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

by Michael Pye

  All dealers constantly face the moral test of being as just as possible. He added: ‘Few succeed.’

  There was also the question of whether an object gains value just because it is shipped from one place to another, whether food can be cheaper or dearer depending on the weather and the harvest. Value was a complicated equation, and the merchant’s job was to work out the value and set the price; that, too, was a service, and it was worth paying for.

  Being modern, we want someone to say that the market sets the price, the comfort of something as impersonal as the market’s ‘invisible hand’, but price and value depended, in the medieval mind, on the immediate moral decisions of many individuals: their will to be just and fair, the decision not to chase always and only after money. It was so much a matter of theology, and not economics, that not much thought was given to checking and regulating the market. When Henry of Ghent put a value on the merchant’s useful work in considering different places and different seasons when setting a price, he didn’t actually deal with the possibility that the merchant might get things wrong or be speculating to make money, or organizing a comfortable monopoly.61

  There is no economics here, not as we know it, but there are fierce discussions and disputes and doubts about the economic world, and some convenient conclusions. From now on, profit is not always usury. Private property is fine. Theologians could agree that there was no private property before the fall of man and the end of the garden of Eden; but now that man was rotten with original sin, private property was the only way to stop the bullies and the strongarms taking over absolutely everything that in an ideal world would be held in common. This flatters those lucky or forceful enough to have property already; at least, it says, they might be much, much worse.

  Nicholas Oresme went to Avignon, where he preached fiercely in front of Pope Urban V, so fiercely that some called him a heretic. ‘Everything the prophets in the Bible said about Jewish priests, he turned against the priests of his time; he called them dogs without the strength to bark, shameless, not knowing how much is enough, and shepherds who cared for their own interests rather than their flocks.’62 At the heart of his anger was money: the fact that the Church was selling pardons and positions, making money the reason for doing things and also for claiming that God did things in return for the money, like forgive sin. Men who should be holy were burning up with a passion for the grand and luxurious and rich; he talked furiously about the merchants selling doves in the temple, the men that Jesus expelled.63 He was, after all, the author of a Traité des monnaies: an Essay on Money.

  He was a bishop, and used his fine training in the abstract questions and answers of the scholastic method to write a work on the mathematics of the sphere, the basics of Euclid and Aristotle’s account of the weather, the sky and how things are born and how they die. He did serious business with texts: for the king’s benefit he turned Latin into French. He also wrote ideas that were his own. He examined the movements of the heavens and whether they could be measured; and with that last investigation, he started what was almost a campaign against astrology. He came to believe, through quite original mathematics, that the heavens turn in a way that can’t be reduced to charts and exact oppositions and conjunctions; all those things are ratios and the more you try to relate all the pairs of numbers you can imagine, and the ratios between them, the more you end up with numbers that can’t be reduced to ratios at all – irrational numbers. He had the young king Charles V as a friend, and he wanted to shuffle him out of the influence of the court astrologers, using mathematics with a clever twist here, a downright radical speculation there.

  He was properly academic, properly intellectual. He was also the man who managed to block the spoiling of French money, the process of clipping and muddling the metals in coins. Money was an issue for him – and not just money when it went wrong, when the official rates differed from the rates in the marketplace, when silver was cut with copper to make more coins – but money as a mathematical idea and its meaning in the world. In Oresme’s view, the world was unstable, always changing – because the amounts of food, drink, metals, pots, pans and necessities were always changing – and money was the essential way to test and calculate real value.

  Money certainly was not just one more merchandise, to be sold and bought like cows or grain or stone; a man could not be rich only in money terms, like old King Midas who could turn everything to gold. It was a test of what things were worth in general, not just some cartload or bargeful. Metal could be melted down, bought and sold, but when it became money it was the measure of things. That is why Oresme reckoned it was fraud and crime, almost sin, to tamper with it; and only a tyrant like the Emperor Nero would dare. Fake the money, make it bad, and trade will fail because nobody wants bad money and everyone will be less truly rich.

