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

by Michael Pye

  The other certainty dissolving around him, so he feared, was sex. It wasn’t just the wearing of soft shirts that concerned him, although he reckoned they made men ‘weak, tender and infirm’. He saw men in general becoming effeminate, by which he meant all too inclined to the company of women and the pleasures of bedding them; he thought women were dressing as whores; and even children looked like ‘whores, strumpets, harlots and bawds’. He was horrified to see women walking out in public in the same way men did. More than anything, he feared the corruption of all the distinctions between the sexes, which he seemed to think depended largely on what people wore; and he was especially aggrieved at the sight of a woman in a doublet. Such women, he said, ‘may not improperly be called Hermaphroditi’.49

  He was, of course, quite right as well as being wrong. Clothes were no longer decreed by court or convent, except at court and in convents. Something had unsettled some perfectly acceptable social order that Stubbes was almost sure he once knew, and clothes showed that. Class, position, power and money could no longer be taken quite for granted.

  In doing so, he helped set the agenda for a thousand moralistic outbursts, a thousand secular sermons against fashion and the breakdown of comforting, solid hierarchy and the unkind way the young sometimes confuse the old about their gender. He taught hacks and preachers that they could always howl against anyone wearing fresh, unfamiliar clothes, that there was virtue in wearing what your father wore. He made change and choice seem like sin.

  6.

  Writing the law

  He’s been three days in the church, living on watercress and water and bread without yeast. It is Sunday now and time for Mass: the time of his ordeal.

  He comes out shaved, barefoot, wearing only a wool shirt.1 The men around help strip him and then they put new linen on him for the sake of decency. They truss him, hands behind his knees, and leave an end of the strong rope free, with a knot tied in it as far down as the man’s longest hair would reach. They lower him very gently by the rope into a pool of holy water that has been blessed and blessed again.

  The ceremony at the church door could be some rough prison version of a baptism, and the onlookers and the lawmakers saw the connection;2 but this is about justice, not salvation. This man has sworn an oath that he is innocent of the crime with which he is charged. If the water accepts him, if he sinks at least to the length of his longest hair, he is innocent. If he floats, it must be because the holy water refuses to take him. His oath was false. His guilt is proved.3

  The charge might be something desperate like sorcery or murder, or the perjury that made nonsense of trials when a man and his friends all swore on oath that he was innocent. He might be a man ‘much-accused’, whose reputation was so bad that nobody was prepared to swear to his innocence. He might be trying to clear his name, or prove he was not a liar, that he was telling the truth about a claim to land. In a world without the files and archives we take for granted, without a paper trail to check a story or establish a precedent, the ordeal could be a way to establish a fact and even stop scandal among the powerful.

  Like court trials later, the ordeal is full of ritual and meant to look as sure as magic. The difference is what it claims, which is the direct participation of God, and what it lacks, which is an over-riding idea of human law and the state machinery to back it.

  No judge and no jury sort out facts and decide who is right and who is wrong, there is no public process of testing evidence and challenging witnesses. Instead, ordeals demand that God show what He alone knows: who is telling the truth. The advantage is that God’s verdict is unanswerable, so ordeals settled cases that nothing else could resolve: cases where the evidence wasn’t quite good enough and a bad man was about to go free, cases per notorium, where otherwise a man would have been condemned just by the fact that everyone was absolutely sure that he was guilty. The problem was that ordeals treated God rather like a hostile witness; they demanded something that He hadn’t volunteered.

  Right up to the start of the thirteenth century, ordeals seemed to make perfect sense. Imagine a world without the kind of state that we know, the power that can police and judge and make war on its own account. Imagine, instead, a world of small communities, where people knew each other and each other’s circumstances almost too well, where reputation was like life itself because you weren’t going to move away and it was hard to settle disputes or reason out crimes when everyone was involved with everyone else. Family ties could be so close that the Church had to change the rules about ‘degrees of consanguinity’ in 1215, how close a relative you could marry, because there were villages across Europe where nobody could legally marry anybody else at all.4

  In such a world writing was only starting to be all-important. There were few records and few lawbooks. The questions of guilt had to be quite simple, and the proof had to be immediate and dramatic. Ordeals were a custom that communities could accept, and nothing like the sophistications of the system of common, universal law that once ran the Roman Empire and was only just being rediscovered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

  That kind of law needed an author and an authority, king or Church, to draft one law for everyone, and books to hold the law so it could be consulted anywhere and shipped and shared, as well as learnèd men to interpret it. Such a law inevitably jarred against old habits and certainties. The point of ordeals was the same everywhere even if the ritual changed from town to town, and everyone could see what was happening; the rediscovered Roman law was a kind of mystery, requiring lawyers who had studied at university, been initiated into a different way of thinking and cut away from the customs of the places where they started. The only professional at the ordeal was the priest, and he was not there to judge or decide; in local courts that ran on custom, nobody brought down a book of laws to make sure they were doing the right thing. There was no great abstract noun – the Crown or the Law or the Empire or the Nation, all the different names of power – to take the blame for bringing charges.

