The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Anyone who knows anything about the Viking raids is likely to see striking similarities between the attacks by the Saxons and their neighbours on late Roman Britain, followed by their conquest of parts of Britain, and the activities of the Danes and Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries. Although, as will be seen, Viking ship construction had developed rather further, the combination of piracy, violent attacks on the shoreline and subsequent settlement were a continuing feature of the North Sea world over many centuries. The Viking age marks an accentuation of something long present. Moreover, Scandinavia was often the source of the fleets that ravaged the shores of northern France, and sometimes penetrated a good way down the complex river system of the Rhine delta as well. The best-documented attack was that of a Danish king called Hygelac, which occurred between 516 and 534, targeting the territories of the Franks; the raiders carried away goods and people, but the Frankish king, Theodoric of the Merovingian dynasty, despatched his son with an army that attacked the Danes, apparently at sea; the Franks were victorious and Hygelac was killed, and all the booty and captives were supposedly recovered.22 This conflict was long remembered, for it featured in the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written at least a hundred and maybe 400 years after Hygelac’s raid: after killing the monster Grendel the hero Beowulf was presented with the neck-ring worn on his last raid by Hygelac, who had been his kinsman: ‘I am Hygelac’s kinsman, one of his hall-troop. When I was younger, I had great triumphs.’ The poet recalled the tragedy of Hygelac’s death in ‘Frisia’, in a battle where Beowulf fought as well, escaping from danger by swimming away loaded with a great pile of armour that he had seized as booty (all his achievements verged on the superhuman).23

  Something is missing from this account of contacts across the North Sea. What has been presented so far is a history of violent contact followed by settlement on a scale sufficient to wipe out most traces of the culture of Roman Britannia. Even the boats that have been unearthed are generally warships. Yet, as the ship from Bruges indicates, despite its early date, cargoes moved back and forth as well as raiders. The raiders themselves often passed the goods they had seized through markets. Indeed, it was because they craved products which they could not easily obtain at home that they set out on pirate raids. Some of their grave goods indicate how much they valued the manufactures of the Roman cities.24 A commercial network linking the lands facing the North Sea did, as will be seen, emerge by the seventh century, but it would be hard to argue that such a network already existed in the age of the Saxon raids, a period that saw the decline of towns as centres of trade and industry or, to put this more dramatically, the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.25

  II

  The arrival of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in Britain not surprisingly saw the introduction of their practice of ceremonial boat burial. The most impressive example, even though all that remained of the boat’s fabric were its nails, is the lavish Sutton Hoo ship burial, excavated in Suffolk in 1939. The burial took place in the early seventh century, and shows traces of Christian influence, so it seems to document a period when Christianity was gradually impregnating a society that still abided by pagan values – indeed, the lavish ceremony of ship burial is a clear indication that pagan practices still prevailed. The site was probably the tomb of the powerful East Anglian king Rædwald; by the time of his death he appears to have established himself as the leading Anglo-Saxon king among the many competing for power in southern England. Some years before he died, he did receive baptism, but he also maintained a pagan shrine, so that his attachment to his new faith seems to have been opportunistic, an attempt to curry favour with the Christian king of Kent, not far away. Among the grave goods was Byzantine silver plate. Twenty-seven metres long and four metres wide, this was a large ship that had undergone repair in the past, to judge from the impressions left in the soil by its timbers. The strakes used in its clinker construction were not single planks of wood but were composite strips made out of several lengths of wood bonded to one another, a technique that appears here for the first time in northern Europe, though there is no way of knowing at what stage between the Nydam boats and Sutton Hoo the method was introduced. The bow and stern posts were raised an impressive four metres above the level of the keel. If there was a mast step it was apparently taken away, to allow for the insertion amidships of a burial chamber for the king. Unfortunately other finds from the same period, in Jutland as well as East Anglia, still leave the question of propulsion up in the air. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that sails were used at least as an auxiliary source of power when wind conditions were suitable. Since the use of wind would have made journeys much shorter, the presence or absence of sails raises significant questions about the ease of contact between the new lands settled by the Anglo-Saxons and their original homeland. It is even possible that sailing skills known to earlier generations were lost, because the need for cargo ships powered by the wind was much reduced as Roman power and Roman cities contracted, and as demand for luxury goods plummeted; one result of the collapse of Roman authority was the abandonment of carefully constructed harbours with quaysides, and the use instead of beaches for loading goods and passengers. And ships drawn up on sand would need to be constructed differently from those that remained afloat – their keel, for instance, should not be too prominent or else they were likely to overbalance.26

