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

by Michael Pye

  The official asked: ‘What is your husband and your name?’ and she told him; she was Ann Harrison – her first son was called Harrison – and she was married to a young merchant. He raised no questions and he said the fee would be a crown; she said ‘that is a great sum for me’ but perhaps he could put a man, a maid and three children on the same pass. He did so, and he added that any ‘malignant’ would give him five pounds for such a paper.

  In her lodgings, Ann took a pen to change the pass, to write over Harrison letter by letter and turn it into Fanshawe. She was sure ‘none could find out the change’ but she also knew she had to move at once: hire a barge to take her to Gravesend, take a coach to Dover. Even so the ‘searchers’ caught up with her at the port and took the pass for their records. ‘I little thought,’ one said, ‘they would give a pass to so great a Malignant, especially in such a troublesome time as this.’ At nine at night she was on board the packet boat, at eight the next morning she was ashore in Calais and the news that the English authorities were looking for her became a laughing matter.29

  The English also worried, occasionally, about infiltration, especially by Jesuits. The traveller Fynes Moryson came back to England in Italian clothes in 1597 and was mistaken for a Roman priest, but the innkeeper was able to persuade the constable that he was, in fact, an overdressed Englishman. The French and Spanish were all too close on the other side of the Channel, which made papers essential. The diarist John Evelyn found in 1641 that crossing south from the United Provinces of Holland to the territory of Spaniards who considered the northerners still rebels could be very complicated. Evelyn had the right pass for leaving the north, issued at Rotterdam, but the commander of the border castle refused to recognize it; indeed, ‘in a great fury, snatching the Paper out of my hand, he flung it scornfully under a table’. A little money sorted things out. Evelyn, meanwhile, had to hide his pass for entering Spanish territory, ‘it being a matter of imprisonment, for that the States were therein treated by the names of Rebels’.30

  Travel was always conditional; it could be blocked by war, opened by a bit of corruption. Plague helped change the conditions of movement around Europe, just as it policed laws about where anyone could live or travel inside England, what she or he was obliged to do for work and for how much pay. Such laws were not just the answer to an emergency, they persisted through the reign of Elizabeth I, into the first years of the nineteenth century. At frontiers, in the fields, plague changed the way a person’s life was checked and trammelled, made it subject to official scrutiny from how you looked after your children in Edinburgh to what you were paid as a thatcher to whether you were worth helping when you were in trouble.

  Plague justified the rules that kept a person in her place.

  12.

  The city and the world

  Leo of Rozmital was a Bohemian, and men from Bohemia were known for their long, long hair; so all across Europe as he travelled he was very obviously a foreigner, the one you watch, the one you try to impress. In England ‘the length of our hair was a source of amazement to them,’ he wrote. ‘They persisted in saying that it was stuck on with tar.’

  He set out in 1465 from Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic with a mission: to persuade someone to persuade the Pope that his Catholic sister could marry a Hussite, a heretic who believed in taking wine as well as bread at communion. He travelled with some forty people, some of them grand, one jester, one lute-player and a cart for luggage and supplies, across German territory to Flanders and then by sea to England. It was a remarkable journey: one moment dancing with nuns, the next out swimming in a ship with horses.

  The nuns belonged to ‘a stately nunnery’ at Neuss on the Rhine and they were ‘the most beautiful nuns I have ever seen’, Leo wrote. Nunneries often took the unmarried and sometimes the unmarriageable daughters of noble families and kept them safe but few had the rule of Neuss: that the women ‘may leave the nunnery to get married’. To improve their social chances, ‘they receive no-one … who is not of noble birth’. Leo’s grand companions were made welcome and the mother superior gave a dance: ‘the nuns were very finely dressed and knew all the best dances … each one had her own page who waited on and preceded her.’

  Even so, Leo rode on to Brussels, to the great show that was the Duchy of Burgundy. Everything was enormous there, everything was magnificent, at least as far as the eye could see; and the Burgundians were skilled at making sure how far you saw. At dinner, there were eight dishes at a time. The zoological garden was ‘of vast proportions’ with ‘all manner of birds and animals which seemed strange to us’. He saw ‘as fine pictures as can be found anywhere’. The keeper of the duke’s jewels ‘told us that his lord had so many jewels that he had not seen them all in many years and indeed did not know where they were’.

