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

by Michael Pye

  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.

  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

  The merchants made an inland headquarters at Dorestad, some two hundred kilometres upstream on the Rhine where the river splits in two. They had a natural beach at first, perfect for landing their boats, but the river was beginning to meander and it formed a wet, slippery shoal between the water and the land; so they built causeways into the river, one jetty to each house, jetties which grew longer over the years as the bed of the river dodged to the east. Roadways of wooden planks ran over the causeways so goods could be loaded and unloaded. Those goods were rich: elegant glass and expensive weapons, pots of the style that buyers wanted wherever it was made, and not the rough local stuff. Even the wood barrels that lined their wells were imported: from Mainz up the river. The houses were long and boat-shaped, wider inland and narrower on the waterfront where they stood at right angles to the water, each claiming a private, personal access to the business of the river.52

  Dorestad was so important to making money that it had the second most-active mint in the empire after the one in Charlemagne’s own court.53 In Charlemagne’s time so much business passed through that the town became one of the main customs posts for the empire; most likely, it was along its harbour that cargo was shifted from sea-going boats to river-going boats, which would make it much easier to check value and take the Emperor’s share. The town was a turntable for travellers, too, on the long haul from the upper Rhine to the sea, which implies some sort of schedule for services and a fair amount of traffic, and maybe somewhere to stay while you waited. Not all travellers found the welcome they expected. The scholar Alcuin of York told his friends in a poem to raise their sails and get out of Dorestad quickly because it was very likely a merchant called Hrotberct wouldn’t open his house to them, just because ‘this greedy merchant doesn’t like your poems’. Alcuin clearly expected merchants to do their duty and offer a bed to distinguished strangers, so ‘niger Hrotberct’, ‘wretched Hrotberct’, let everyone down.54 In doing so, mind you, he got a minor kind of immortality; his very Frankish name is the only name we have for a merchant in Dorestad.

  Look a little closer, and the port is much odder: a port that only men from the terpen could have imagined. The houses by the Rhine were packed closely but each made itself into an island: there was a wood palisade to mark its boundaries and a gallery that ran round the outside of the building to look out towards the neighbours, all the connection and the isolation of the terpen. There was not just one well to provide water, but two: one for humans, one for animals. In the north of the town there were substantial farms, linked by wooden plank roadways, and they raised more meat than the town could possibly eat. Each merchant house made things on a small scale, tanned leather or carved amber or did basic blacksmithing, produced ropes and baskets and maybe also cloth. The warehouses were storing goods, but also producing more goods than the town could use.55 Dorestad was a port and a market town which kept the habits of the terpen: raise animals, make anything you can, go into business with what you have and then go as far as you can with the business.

  All this required organization. Frisians sailed in convoys, which means they had to time and plan their voyages and share the information; we know this because the priest Ragenbert was sent north to what is now Sweden by way of Schleswig, ‘where there were ships and merchants who were to make the journey with him’ (and it was just bad luck that he was set upon by robbers and never made it alive).56 Later they definitely had guilds, sworn brotherhoods; but perhaps they always had associations capable of keeping their members informed of and organizing the convoys and also defending their interests. 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

  They were also settled in Jutland, in the port called Haithabu, or else Schleswig, where there were many Christians ‘who had been baptised at Dorestad’;58 or else at Hamburg, where the Frisians came and went. When the city of Worms on the upper Rhine burned down in 886 the chronicler at Fulda reports the burning of the best part of town, ‘where the Frisian merchants live’;59 they also had the best quarters of Cologne and Mayence on the Rhine. They were settled enough to be buried abroad, although it was always possible to take the bones back home after a decent time; funerals in Yorkshire looked remarkably like Frisian funerals. They also left traces around the Humber and in Northumberland, which may help explain why Northumbrian missionaries found it quite easy, martyrdoms aside, to bring Christianity to their brothers in Frisia itself.

  They went to live even at the outer limits of their trading world. There was a Frisian house in Kaupang at the mouth of the Oslo fjord in south Norway, on the way from the North Sea to the Baltic through the Kattegat, where the trade of the two seas criss-crossed in sheltered waters. The glass beakers found there are like the ones used by the Franks and the Frisians, which means Southern drinking habits, and there are double-ended dress hooks, which would have been useless on local clothes but which any Frisian woman would have needed; there were copper brooches, which were pretty, but nothing worth trading and certainly not worth stealing, so they were for use then and there; there were loom weights, which might mean cloth was woven in the house, but on a small scale. People were making a whole life onshore, women and men, sociable drinkers who liked the styles familiar from home. The house is unusual because it has two side aisles for sleeping, which take up much more space than in other houses around, as though crews were coming in and going out with cargo and needed somewhere to stay together: foreigners.

