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

by Michael Pye

  Stevin planned the school, organized it and taught there. The teaching was in Dutch because Stevin thought it better than Latin for practical subjects, a revolution in itself; a few years earlier he’d had to invent the Dutch words for a ‘triangle’ or something ‘parallel’ and it would be another eighty years before German universities started lectures in German. The change of language made the school open to anyone; the clerics, the ones who spoke Latin both as a lingua franca and as a code, had to make room for newcomers. The curriculum had nothing to do with the medieval plan that had shaped Stevin’s own time at Leiden: he had studied philosophy or humanities, which included rhetoric and physics, maths, ethics, Greek and Hebrew. The new school meant to turn out people with specific skills, not a rather general culture: a modern school.

  Stevin left one other monument, quite unexpected: the shape of cities round the world. He always meant to write a whole book on architecture and how to plan a town; he mentioned the subject often, and he left copious notes.45 He started with drains and foundations, but he kept thinking about the human beings who would live inside his towns; the beauty of a facade, the rules of classical building did not matter half as much. When he wrote about the layout of a house, he worried about fire, he thought out loud about how to keep thieves out, where a man could exercise, how to save your wife or daughter from sitting in a window to be seen and ‘being called at by people passing in the street’. Furnace rooms were a good idea for heating, but ‘those who are not used to them become ill almost like people who are seasick’. He thought courtyards a good thing because lovers could not reach their sweethearts easily, but a bad thing because when you lean out of a window, you can’t see what is happening on the street. You can tell he had children: two daughters, two sons.

  He wanted streets to be regular and facades to be uniform, no great fuss of pillars and decoration when simple stone looked so good; he knew he had to plan traffic, and it seemed a good idea to make models before building. He proposed cities on a rectangular plan, cut up with canals, looking a little like the simple, squared-off layout of an army camp, but complicated with markets, with princely houses, with public squares for air and light.

  And after he was dead, those cities were built at last: Recife in Brazil, where you can still pick out the framework of the streets of the Dutch city of Mauritsstad; Colombo in Sri Lanka, Cape Town in South Africa; the fort at Paramaribo in Surinam. His ideas went with empire all around the world.

  The golden age of Amsterdam is just beginning: the art, the riches, the great fleets and the complex markets in anything from paper to grain for bread. Everything is ready.

  Consider what had already happened in Antwerp and Flanders and Burgundy. Power became a matter of show and glitz as well as armies and diplomacy, soft power perhaps but essential when a ruler is surrounded by disorderly, independent towns and dependent on the big merchant enterprises. Much the same will happen in Amsterdam. The city burghers insist on their own authority while down the road in The Hague a stadhouder prince has to act out the role of ruler as though he were on stage, all show and fashion and ostentatious rules. Meanwhile the whole nature of the United Provinces of the Netherlands will change with the great trading companies that work the East and West Indies: powers that are only partly political and mainly commercial, able to find, take and organize an empire. The ruler is one among many powers.

  Markets like the Bourse in Catholic Antwerp have already emancipated themselves from actual, solid goods, so they can buy and sell the relationships between prices in different places, at different times, and dealers can speculate as well as calculate. On this, and the older traditions of sharing the cost of a ship or forming a company to defend the land against the encroaching sea, the machinery of capitalism can be built.

  Information has become a commodity of great value, to be marketed, exchanged, sometimes hoarded. People want to know, and they expect to be told; they think knowledge means change. Finding things out is a priority even on merchant company ships sent to sink the enemy, take his silver and maybe do some peaceful business as well; the captains are told to bring back specimens and facts. The Amsterdam presses make the books and newsletters that carry the facts around Europe, that sometimes give away secrets and sometimes cause scandals.