  This spectacle had turned the flimsy duchy into the mentor, the coach of a continent: the true inventor of ‘soft’ power. The tactic was necessary. In 1369 the Count of Flanders had married his daughter Margaret to the Duke of Burgundy, first peer of France from the ruling house of Valois: the traditional kind of Realpolitik that dynasties like to work out in bed. The wedding feast was in Ghent in Flanders, the wine was a good Beaune from Burgundy. When everyone sobered up, the prospects were rather meagre since the economy of Flanders depended largely on trade with the wool merchants of England, and England happened to be at war with Valois France. The count had his family loyalties, but that did not stop him making a practical peace with England, and playing the two powers against each other. It was a game he knew very well, since his Flanders was a patchwork of quarrelsome towns and an ambitious count had to manage his subjects as much as rule them.

  So Count Louis expanded his territory, marriage by marriage, deal by deal. His daughter Margaret was named heir apparent to Brabant, next door to Flanders in what is now Belgium and a short way north; a little later, in 1404, Flanders effectively annexed Brabant, which was in dire need of military help. In 1428 Philip the Good of Burgundy became lord of Holland and Zeeland to the north, in what is now the Netherlands. In 1430 he had wonderful luck when the Duke of Brabant died, so conveniently that many people thought Philip must have murdered him, and he inherited Brabant. He now had to worry about how to administer all this and make a state of it. The towns around him remained as obstinate as ever, Burgundy itself and its wines were becoming just a second thought on the other side of France, and there was always the possibility of bloody revolt in the north; and yet Philippe de Commynes, diplomat and sometime historian, reckoned that the duchy was very like ‘the promised land’.

  To succeed the dukes of Burgundy had to be noticed across Europe, to be able to influence courts on both sides of long wars and to dazzle their own people. Politics had become what it remains: a show.

  Burgundy made itself the fashion all around Europe. Go to Spain, and Queen Isabella’s tournaments were organized by a Netherlander, as were her chapel music, her funeral chapel and most of her collection of pictures. The Sforzas of Milan needed good painters and decided to look beyond the Alps for them; they sent the painter Zanetto Bugatto to Brussels to study with the master Rogier van der Weyden because although he could paint, he could not paint in the Northern, Netherlandish manner. Zanetto was rapidly in trouble, probably for drink; the Milanese ambassador reported he had been made to promise ‘not to drink wine during the year’.1 Medicis and Sforzas bought Netherlandish pictures and tapestries for their Northern way of seeing the world. As for wooden altarpieces, those went out to Poland, Germany, all of Scandinavia, to Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and England; they were exports so important that guildsmen were allowed to break the general curfew and work at night if ‘a sale or a contract has been made with a merchant whose ship is ready to sail’.

  The world knew the skyline of Bruges because it was in the background of the paintings in their churches, halls and mansions. There is a Netherlandish townscape behind one Madonna by Botticelli. A Leonardo landscape echoes the famous rocks in Jan va
n Eyck’s painting of St Francis receiving the stigmata. Assorted other Italian masters found it useful to adopt van Eyck’s real, atmospheric landscapes, which stretched to the horizon behind his foreground figures.2 Jan van Eyck, like Rubens after him, could be sent on diplomatic missions because he was a very famous man, and therefore a man that people would want to know.

  Burgundy had the knack of showing people themselves as they wanted to be seen. The painter Hans Memling made a triptych for Sir John Donne of Kidwelly and his wife, gentry in the service of the House of York in England, and he painted his patrons into the picture as usual. Elizabeth Donne is dressed in purple and ermine, which she probably never wore, and Memling painted her clothes before he ever saw her because her face had to be redrawn rather thinner than he first imagined; so status came before the individual face. She holds a lovely Book of Hours, a fine illuminated manuscript, to show she knows the fashionable form of piety; psalters were no longer the thing. Donne himself is shown in a black mantle with fur, hung about with gold chains in the sun-and-rose pattern of the House of York: we can see he is an intimate of the king. The Donnes are massed so close to the Virgin Mary at the heart of the picture you could imagine they were used to dining with her.3