  This is money as the moral measure of all human needs, so Oresme said. He looked for the same kind of measure in making his scientific investigations, the same kind of abstract ideas about objects as solid as spheres or planets, about facts as fundamental as death and life. He wanted to examine and calculate those ideas, as a trader might work out a price. He wanted a way to express what was just, and to do it in numbers.

  Science and theology were not far apart. What connected them was the great issue of the times all around the North Sea: price and value and above all money.

  9.

  Dealers rule

  Those threatening ships were not pirates after all; they were police. They were heavy vessels, trading ‘cogs’ built of thick oak planks, one tall spruce tree for a mast, caulked shut with tow and tar, their sides rubbed with resin and linseed oil: solid and boxy as safes. As the tide fell they could come to rest on their flat bottoms without rolling over, just like the Frisian boats before them; they had ungainly bows and sterns at sharp angles to their hulls, a big box for goods or soldiers.1 They also had hinged rudders at the stern, which was new, and decks over their whole length, and down below there were gratings to hold the freight out of the sea water.2 Whatever business they were doing, they were built to do it right.

  Their business this day was to stop other ships doing business. They challenged and stopped ships in the narrow water of the Øresund between Sweden and Denmark, they were armed and insistent, and they were ready to confiscate anything the ships were carrying and demand a ransom or a fine; but they didn’t empty every ship that passed. They were interested only in the ships that were sailing to stop Norway starving.

  It was 1284, the weather was turning colder, the summers were not certain any more and there was pack ice drifting south around Iceland: the times felt tough. The Norwegian ports, Bergen in particular, were waiting for the last shipments of the things they needed for the winter: grain for bread and beer, peas, beans, malt and flour. They had come to depend on these shipments; their year was measured out by the ships from Lübeck that took away their butter and dried cod, their furs and their good axes, and brought back basics from around the Baltic – where there was land to grow things, not like their own narrow fields between mountains and fjords and forests. They had once done business with the English as well, but now they depended on the Lübeck merchants of the Hansa.

  This Hansa had no flag, no seal and no king of its own: it was a loose arrangement between trader towns, a sort of economic community. It was nothing like a nation or a kingdom because it had no responsibilities and no territory to defend, and sometimes it seemed downright allergic to either. All it had was power.

  A hundred years earlier King Sverre of Norway had complained that the Hansa towns brought in far too much wine, which could only do harm to his country. He had to put up with them. Another king in 1248 had to write to Lübeck to ask for grain, malt, flour, because Norway was miserably short of all those things. Merchants from Lübeck and the other Hansa towns now began to spend the whole year in Bergen, not just the sailing season in summer. They had their own office there, although it was so small at first that the heat of one man’s body coul
d keep it warm in winter.3 They rented houses by the waterfront, settled down, enjoyed the right to do business on the streets, in the docks, on board boats, to be exempt from guard duty and from the arduous business of hauling ships up onto the beaches. This mattered because Bergen sits on a calm fjord where the water hardly moves, no tide and no river current, and ships had to be manhandled off the flat, muddy beach.4

  It was too much for the Norwegians at times. Bergen was the king’s town, a port kept open by the warmer Gulf Stream waters and sheltered behind islands, a rich town where ‘a very great number of people live … ships and men arrive from every land; there are Icelanders, Greenlanders, Englishmen, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Gothlanders and other nations too numerous to mention’; at least that is what a band of crusaders found in 1191. A century later the English had gone, there had been a trade war with Iceland and the Germans were installed. German craftsmen, shoemakers and tailors, were setting up business and their own associations; they were joined by barbers, bakers, goldsmiths and fur dealers. The town spoke two languages, Norwegian but also German. The merchants seemed to do business just as they liked, and they liked to bring in beer and bits and pieces, not the grain that Norway needed. Their power was all too obvious.