  The history of Anglo-Saxon shipping can be reconstructed from evidence other than ship burials. One notable feature of Anglo-Saxon literature is the survival of written accounts of journeys at sea. Allusive, alliterative poems celebrated voyages and voyagers. In ‘The Wanderer’ an exile recounts the hard life of one who could not return home:

  Ond ic hean þonan wod wintercearig ofer waþema gebind …

  Wretched I went thence,

  winter-wearied, over the waves’ bound;

  dreary I sought hall of a gold-giver,

  where far or near I might find

  him who in meadhall might take heed of me,

  furnish comfort to a man friendless,

  win me cheer.27

  Another powerful poem, ‘The Seafarer’, one that moved Ezra Pound to produce his own eccentric version, tells of the fear every traveller must experience before setting out:

  Forþan cnyssaðnu heortan geþohtas þæt ic hean streamas …

  Now come thoughts

  knocking my heart, of the high waves,

  clashing salt-crests, I am to cross again.

  Mind-lust maddens, moves as I breathe

  soul to set out, seek out the way

  to a far folk-land flood-beyond.

  For no man is so mood-proud,

  so thoroughly equipped, so quick to do,

  so strong in his youth, or with so staunch a lord

  that before seafaring he does not fear a little

  whither the Lord shall lead him in the end.28

  Whether this poem records a real sea voyage, as has been claimed, or whether it conveys an underlying Christian message, awareness of the sea and its dangers became a common theme in the lively literature of the Anglo-Saxons. They remained conscious of their maritime heritage.

  The Beowulf poet was also well acquainted with the sea, and with the Danish lands from which Hygelac hailed; Beowulf was a ‘Geat’, the term the author used for the Danes, for the oldest English epic poem is not a poem about England. The story begins with a boat burial, though, unlike those that have been excavated, this one took place at sea; and for all one knows this was the favourite way of honouring someone whose grand status earned him, or her, a boat burial:

  A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,

  ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.

  They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,

  laid out by the mast, amidships,

  the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures

  were piled upon him, and precious gear.

  I never heard before of a ship so well furbished

  with battl
e-tackle, bladed weapons

  and coats of mail …

  And they set a gold standard up

  high above his head, and let him drift

  to wind and tide, bewailing him

  And mourning their loss.29

  There are also eloquent descriptions of warships ready to leave harbour, ‘their wood-wreathed ship’ and ‘steep-hulled boat’, in Seamus Heaney’s sensitive translation, which ‘flew like a bird until her curved prow had covered the distance’.30 And these vessels carried sails:

  Right away the mast was rigged with its sea-shawl;

  sail-ropes were tightened, timbers drummed

  and stiff winds kept the wave-crosser

  skimming ahead; as she heaved forward,

  her foamy neck was fleet and buoyant,

  a lapped prow loping over currents,

  until finally the Geats caught sight of coastline

  and familiar cliffs. The keel reared up,

  wind lifted it home, it hit on the land.31

  Then a harbour master came to greet the ship and ensured that it was fastened to the beach with its anchor cables, ‘in case a backwash might catch the hull and carry it away’. This was a world in which fear of the sea was countered by a sense that the sea could be mastered, with the help of the great wooden seabirds that the English and the Danes knew so well how to build – and how to describe. It was also a society in which the exchange of gifts between people of high status sealed personal relationships – Beowulf’s neck-ring was a gift from a queen. And it was a society in which raiding was an accepted reality, and showing prowess in a raid was a way to win wealth but also a way to win honour.