  These things were manufactured – painters imitating and borrowing and reworking other painters’ work – by industries that produced the most lovely and vivid things. The gold and silver metalwork from Burgundy was famous, and so were the tapestries, some on classic themes like the Trojan War; as had been the music of the ars nova, a kind of polyphony which had a special clarity because it respected the rhythm of the words being sung. Netherlandish teachers were hired for Italian choir schools. Northern boys were in great demand to sing in Italian chapels because they were better trained and had more experience; north of the Alps, they sang much more music at many more services. The papal chapel at Avignon hired them, and paid them from the Pope’s prebends, his cut of cathedral income in the North.4

  All this was the official, splendid version, but the court itself could be rough. It was usual to get guests drunk, Leo found. There was a great bed kept for them in the palace at Breda, and ‘if guests could not stand they were thrown onto it’. It was also usual for quite grand persons to wrestle in their tunic and hose, their ‘underclothes’; ‘it is no shame to wrestle thus clad, even though multitudes of matrons and maidens be present’.

  When it was needed, when it was useful, this court understood theatre perfectly. Leo saw Charles the Bold, the duke’s son, return from Paris. The guilds and the councillors greeted him in the streets of Brussels with lighted candles, ‘an uninterrupted line of lights through the whole town’, and with ‘stately tableaux’.5 Often there was a play, a masque, an opera, with the crowds cheering and also heckling. A century later, when Calvinists ruled Antwerp for a while after 1577, they went on staging civic processions as a substitute for the religious ones that they banned. By 1583, these performances of power were so usual they made nobody suspicious. The corporation of Antwerp footed the bill for the French Duke of Anjou to make a ‘Joyous Entry’ into the town, a civic and not a courtly occasion. They paid for a gold canopy to protect the duke, the white horse he rode, his cap and his robes, and wine for the patricians who carried the canopy; they built an arch of triumph with torches, flags, inscriptions and coats of arms.6 They also slammed the gates shut and slaughtered Anjou’s army, and the duke was lucky to escape with his life; it was all, after all, a show.

  It was rather like Burgundy itself, whose land was largely man-made, dependent on constant work and artifice to keep it from going under water. Gilles le Bouvier, herald and chronicler, was in Bruges in 1417 with the new Dauphin of France and he reported that Flanders was ‘a rich land with goods that come by sea from every Christian nation, heavily peopled and they make much woollen cloth and they have two very good towns, Ghent and Bruges’. He found the people honest, but rebellious. But he added: ‘The country itself is a poor country … because it is all water and sand.’ He saw the dikes along the coast of Holland and he reckoned ‘if these dikes ever broke, all the land would be in the sea and drowned for ever and ever’.7

  Within that show, the riches were dazzling; as the Spaniard Pero Tafur found when he visited in the 1430s. ‘I saw there oranges and lemons from Castille which seemed only just to have been gathered from the trees,’ he wrote, ‘and wine from Greece as abundant as in that country. I saw also confections and spices from Alexandria and all the Levant, just as if one were there; furs from the Black Sea … all Italy with its brocades, silks and armour. There is no part of the world whose products are not found there of their best.’ Bruges was ‘one of the greatest markets of the world’, ships were carried in and out by the tide ‘to save the cost and bother of beasts’ to pull them and ‘they say that at times the number of ships sailing from the harbour at Bruges exceeds seven hundred a day’. At the great Antwerp fairs ‘anyone desiring to see all Christendom or the greater part of it assembled in one place can do so here’.

  And yet: ‘there was a great famine in the year of my visit’.8

  Outsiders noticed the huge difference between the dockside economy and the inland nation. The chronicler Froissart said Flanders had only cloth to offer in return for the products of seventeen nations (which rather missed the point of being merchants and living off the market). An English pamphlet sniffed that Flanders was ‘just a market for other countries’ and dependent on wool, naturally from England. The duchy had to buy in food and quite often could not feed itself, even though there was fine and profitable business passing through its ports: it lived by business.