  Paintings have come off the altars and gone into houses, made for the market and not for the glory of God and the fame of some patron. The process started long before any Protestant iconoclasm took the pictures out of churches. Art has become domestic, a commodity; there were art dealers in Antwerp with crowded shops just as there will be in Amsterdam. Painting was still craftsman’s work which often amounted to copying; but the idea of the importance of talent is being born, the value of the original and the personal. Amsterdam, too, will muddle these two ideas: the importance of genius, the importance of consumers.

  Above all, the world is ready to be counted and engineered, to put mathematics at the heart of building a fort or a windmill, keeping the records of a business or laying out a town. Antwerp knew that change, but rebellion and a war of religious denominations took out the city’s sense of order. Amsterdam inherited the idea. Both cities shared the same shining, seemingly reasonable faith which we still maintain.

  That faith has roots very deep in time.

  Empire fleets sailed out over the Atlantic and the Pacific and with their voyages our wider world began; a new world, so Francis Bacon thought, and as philosopher and politician and enthusiast for experiment he wanted to understand. ‘In our time large parts of the New World and the farthest parts of the Old are becoming known everywhere, and the store of experiences has grown immeasurably,’ he wrote in 1620. The Portuguese were all down the coast of Western Africa, then at the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, in India by 1498. They were on the shores of Brazil in 1500, to be followed by the French in the 1550s. They reached China in 1513 and Japan in 1543. Christopher Columbus beached at San Salvador in the Bahamas in 1492. The English were off the coast of North America in 1497. A century later Dutch merchants sent out their first trading mission to Indonesia, the English were about to try to settle parts of North America, and the French, Dutch, Swedes and others followed.

  This is the usual story of ‘discovery’, how we came to know about the world and make it modern; but if ‘discovery’ means finding unknown places and peoples for the first time, it is not the right word. The Portuguese found a sea route to India, but the Romans were trading around Karachi and Gujarat more than a millennium earlier, selling coral and frankincense that went over the Himalaya to China, buying silk from China and animal hides and indigo, ivory and ‘long peppers’. Once they knew about the monsoon winds the ships of Alexandria in Egypt began sailing out to India in the first century CE.46 The Romans used cloves and nutmeg from the Moluccas in Indonesia in the fourth century CE.47 Usually there were Arab middlemen involved, but the Romans knew about the world at least at second hand, and how it was connected. So did the Norsemen, as we have seen, all the way across Russia to Byzantium and beyond, and west to the shores of North America; the Buddha found in the fields in Sweden from the eighth century begins to seem less strange when you realize the strength of these long, long trading runs.

  We knew the world. What changed with the empire fleets was our way of looking at it: of investigating it, not just collecting or trading it, and trying to use our guns and skills to dominate it. Our world and our way of thinking seem to start quite abruptly, but both have a long and complex story, the history of all the necessary conditions for being modern in our particular way. It could all have worked out very differently, but it could not have happened at all without the story I have tried to tell.

  It starts with those Frisian traders in their flat-bottomed boats working the coasts of the North Sea and spreading the use of money: of an abstract way to think about the world and its value. Monks in their cold cells work out the mathematics of time, and they shape the way others think about the natural world: not just turning the page of an ancient
text but looking, reasoning, calculating. They help along the process of exchanging ideas across the seas, a busy trade that keeps them in touch with the ideas of strangers and which gives great value to the written word. Trading cloth and iron in the shallows on the edge of the world begins to change the way we see the world; Francis Bacon himself is heir to a millennium of other people’s work and history.

  Norsemen come south and they become the enemies that the Christian missions need to be sure of their own righteousness. They also settle, and where they settle they create a new independent kind of town whose success will change the landscape. Some of them do far more: long before the empire ships went out, from the time of the Norseman Ohthere, we have evidence of men sailing on just because they did not know what lay ahead. They went into the unknown.

