t die; their value persisted. They could be buried in times of trouble and dug up to spend later. The laws of the Franks show, equivalent by equivalent, how gold and goods gave way to silver and this idea of value. For example, a murderer was obliged to pay off the heirs and survivors of the man he had killed, and the rate of the blood money, wergeld, was fixed. At first it was set in gold solidi, with an equivalent in goods and perishables: a cow for 3 solidi, a horse for 12 and a sword and sheath for 7. Once silver money was in use, the exchange rate was about coins, not solid goods: 12 silver deniers to the solidus.49 The value of money was a theory that everyone accepted, and it was anchored in the real world in the most surprising ways. Life itself had a price: roughly 1,664 grains of fine silver in the form of coins. To make that kind of equation you have to have the habit of paying off every kind of debt with silver money.50

  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.