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

by Michael Pye

  Take observation, for example: the hunger to look hard and direct at things. That was needed for the quest to calculate the calendar of the world, to find out in which age men were living, to work out when the end and the Last Judgement were coming. The world had to be checked for signs to find out exactly how much history was left. There is a tenth-century list of the signs of the last days which went round Christian Europe: the sea flooding the land, earthquakes to make mountains and valleys disappear, stars falling to earth, mankind going mad, universal fire and, of course, a rain of blood. The world had to be watched for these things.22

  Yet when the seas boiled around Iceland, fire belched from the earth and a mountain surged quite suddenly out of the water, the author of the History of Norway, writing around the start of the thirteenth century, refused to see omens of the last days. He preferred to go back to the Latin writer Solinus, who said there was a deep crack in the earth, and caves full of the winds created by the breathing of the water, which sucks the sea through hidden passages and starts surges and waterspouts and makes the earth roar and tremble. That breath muddles with the hot heart of the earth and pushes smoke and sulphurous flames out in the middle of the ocean. It is an elaborate explanation, which acknowledges the heat at the centre of the earth but otherwise is pure invention out of an old book; but it is a mechanical explanation, which is remarkable. ‘Although we do not clearly understand these marvels in the world, or others greater still,’ the author of the History says, ‘they are not therefore to be taken as omens or reckoned portents foreboding the deluge.’23

  Roger Bacon, even though he was a friar, went further. ‘We do not see the wonderful actions of nature that are all day brought about in us and in things in front of our eyes,’ he complained, ‘but we judge them to be brought about either by a special divine operation, or by angels, or by demons, or by chance and fortune. But it is not so, except insofar as every operation of a creature is in some way from God.’24

  Human beings set out to test the world, using their own eyes and minds, and mathematics; they were still tangled up with invisible, mysterious, metaphysical things but the relationship had changed. Science could be separated out. A man looking at the stars was no longer obliged to do metaphysics, not even to hunt out an astrological meaning for an eclipse; he could do astronomy. Mind you, a kind of astrology mattered to doctors well into the seventeenth century; it was always possible the stars still ruled men. But a man seeing some new volcanic island come up out of the sea was looking now at physical changes in the earth that he might be able to explain, not trying to decode some message from God about the end of time. That did not diminish the sense of wonder. The remarkable Dominican Albertus Magnus thought there could be no philosophy found in the details of specific things, like the species of plants. But he was still curious, and he went on writing down specifics. He showed by experiment that turtles won’t drink sea water; he was told that ostriches eat metal, but they turned down the snacks of iron that he offered; he cut off the head of a cicada and heard it sing on and on. He also insisted that toads crack emeralds just by staring at them, which suggests he was a collector of everybody else’s wonders, too.25

  Even magic was becoming self-conscious. In a twelfth-century manuscript there is a kind of experiment: split a green hazel rod while saying the Lord’s Prayer, then have two men make the sign of the cross and take an end of the rod, then say a spell: ‘Ellum sat upon ella and held a green rod in his hand and said Rod of green unite again.’ The rod should come back together to make a magic wand. By the start of the thirteenth century William of Auvergne said he had seen this happen, but he wrote that the rod put itself back together, naturally and of its own accord, and all the ceremony and all the words, even the holy ones, were of no significance at all. When it came to explaining things, magic and its paraphernalia were fading.26

  God wasn’t; and so a kind of scientific thinking could be comfortably bundled together with theology, sometimes metaphysics, mathematics and inspiration. It was easy for new thinkers to be smeared, accused and ruined for heresy, so it was also useful to invoke God. The mathematics was new, as was the rediscovery of texts in ancient languages that had nothing to do with the Bible, but they were tools to do an old job.