  Lawyers’ law meant a change of mind that may be even more profound than it seems. In a trial by evidence, the whole point is to judge; so what seems strangest of all is the Gospel passage that always had to be read before the ordeal among the Franks.

  It is: ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’5

  Lawyers’ law was Roman law rediscovered by a Roman Church, but that is not the whole story. Lawyers’ law begins in Ireland, and Wales, and in newly settled Iceland, all of them well outside the Roman Empire.

  All three trained up lawyers; the monasteries of Cloyne, Cork and Slane had something like law schools, and not just for monks, priests and clerics. Even though most manuscripts get lost or ruined with time, there are still seventy-seven legal texts surviving from Ireland between the seventh century and the start of the eleventh, traces of a formidable legal scholarship and a devotion to writing things down. And lawyers were taken just as seriously as lawyers like. Minor court workers counted only as farmers in the social order, but the grandest ‘advocates whom judgement encounters’ were considered among the high nobility. In a time when crimes had to be compensated, and the price of a stolen pig had to be judged on age, weight and health, there was a sliding scale for killing a man depending on his value. Killing a judge was very expensive.

  This law was about words on the page. There had always been records, charters and conveyances and histories, and literacy was much more general in the Middle Ages than we used to think from the pages that survive; but the ability to write, not just read, was still a matter of privilege, something you often paid someone else to do properly. Anything written had an almost magical quality; it became more right, more real and always more essential than anything a live witness could say. Royal governments, Church governments, began to surf on a great tide of parchment and paper; and lawyers managed the flow. By the time lawyers’ law was fully established, every law case required a regimen of writing, a suite of formal documents: written complaint, formal denial, proof of reso
urces to pay all the bills, then a written rejoinder and a written counter-reply before the case was defined enough to go to court, where the lawyers presented all manner of written position papers. Witnesses had to be listed along with the questions to be asked and the answers that were expected; and when the witnesses were finally allowed to speak, a notary wrote down everything they said so that the parties to the case, or usually their lawyers, could mark up their copies in red ink to show the points they reckoned helped their case, and those that hurt the other side.

  So the first condition of lawyers’ law is writing: its magic and its uses.

  The power of writing is as old as the runes, the early alphabet of the North Sea, which are almost as old as the Common Era: marks easy to carve, roughly based on Roman and imperial writing, useful but also extraordinary because of the magic they could carry. They were cut into wood or stone, they were stained a reddish colour, they had to be interpreted with great care; ‘few folk have mastery of runes’, as the old poem said.6 To know runes well was a matter of pride, one of Kali Kolsson’s nine skills before he came to power in the Orkneys in the twelfth century, along with chess, skiing, music, shooting and sculling, reading and writing and verse (‘runes I rarely spoil …’ he sang7); he carved in stone his claim to be the greatest expert in runes in the Western Sea.8

  There were victory runes cut on the blade or the hilt of a sword9 and sea runes on a ship’s prow and rudder to make sure of a safe voyage,10 runes for giving birth and runes for being strong-minded and sensible when dealing with someone else’s wife. Runes could be ‘very great symbols, very strong symbols’.11 They could curse an unwilling woman with unbridled lust and a three-headed ogre for a lover,12 they could make a woman speak when she was struck dumb with grief.13 A malicious man would spoil the runes a good wife carved to help her menfolk on a sea voyage,14 and unknown runes could be downright alarming – one Viking poem tells of a sinister cup cut with the signs for entrails of animals, a snake and seaweeds, which contained a drink that had the power to blot away the past.15 Just writing out the futhark, all sixteen Viking runes in order like an alphabet, was a good-luck charm: so alphabet sticks had to do with life, and risk, not the schoolroom.

  Then there were runes cut into stones: to carry the memory of the dead, to honour great travellers or to claim their estates when they were gone. Runestones were an archive that stood along roads, at bridges or on causeways to say who built them, and in whose honour: at Dynna in Norway a woman honours her lost daughter by building a bridge and putting up a runestone covered with new-fangled Christian images, since Christians disapproved of making actual graves look grand. This daughter, Astrid, was ‘the most gifted with her hands’, the stone says; she made tapestries in honour of the Christmas star, the Baby Jesus and the Wise Men on their way to the stable, and versions of her pictures are carved onto the stone.16 Often runestones were stone prayers, a way of talking directly to God or the Virgin Mary, or even Thor, although in Norse tradition it could be considered dangerous to address a Norse god directly.17

  On one stone at Hillersjö in Sweden, the runes are cut into the body of a twisting snake and they carry a whole family history, including who died too young and who inherited, with the single word ‘interpret’ carved in the snake’s eye.18 Travellers were honoured with runestones when they failed to return, which was a way of certifying their death; absentees did the same from far away, honouring the dead to make sure of their part of the inheritance.19