  Norway made a new rule: either bring in grain or get out during the winter. The Hansa merchants objected, and they complained furiously about the ‘injustices’ they were suffering. The Norwegians commissioned Alv Erlingsson, a local noble, diplomat and thug, to go out and do serious injustice to them in a small pirate war; at least one ship was wrecked.

  So the Hansa decided to correct the Norwegians’ attitude. It banned the sale of grain, flour, vegetables and beer to Norway, the winter essentials. They policed the Øresund, and of all their town allies on the Baltic and the North Sea only Bremen declined to help. It was as though the whole trading world was putting Bergen under siege. And they waited, knowing that their actions meant hunger for a whole nation of civilians, until the merchants got what they wanted.

  Hansa members reckoned on support from other merchants in other countries: the business community of the time. The town of Rostock on the Baltic wrote to Edward I of England to ask him to ban the sale of grain and legumes from England to Norway; Wismar, just to the east of Rostock, wrote a few days later; Emperor Rudolf I and his imperial city of Lübeck asked for help ‘against the ravages of the Norwegians’, so Germans could once more freely visit English ports for business. England had only just renewed its treaty of friendship with Norway, so England helpfully did nothing at all.

  As for what happened in Norway, the Lübeck chronicler Detmar wrote with some satisfaction: ‘there broke out a famine so great that they were forced to make atonement’. Within a year, the Norwegians begged for Swedish help to reach a settlement. They paid a price – two thousand marks in silver, although probably they paid up in fish – and they gave the Hansa extraordinary privileges, even including the right to go out and salvage its own cargo from wrecked ships.

  Everything the Norwegians did after that seemed only to make them more dependent on the Hansa. Bergen’s great export was stockfish, the dried cod from the waters off the northern coast: hard boards, almost indestructible, cut with saws, and cheaper for very good reason than salted cod or smoked fish. Before it could be soaked, let alone cooked, it had to be thoroughly beaten with a hammer; the Earl of Derby’s kitchen accounts for 1390–91 show a man paid eight pence for giving the fish at least two hundred blows.5 Still, it was a universal protein with ten years or more of shelf life and the Hansa had the whole valuable trade locked. It had good things from Lübeck, and the fishermen wanted them and had them on credit; the fish was somehow never quite enough to settle the debt. The whole coast of Norway could hardly think of selling their fish anywhere else. Fifty years later King Magnus Eriksson meant to do something about the situation, but he could do nothing because he needed credit from the Hansa to keep his economy moving.6

  The merchants followed the logic of their trade all the way. They flourished in a time when nations were struggling to find their shapes and frontiers, when kings were trying to create a rule which was only as absolute as a well-fed army and an insistent faith could make it. The Hansa stood outside all that. It was a cartel of towns in the north, mostly on the Baltic, all more or less German-speaking, which banded together to keep their ships safe, make sure they were well treated in foreign ports, and get as close as they could to the perfect state of traders: monopoly. They acquired power without the ceremony and pretence of kings, and without any of the occasional royal sense of responsibility, or moments of weakness. Kings and chancellors and politicians might have to concede things under pressure, liberties or land; they owned so much, ruled so much that they were always vulnerable. They might even change their minds about what was most important. The Hansa was townspeople with only two things in mind: trade and the profit to be made from it, and for most of the time everyone around them agreed; as long as ships were sailing on the Hansa’s terms, there was no need for talk.

  Kingdoms needed the philosophic kind of foundations: God or heredity or precedent or else God’s favour as shown by battle victories. The power of a Hansa town like Lübeck rested on the fact of where it stood, at the head of the slow canal and river that cut across the neck of Denmark, where ships could be pulled across the inland route from the Baltic to the North Sea and avoid the challenging seas around Jutland. Controlling that route was enough to launch a group which made its first treaty with a foreign prince in the twelfth century and was still around almost five hundred years later to join the talks in 1648 that ended the wretchedly persistent war that had ruined Germany for thirty years.

