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

by Michael Pye

  38 Þorsteinn Vilhjálmsson, ‘Navigation and Vínland’, in Andrew Wawn and Þórunn Sigurðardóttir, Approaches to Vínland (Reykjavik, 2001), pp. 108ff.

  39 Árni Björnsson, ‘Prerequisites for Saga Writing’, in Wawn and Sigurðardóttir, Approaches to Vínland, pp. 53–5.

  40 P. Schledermann and K. M. McCullough, ‘Inuit-Norse Contact in the Smith Sound Region’, in Barrett, Contact, Continuity and Collapse, pp. 184–5.

  41 Keneva Kunz (tr.), The Saga of the Greenlanders, in Gísli Sigurdsson (ed.) and Keneva Kunz (tr.), The Vinland Sagas (London, 2008), p. 3.

  42 Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, ‘L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland’, in Barrett, Contact, Continuity and Collapse, pp. 207ff.

  43 Erik the Red’s Saga, in Sigurdsson and Kunz, Vinland Sagas, p. 46.

  44 Jenny Jochens uses the word ‘molest’ in this context. See ‘The Western Voyages: Women and Vikings’, in Wawn and Sigurðardóttir, Approaches to Vínland, p. 84.

  45 The Saga of the Greenlanders, in Sigurdsson and Kunz, Vinland Sagas, p. 4 for characters; pp. 17–20 for deals and murders.

  46 Erik the Red’s Saga, in Sigurdsson and Kunz, Vinland Sagas, p. 48.

  47 For commentary on the saga stories, see William P. L. Thomson, The New History of Orkney (Edinburgh, 2008), pp. 109–12.

  48 Based on Herman Pálsson and Paul Edwards (tr.), Orkneyinga Saga (London, 1978), pp. 214–18; ‘greatest man’ at section 108; spring and autumn trips at section 105; last trip and death at sections 107, 108.

  5. FASHION

  1 The Saga of Hacon and a fragment of the Saga of Magnus in G. W. Dasent (tr.), Icelandic Sagas, vol. IV (London, 1894), p. 266.

  2 Richard Vaughan (tr. and ed.), The Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris (Stroud, 1993), p. 75.

  3 Dasent, Icelandic Sagas, p. 266.

  4 Vaughan, Illustrated Chronicles, pp. 75–6.

  5 Ibid., p. 76; Dasent, Icelandic Sagas, p. 267.

  6 Herman Palsson and Paul Edwards (tr.). Orkneyinga Saga, ch. 60, p. 109 for the Grimsby trip; p. 110 for the clothes.

  7 Snorri Sturluson (tr. Lee M. Hollander), Heimskringla (Austin, 1964), chs. 2–3, pp. 664–5.

  8 Ibid., ch. 31, p. 816.

  9 Gitte Hansen, ‘Luxury for Everyone? – Embroideries on Leather Shoes and the Consumption of Silk Yarn in 11th–13th Century Northern Europe’, in Angela Ling Huang and Carsten Janhnke (eds.), Textiles and the Medieval Economy (Oxford, forthcoming 2014).

  10 Henri Joseph L. Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe privé et public, vol. III (Paris, 1881), pp. 250–51.

  11 See Else Østergård, Woven into the Earth: Textiles from Norse Greenland (Aarhus, 2009), p. 39 for use of sheep; p. 62 for vaðmál; pp. 95–7 for garment construction; p. 146 for imported cloth.

  12 Quoted in Østergård, Woven into the Earth, p. 144.

  13 Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion (London, 2007), p. 169; p. 145 for necklines.

  14 Gisela and Eberhard, Count of Friuli, cited in ibid., p. 16.

  15 Laura F. Hodges, ‘A Reconsideration of the Monk’s Costume’, in Chaucer Review 26, 2 (1991), p. 143n.9, citing C. G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion (Cambridge, 1923).

  16 Bede, Life of Cuthbert, in J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer (trs.), The Age of Bede (London, 1988), p. 67.