  Robert Grosseteste launched the science of optics, which was known as perspectiva, and he drew out diagrams and used mathematics to try to show how we see things; but he saw light as the cause of everything, something from God that multiplies itself and produces matter that takes up space in the world. His geometry was a way to put the intangible on paper, to get a physical grip on mystery; physical fact and spiritual visions were both in his mind.27 Roger Bacon thought optics was a useful science precisely because it gave men access to the miraculous in nature. ‘There are,’ he writes, ‘an infinite number of truths in living things.’28

  It was beginning to be agreed that observation was not enough, though. Logic and calculations were needed, too: a way to order what you sense so you can think more clearly about it. Mathematics was all-important, and especially the idea of finding proofs for rock-solid general ideas just like the ones Euclid found in geometry. There were new tools for examining the relationships and the ratios between things – quadratic equations, finding the roots of numbers, trigonometry. Lines and points and numbers became as important in philosophy or theology as they were, more obviously, when it came to measuring the rates at which objects fall, or trying to draw diagrams to show the lines by which the eye sees. ‘The usefulness of considering lines, angles and figures is very great, since it is impossible to understand natural philosophy without them,’ Robert Grosseteste wrote. Roger Bacon called mathematics ‘the gate and key of these sciences’; he said the Devil found it most convenient when people ignored maths ‘since that made theology and philosophy useless’.29 All the effort of measuring the ages of the world in the expectation of the end of the world had the unexpected effect of getting mathematics off the page and into the real world, where its effects were radical. Number became more complicated, more subtle and more useful. Thomas Bradwardine took Aristotle’s formula for speed, force and resistance, the theory of how objects move, and respectfully showed that its plain arithmetic was far too simple, and needed a kind of geometric thinking (which in modern terms is logarithmic).30 That was a whole new way to work figures, and to see unfamiliar shapes and structures in the well-known world.

  This was classroom stuff, mostly reserved for those who could read and afford to buy books. It ought to have been hedged about by older ways of thinking, which by now had the power to call new thinking ‘heresy’. Yet this change of mind proved so powerful that we’re allowed to wonder: had it already begun outside the classroom, in the world? Was the scientific, the logical, the ability to see reality in an abstract ratio, simply the new form of something that was already built into everyone’s everyday lives around the northern sea?

  It was. The sheer scale of the change can’t have depended on what we might expect: the traffic in secret books, communities with esoteric knowledge, ideas of divine inspiration or plain human terror at the prospect of the end of the world. All those mattered, but this change of mind goes much further back. Remember those Frisian traders working the coasts, and how they carried with them a way to put ideas of price and value on paper, along with coins to settle their deals whose meaning was something abstract, not the market value of the metal they contained. They dealt in ratios between shiploads, ratios between wood and wool, grain and pots, wine and iron, so that everyone could understand them and use them the next market day. They calculated the content of their ships, their goods at a fair; they turned the very physical world of barges and cargo into numbers. The sea which carried their business also brought ideas, books, thinkers back and forth; but, more than anything, it carried the idea, the fact, the use of money.

  Consider this: from the 1330s, Paris theologians could talk in terms of calculating and measuring ratios for grace and love and charity, virtues written dow
n almost as sums. Just before they began this, the Pope had published a kind of price list for indulgences, which laid down how much each year of pardon cost: one penny from Tours. Salvation was priced. An Ordonnance of 1268 in France condemns ‘those who blaspheme against God, the Virgin and the Saints’ and lays down penalties that carefully match the poison in the blasphemy (‘horrible’ blasphemy cost between twenty and forty pounds) and also the ability to pay.31 When both virtue and sin can be turned into numbers, and calculated and assessed, mathematics has entered the minds of theologians and philosophers and not just engineers and merchants; and it did so because it already permeated their whole world every time they bought something, sold something, paid the rent or taxes or fees. They knew just how complicated were questions of finding the right price. In the 1300s the philosopher Jean Buridan imagined being given ten pounds by a stranger and thanking him, ‘Grates domine’, which sounds a quite unfair exchange; the money will buy things, but the words are lost on the wind. Buridan pointed out that maybe the stranger was grossly rich, but much in need of respect and honour; and maybe the man who said ‘thank you’ was known to be particularly honest and good. The rich man’s needs and the virtue the poor man had to share became a matter of market forces, and the price turned out to be right.