  Hansa towns lived from the water: sea ports like Bremen, Hamburg and especially Lübeck, and river ports like Cologne. Almost everywhere else power and title and position depended on land: estates or kingdoms, the income from rents, the service of serfs. In the water towns, on the edge of things, there was only one source of wealth: trading outwards. Their world was offshore. Even when they did choose to expand and set up new towns, they worked their way along the coasts: from Lübeck along to Gotland in Sweden and then all the way to Novgorod in Russia.7 These new towns were also all about trading, hardly connected with the land powers around them. No feudal lord had the ships to interfere with business at sea.

  Something is beginning on the edge of the world: the kind of multinational power that does not depend on where it is based, which flirts or fights in the modern world with the obvious kinds of political and state power, which usually gets its own way.

  This is money at the start of its great war with nations.

  The merchants who traded with Bergen were not the grandest men back home; they were known as country toughs, boys who went out to brutal initiations in Norway and came back self-made men, never quite as perfectly urbane as the stay-at-home merchants thought themselves. In Lübeck they bought houses alongside the grandest citizens, in the broad streets leading west down to the harbour, and for a while they joined the religious guilds, which combined the roles of intelligence service and gentlemen’s clubs. They got respect just as long as their trading connections were intact, especially since they dominated the trade to and from England so much that the English hesitated to compete; when English ships went sailing again, their social standing collapsed. Then they had to be happy with the second-rate clubs, and they were no longer in the running for town office.8

  Their boys served a tough apprenticeship, oddly like the kind that turned out the servants of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Boys didn’t learn languages at school, even though the Hansa merchants were famous for speaking English, Russian, French and even Estonian; they tried to stop outsiders, especially their Dutch rivals, learning the languages of the Baltic. Language was their advantage, but they did not teach it. Nor did they teach mathematics, which might account for the slowness with which the Hansa adopted sophisticated Mediterranean ideas like maritime insurance. Instead the teacher ca
rried a cane, and the boys fooled around: authority that hurt, high spirits that meant trouble.

  The boys went off on voyages which their fathers no longer needed to do – they had sons, or other men to do that for them – and they carried an almost imperial spirit: domineering, slightly anxious, away from the daily respectability of home.9 They were meant to make good in Bergen, to make the money to buy their own business; and then to go home and hire someone else to run things for them.

  The fleet came into Bergen each spring with the newcomers. Their first challenge was the ‘games’. The boys had to be men, and they had to be initiated. They were keel-hauled, tied up with rope and pulled right under a ship; they were held over barrels of burning, stinking stuff; they were hoisted up smoking chimneys to be cross-examined on nothing in particular while they choked. They were thrown three times into deep water and had to get back into the boat to stay alive while a congregation of older merchants beat them. They were given drink until they were drunk, stripped naked and blindfolded, and then whipped until they bled, with drums more or less covering their screams; after which they had to sing a comic song. They had their mouths and noses stuffed with dogshit and catshit, they were subject to ‘unclean shaves’; they went ‘eel treading’ and ‘pig scalding’. They learned to say nothing, never to complain, never to cry.

  These games must have mattered very much because they survived into the middle of the sixteenth century. Established merchants took turns to organize them; they served as the last chance to check a man’s credentials, his town of origin and his single-mindedness, before admission to the club. It might seem as though the games were meant to discourage rich, soft, comfortable townee kids from coming to a trading post run by tough country people who knew about dung and muck; but things were not that simple. There were townspeople, and rich ones, going under the keel or up the chimney at Bergen, and it’s not clear that anyone was ever put off by the games: once they were over, after all, a boy was a Hansa man for life.10 In any case, the games fitted the Hansa style. When members from Dutch towns were accused of trading with outsider Dutchmen in 1468, they weren’t just barred from business and told they could no longer eat at the Hansa’s common table. They were taken out, stripped to their underwear and made to grovel for forgiveness before all the other assembled merchants.11 Read Tom Brown’s Schooldays and it all makes a queasy kind of sense.