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

by Michael Pye

  Sometimes a boss wanted to avoid the prickly business of negotiating altogether, to sidestep the one time a worker could make some choices and lay down some conditions; the tailor Matthew Ruthin in Oxford demanded the services of Christine Hinksey, who had no job, and when she refused, she went to jail. But it wasn’t just the wanderers, the persons without work, who had reason to be nervous. Roger Gedeney of Stainton in Lincolnshire was accused of refusing to ‘serve in his trade’ of thatcher in the village, and then going off ‘through the countryside to get better and excessive wages’. A community was determined to hold on to its own, and not to pay him overmuch. John Bingham had a home and work as a ploughman and was doing fine as a day labourer; but his neighbours wanted to give him a contract and pay him less, accused him of refusing compulsory service for them and told the justices he was a vagrant.

  The law could be twisted, abused but also defied, sometimes by the constables and justices. They did force labourers into contracts, but the contracts could be better than a man could otherwise expect. Not everyone went quietly: husbands brought back wives who had been assigned to labour for local grandees, and Richard Cross rescued Joan Busker with a show of force. On occasions, the constables themselves were hauled into court for letting people go or simply refusing to apply the law. There were signs of rebellion even from clerics; the vicar of Preston in Suffolk, in front of his startled congregation, excommunicated the constables who wanted to tell a day labourer called Digg that he had to serve various men in the village and he must not go travelling. Digg worked on, for himself. The constables got off lightly, whatever the harm to their souls; in the 1370s their colleagues in Wyberton put a vagabond in the stocks and were set upon by a small holy army, the rector, a chaplain and the rector’s servant.

  The greatest resistance came from the people paying the wages, who knew how hard it was to find workers and keep them. They paid the official wage, of course, for the sake of appearances, often put that amount in their accounts, but that was only the start. They also found extra payments for threshing, gifts of wheat, food and drink at mid-day, a bonus for working in the rain: all put down to general expenses but going to the workers. Employers were very aware that workers thought they had choices, the main one being to go and work elsewhere, or have a holiday when there was enough money for the year. At Knightsbridge in Lincolnshire even the carpenter who made the stocks, the punishment for anyone breaking the Statute, was paid an illegal rate: 5½d a day.

  There were also new laws about spending money, especially on clothes. Preachers thought they had reason to condemn the way country people dressed: some ‘wretched knave that goes to the plough and the cart, that has nothing but makes his living year by year … now he must have a fresh doublet of five shillings or more the price, and above a costly gown with bags hanging to his knee.’ The law tried to stop the working classes buying their way out of their proper station. Likewise, in 1390, the law stopped ‘any kind of artificer or labourer’ from hunting ‘beasts of the forest, hares or rabbits or other sport of gentlefolk’. The scaffolding of society, having rusted a bit and even fallen, was being put back; ‘gentlefolk’ were becoming a protected class. By English law in 1388, servants and labourers who had gone travelling were made to return to their home villages, ‘to work at whatever occupation they had formerly undertaken’; an old, familiar world was being restored. A man who persisted in moving faced prison and, at least in theory, branding on his forehead: the letter ‘F’ for ‘Falsity’.

  All across Europe this kind of control followed the plague. In Sweden, after 1350, every able-bodied adult had to work unless he could show he had a fortune enough to keep him for a full year; in 1354 the Danes had the same law. They added a change that looks almost humanitarian at first sight: capital punishment was limited, as was any punishment that involved maiming. Workers were scarce and it was unhelpful to harm or kill them.

  In Antwerp, the notion of deserving and undeserving poor took root, and by the sixteenth century virtue was being policed. Anyone pub crawling lost all right to help, and public sinners – like adulterers – were not eligible in the first place; to get outdoor relief, which means help without being shut up, you had to go to confession once a year and to Mass at Easter, and prove it. The nuns at St Elizabeth’s Hospital refused to help anyone who was pregnant or who had a sexually transmitted disease, because helping the pregnant would just encourage sin. People with plague lay dying there alongside other patients and one magistrate reckoned ‘a patient who has been in the hospital once would rather die than return there’.

  In Hamburg the town physician, Johann Böckel, said plague broke out in poor areas and was spread by beggars in the street; so the vagabonds, the homeless and workless were bundled off to plague hospitals. In London, where the workhouse truly began, the poor were set to work in the ‘house of labour and occupation’ at Bridewell in 1552; within thirty years the house was ‘a lock up for petty offenders’, a ‘nursery of rogues, thieves, idlers and drunken persons’. The wretched poor made tennis balls and felt and nails, and they spun wool, which inspired the Amsterdam house for inconvenient women called the Spinhuis. The poorhouse was meant to cure the poor of being poor, and make them useful; it was almost a medical idea.18

  Plague, like the threat of terror nowadays, was the reason for supervising people’s lives, examining, controlling and disciplining. The right to do so lay not with a Church that could preach against sin but with civil authorities who could act. They could adjust a society to their own tastes.