  III

  Movement across the North Sea was not conducted solely by warships. As early as the sixth century, ship-borne merchants were setting out from an area broadly defined as ‘Frisia’, stretching from southern Jutland down the marshy, boggy coasts of northern Germany and the Netherlands. It was not an area that an army could easily hope to conquer, with its creeks and inlets, its rivers and streams, and its patches of land that lay perilously close to sea level; land was lost and gained, for the delta was in constant flux as riverbeds moved across space and as new waterways carved themselves into the shifting alluvial soil. The best hope for anyone trying to live there was to settle in the terpen, the mounds that rose above the waters, and some of these evolved into ports, or vici, from which archaeologists have recovered gold and silver coins that reveal how the terpen were by no means isolated communities. ‘The sea’, it has been observed, ‘was omni-present’: water, water everywhere. Yet the water offered valuable resources, such as salt and fish, while the use of what dry land there was for pasture enabled the Frisians to trade in the wool and leather that became standard cargo aboard their ships. Cattle were as important to them as boats, for they followed a diet rich in meat and milk. The Frisians were both merchants and peasants, exploiting such local resources as there were, while building links that extended further and further afield.32 To build their ships they required plenty of wood, and that had to be brought down from the Rhine, along with grain and other staple goods they found it hard to produce. Thus the early Frisians provide an excellent example of the way that an unbalanced local economy and the necessity of specializing stimulate trade. They began to trade not in order to accumulate wealth and to live in luxury, but in order to ensure their day-to-day survival. Their success in guaranteeing survival provided the basis for more ambitious trading voyages that, as will be seen, offered wine, textiles and other finished products to consumers around the North Sea.33

  This was the obstinate land, unwelcoming to conquerors, in which King Hygelac had met his death. This region had earlier been the home of Angles and other peoples who had invaded what became England, and the Frisian language remains the closest Germanic language to Anglo-Saxon and indeed modern English. The inhabitants, up to and beyond their conversion from paganism, were regarded as ‘ferocious’ and lived largely free of outside interference until the Frankish ‘Mayor of the Palace’ (and to all intents the ruler of the Merovingian kingdom), Charles Martel, launched an ambitious campaign against that ‘most fearsome race’, the Frisians.34 But Christianity was already gaining a purchase in Frisia, for the inhabitants were evangelized by an early archbishop of York, Wilfred, late in the seventh century, while another missionary, Willibrord, set out from Ireland to complete the conversion of the Frisians at the very end of the century. The fact that the missionary campaigns were initiated in the British Isles already provides proof that there was traffic between Frisia and lands across the North Sea.35

  The traffic went both ways: the Venerable Bede, writing in the north of England, knew that in 678 a noble war captive from Northumbria named Imma had suffered the ignominy of being taken down to London to be sold to a Frisian trader. The merchant was kind-hearted enough to allow him to go and seek ransom money in Kent, which Imma managed to do. This way the Frisian was not left out of pocket when Imma was released.36 By the late eighth century, on the eve of the first Viking attacks, there were plenty of Frisian merchants living in England, notably at York, Ipswich and Hamwih, now known as Southampton, as well as across northern France and along the lower Rhine. Silver coins minted in Frisia have turned up repeatedly in eastern England and gold coins minted in Frisia have been found at Kaupang near Oslo and Jelling in Jutland; these date from the 670s. Brooches from Scandinavia have been found in Frisia, and brooches from Frisia in Scandinavia.37 A particularly important centre of Frisian trade lay at Dorestad near Utrecht, within the Rhine delta, and another major trading hub existed by about 600 a few miles upriver beyond Boulogne, at a place known as Quentovic. Some of the Frisian bases in and around Flanders had been Roman trading centres, while others were new, or at least revived, ports of trade. Here one could buy wool and woollen cloth, hides and slaves; down the rivers feeding into the North Sea came high-grade Rhenish pottery, glassware and good-quality millstones.38