  The house wasn’t used for very long, just from the 800s to around 840, the time when Kaupang went from being a seasonal base to a settlement where people lived all year round. Those are also the years when the Frisians’ tight control of trade on the southern North Sea was at its height and the time when it was starting to fray. The business of the house was basic goods, raw materials, the perfect opposite of all those crafted, gaudy bits and pieces once shipped about for the benefit of kings and grand persons. The Frisians dealt in ingots of copper alloy, most likely for the craftsmen in Kaupang; and they left behind such a trail of iron fragments that they may have been exporting iron. From Kaupang there were long valley routes by water and then land, up onto the vast mountain plateau of Hardangervidda, a treeless waste which produced remarkable ore; it made iron that was much less brittle than other sources, which made better steel and famously better axes. It was worth shipping out. They may have brought in amber, which commonly washed up on the Frisian coast; they left behind a very little waste from cutting and carving amber. They introduced hacksilver to Kaupang, silver goods chopped up to make them useable as money; and they certainly brought north their great idea: money itself.60 The quantity of hacksilver, mind you, implies that coins were still too strange for daily deals.

  Don’t think for one moment that trade meant peace, not for the Frisians. The Franks to their south wanted their territory, their connections and their business, and took all of them by force. Radbod, the last independent king of Frisia before the Franks took over, sailed up the Rhine as far as Cologne, vengefully ruining and wrecking most thoroughly as he went;61 a few years later a chronicler called the Frisians ‘gens dirissima maritima’ – the hard men from the sea, ill-om
ened and terrible.62

  The Vikings came raiding in 837 CE and found Frankish soldiers in Domburg to kill.63 They also took away many women as captives and countless money of all kinds, and went up the Rhine to overrun Dorestad, a victory which cost them many dead;64 they were stealing the Frisians’ business, and the Frisians were murderously good at fighting back. When there was a Danish ruler later in Frisia, the Frisians shipped out with the Viking raiders when it suited them, even though the Vikings were taking over their bases, their ports and their business; they adapted, but their dominance was over because, in a way, they had taught their methods all too well.

  They ending up doing their business on the very edge of the law. In Tiel, between Utrecht and Arnhem, the merchants complained that the Frisians were hard men with no respect for the law, working with robbers in the woods so that it was no longer possible to sail safely out to England or to have the English come with goods. The monk Alpert also noticed that, apart from being drunk in the morning and being unnecessarily tolerant of adultery (as long as the wife kept quiet) and running off at their filthy mouths, the Frisians were unusually tight-knit. He noticed they were sworn to support each other’s stories even if it meant lying. They co-operated; they pooled their money at their drinking bouts, to pay for wine but also to share the profits of business. They kept their terpen principles even when the imperial army finally drove them out of their woods and their trade runs, and faced them down among the ditches and moats close to modern Rotterdam: the battle was the last, great Frisian victory, 29 July 1018.65

  But the Frisian Sea: that already had new owners.

  2.

  The book trade

  There was nobody else alive, nobody who could read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not yet.

  In 686, the sun went dark behind the moon. When the eclipse ended the plague came suddenly from the sea. It broke into the monasteries like this double house at Jarrow and Wearmouth in Northumbria and all the little ports along the coast. It killed quickly. The old abbot, Eosterwine, was sick and dying and he called all the monks to him. ‘With the compassion that was second nature to him, he gave them each the kiss of peace,’ Bede remembered.1 Nobody worried then about touching the sick; sickness was known to come in an impersonal miasma, a kind of mist; so the abbot’s kindness killed almost all of them.

  The deaths left a quiet in the stone church that was as bad as the sight of walls stripped of pictures or a library without books: the house was reminded that it had lost its glory. Music was not yet written down; it lived only in men’s minds and could be learned only by ear; if it was not sung, it was lost. The monks had been taught ‘at first hand’ by the chief cantor of St Peter’s in Rome,2 and plainsong was one of great riches of the house; they were the first to sing Gregorian chant in Britain. But now the familiar antiphons, the sacred conversation of voices answering each other back and forth across the choir, were gone.

  Ceolfrith was miserable, even tearful, and he stood the quiet for only a week. He needed to begin the familiar services again. He began by singing on his own, and then the boy Bede joined in: two voices instead of a dozen taking the parts. It was a thin sound in the small stone chancel, but they did what had to be done: they kept the music alive.3

  The plague went away almost as suddenly as it had come, and Bede lived to see the monastery thriving again. A whole new generation of novices arrived. There were new political crises, especially a tyrant king called Osred, which made the monasteries into a most welcome refuge. When Ceolfrith decided to go to Rome in 716 he left ‘behind him in his monasteries brethren to the number of around six hundred’.4

  And this was all the world that Bede ever knew. He’d been taken to the monastery at the age of seven, and dedicated to the Church by parents who may have been quite grand and certainly lived close by. He hardly ever left, except for study in another monastery;5 he never went on pilgrimage; he never travelled the fixed route from his home in the north-east of England to Ireland, which other men used in order to study or to escape the world or go out missioning. He could have gone overland from one church guest house to another, taking the usual three days and nights in each; he could have met up with the professional sailors who worked in the monastery on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland; he could have followed the tracks of his colleagues and predecessors to the Firth of Forth and then to the Firth of Clyde and then across to Derry. Those were regular routes even after the strong connection between the Christian communities at Lindisfarne and Iona was broken.6 Instead, Bede lived almost always inside his new, closed family. He shared all its high emotions.