  In this, the pioneer was Edinburgh, in 1498, with rules that trimmed back tavern hours, insisted that children be kept under supervision on pain of a forty-shilling fine and put a stop to fairs and markets; the point was to control movement of people and goods, so nobody could lodge an outsider without a licence, no English cloth could be imported and anybody visiting Glasgow without permission went to jail for forty days. Nobody could travel without explaining themselves, or arrive without being checked. A few years later citizens were told to report the presence of plague at once; one man was hanged for concealing a case of plague in his house. Nobody could deal in old clothes or even remove them for washing. The city was cleaned and cleaned again, the streets swept and scrubbed, all vagrants expelled on pain of branding if they ignored the order and death if they came back, because the fear of death easily justified a social cleansing. ‘Timor mortis conturbat me,’ William Dunbar was writing, with reason: ‘I am troubled by the fear of death.’ One more gallows was built, like the one that already warned the lepers what would happen if they strayed, to show that the city was in earnest.19

  The Scottish authorities also understood very well that plague came by sea and all the small east coast ports were at risk. Quarantine was long and careful. Ships from Gdansk in 1564 were told to land at ‘quiet places’, not the main ports, and they were kept there for two months. Some cargo could be kept on board, pitch and iron and timber and tar because nobody could see how they could carry infection, but flax had to be destroyed at once. The ships were half scuttled so that the tides could wash over the cargo; then it was fumigated with burning heather. In theory ‘sick and foul people’ who broke out of isolation were executed, although magistrates were usually lenient.20

  In England, there were no general rules made for another century. There were only emergencies: particular ships to be searched and stopped from particular origins, ships from Lisbon in 1580, Bordeaux in 1585, sites of plague and places under suspicion. It was not enough. Plague was imported into England every time, striking first in a port, often London, sometimes Yarmouth, Hull or Plymouth: a sea-borne disease, a product of travel. From the ports, plague went town to town, market to market along the main routes inland on roads or rivers, wherever rats and fleas could hitch a ride. Fleas travelled on humans as well as on rats – people said they fell sick after sharing a bed with sick people – and perhaps sometimes mice and rats went on wild runs across the fields and infected new villages; but mostly it
was the rats from the ships that settled in houses, infected other rats and infected humans.21 So the best line of protection was a little out to sea at the mouth of rivers like the Thames, where a couple of warships and some customs officials could interrogate every ship, give out passes to any coming from clean ports and turn the others into the creek at Holehaven – ‘a thing never done by us before’, as Samuel Pepys writes in 1663 – to spend at least thirty days in quarantine. They were also to make sure that no passengers were ‘permitted to be wafted over into England in the pacquet boats’ from any Dutch port.22

  The blockade did not stop plague returning to London. It did show seamen, forcibly, which side they were on.

  Before there were solid, all-powerful nation states, choosing and changing sides was always an option; you went where you were known, where you could do the things you wanted to do and where someone would protect you from being jailed, hanged or broken on the wheel for doing them. Even bureaucrats could be flexible, if the situation allowed: Weland of Stiklaw was a canon at the cathedral of Dunkeld before he entered the service of the Scottish king in the 1280s; he was sent on a mission to bring the Maid of Norway back to her Scottish husband, the king, but then, after her sudden death in Orkney, he turned back round, crossed the sea properly and entered the service of the Norwegian king. Weland went back and forth across the sea on diplomatic missions as though his real nationality depended on the sea he sailed or the job he was doing. He certainly kept his distance from the situation in Scotland, which was under English administration, perhaps an exile on principle; and yet after the Norwegian king gave him control of the business of the earldom of Orkney, he turns up doing homage to the English king just to make sure of his rights over the other part of the earldom in Caithness. And then he may have offered safe refuge in Caithness to the family of Robert Bruce in his war against the English. And then, having started out as a foreign cleric, he turns up as a baron, ranking number five in the secular hierarchy of the Norwegian court.23 Bureaucrats were technocrats, with skills that could travel.

  So were pirates. The Flemish seaman John Crabbe is first recorded in 1305 for stealing 160 tuns of wine, burning a ship off La Rochelle and kidnapping the sailors: he was being a good Fleming since the ship came from enemy territory in Dordrecht. It proved difficult to arrest Crabbe in Flanders, mostly because he was now in Scotland; again, as a good Fleming he was supporting the Scots against their English enemies, who were also enemies of Flanders, and making life hard for English vessels on the North Sea. In 1316 he turns up in Rouen, stealing two English ships full of victuals which were on their way to help out with the terrible famine in Flanders – the English and Flemish were making up their quarrel at the time. The same year, he intercepted a shipload of Bordeaux wine for the English market, and London demanded that Crabbe be punished. Flanders said he had already been banished as a murderer. London said he was well known in Flanders, where he lived ‘whenever he wished’. They added that they knew the wine had been handed to the Count of Flanders himself.