  17 Ernst Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Karolini aevi, vol. II (Berlin, 1895), letter 21, p. 59.

  18 Hodges, ‘Reconsideration of the Monk’s Costume’, pp. 134–5.

  19 Janet M. Cowen and Jennifer C. Ward, ‘Al myn array is bliew, what nedith more?’, in Cordelia Beattie et al. (eds.), The Medieval Household in Christian Europe c.850–c.1550 (Turnhout, 2003), p. 117.

  20 See Michèle Beaulieu and Jeanne Baylé, Le Costume de Bourgogne de Philippe le Hardi à Charles le Téméraire (Paris, 1956).

  21 Francisque-Michel (ed.), Le Roman de la Rose (Paris, 1864), vol. II, p. 10.

  22 Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 210–11.

  23 See Kay Stanisland, ‘Getting There, Got It: Archaeological Textiles and Tailoring in London 1330–1580’, in David Gaimster and Paul Stamper (eds.), The Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture 1400–1600 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 239–40.

  24 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships (New York, 1996), p. 30.

  25 For a discussion of the wider motives for sumptuary laws, see Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, pp. 208ff.

  26 Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion, pp. 80, 131, 166, 126.

  27 Ibid., pp. 44–5.

  28 Beaulieu and Baylé, Costume de Bourgogne, say Poland; Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion, names Fulk, Count of Anjou.

  29 Le Testament Maistre Jehan de Meun, lines 1195–1201; see Silvia Buzzetti Gallarati, Le Testament Maistre Jehan de Meun, un caso literario (Alessandria, 1989), p. 171 for text; p. 85 for commentary.

  30 E. Nicaise et al. (eds.), Chirugerie de maître Henri de Mondeville … (Paris, 1893), pp. 591–3.

  31 James M. Dean (ed.), Richard the Redeless and Mom and the Sothsegger (Kalamazoo, 2000), III, lines 221–34.

  32 See Camilla Luise Dahl, ‘Mengiað klæthe and tweskifte klædher’, in Kathrine Vestergård Pedersen and Marie-Louise B. Nosch, The Medieval Broadcloth (Oxford, 2009), pp. 129ff.

  33 Testament, lines 1277–80, 1313–14, in Gallarati, Testament Maistre Jehan de Meun, pp. 174, 176.

  34 Christine de Pizan (tr. Sarah Lawson), The Treasure of the City of Ladies (London, 2003), pp. 116, 132.

  35 William Harrison (ed. Georges Edelen), The Description of England (Ithaca, 1968), p. 145.

  36 Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion, pp. 84–5.

  37 Quoted in Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion (Manchester, 1995), p. 56.

  38 Philip Stubbes (ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie), The Anatomie of Abuses (Tempe, 2002), p. 99.

  39 John Warrington (ed.), The Paston Letters (London, 1956), vol. II, p. 50.

  40 Ibid., II, 195.

  41 Ibid., I, 161; I, 223; II, 23; II, 63; II, 32; II, 206; II, 178. The Howards’ list is on pp. 37–9 of vol. II.

  42 Cited from the reissue of Eileen Power’s translation The Goodman of Paris (1928) (Woodbridge, 2008), p. 37; cf. Daniel Roche, La Culture des apparences (Paris, 1989).

  43 Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion, p. 89.

  44 Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Habits, Holdings, Heterologies: Populations in Print in a 1562 Costume Book’, Yale French Studies 110 (2006).

  45 François Deserps (ed. Sara Shannon), A collection of the various styles of clothing which are presently worn in countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and the savage islands: all realistically depicted (Minneapolis, 2001), p. 28 for diversity; pp. 120–21 for Lübeck; p. 68 for Scots; p. 60 for Dutch; p. 56 for Brabant; p. 82 for Zeeland.

  46 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi et Modeni di tutto il Mundo (Venice, 1589), p. 276 for Englishwomen; p. 239 for women of Antwerp; pp. 293–4 for Northern women’s habits; unpaginated front matter for ‘capriccio’.

