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

by Michael Pye

  9 Tim Soens, ‘Floods and Money: Funding Drainage and Flood Control in Coastal Flanders from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries’, Continuity and Change 26, 3 (2011), pp. 333ff.

  10 J. M. Bos, ‘A Fourteenth Century Industrial Complex at Monnickendam’, in Heidinga and Altena, Medemblik and Monnickendam, p. 59.

  11 Bas van Bavel and Oscar Gelderbloom, ‘Cleanliness in the Dutch Golden Age’, Past and Present 205 (2009), pp. 41ff.

  12 James H. Barrett, Alison M. Locker and Callum M. Roberts, ‘“Dark Age Economics” Revisited: The English Fish Bone Evidence AD 600–1600’, Antiquity 78 (2004), pp. 618 ff.

  13 James H. Barrett, Roelf P. Beukens and Rebecca A. Nicholson, ‘Diet and Ethnicity during the Viking Colonization of Northern Scotland: Evidence from Fish Bones and Table Carbon Isotopes’, Antiquity 75 (2000), pp. 145ff. Compare James H. Barrett et al., ‘Archaeo-ichthyological Evidence for Long-Term Socio-economic Trends in Northern Scotland: 3500 BC to AD 1500’, Journal of Archaeological Science 26, pp. 353ff.

  14 Kevin Crossley-Holland (tr.), The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford, 1984), p. 223.

  15 Astri Riddervold, ‘The Importance of Herring in the Daily Life of the Coastal Population of Norway’, in Harlan Walker (ed.), Staple Foods (London, 1990), pp. 189–90.

  16 Sophia Perdikaris, ‘From Chiefly Provisioning to Commercial Fishery: Long-Term Economic Change in Arctic Norway’, World Archaeology 30, 3 (1999), pp. 397–9.

  17 Carsten Jahnke, ‘The Medieval Herring Fishery in the Western Baltic’, in Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (eds.), Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic 900–1850 (Leiden, 2009), pp. 172–6.

  18 Richard C. Hoffmann, ‘Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe’, American Historical Review 101, 3 (1996), pp. 631ff.

  19 Jean Desse and Nathalie Desse-Berset, ‘Pêches locales, côtières ou lointaines: le poisson au menu des parisiens du Grand Louvre du 14ème au 18ème siècles’, Anthropozoologica 16 (1992), pp. 119–26.

  20 Oliver H. Creighton, Designs upon the Land: Élite landscapes of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 114–19.

  21 Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy (Chicago, 1998), pp. 123–4.

  22 Naomi Sykes, ‘Animal Bones and Animal Parks’, in Robert Liddiard (ed.), The Medieval Park: New Perspectives (Macclesfield, 2007), pp. 50–51.

  23 Aleksander Pluskowski, ‘The Social Construction of Medieval Park Ecosystems: An Interdisciplinary Perspective’, in Liddiard, Medieval Park, pp. 63ff.

  24 Richard C. Hoffmann, ‘Fishing for Sport in Medieval Europe: New Evidence’, Speculum 60, 4 (1985), pp. 884–5 for Perceval; pp. 887–8 for Wallace.

  25 Christopher K. Currie, ‘The Early History of the Carp and Its Economic Significance in England’, Agricultural History Review 39, 2 (1991), pp. 97–107.

  26 Thomas Hale, A compleat body of husbandry, II (London, 1758), p. 116.

  27 See Dries Tys, ‘Walraversijde, Another Kettle of Fish? Dynamics and Identity of a Late Medieval Coastal Settlement in a proto-Capitalistic Landscape’, and on material culture Marnix Pieters, ‘The Archaeology of Fishery, Trade and Piracy: The Material Environment of Walraversijde and Other Late Medieval and Early Modern Fishing Communities along the Southern North Sea’, in Marnix Pieters, Frans Verhaege and Glenn Geveart (eds.), Fishery, Trade and Piracy (Brussels, 2006).