  In the war between the English and the Scots, Crabbe skippered a fleet which tried to wreck the English in the Firth of Tay, but failed. He escaped, but not for long; he was captured and handed over to the English forces, led as it happened by a soldier from Flanders. Everyone English wanted him punished; they remembered the sailors he hanged from the masts of their captured ships. He was guarded well and kept in chains. The English were marching on Berwick, where Crabbe had lived and his son still lived, so he was offered to the town on payment of a ransom. The town declined, so Crabbe the villain changed sides one more time. He knew Berwick well and he traded his information to the English: a full pardon for everything else he’d done in return for what the king called ‘his good service in the siege of Berwick’. We can’t know what exactly he revealed, but it was worth his life.

  And now the English started to use Crabbe, the man they had meant to hang. He helped get their ships and weapons ready for action. He used his pirate’s knowledge of the coasts around the North Sea to keep France out of the sea lanes between England and Flanders; for the French and English were now at war. At the battle of Sluys in 1340, he led forty ships on the English side in the hectic chase after another Flemish pirate on the French side, Spoudevisch: pirate against pirate under cover of war.24

  Nobody thought such a man was a traitor; he was just available.

  Ordinary sailors also had skills which could be useful to either side in a war between nations; so they could choose sides, sometimes freely, sometimes under pressure. It helped that there was a whole seaman’s vocabulary that worked in Dutch or French or English. The Dutch United Provinces in 1672 issued a decree deploring the fact that ‘inhabitants of these Provinces doe dayly in great numbers quitt their country to serve on foreign ships … to the great damage and prejudice of this state, most of them leaving their wives and children to the charge of the places where they lived’.25 When in 1667 the Dutch captured the flagship of the British fleet, the Royal Charles, it was an English captain sailing for the United Provinces who accepted the surrender while an English trumpeter in his crew sounded out an English bawdy song called ‘Jumping Joan’ about a girl who also liked surrendering.26

  After the Battle of Portland in 1653, the British took so many Scots and English prisoners of war off the Dutch ships that the numbers became a scandal. In 1667 when the Dutch were planning the Battle of the Medway, they had no difficulty recruiting pilots from the Thames and Medway to guide them; treason was a much better prospect than being shackled and cramped in the stinking holes where prisoners of war rotted away. What’s more the British had a very casual attitude to paying actual wages to their men; they much preferred to hand out IOUs of doubtful value. After the great Dutch victory at the Medway Pepys wrote in his diary that ‘in the open streets of Wapping, and up and down, the wives have cried publicly: “This comes of not paying our husbands; and now your work is undone.”’ His office at the Admiralty needed extra guards, ‘for fear of firing of the office’; and the town felt, he said, like the time when London itself was on fire, ‘nobody knowing which way to turn themselves’. ‘The people that I speak with are in doubt how we shall do to secure our seamen from running over to the Dutch.’27

  Lives were still so fluid that nationality could not keep a bureaucrat, a pirate, a sailor in his place; cross the sea, and you could change your loyalty, your paymaster or your role. Such times were coming rapidly to an end. There was a new enthusiasm for papers, and new difficulty getting them: certificates of health, exit permits, passports, visas and personal letters of recommendation in case all the other papers failed. Without papers, anyone could be anything, on any side; so without papers nobody moved. It took a certificate of health, in the plague years, to come within miles of the city of Geneva.

  It could also be tricky to get away from Geneva, as Sir George Courthop found in the 1630s. He was ‘searched … in relation to my bodily health before I was suffered to come into the town’ and when he wanted to leave for Italy he found ‘the city of Geneva being so visited with the Plague no other place or town will let us come into it, unless we lay in a Lazaretto forty days to air ourselves without the town’. To get away, he persuaded a secretary to the Duke of Savoy that he could add one or two Englishmen to his party and give them the cover of the duke’s own papers. He slipped out of Geneva and met up with the duke’s men three leagues away, and went on south. He had trouble again when landing on Malta, where the ship’s captain had to go ashore ‘to show his certificate that he came from a place that was not affected with the Plague’. Despite the certificate the Governor of Malta sent men to go on board the ship to check the health of the English passengers.28

  Politics, too, made the paperwork for travel essential. The royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe was lucky: he got himself out of Commonwealth England just after Oliver Cromwell’s death with a passage specially arranged to take an earl’s son to school in Paris. He was free at last to contact the exiled Charles
II and take up his cause, and he wanted his wife, Ann, and their three children to join him, to find a school for his oldest son alongside the son of the earl. Ann’s problem was that she had money to travel at a moment’s notice, but she did not have the pass for Paris, and without that she could not even board a ship at Dover. After Richard’s escape, she counted as a ‘malignant’.

  She tried connections first, went to her cousin at the High Court of Justice, but he was not helpful; he said her husband had got out of England by a trick, and ‘upon no conditions’ should she try to join him. She sat down for a moment in the next room ‘full sadly to consider what I should do’ because she knew that ‘if I were denied a passage then, they would ever after be more severe upon all occasions’. She decided she would go down to Whitehall to the office for passes and she would cheat. She went ‘in as plain a way and speech as I could devise’; she left behind her maid ‘who was much a finer gentlewoman than myself’. She went in to ask for her pass ‘with many courtesies’.