  The Frisians went trading and they brought money with them, which is a way to bring very different objects into one equation and do the sums. Now that same kind of equation took in music, blasphemy, pardon from Hell, love and charity: it took in the world.

  This isn’t a simple story, no revelations, no discoveries, and it may be easiest to begin with what science is not. It is not just experiment, otherwise we’d honour Eilmerus, that old and most learnèd monk at Malmesbury, a man who had great difficulty walking, and everyone knew the reason: when he was young, he thought he knew how to fly.

  He ‘used some skill to weave feathers into his hands and feet’, William of Malmesbury records. ‘Then he took to the air from the top of a tower, but he began to shake because the winds were so strong and turbulent, and also because he was all too aware of what a foolhardy thing he was doing. He fell, broke his legs and was crippled ever after.’ He imagined man could fly like the birds, he made an experiment to test it, and afterwards he had his explanation for what went wrong with the experiment; but he had no general principles, no general theory, he was testing and he made no calculations and no diagrams. ‘He used to say,’ William writes, ‘the cause of his catastrophe was that he forgot to put a tail at his rear end.’32

  We might say: he didn’t experiment, he just tried.

  Robert Grosseteste, Robert ‘with the big head’, helped begin the move from writing about experientia, which means experience, to becoming an experimenter who staged tests and experiences to prove theories. He came to the bishop’s household at Hereford, with a brilliant testimonial from a man who had known him in the bishop’s household at Lincoln: ‘will be a great support to you’, the letter promised, ‘in various kinds of business and legal decisions, and in providing cures to restore and preserve your health’. He had ‘highest standards of conduct’, he had ‘wide reading’ and if he was going to cost money then the bishop was reminded that he knew branches of learning, law and medicine, which ‘in these days are most highly rewarded’.33

  This Grosseteste was a remarkable man. He was the first to look closely into the role of experiment in science, to think that falsifying an idea could be quite as important as proving it. Other people were looking carefully at the stars, the world, the rainbow or comets, just as Grosseteste did, but he insisted that ‘those who form their own opinion from their own experiences without any depth of reasoning will inevitably fall into wrong opinions’.34 Add mathematics to what you see and sense, make big general ideas that are supposed to work in any circumstance, and you have the groundwork for science.

  Matthew Paris thought Grosseteste was ‘a man of too much learning’, who must have been in the schools ‘from his earliest years’; and by ‘the schools’ he meant the formal debates and seminars of the new universities, Paris or Oxford. Grosseteste certainly lectured at Oxford, taught with the Franciscans there and was so closely linked to the university that scholars used to assume he must have been its first chancellor. But his background was rather different, which may explain why he thought so fiercely for himself: he knew Paris, but he started in provincial England.

  He was born in a small Suffolk village with Stow in its name, brought up for a while by a widowed mother, whose death left him begging on the streets. Some civic grandee in Lincoln paid for him to go to a local school, which may not have taught him all that much of what he needed to know; to the end of his life he needed help translating Greek, so Roger Bacon wrote, and although he had a passion for languages, he knew very well he had started them too late.35 His learning was founded in Lincoln in the bishop’s household, and in the school and library at the cathedral in Hereford, where he could learn from foreigners, outsiders, men who were trying things out.

  It took money to study in Paris, which would have seemed the next likely move for him, but he had no money and he never formally enrolled to learn or teach there. A certain Robert Grosseteste did write a will in Paris in 1224, leaving to his children a lifetime interest in a house in the courtyard of the church of Sainte-Opportune, a holy island just off the Rue Saint-Denis and a bit south of Les Halles. When his children were gone, the house was to go to the church; and in 1249 his children were evidently gone because his grandchildren went to law to hold on to their property.36 This is extremely curious on the face of it: Grosseteste was a serious cleric, who should not have been married, let alone involve a Paris church in providing for his children. But at the time of this bequest, which is just before Grosseteste turns up again in England, he was not yet a priest or even a deacon. In fact, he was not ordained until very late in life. Having been married could explain that delay, and not being ordained would help explain why he could not formally study or teach in Paris. But he was there; one witness of the bequest is William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, and when Grosseteste wrote to William in 1239, recommending a clerk who was coming to Paris, he calls him with unusual intimacy his ‘dearest friend’.37 If Grosseteste did live in Paris, did he take the learning of Hereford to the learnèd schools in the big city?