  8. SCIENCE AND MONEY

  1 Ivo of Narbonne’s letter is in C. Raymond Beazley, The Texts and Versions of John de Plano Carpini and William of Rubruquis as printed for the first time by Hakluyt in 1598 (London 1903), p. 41. Hygiene and pigtails are in the Journal of John of Plano Carpini, in Beazley, Texts and Versions, p. 109; Hakluyt’s translations and his idea of editing may be troublesome, but his verve is irresistible.

  2 Beazley, Texts and Versions, p. 203, lines 25–8.

  3 Ibid., p. 40 for eating women.

  4 Quoted in Sophia Menache, ‘Tartars, Jews, Saracens and the Jewish-Mongol “Plot” of 1241’, in History 81, 263 (July 1996), p. 324 for ‘infliction’; p. 321 for ‘lions or bears’.

  5 Robert Marshall, Storm from the East: From Genghis Khan to Khublai Khan (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 91–6.

  6 Beazley, Texts and Versions, p. 114, line 13, for hunters; p. 122, line 17, for skulls; p. 188, line 8, for lack of cities.

  7 Marshall, Storm from the East, p. 132 for fishermen; p. 133 for evil spirits.

  8 Beazley, Texts and Versions, p. 126, line 11, for spies; p. 126, line 28, for ‘policy’; p. 126, line 38, for ‘devils’; p. 125, line 26, for ‘not any one kingdom’; p. 138, line 3, for chapels.

  9 Menache, ‘Tartars, Jews, Saracens’, p. 325.

  10 Ibid., p. 334 for Messiah; p. 332 for ‘enclosed people’; p. 336 for David; p. 337 for rumours.

  11 For a discussion of this, see Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom (Turnhout, 2008), pp. 213ff.

  12 Benjamin Hudson, North Sea Studies (Dublin, 2006), pp. 188ff.

  13 Davide Bigalli, I Tartari e l’Apocalisse (Firenze, 1971), pp. 110–14.

  14 Stewart C. Easton, Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science (Oxford, 1952), p. 176 for revelation; p. 32 for diamonds; pp. 114–15 for cheapness; pp. 87–8 for letter to Pope; p. 112 for list of inventions.

  15 Ernst Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Karolini aevi, vol. II (Berlin, 1895), letters 16–21, p. 43.

  16 J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae cursus completus: sive biblioteca universalis, vol. 172 (Paris, 1854), cap. IV, col. 76, for rain and cap. VII, col. 77, for blood rain and why it is red. For a fuller discussion, see Paul Edward Dutton, ‘Observations on Early Medieval Weather in General, Bloody Rain in Particular’, in Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (eds.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 177ff.

  17 Charles Burnett (ed.), Quaestiones Naturales, in Adelard of Bath: Conversations with His Nephew (Cambridge, 1998), C1 at p. 92 and C4 at p. 96. The translations are mine.

  18 Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1923), vol. II, p. 39.

  19 See Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York, 1998), pp. 109ff.

  20 Thorndike, History of Magic, vol. II, p. 24 for ‘modern’ attitudes.

  21 See Steven P. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and the Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden, 2001), vol. I, pp. 11, 78–9, 105.

  22 Johannes Fried (tr. Denise Modigliani), Les Fruits de l’Apocalyspe: Origines de la pensée scientifique au Moyen ge (Paris, 2004), pp. 54–5.

  23 Devra Kunin (tr.) and Carl Phelpstead (ed.), A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr (London, 2001), p. 11.

  24 Quoted in A. George Molland, ‘Colonizing the World for Mathematics: The Diversity of Medieval Strategies’, in Edward Grant and John E. Murdoch (eds.), Mathematics and Its Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1987), p. 50.