  Bacon understood that: ‘It is unthinkable,’ he wrote, ‘that there is some boundary or farthest point of the world; it always appears, almost by necessity, that there is something beyond.’ He understood the power of all the new creatures, minerals, sights and information to be found; ‘They are capable of shedding new light in philosophy,’ he wrote. ‘Indeed it would be a disgrace to mankind if wide areas of the physical globe, of land, sea and stars, have been opened up and explored in our time while the boundaries of the intellectual globe were confined to the discoveries and narrow limits of the ancients.’48 The landings on Brazil and on Southern Africa, for example, flatly contradicted Aristotle’s assumption that no living thing could survive in the burning world south of the Equator, that the north was all there could be on Earth. The process of opening up the Earth disrupted ideas of authority; man had to look for himself and think for himself. But authority was already challenged by the saintly Bede, a loyal churchman, and his notions of investigating the moon and the tides.

  Travelling showed other ways of life, other lengths of robe, other colours and styles: it bred fashion, and fashion implies choices. Since it also involves change, it alarmed conservatives. A woman might choose to dress above her station. A man might insist that he could choose how he looked. Every kind of social confusion, even sexual confusion, could be read on the backs of the people in the street. It was dangerous, even monstrous proof that people could choose, and an anxious settled world could not ignore it.

  At the edge of the world, the law written in Rome never quite worked; instead law had to contend with custom, with habit, with the Northern way of life. In doing so it became more flexible and perhaps more humane, more able to handle a business dispute, more able to consider the state of mind of some broken man who had done murder. Papers became all important with a special trust in the written word, which brought out the very best forgers to change history the way they wanted. On the edge of the world a profession of lawyers formed, to which we owe not just the high self-importance of the law but also the idea of a profession that was not priestly and its inevitable consequence: the idea of a middle class.

  These changes were profound; they made possible the bureaucracy which made possible nation states. The changes to the natural world were arguably even more important. On the fragile shoreline, broken by tides, buried in sand drifts, where a single storm could change the whole shape of a community, man first came close to losing land in order to fuel the new and growing towns, and then came to believe he could engineer his world with dams, dikes, sluices. The forests, the clean waters gave way to a conditional world, which was our fault and also our duty.

  Alongside this need to control went a new appetite for experiment: for finding things out and then testing and proving them. The process that Simon Stevin would develop had already begun out of terror of Mongol hordes and the end of the world. In the new universities mathematical thinking was tangled up still with the idea of money, of moral trading and just prices: the connection that began with the Frisians was still shaping minds.

  Trading became a power in its own right. The towns of the German Hansa formed an alliance which could make its own treaties, see off kings, blockade a nation into starvation and force surrender. Money went to war with political powers.

  The modern world is taking its shape: law, professions, the written word; towns, and what they do to the natural world; books and fashion, business and its relationship to power. We are not on the margins of history any more; we are dealing in the essential, the changes of mind that made our world possible.

  We’ve seen how women made their choices, often surprisingly, and built worlds the way they wanted them. The possibility of love, of truly choosing a partner, turned out to mean later marriage, and with it the possibility of young people going about Europe and taking with them knowledge of all kinds of technology. The edge of the world found some of its economic advantages in bed.

  We’ve seen how plague became the reason, just like terrorism today, for social regulation, for saying how children must behave, for taking away a worker’s right to choose what work he wanted, for deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels. Plague enforced frontiers that were otherwise wonderfully insecure, and made our movements and travels conditional. It helped make the state a physical reality, and give it ambitions.

  In Antwerp all this produced a glittering civilization which spawned so many of our attitudes: to art, insurance, shares, genius, power as a great show; to the possibility of engineering the world as we want it. When war broke up Flanders, when the northern provinces broke away, those attitudes came to Amsterdam.

  They came in glory. They look like something both new and brilliant, but the truth is that they grew out of the light in what we used to casually call the ‘dark ages’ and the central importance of what we used to call ‘the edge of the world’. Around the cold, grey waters of the North Sea, the old, the marginal, the unfashionable made us possible: for much better, and for much, much worse.

  It is time now to give them all their due.

  References

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Warwickshire Record Office (WRO): CR1368/vol. I/66.