  Before Ceolfrith there had been two abbots for the two monasteries, one at Jarrow and one at Wearmouth: Benedict Biscop and Sigfrith. The two men were deathly sick at the same time and Bede remembered how Sigfrith had to be carried on a pallet to see his friend, and set down to lie side by side on the same pillow. Their two faces were close, but the men did not even have the strength to kiss; the monks had to reach down to turn their heads towards each other. Bede found it, he wrote, ‘a sight to move you to tears’. When Benedict decided that the two houses should be run by one man, and that man should be Ceolfrith, Bede tells how their virtues bound the two men together ‘more closely than any family relationship’.7 This Ceolfrith was central to Bede’s life, the father who never sent him away, and when Ceolfrith decided he would go again to Rome, this time to die, Bede had the one moment of crisis he acknowledges in all his life. In the preface to one of his biblical commentaries he writes of the consternation he felt, the ‘sudden anguish of mind’.8

  Being shut in by the monastery walls, the only way Bede could know the world outside was to read, study and ask; he had to build his whole world with books. The library Bede knew, some two hundred manuscripts, had been assembled by men who thought books for reading were just as important as pictures or relics or music. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the house, brought back ‘a large number of books on all branches of sacred knowledge’ from his third trip to Rome, ‘some bought at a favourable price, others the gifts of well-wishers’.9 The book trade was flourishing and it was complicated: Bede could read at Jarrow a codex of the Acts of the Apostles, Greek and Latin versions, which had been in Sardinia until the seventh century and ended up later in Germany.10 On Biscop’s next trip, he brought back ‘spiritual treasures of all kinds’ but ‘in the first place he returned with a great mass of books of every sort’. Everything else – relics of the saints, holy pictures, music in the Roman manner and even a promise of perpetual independence from any outside interference – comes further down the list in Bede’s account. His friend and mentor Ceolfrith, the third abbot, ‘doubled the number of books in the libraries of both monasteries’, he says, ‘with an ardour equal to that which Benedict had shown in founding them’.11

  These books were Bede’s work. From the time he became a priest at the age of thirty ‘until the age of 59’ he says he spent his time studying Scripture, collecting and annotating the works of the Church fathers and making extracts from them, adding his own explanations, even putting right one rotten translation from the Greek.12 He was under orders from his bishop to gather and make a digest of the books around him because they were so many and so long that only the very rich could own them and so deep that only the very learnèd could understand them.13 He was to take the riches of the Jarrow and Wearmouth library, manuscripts of all ages and origins, and publish them to all those houses which did not have a decent library at all.14 Books were not fine possessions to be stored away, precious but not for use; they were a practical way to distribute ideas and information, ship them out and share them.

  Bede knew the whole process of making books from imagining and dictating the words to being the clerk who took them down, in the medieval version of the Roman shorthand call
ed ‘Tironian notes’, a puzzle of dots, bows and teardrops, curved, wavy and straight lines all tilted five different ways and taking their meaning from where they were placed on the page. The code was an important part of literacy; it was schoolroom stuff.15 He also knew about being the scribe, the one who made fair or even lovely copies of the final result; he worked on one glorious coloured and decorated Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, which was given to the Pope.16

  So he worked in the scriptorium, the writing place, a narrow world inside the monastery. Everyone wrote exactly the same way: a neat, uniform and impersonal hand. In Jarrow, the writing was an uncial script, which is round like your first schooldays writing, but all in capital letters. Getting it right was very important because uncial script was Roman, and Jarrow was very much a monastery which looked to Rome. The Irish monks on Iona used an island script, and they had full heads of hair; at Jarrow the monks had the tonsure and they wrote in the Roman way because to do anything else would have bordered on heresy. Rome and the Celtic Church in the North were still arguing over issues such as how to date Easter, and writing was a way to choose sides. The scribes could sometimes play and make something personal in the decoration of the page, even glory in the beauty of what they could make, but it would be centuries before scribes could have reputations as artists. The act of writing was anonymous and a matter of monastic discipline.17

  They wrote with black ink made of oak galls and iron salts, using goose feather quills. They wrote on parchment: sheepskin or the hide of a calf, shaved, polished and cut until it had the texture of a kind of suede and a colour close to ivory, between white and yellow. When they wanted colours, gold was gold leaf, silver was silver leaf, fixed to the page. Black in the painted patterns and images was usually carbon, white was chalk or crushed shells; blue was woad before the much more costly lapis lazuli was easily available, purple came from lichen, yellow from a salt of arsenic, oranges and reds from toasted lead, and for green the scribes used verdigris, made by holding copper over vinegar for a while. A scribe making a book as lovely as the bible made at Jarrow for the Pope, or the Gospels made at Lindisfarne, was chemist and artist all at the same time, especially in the making of subtler colours like the surprising, polished pinks.18