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

by Michael Pye

  Our very separate identity turns out to be an error, even a lie.

  Mind you, all the connections across Europe, the links that crossed religious and official and language frontiers, can also be celebrated in very dubious ways. The Vikings are hailed as the first Europeans, at least by some French scholars, breaking cultural divisions as well as breaking heads,47 and made into a foundation myth for our flabby, neo-liberal Europe. In this version of history Charlemagne, autocratic, imperial, a tycoon of the slave trade and aggressively brutal to his neighbours, becomes the patron saint of a fairly quiet customs union because at least he tried to rule both North and South. I do not think he would be flattered. The easy flow of ideas between individuals, the shared culture of Europeans, is turned by the magic of grant-giving into a kind of infrastructure for particular central institutions whose main characteristic is that they seem to take no notice at all of the easy flow of ideas that already exists between individuals who disagree with them.

  That is why we need to try to tell this story straight. It is a way of thinking again about who we really are.

  We have to get away from the raucous seaside, the holiday place that Cecil Warburton knew; the North Sea is much more than the water between a thousand beaches. It seems minor, it seems grey, but it has a furious and brilliant history. We can start with the stones on the beach at Domburg and ask: who brought them there and why, and what did they think they were doing?

  1.

  The invention of money

  The Roman army on manoeuvres: first century CE, on the North Sea coast, roughly where Belgium now stops and the Netherlands starts. Plinius Secundus was one of the commanders, and when he came to write his famous natural histories, he remembered what he had seen.

  There were wide salt marshes and he saw no trees at all. He could not make up his mind if he was on the land or on the sea. There were houses built on hillocks and he thought they looked like ships in the water, or maybe more like shipwrecks; he reckoned the houses must be built that way to escape the worst daily surges of the tides. He sounds almost nervous in this strange marsh landscape, being an inland Roman and used to having the ground stay firm under his boots; now he was looking out at a landscape of shifting clay, all cut up with creeks and gullies where the tides pushed salt water in and out. He might as well have left the empire altogether because this coast was cut off from the mainland by lagoons and brackish peat, as good a frontier as the forests that kept whole peoples apart, better than any river. To reach the marshes, and the water people who lived there, you had to know the marshes. You also had to be welcome, because you would be seen.

  Pliny considered the water people and he decided they were not worth the bother of conquering. Fish, he wrote, was all they had.1

  Seven centuries later opinions had not much changed. Radbodo, Bishop of Utrecht, was most uncharitable about the Frisians, the people of these marshes: he wrote that they lived in water like fish and they rarely went anywhere except by boat. They were also crude, barbarous and remote: sodden provincials.2 And yet between the writing of those two accounts the Frisians reinvented all the links and ties across the North Sea, as far as Jutland at the northern tip of Denmark and even beyond. They founded a new kind of town on the coast that thrived as the old Roman towns were in decline. They made themselves a capital on the left bank of the Rhine at Dorestad, just where the river divides to run down to its delta, which became the turntable of all Northern trade. And they ruled the North Sea, dominating all the trade that went by water, so for a time its name was changed: the Frisian Sea.

  They did something else which helped to shape our world: they reinvented money. They took coins with them on their trading voyages, money for buying and selling and doing business. Other territories had run out of cash, or lived off gifts and barter, or stopped using money for anything except tax and politics, but the Frisians carried the idea of using money wherever they went. It was not at all a trivial idea. With it came ideas of the value of things and how to calculate that abstract value on paper – the value that objects in the real world share, a pot with a pile of grain with a fish with a plank with a place in a boat going up the Rhine, even when it seems obvious they have nothing else in common at all. The idea of value had to work wherever the Frisians came ashore. Trading meant taking that value and working with it, even experimenting with it: seeing the world in mathematical terms.

  Money was going to change people’s minds.

  That story is easy to miss, but then it is extraordinary how much Pliny missed and he was there. He saw ramshackle shipwrecks on the little hills, most likely fishermen’s shacks, and missed the solid houses with their sod walls a full metre thick. He didn’t notice the real business of the marshes.

  He says nothing about the two temples facing each other across the water at the start of the open sea, on the very last point of the land: Roman temples dedicated to Nehalennia, a goddess of death and trade and fertility, almost everything that matters. On her altars, salt merchants gave thanks for voyages she had made successful, and so did men who dealt in potter’s clay and fish sauce, wine, cloth and pottery and anything that was going out to England across the sea; sometimes the same merchant thanked her on both sides of the river.3 At the temple in Colijnsplaat, to the north, the goddess was all business; the one to the south, at Domburg, where the stones later came back from under the sea, makes clear her darker side. Here she has a hound sitting by her, as she stands by a set of curtains that screen away a passage to the next world; she is watching over the dead as they go out to sea, sailing west to the isles of the blessed.4 Practical cargoes and magical journeys, life and death, were all going over the beach at Domburg.