  47 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, on these pages: 236 for music; 199 for actors; 251 for football; 156 for ‘cankers’; 134 for ‘fashions’; 123 for flowers; 67 for ‘sin’; 122 for ‘Arithmetician’; 92 for ‘Ruffs’; 90 for hats; 100 for slippers; 96 for doublets; 10 for ‘apparel lying rotting’; 107 for make-up; 111 for hair; 117 for Devil starching; 112 for fair hair; 120 for daughters; 66 for Pride; 71 for ‘who is a Gentleman’. Kidnie’s immaculate edition reproduces Stubbes’s spellings, which I have adjusted without changing his vocabulary.

  48 See Stanisland, ‘Getting There, Got It’, in Gaimster and Stamper, Age of Transition, p. 244.

  49 Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, p. 29 for ‘according to degree’; p. 95 for soft shirts; pp. 30–31 for effeminacy; p. 32 for women in doublets.

  6. WRITING THE LAW

  1 The rules for ordeals varied. Anglo-Saxon rules (the diet for the fast, for example) are discussed in M. H. Kerr, R. D. Forsyth and M. J. Plyley, ‘Cold Water and Hot Iron: Trial by Ordeal in England’, Journa
l of Interdisciplinary History 22, 4 (Spring 1992), pp. 582–3. Those rules are set out in the twelfth-century Textus Roffensis, excerpted and translated in Michael Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose (London, 1975), pp. 5–6. Rules in the Frankish kingdoms included the kissing of the Gospel, the specific forms of prayer; see Karl Zeumer (ed.), Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi (Hannover, 1886), pp. 638ff. For shaving and the three days of fasting, see Peter Brown, ‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change’, Daedalus 104, 2 (1975), p. 134.

  2 Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, pp. 639, 654.

  3 Ibid., p. 640.

  4 James A. Brundage, ‘E Pluribus Unum: Custom, the Professionalisation of Medieval Law and Regional Variations in Marriage Formation’, in Mia Korpiola (ed.), Regional Variations in Matrimonial Law and Custom in Europe 1150–1600 (Leiden, 2011), p. 37.

  5 Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, p. 639.

  6 Atlamál in Grœnlenzku 11, in Andy Orchard (tr. and ed.), The Elder Edda (London, 2011), p. 217.

  7 Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (tr.), Orkneyinga Saga (London, 1978), p. 108.

  8 Quoted in Alain Marez, ‘Une Europe des Vikings? La leçon des inscriptions runiques’, in Regis Boyer, Les Vikings, premiers Européens, VIIIème–XIème siècle (Paris, 2005), p. 143.

  9 Sigrdrífumál 6, in Orchard, Elder Edda, p. 170.

  10 Sigrdrífumál 10, in ibid., p. 171.

  11 Hávamál 142, in ibid., p. 36.

  12 För Skírnis 31, 36, in ibid., p. 65.

  13 Gudrúnarkvida in fyrsta 23, in ibid., p. 182.

  14 Atlamál in Grœnlenzku 3, 4, 12, in ibid., p. 216–17.

  15 Gudrúnarkvida in Forna 22–4, in ibid., p. 199.

  16 Jenny Jochens, ‘La Femme Viking en avance sur son temps’, in Boyer, Vikings, p. 224.

  17 Catharina Randvere, ‘The Power of the Spoken Word’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia I (2005), pp. 182–3.

  18 Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge, 1991), p. 56.

  19 Birgit Sawyer, The Viking Age Rune-Stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia (Oxford, 2000), p. 119.

  20 Magnus Olsen, ‘Runic Inscriptions in Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man’, in Haakon Shetelig (ed.), Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland (Oslo, 1954), p. 191.

  21 Jesch, Women in the Viking Age, p. 51.

  22 Ibid., p. 64.

  23 Olsen, ‘Runic Inscriptions’, in Shetelig, Viking Antiquities, p. 215, and Marez, ‘Une Europe des Vikings?’, in Boyer, Vikings, p. 140.

  24 Marez, ‘Une Europe des Vikings?’, in Boyer, Vikings, p. 155.

  25 Ibid., p. 156.

  26 Ibid., p. 160.

  27 Ibid., p. 170.

  28 Ibid., pp. 172, 174.

  29 Gitte Hansen, ‘Kontekst, avsetningshistorie og frekke runeristere i Bergen’, in Årbok for Bergen Museum 2005, pp. 44–7.