  His origins, his ghostly presence on the outskirts of the university in Paris, all fit with the sense that Grosseteste was not quite ‘one of us’, where ‘we’ are all good and orthodox and mannerly schoolsmen with a bit of money behind us. He quarrelled with the canons of Lincoln Cathedral, who at once remembered his origins, ‘so very humble’. Matthew Paris, used to the quiet and even elegant life of a rich monastery, thought he was ‘heartless and inhuman’ for ‘the violent acts which he did in his lifetime … his canons whom he excommunicated and harassed, his savage attacks on monks and even more savage against nuns …’; he acted, perhaps, ‘not according to knowledge’. Matthew Paris also felt he should point out that Grosseteste was ‘born from the very humblest stock’; the man was simply not couth. When cardinals insisted he give parishes to some Italian priests, he objected because they could handle the sins of the French-speaking gentry but not all the English-speaking others. When the cardinals persisted, Grosseteste made a scene. He went down on his knees before the priests, made his confession in English, and then, when they did not understand a word and sat looking puzzled, he began to hammer on his breast, he began to sob and to bellow. The priests went off in confusion.38

  Now imagine this man staring at a rainbow, and thinking for himself.39 He began by sorting out the various ways a full spectrum of colours can appear: in rainbows, in the spray made by millwheels or the oars of a boat, or just by squirting water from the mouth, when sunlight shines through a crystal, and lastly the colours that reflect off the shine of a starling’s feathers. The reflections, he saw, were something different; but the rainbow, like light through a crystal, was a matter of refraction, colours produced, as he though
t, ‘by the weakening of white light’ as it passed through something dense like water or stone. So he decided that rainbows were colour made by sunlight passing through water, the drops and spheres of water, and coming out brilliantly at an angle of 42° to the source of the light. He had described a rainbow and also put it on paper to think about it more clearly.

  He had an idea of what a rainbow was; now he asked how a rainbow happens. Grosseteste had watched light passing through a spherical glass full of water and spraying an arc of colour onto a screen; so he reckoned that water was involved, and some kind of surface where the colours could show. He knew about lenses that ‘make things very far off seem close at hand … so that it is possible for us to read the smallest letters at an incredible distance or to count sand or grain or grass or any other minute objects’ – did he in his fifties wear the newly invented spectacles? – and he thought a lens broke the ‘visual ray’, refracting the light.40 He brought all these thoughts together to imagine the moist layers of a cloud together forming a single lens, and he thought there must be a second cloud which worked as a screen. He had a theory, and he set out to test if it was true or false, complete or incomplete.

  It was, of course, wrong; but it took time to prove that. In the meantime, some of Grosseteste’s ideas on the rainbow were still influential when Isaac Newton was working: the idea that each colour in the rainbow was somehow a different kind of ray, created as white light was changed by refraction. It is remarkable that he realized it is not distance that puts things out of sight, but the increasing narrowness of the angle under which we see distant objects. His ideas of falsification worked so well that he managed to dispose of a good many bad theories about comets, even though he never found the truth of what they are.

  He was inventing our idea of science. He drew on ancient writers, on Aristotle and on Galen, and he presented methods that allowed the very beginning of the methods we recognize as modern: testing theories, falsifying some, proving some things impossible, insisting on combining observation and ideas. He was still tentative. He said he wouldn’t ask, for example, why the moon was a sphere, because he was sure the reasons lay outside nature and no astronomer could know them; much later, the astronomer Kepler would show how a sphere forms because of the various gravitational pulls of the moving planets.41 Grosseteste started the move to the methods that would let Kepler find out such things.