  A hundred years later there would have been nothing much for Pliny to miss. Domburg was abandoned. Pirates moved in, some of them local and Frisian, some of them from the Frankish kingdoms to the south.5 Rome began to lose control. Then the water took over by force: the sea rushed in and drowned the temples around the end of the second century. The dunes moved, the channels for boats changed, and the site became impossible. All that was left was a fragile stretch of sand which a single wind storm could skirl into a new landscape, a coastline where a surging sea could wash away all the business that had made so many merchants give thanks to the goddess. There was no sign of life or business there for almost four centuries until the story began over again.

  But in the marshes there were heavy barges which had come down the Rhine from the middle of Europe, boats thirty metres long and three metres across, steering oars forward and steering oars aft: solid, flat-bottomed craft made out of thick slabs of oak. They were rowed and hauled down the river, carrying loads of slate and stone, or wine or pots, and when they reached the marshes, they moved their cargo onto sea-going ships.6 From the marshes, the goods could go north or south by sea in the lee of the islands along the coast, down to where Calais now stands to cross to England or directly across the sea to markets where York and London and even Southampton stand now, or up to the start of the Danish peninsula, where they could cross by land and river into the Baltic and reach up to Birka and Helgö in Sweden. The marshes held the trade of half a continent.

  All this is unfamiliar in part because there is so little written evidence. We wouldn’t know that ‘Frisian’ meant ‘merchant’ in seventh-century London, except that Bede mentions in his History that some young aristo from Northumberland ended up in Mercian hands, and was sold in the market to ‘a Frisian’. This Frisian couldn’t manage to keep the kid safely tied up, and so allowed him to go off and ransom himself.7 Bede says he checked the story with particular care, so we can assume that Frisians were practical merchants who did not deal in bothersome merchandise. We would find it hard to prove that there was a Frisian colony in eighth-century York, except that Altfrid wrote the life of a saint called Liudger and mentions the time a Frisian merchant happened to brawl with the young son of a local duke and the boy ended up dead; at which point all the Frisians, Liudger included, got out
quickly for fear of the anger of the young man’s family. Frisians stuck together, like any expatriate community.8 We owe the idea that Frisians had a distinctive kind of ship, nothing like the Viking ships, to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which mentions in the entry for 896 that King Alfred ordered fast, steady longships to be built with more oarsmen than ever before, and ‘they were neither of Frisian design nor of Danish’.9

  The abbey at Saint-Denis, close to Paris, has a royal document which guarantees that its monks will keep all the revenue from selling wine at their annual fair and also extract a kind of commission from the merchants ‘Saxon or Frisian or people of other indeterminate nations’.10 So the Frisians were important in the wine trade. It is likely that the Bishop of Liège in modern Belgium had to send to Domburg for his German and his Alsatian wine.

  The stories of saints, meanwhile, bear traces of how the Frisians worked up and down the Rhine. St Goar was a hermit left in a cell by the Rhine not far from the alarming Lorelei rocks, where the river was twenty-seven metres deep and the surface was a roil of violent currents; passing travellers might well be in need of miracles. One Frisian merchant was carried downstream onto the rocks, asked the saint for help and was saved; he had on board a garment of silk splendid enough to be his offering of thanks, so he must have been a middleman shipping exotic and valuable goods since Frisia produced wool, not silk. Another was being hauled upriver by porters, alone in his boat with one servant, and refused to stop to pray to St Goar. He couldn’t steer on his own, the current dragged him over to the dangerous side, all the porters managed to drop the rope except for one. The boat smashed on the opposite shore, and the body of the last porter was found, drowned, at the end of the rope. The merchant now thought that a prayer might be in order. The drowned man revived, stood up, coughed some blood and went back to leading the porters who were hauling the barge. The grateful merchant left a full pound weight of silver to thank the saint, which must mean he was carrying much more than a full pound weight of silver coins; business was good.11

  This sparse patchwork of clues can now be combined with the physical record, the evidence that has been dug out of the earth or washed up on the beaches. Together they tell a story that was almost lost, as the story of losers tends to be. The old Frisians were enthusiastic pagans, so when they stopped smashing the skulls of passing saints and accepted Christianity, they were not supposed to honour their pagan past. They were subjects inside the Frankish empire that Charlemagne was building, whose pride in their separate identity and their past had been known to send them on murderous raids up the Rhine against the imperial powers; defeated, they were supposed to adopt the empire’s history. Worse, they did not have a land fit for monuments. They lived in a water world where high tides and sandstorms could cover or ruin their past: ‘a pagan people divided by the intervening waters into many farming hamlets, with all kinds of names but belonging to just one people’.12 Even in the years when they owned the sea lanes, the sea could ruin them. The water swept back over the land at full moon in 834, flooding the land strongly; and again in 838 when the earth shook, the sun burned the earth, there were dragons in the air and around Christmas high winds broke the usual pattern of the tides and whipped the sea inland, wrecking houses along the coast and levelling the high dunes; more people died than it was possible to count, although there were curiously precise reports that 2,437 people died.13 Being out at sea, with all kinds of choices to make, was sometimes more secure than staying on land with none at all. Again in February 868, when a comet passed overhead, the winds got up and a vast flood killed many who were not prepared for it. That year, the famine was so terrible that men ate human flesh to survive.14

  Yet the Frisians lived well on these difficult margins. They had a long record of being separate, and being independent.