  25 Thorndike, History of Magic, vol. II, p. 541.

  26 Ibid., vol. I, p. 726, and vol. II, p. 361.

  27 Molland, ‘Colonizing the World’, in Grant and Murdoch, Mathematics and Its Applications, p. 47.

  28 Roger Bacon, Opus Tertium, in J. S. Brewer (ed.), Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, vol. I (London, 1859), pp. 51–2.

  29 David C. Lindberg, ‘Roger Bacon and the Origins of Perspectiva in the West’, in Grant and Murdoch, Mathematics and Its Applications, pp. 254, 258–9.

  30 Angelo Crescini, Il Problema Metodologico alle Origini della Scienza Moderna (Rome, 1972), pp. 308–9.

  31 Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge, 1998), p. 143; pp. 166–73 for Buridan.

  32 J. A. Giles (ed.), William of Malmesbury’s Chronicle (London, 1847), pp. 251ff.; cf. Maria Elena Ruggerini, ‘Tales of Flight in Old Norse and Medieval English Te
xts’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 2 (2006), pp. 222ff.

  33 Quoted in R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1992), p. 65 (for the importance of this book, see infra).

  34 Ibid., p. 147; I have slightly adjusted the translation.

  35 Southern, Robert Grosseteste, is the basis for this account: p. 64 for humble origins; p. 17 for his Greek. Grosseteste’s life before he became a bishop has been hotly disputed – if he was chancellor at Oxford, it is unlikely to have been in the years when such an honour might be taken as evidence of an earlier career in Paris and Oxford, for example – but Southern’s account seems more convincing than that in D. A. Callus (ed.), Robert Grosseteste: Scholar and Bishop (Oxford, 1955). For a summary of the arguments, see James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford, 2000), pp. 19ff.

  36 N. M. Schulman, ‘Husband, Father, Bishop? Grosseteste in Paris’, Speculum 72, 2, pp. 340ff.

  37 ‘amico carissimo’: Grosseteste to Willelmus Avernus 1239, letter LXXVIII, p. 250, in Henry Richards Luard (ed.), Roberti Grosseteste … Epistolae (London, 1861).

  38 McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, pp. 20–21.

  39 A. C. Crombie, ‘Grosseteste’s Position in the History of Science’, in D. A. Callus (ed.), Robert Grosseteste: Scholar and Bishop (Oxford, 1955), pp. 104ff.; and for a fuller account, A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100–1700 (Oxford, 1953), which is, as the author acknowledges in later editions, ‘a moment of enthusiasm’.

  40 Quoted in Thorndike, History of Magic, vol. II, p. 441.

  41 Crescini, Problema Metodologico, p. 266n.

  42 James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath (eds.), Temporis Partus Masculus, in Works of Francis Bacon: Philosophical Works (London, 1858), p. 118.

  43 R. H. and M. A. Rouse, ‘Expenses of a Mid Thirteenth-Century Paris Scholar: Gerard of Abbeville’, in Lesley Smith and Benedicta Ward (eds.), Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1992), pp. 207ff.

  44 Thorndike, History of Magic, vol. II, pp. 172–3.

  45 P. Glorieux, La Faculté des Arts et ses maîtres au XIIIème siècle (Paris, 1971), p. 56.

  46 Elizabeth Mornet, ‘Pauperes scolares: Essai sur la condition matérielle des étudiants scandinaves dans les Universités aux XIVème et XVème siècles’, Le Moyen ge 84 (1978), pp. 54ff.; p. 75 for straw rules; p. 55 for records and bursae.

  47 Alan B. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c1500 (Berkeley, 1988), p. 301.

  48 Rainer Christopher Schwinges, ‘Student Education, Student Life’, in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, vol. I: Universities in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 236–8; William J. Courtenay, Parisian Scholars in the Early Fourteenth Century: A Social Portrait (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 9, 36 for the computus of 1329–30, and Kaye, Economy and Nature, p. 7 for the estimate of time spent.