  30 A. Liestol, Runer fra Bryggen (Oslo, 1964); I am grateful to Gitte Hansen (personal communication) for the citation, the translation and the dating. The stick is BRM 0/18959 in the Bryggen Museum, Bergen.

  31 Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 6.

  32 Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, p. 649.

  33 Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 5.

  34 Finbarr McAuley, ‘Canon Law and the End of the Ordeal’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 26, 3 (2006), p. 481.

  35 Kerr, Forsyth and Plyley, ‘Cold Water and Hot Iron’, p. 579.

  36 Ernest C. York, ‘Isolt’s Ordeal: English Legal Customs in the Medieval Tristan Legend’, Studies in Philology 68, 1, p. 7, for the list.

  37 Kerr, Forsyth and Plyley, ‘Cold Water and Hot Iron’, pp. 579–80.

  38 Gudrúnarkvida in Thridja 6–11, in Orchard, Elder Edda, pp. 203–4.

  39 Michael H. Gelting, ‘Poppo’s Ordeal: Courtier Bishops and the Success of Christianization at the Turn of the First Millennium’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 6 (2010), p. 104, quoting Widukind, Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum libri tres.

  40 Alfred Levison (ed.), Capitularia Regum Francorum (Hannover, 1883), p. 129, under Divisio Regnorum, dated 6 February 806, par. 14.

  41 Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, p. 641.

  42 Ibid., p. 651.

  43 Ibid., p. 641.

  44 Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 6.

  45 John W. Baldwin, ‘The Intellectual Preparation for the Canon of 1215 against Ordeals’, Speculum 36, 4 (October 1961), pp. 613ff.

  46 Wolfgang P. Müller, ‘The Recovery of Justinian’s Digest in the Middle Ages’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 20 (1990), pp. 1–6, 25–7.

  47 Brundage, ‘E Pluribus Unum’, p. 97.

  48 Ibid., pp. 21, 31, 34–5.

  49 Quoted in McAuley, ‘Canon Law’, p. 473.

  50 Baldwin, Intellectual Preparation, p. 620.

  51 For objections to ordeals and the arguments of Peter the Chanter, see ibid., esp. pp. 627ff.

  52 James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession (Chicago, 2008), pp. 1–8 for start of profession; pp. 70–72 for Ireland; p. 37 for Martial and Juvenal.

  53 A. G. van Hamel (ed.), Lamentations de Matheolus … de Jehan le Fèvre, de Resson (Paris, 1892), vol. I, p. 283: in French, lines 519–30; in Latin, 4579–83.

  54 William Langland (tr. A. V. C. Schmidt), Piers Plowman (Oxford, 1992), p. 7.

  55 Michael Haren (ed. and tr.), ‘The Interrogatories for Official, Large and Secular Estates of the Memoriale Presbiterorum’, in Peter Billen and A. J. Minnis (eds.), Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 132–3.

  56 See Adriaan Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge and Paris, 1999), esp. pp. 153ff.

  57 Howell, Commerce before Capitalism, pp. 61–3 for trees; pp. 38–41 for property and law.

  58 Sister James Eugene Madden, ‘Business Monks, Banker Monks, Bankrupt Monks: The English Cistercians in the Thirteenth Century’, Catholic Historical Review 49, 3 (1963), pp. 341ff.

  59 William M. McGovern Jr, ‘The Enforcement of Informal Contracts in the Later Middle Ages’, California Law Review 59, 5 (1971), pp. 1145ff.

  60 F. R. (Fritz Redlich), ‘A Fourteenth Century Business History’, Business History Review 39, 2 (1965), pp. 261ff.

  61 Pamela Nightingale, ‘Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England’, Economic History Review 43, 4 (1990), pp. 573–4.

  62 Anton Englert, ‘Large Cargo Vessels in Danish Waters 1000–1250: Archaeological Evidence for Professional Merchant Seafaring before the Hanseatic Period’, in C. Beltrame (ed.), Boats, Ships and Shipyards (Oxford, 2003), pp. 273ff.