  In Bruges in the thirteenth century there was wool and cloth that came from England with lead, leather, coal and cheese; fish came from the north, including the dried salmon the Scots sold alongside their lard; there were furs from Russia, ermine and sable from Bulgaria, gold from Poland; there was Rhine wine; there were wood, grains, iron, almonds, goatskins, saffron, rice; there were wax and anis, copper and figs, cumin and mercury; dates and sugar from the North of Africa, cotton from Armenia, silk from Tartary.9 Spring fleets brought wine and olive oil, figs and grapes from Portugal. Making jewels from amber and from jet, some from the North Sea coast and some from the Baltic, was a speciality. Later the Portuguese connection brought spices there from the East and the East Indies for buyers from the European heartlands.

  Everything passed through Flanders and somebody took a cut. Italian bankers set up offices alongside the Hansa Kontor. When Philip the Good made his triumphal entrance into Bruges in 1440, there were 150 Italian merchants in the grand parade, 136 Hanseatics, 48 from Castille, men from Scotland, Catalonia, Portugal.10 They rode in their parade clothes by torchlight: they saw the point of playing their part in the great show of power.

  There were kings as well as merchants. Edward IV was there in exile from England for a year. So was Mulay Hassan, the deposed Bey of Tunis, who came to ask the Emperor’s protection. He was painted by the local painter Vermeyen, he went hunting the forest with the Duke of Taxis, both of them in splendid Arab robes; he disconcerted his hosts by eating very expensive peacock and pheasant, taking aubergines as a sauce for his meat and insisting on being blindfolded to listen to music. He was the start of an Antwerp tradition of painting exotic people in exotic clothes, making exiles useful; a hundred years later, the ex-bey was still the model for one of Rubens’s Magi visiting Christ.11

  The kings came for safety, for the relative ease of being on territory that was French but not in Paris, and later Hapsburg and imperial but not in Spain. Being in exile, however brief, they understood how a ruler’s position could be weak, and they learned what show it took to stay in power. They watched the rulers of Burgundy bluff, as states were learning to bluff; the dukes played to an audience of citizens, subjects and the world. Tafur said: ‘nothing could surpass in majesty the persons of the Duke and Duchess and the state in which they live, which is the most splendid I have ever seen’. The Duchess had two hundre
d maids of honour, all of them all the time, so he heard.

  He arrived just as the duke put down a serious rebellion. He wrote: ‘I myself saw many high gallows around Bruges.’12

  The court lived with all kinds of glory, as the diplomat Prospero da Camogli told the Duke of Milan: he complained about the ‘mad rush of dishes’ at dinner every day, not to mention the habit of leaving the silver on the table at the end of each course just to show the duke owned more and had ‘spare’. He was hugely impressed by the ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the scarlet hoods when scarlet was costly, a piece of the True Cross, and a fleur-de-lys crusted in jewels, and ‘of singers, heralds and such like there was an infinite number’. The banqueting hall was hung with cloth of gold and there were four unicorn horns ‘like organ pipes’ among the silver. Anyone would want to join, and the Burgundians knew it; the Order was a diplomatic instrument to seal their reputation as a knightly finishing school, the place to learn war, chivalry and how to behave at court. It was imitated in France and Denmark, Scotland and Germany, even among the Renaissance aristocrats of Italy.

  Yet Prospero had to apologize a month later that ‘I have not sent you the names of the lords and knights of the Order because the Duke of Burgundy’s household is so lacking in organization that not a secretary in it has been able to give me the names.’ Weeks later, he was judgemental: he wrote of the ‘inept administration of the Duke of Burgundy, who is ruled by other men’.13

  The show was brilliant and also insubstantial. There was a solid-looking throne of gold, hugely impressive unless you realized it was just gilt on a wooden frame. Diplomats, visitors, were constantly reminded of what was in the treasury; Gabriel Tetzel from Bohemia was told there was a ‘hundred thousand pound weight of beaten gold and silver’ but he never got to see or count it. Having gold meant you could afford to go to war; it was a kind of deterrent. It also meant you could act like a king. At dinner the duke was served by men riding a two-headed horse, drank aromatic wine from the breasts of a naked girl who was guarded by a live lion, was entertained by an elephant who begged: all illusions.