  Runes carry fragments of stories, too, very personal stories of loss or anger or sometimes ambition. We can’t know who the Hrossketil was who ‘broke faith and deceived his sworn friend’, but that treachery is his one mark on history because it was carved in stone.20 We can only guess why Thorir carved the words ‘death of a mother is the worst that can happen to a son’,21 or why a widow called Ragnelf asked God to help the soul of her only son ‘better than he deserves’.22 Something happened in the family of Mael Lochon on the Isle of Man so that he honoured his adoptive mother, Malmura, and added: ‘Better it is to have a good foster son than a bad son.’23

  The stones honour the dead, which means they have to lay out the story of lives. Some died in the course of raids, some on Viking expeditions, or in battles raging between the various kings; once, the stone says that its sponsor and its subject ‘went out to meet the warriors of Frisia and split the booty of war’.24 Some died as mercenaries out of Byzantium, fighting the Lombards; at least one, a man called Ragnvald, ‘was in Greece the head of the armed troops’, which means he was in charge of the mercenaries at Byzantium.25 Some were glorified tax-farmers, like Ulf who three times sailed to England and raised the tribute the Danes reckoned was their due.26 And many were traders, going out with partners on voyages which could prove as dangerous and end as badly as war. Sons honour a father who died on board his freighter; a wife has the runes carved to say that her husband ‘drowned in the sea of Holm’. His knørr, his ship, ‘went down and only three men were saved’.27 And if sometimes there are stones which say they mark the place where a boat full of gold is buried, brought back from the land of giants in the far north, others mark tragedy. A trading ship went out perhaps to the worst side of Greenland: ‘Gone far out to sea, sadly without food or dry clothes, they washed up on a great plain of ice blasted by cold winds, a desert where nothing could live. Happiness can be wrecked by an unhappy fate and then a man finds death all too early.’28

  These are public statements out on the open road, which means readers were passing. In time readers learn to write, and the skill becomes more general. Runesticks were used for labels to show who owned which sack of goods in a warehouse, and then for much more. In Bergen some time around 1170 a lover scratched on a runestick: ‘I love that man’s wife so dearly that fire seems cold to me. And I am that woman’s lover.’ Someone else, perhaps, wrote: ‘I love that man’s wife.’ And someone boasted: ‘Ingebjörg loved me while I was in Stavanger.’ A few years later someone carved out a plea: ‘Love me, I love you Gunnhild. Kiss me. I know you well.’ Maybe these are only graffiti, but they sometimes seem like messages; so maybe Gunnhild could read. It’s true that the next century there are runesticks that read like bathroom walls – ‘Smith lay with Vigdis’ is just a boast, and ‘The cunt is delightful, may the prick fill it up’29 is a hope – but there are also curiously domestic messages. Some time in the first half of the thirteenth century, someone wrote on the back of a stick already used for a message: ‘Gyda says you must come home’ and added something else that nobody can now read. Someone thought the easiest way to send a message, maybe to a boozing husband in the pub, was to write it in the knowledge he could read.30

  Of course, lawyers’ law needed much more than the magic and usefulness of the written record. Lawyers’ law had to be able to do what custom did: reflect the shape and nature of all the connections and powers in a community, account for who owned what and who was free and the ranks of society, so it would somehow seem natural and essential. The tussles between law and custom went on for centuries because custom, in its way, worked.

  The ordeal survived the coming of the lawyers, even when the experts made it seem blasphemous or an empty superstition. The ordeal was theatre, after all; it expressed the conflict between accuser and accused and then the moment of decision, it made an audience wait for the verdict. It was decisive where law was all too often conditional. It was also very public, with the community looking on, with all its layers of privilege and standing, just like in life, while the law put justice away in a closed room, to be handled carefully by outsiders.

  There were dozens of local rules for the rite. A free man, not subject to a feudal lord, usually had to pull a stone out of boiling water or else grab red-hot metal, often ploughshares, from a fire and carry the glowing metal at least nine paces (‘measured nine feet by the feet of the man who undergoes the ordeal’; justice was tailored). The hot iron was cooked red in a fire that could not be stoked once the consecration started, and then
it had to lie on the embers until the last prayer had been read.31 The ploughshares were ‘on fire to discover the truth’.32

  The water had to boil, and it had to be checked by two men for the accused and two men for the accuser; everyone had to see the tests and know. The accused plunged his hand up to the wrist for a single offence, or up to the elbow for three charges;33 and then his hands and arms were bound up and sealed with wax. The test was how he healed. In three days he ought to be almost mended, or else he was guilty; and again, everyone could see.

  A man who was not free, who belonged to a feudal lord, was trussed up and thrown naked into cold water because bare skin stopped the possibility of trickery. The verdict was immediate, as though there was no point wasting three whole days on a man who wasn’t free; he either sank or he floated. That wasn’t torture, because the pain had nothing to do with the result, although it might well lead to a confession. Pain was reserved, enthusiastically, for punishment.

  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.