  63 Jacques Heers, La Naissance du capitalisme au Moyen ge (Paris, 2012), pp. 229–30.

  64 For a full account of these new complexities, see Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London, 2002), esp. pp. 12–42.

  65 Eric Knibbs, Ansgar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg–Bremen (Farnham, 2011), p. 135 for Charlemagne; p. 153 for archbishop; p. 207 for Rimbert’s role.

  66 Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London, 2004), p. 22 for scale of forgeries; p. 25 for John of Salisbury; pp. 36–7 for Crowland; pp. 156ff. for Austria; pp. 70ff. for Cambridge.

  67 McAuley, ‘Canon Law’, pp. 490–97.

  68 James Bruce Ross (tr. and ed.), Galbert of Bruges: The Murder of Charles the Good (New York, 2005), p. 160 for the ‘murderers’; p. 192 for the body; p. 204 for the law.

  69 R. C. Van Caenegem, ‘Customary Law in Twelfth-Century Flanders’, in Ludo Milis et al. (eds.), Law, History, the Low Countries and Europe (London, 1994), pp. 97ff.

  70 R. C. Van Caenegem, ‘Roman Law in the Southern Netherlands’, in Milis et al., Law, History, the Low Countries and Europe, pp. 123ff.

  71 Marc Bouchat, ‘Procedures Juris Ordine Observato et Juris Ordine Non Observato dans les arbitrages du diocèse de Liège au XIIIe siècle’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiend
enis 60 (1992), pp. 377ff.

  72 Oscar Gelderblom, ‘The Resolution of Commercial Conflicts in Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam (1250–1650)’, in Debin Ma and Jan Luiten van Zanden (eds.), Law and Long-Term Economic Change (Stanford, 2011), pp. 246–7 for Veckinchusen case.

  73 Wendy J. Turner, ‘Silent Testimony: Emotional Displays and Lapses of Memory as Indicators of Mental Instability in Medieval English Investigations’, in Wendy J. Turner (ed.), Madness in Medieval Law and Custom (Leiden, 2010), p. 81.

  74 James R. King, ‘The Mysterious Case of the “Mad” Rector’, in Turner, Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, pp. 70ff.

  7. OVERSEEING NATURE

  1 Richard Vaughan (tr.), The Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris (Stroud, 1993), p. 187.

  2 J. M. Bos, B. van Geel and J. P. Pals, ‘Waterland 1000–2000 AD’, in Hilary H. Birks et al. (eds.), The Cultural Landscape Past, Present and Future (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 321ff.

  3 J. C. Besteman, ‘The pre-Urban Development of Medemblik: From an Early Medieval Trading Centre to a Medieval Town’, in H. A. Heidinga and H. H. van Regteren Altena (eds.), Medemblik and Monnickendam: Aspects of Medieval Urbanization in Northern Holland (Amsterdam, 1989), esp. pp. 21–8.

  4 William H. TeBrake, ‘Taming the Waterwolf: Hydraulic Engineering and Water Management in the Netherlands during the Middle Ages’, Technology and Culture 43, 3 (2002), pp. 475ff.

  5 Jill Eddison, ‘The Purpose, Construction and Operation of a 13th Century Watercourse: The Rhee, Romney Marsh, Kent’, in Anthony Long, Stephen Hipkin and Helen Clarke (eds.), Romney Marsh: Coastal and Landscape Change through the Ages (Oxford, 2002).

  6 Alan Mayhew, Rural Settlement and Farming in Germany (London, 1973), pp. 47–9, 148; G. P. van de Ven (ed.), Man-Made Lowlands: History of Water Management and Land Reclamation in the Netherlands (Utrecht, 2004), pp. 98–100, 139–40.

  7 C. T. Smith, ‘Dutch Peat Digging and the Origin of the Norfolk Broads’, Geographical Journal 132, 1 (1966), pp. 71–2.

  8 On this and the ‘lake phase’, see Petra J. E. M. van Dam, ‘Sinking Peat Bogs: Environmental Change in Holland 1350–1550’, Environmental History 6, 1 (2001), pp. 32ff.