  No country can match the Netherlands for the intermingling of sea and land, and the major Frisian port at Dorestad linked the maritime to the terrestrial world. Although it already existed in some form in the late Roman period, Dorestad experienced particularly fast growth during the early Middle Ages, so that it encompassed 250 hectares by the end of the eighth century. Its merchant houses, long, hall-like structures surrounded by a palisade containing a well and a refuse pit, were joined to the rivers that flowed past the town by lengthy wooden jetties, and here barrels or jars filled with Rhineland wine were loaded for transit to small ports along the coast that stretched northwards towards Jutland and into the Baltic as far as Gotland and eastern Sweden, where fragments of Rhenish pottery and glass abound. Eighty per cent of the pottery recovered at Dorestad is not local but foreign, predominantly Rhenish. Nonetheless, the Frisian towns, including Dorestad, were modest-looking places, for all their wealth: ‘monumentally they were far from impressive; Dorestad would have looked very utilitarian to a visitor from Cologne, or maybe even one from Tours, though it was more active as an urban centre than the latter by far.’39 Ships travelling from Cologne to Denmark in the early ninth century passed through Dorestad, which functioned as the key link between the Rhineland and the open North Sea. Dorestad was also the home of an exceptionally important mint during the eighth and early ninth centuries, which makes sense, as its prominence in trade brought plenty of bullion to the town; indeed, it became the most important mint in the realms of Charlemagne, who reformed the currency of his empire, abandoning the minting of gold in favour of silver, which was much easier to obtain.40 Dorestad, Quentovic and other towns benefited from the presence of Frankish royal officials once Carolingian power had been imposed on the region; and the high point of their fortunes coincided with the high point of the fortunes of the Carolingian dynasty. As, towards the middle of the ninth century, the Carolingian empire fragmented, the importance of these towns waned.41 This suggests that one of the best sources of profit was the court of the Carolingian rulers th
emselves, who are known to have welcomed other merchants, such as Jews from the Mediterranean, and whose attempts to project themselves as a new generation of Roman emperors were expressed through luxury and magnificence.

  The Frisians were not just masters of the trade networks of northern Europe; they were also expert navigators. Judging from their coins, they built round-bottomed ships that lay low in the water but were suitable for medium-range voyages across the open sea, all the way to England. These were possibly the ancestors of the late medieval cargo ship known as the hulk. Ships sailing closer to the shore or up and down the rivers were flat-bottomed and had higher sides, resembling another type of late medieval cargo ship, the cog. Beyond the schematic images on coins, there is the evidence of a Frisian ship that was unearthed at Utrecht in 1939; it has now been dated to the high point of Frisian commercial activity, around 790, using Carbon 14 analysis. This ship, which resembled the banana-shaped boats shown on Frisian coins, was built out of oak, and it was nearly eighteen metres long; its maximum width was four metres, with a displacement of about ten tons. What sort of mast and sail it possessed has been much debated, and without an answer to this question it is impossible to be sure that this ship could cope with the open sea.42 This, then, was a proto-hulk. But Frisian coins found in Birka, in Sweden, also portray flat-bottomed cogs with big central masts, rigging and large square sails. Whichever types of ships Frisian sailors used, they preferred to hug the shore as much as possible, taking shelter in the Wadden Sea amid the North Frisian islands when bound for Denmark and beyond. This way they could make the voyage all the way to Ribe in south-western Denmark without heading further out to sea than Heligoland. Heading west too there was the shelter of islands that have now become part of the European landmass, in what is now the Dutch province of Zeeland; following this course, they could travel from Dorestad almost all the way to Quentovic. They seem to have travelled in convoy when they were out on the open sea, and they would not set out in winter: sea journeys were strictly seasonal. Their dominant position in the trade of the North Sea led contemporaries to call the waters between Frisia and England the ‘Frisian Sea’.43