  They left their first traces on the east shores of the Aelmere, a sealed freshwater lake that was later flooded from the sea and became, for a time, the salt Zuiderzee and is now the freshwater IJsselmeer. They moved as the other peoples of Northern Europe began to move: some pushed, some ambitious, some displaced. They went east up to the River Weser, and west to the delta of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt. As political boundaries shifted, as the Franks wanted a name for their neighbours, Frisia grew. The islands and marshes of Zeeland, where the temple at Domburg once stood, became the nearer part of Frisia.

  As they were settling, the Germanic peoples across the Rhine, famous for their seamanship, were also on the move. Many shipped out to England: Angles, Saxons, Jutes. Some went overland into Gaul. Some of them chose to stay in the new Frisian territory, which made them Frisian; before there were passports and papers and notions of national identity, or even national history, you identified with where you happened to be, not where your mother and father were born. Your identity was lived in the present tense.

  Since these Frisians spoke a language much like Saxon they never had to lose touch with their countrymen and cousins now in England. So these water people had connections in place over land and over the sea: south to Gaul, east to Saxony, as well as north and west to Jutland and to England.

  It took one other tidal move of human beings to give the Frisians their living. Tribes who poured into Eastern Europe in the sixth century blocked the old trading links between Scandinavia and Byzantium, the river routes that tracked across what is now Russia. Any goods that Scandinavians wanted had to come by some other route and from some other source, and so they came up from Frisia; in the two centuries before the Viking times began around 800 CE, everything that we know reached Scandinavia came by way of Frisian traders.15 They had a monopoly without the need to create it.

  Along the coast the Frisians made slipways so they could build their flat-bottomed boats, the kind that moved easily in the shallow waters between the dunes and the coast. These boats could be beached on any stretch of sand and their bows and stern came up sharply so the incoming tide could get underneath to float them. Since the easiest trade routes were over water, the beaches were the obvious places for markets. The markets led to year-round settlements, and those settlements became quick, small and independent towns: ‘mushroom’ towns.

  Inland towns depended on royal favour, or a local lord who required taxes, or on the presence of a church or a monastery; these economies were about supporting their masters. Monasteries were factories and farms and workshops, turning out all kinds of goods: shoes for holy feet, saddles for holy riders, swords and shields when needed, leather and cloth and gold. They had builders, blacksmiths, glass-makers; but all this was so the monastery itself could be self-sufficient. They did not make to sell or trade; and when they took goods from the towns around them, they took them as tribute, not as business.16

  On the coast, individuals did business for themselves. Frisians opened up the trade routes that had been dormant since Rome fell, and added some: they sold pots, wine, human slaves. They shipped and sold whatever people wanted. The name of Frisian came to mean merchant, overseas trader, the perfect example of the long-distance seaman. The sea was truly ‘the Frisian sea’.

  The water people chose their place in the world. It had once been possible to build directly on the surface of their salt marshes, but that was five hundred years before Pliny passed by. When the sea rose again and broke into the land, human beings were faced with a choice. The obvious tactic was to run away, which is what happened almost everywhere else; water people could move like so many other peoples who were moving across the face of Europe. Instead, the Frisians chose to stay and keep their place on the edge of things.

  For that, they had to build their own land. They heaped up hillocks on the marshes, built on them, and the hillocks became permanent settlements all the year round: the terpen. They owned the land outright as peasants never could in the feudal systems around them, and they were settled and at home; you can tell because houses were rebuilt again and again, twice or more in a century, but always on exactly the same site.17 They also had to co-operate, house to
house, terp to terp, if only because finding sweet water was never easy, not even when wells replaced the old clay-lined reservoirs for collecting rainwater; the supply of water to drink depended on the discipline of the community.18 Co-operation, not always within the law, was a Frisian habit.

  As the farms on terpen disposed of their rubbish, the terpen grew taller. Each hillock started as a single farm, but as they expanded they merged one into another to form villages on higher ground: communities of houses built round an open space at the top of the terp, the back doors for the cattle and sheep to wander out onto the salt pastures, the front doors facing each other across the common space.

  Anyone who lived there had to be a boatman, or they were trapped; they were peasants raising beasts because the salt land would not support most grains. Their situation gave them the advantage over inland farmers who ploughed and sowed and tended and reaped and were generally busy all year round. As cattlemen and sheep herders they weren’t tied to the land day by day, always working to make the next crop happen. Ram and ewe, bull and cow, would do that for them. They were left with the luxury of time.

  Their kind of farming had other advantages. The rest of Europe around them lived on cereals, on bread and beer and gruel, and a pot kept permanently bubbling on the fire with anything sweet or savoury or fleshy that would help the gruel down. A poor harvest meant starvation, and crop yields were low at the best of times, just enough to keep people alive. The Frisians were rich by comparison. They had grazing for their animals, mostly cattle; so they had milk and meat as well as fish and game, a diet that was nourishing twelve months a year. For a while, the marshes that Pliny dismissed were more densely populated than anywhere else in Western Europe except for the Seine around Paris and the Rhine around Cologne.19