  2 For Scarborough’s visitors and their pastimes passim, see: A list of the Nobility, Quality and Gentry at Scarborough (1733); The Scarborough Miscellany for the year 1733; A Journey from London to Scarborough (1734). For the discovery of the spa: Robert Wittie, Scarborough-Spaw: or a Description of the Nature and Virtues of the Spaw at Scarborough, Yorkshire (1667). For the debate about the use and value of sea water: W. Simpson, Hydrologia Chymica: or the Chymical Anatomy of the Scarborough and other Spaws in Yorkshire (1669); Anon., A dissertation on the Contents, Virtues and Uses of Cold and Hot Mineral Springs, particularly those of Scarborough (1735); Robert White MD, The Use and Abuse of Sea Water Impartially Considered (1775).

  3 WRO: CR1368/vol. I/67.

  4 For a fuller sketch of this argument, see R. Dettingmeijer, ‘The Emergence of the Bathing Culture Marks the End of the North Sea as a Common Cultural Ground’, in Juliet Roding and Lex Heerma van Voss (eds.), The North Sea and Culture 1550–1800 (Hilversum, 1996), pp. 482ff.

  5 Peter Shaw’s analysis of the waters was read as a lecture in Scarborough in 1733, then sent in a letter to the recorder of the corporation, then published in its own right in 1735. See Peter Shaw, An enquiry into the contents, virtues and uses of the Scarborough Spaw-waters: with the method of examining any other mineral water (London, 1735).

  6 David Kirby and Merja-Lisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas (London, 2000), p. 53.

  7 Baedeker’s Belgium and Holland (Leipzig and London, 1894), p. 255.

  8 See Ada Hondius-Crone, The Temple of Nehalennia at Domburg (Amsterdam, 1955), p. 7, and for a facsimile of the newsletter.

  9 Marie de Man, ‘Que sait-on de la plage de Dombourg?’, in van het Nederlandisch Genootschap voor Munt- en Penningkunde (Amsterdam, 1899); Marie de Man, a most remarkable numismatist and local historian, describes all the revelations on the beach over two centuries and catalogues the coins found. She also reports the sporadic pilfering from the gravesites.

  10 Stéphane Lebecq, Mar
chands et navigateurs frisons du haut Moyen ge, vol. 1: Essai (Lille, 1983), pp. 142–4 for an account of Frisian Domburg; p. 144 for the specific discoveries.

  11 B. Krusch and W. Levison (eds.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum, vol. 7: Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici (Hannover/Leipzig, 1920), p. 128, ch. 14, lines 4–13.

  12 Ephraim Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface (New York, 2000), letter XV, pp. 27–8.

  13 Cf. John E. Pattison, ‘Is It Necessary to Assume an Apartheid-Like Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England?’, Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 275, 1650 (7 November 2008), pp. 2423 ff.

  14 Quoted in Sebastian I. Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2008), p. 30.

  15 John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum, in my modern version: Trevisa quoted in Sobecki, Sea and Medieval English Literature, p. 39.

  16 Martin W. Lewis: ‘Dividing the Ocean Sea’, Geographical Review 89, 2 (April 1999), pp. 192–5.

  17 Cf. Rosemary Muir Wright, ‘The Rider on the Sea-Monster’, in Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (eds.), The North Sea World in the Middle Ages (Dublin, 2001), pp. 70ff.

  18 Bernard McGinn, ‘Ocean and Desert as Symbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition’, Journal of Religion 74, 2 (1994), pp. 156, 157.

  19 For a full discussion, see Barbara Hillers, ‘Voyages between Heaven and Hell: Navigating the Early Irish Immram Tales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 13 (1993), pp. 66ff.

  20 ‘The Voyage of St Brendan’, in J. F. Webb, The Age of Bede (London, 1965), p. 236.

  21 Ibid., p. 261.

  22 Dicuil (ed. J. J. Tierney), Liber de mensura orbis terrae, 7, 15 (Dublin, 1967), pp. 72–3.