  49 Cobban, Medieval English Universities, pp. 146, 159, 149.

  50 Quoted in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ‘Mobility’, in Ridder-Symoens, History of the University, p. 282.

  51 James A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession (Chicago, 2008), pp. 122–3. I have adjusted the translation slightly.

  52 Courtenay, Parisian Scholars, pp. 82–3.

  53 Virpi Mäkinen, Property Rights in the Late Medieval Discussion on Franciscan Poverty (Leuven, 2001), p. 22.

  54 A. G. Traver, ‘Rewriting History? The Parisian Secular Masters’ Apologia of 1254’, in Peter Denley (ed.), History of Universities, vol. XV: 1997–1999, pp. 9–45.

  55 James M. Murray, Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism 1280–1390 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 178ff.

  56 Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 209, 215, 216.

  57 André Goddu, ‘The Impact of Ockham’s Reading of the “Physics” on the Mertonians and Parisian Terminists’, Early Science and Medicine 6, 3 (2001), esp. pp. 214–18.

  58 For a discussion of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus and others, see Amleto Spicciani, La mercatura e la formazione del prezzo nella iflessione teologica medioevale (Rome, 1977).

  59 ‘… solum mensuram debitam non excedat’, in ibid., p. 267, text of Olivi, Tractatus de emptione et venditione, lines 85–6.

  60 Spicciani, Mercatura e la formazione, p. 158.

  61 Ibid., p. 179.

  62 Matthias Flacius, Catalogus testium veritatis (Basle, 1556), p. 876.

  63 Lucien Gillard, Nicole Oresme, économiste, Revue Historique 279, 1/565 (1988), pp. 3ff., and Marshall Clagett, ‘Nicole Oresme and Medieval Scientific Thought’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108, 4 (1964), pp. 298ff.

  9. DEALERS RULE

  1 Joe Flatman, Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts (London, 2009), pp. 81ff.

  2 Kasimirs Slaski, in Albert d’Haenens, Europe of the North Sea and the Baltic: The World of the Hanse (Brussels, 1984), p. 160.

  3 D’Haenens, Europe of the North Sea, p. 201.

  4 For the topography of early Bergen, see Edward C. Harris, ‘Bergen, Bryggen 1972: The Evolution of a Harbour Front’, World Archaeology 5, 1 (1973), pp. 69–70, and Asbjørn E. Herteig, ‘The Excavation of Bryggen, Bergen, Norway’, in Rupert Bruce-Mitford (ed.), Recent Archaeological Excavations in Europe (London, 1975), pp. 65–89.

  5 Moira Buxton, ‘Fish-Eating in Medieval England’, in Harlan Walker (ed.), Fish: Food from the Waters (Totnes, 1998), p. 54.

  6 Oscar Albert Johnsen, ‘Le Commerce et la navigation en Norvège au Moyen ge’, Revue Historique 178, 3 (1936), pp. 385ff.; Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, Ties and Tensions (Hilversum, 2008), pp. 38–41; Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1970), pp. 49–50; Knut Helle, ‘Norwegian Foreign Policy and the Maid of Norway’, Scottish Historical Review 69/188, 2 (1990), pp. 147–8; Nils Hybel, ‘The Grain Trade in Northern Europe before 1350’, Economic History Review 55, 2 (2002), pp. 226–7.

  7 Fritz Rörig, The Medieval Town (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 32–6.

  8 Mike Burkhardt, ‘Testing a Traditional Certainty: The Social Standing of the Bergenfahrer in Late Medieval Lübeck’, in Geir Atle Ersland and Marco Trebbi (eds.), Neue Studien zum Archiv und zur Sprache der Hanseaten (Bergen, 2008), pp. 84ff.

  9 Johannes Schildhauer, The Hansa: History and Culture (Leipzig, 1985), p. 104.

  10 Dollinger, German Hansa, p. 183; Schildhauer, Hansa, p. 104, and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘Hansards and the “Other”’, in Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks (eds.), The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), pp. 158–9.

  11 Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, Ties and Tensions, p. 11.

  12 Herteig, Excavation of Bryggen, Bergen, pp. 74–9.

  13 Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, 1994), p. 126.

  14 Sigrid Samset Mygland, Children in Medieval Bergen: An Archaeological Analysis of Child-Related Artefacts (Bergen, 2007).

  15 Haenens, Europe of the North Sea, p. 197.

  16 Mike Burkhardt, ‘Policy, Business, Privacy: Contacts Made by the Merchants of the Hanse Kontor in Bergen in the Late Middle Ages’, in Hanno Brand (ed.), Trade, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange: Continuity and Change in the North Sea Area and the Baltic c.1350–1750 (Hilversum, 2005), p. 148.

  17 Ibid., pp. 140, 148.

  18 Frederich Bruns, Die Lübecker Bergenfarhrer und ihre Chronistik: Quellen zur Geschichte der Lübecker Bergenfarhrer, vol. 1: Urkundliche Quellen (Berlin, 1900), p. 15, will 14.

  19 Ibid., p. 16, will 16.

  20 Ibid., p. 64, will 94.

  21 Klaus Friedland, ‘Maritime Law and Piracy: Advantages and Inconveniences of Shipping in the Baltic’, in A. I. McInnes, T. Riis and F. G. Pedersen (eds.), Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and the Baltic States c1350–c1700 (East Linton, 2000), pp. 32–5.

  22 Johnsen, ‘Commerce et la navigation’, pp. 394–7.

  23 Rhiman A. Rotz, ‘The Lübeck Uprising of 1408 and the Decline of the Hanseat
ic League’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 121, 1 (1977), pp. 1–45.

  24 Text in Dollinger, German Hansa, document 26, pp. 411–13.

  25 Sebastian I. Sobecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 32, 140–42.

  26 Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘“Alle goede coepluyden”: Strategies in the Scandinavian Trade Politics of Amsterdam and Lübeck c1440–1560’, in Hanno Brand and Leos Müller (eds.), The Dynamics of Economic Culture in the North Sea and Baltic Region (Hilversum, 2007), p. 96.

  27 Dick E. H. de Boer, ‘Looking for Security: Merchant Networks and Risk Reduction Strategies’, in Hanno Brand (ed.), The German Hanse in Past and Present Europe (Groningen, 2007), pp. 52–5.

  28 Wubs-Mrozewicz, Traders, Ties and Tensions, p. 111n.45.

  29 James M. Murray, ‘Bruges as Hansestadt’, in Wubs-Mrozewicz and Jenks, Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, pp. 183–5.

  30 Burkhardt, ‘Policy, Business, Privacy’, in Brand, Trade, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange, p. 145.

  31 Dollinger, German Hansa, pp. 78–81.

  32 David Ditchburn, ‘Bremen Piracy and Scottish Periphery: The North Sea World in the 1440s’, in McInnes et al., Ships, Guns and Bibles, pp. 3–8.

  33 D’Haenens, Europe of the North Sea, p. 143.

  34 Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, 1994), pp. 109–29 for a detailed development of this argument.

  35 David Gaimster, ‘A Parallel History: The Archaeology of Hanseatic Urban Culture in the Baltic c.1200–1600’, World Archaeology 37, 3 (2005), pp. 412–19.

  36 Anders Reisnert, in Andris Caune and Ieva Ose (eds.), The Hansa Town Riga as Mediator between East and West (Riga, 2009), pp. 210–11, 219.

  37 Mike Burkhardt, ‘One Hundred Years of Thriving Commerce at a Major English Seaport’, in Brand and Müller, Dynamics of Economic Culture, pp. 81–2.

  38 Wubs-Mrozewicz, ‘“Alle goede coepluyden”’, in Brand and Müller, Dynamics of Economic Culture, p. 86.

  10. LOVE AND CAPITAL