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

by Michael Pye

  His luck turned on the open sea when he challenged two English freighters carrying loads of lavish broadcloth. He boarded both ships and left the crews with only food and the clothes they wore, and then he sailed for the Hebrides to share out the loot with his crew and boast to everyone else about his robbing. He also made awnings for his ships from the broadcloth so everyone could appreciate his haul. If he could be farmer and Viking, they could be both victims one moment and admirers the next: nothing need be settled. For the voyage home, he had the cloth stitched to the front of the sails so that his ships came into harbour under the power of their loot.

  His return home was the excuse for a grandiose feast, but there was one man who did not praise Svein: the Earl Harald. Instead, he asked him to stop his raiding. He said it was better to be safe back home, that ‘Most troublemakers are doomed to be killed unless they stop of their own free will.’ Svein acknowledged he was getting older and less suited to the hardships of war. He said he wanted one more trip and then he would give up raiding. ‘Hard to tell which comes first, old fellow,’ the earl said. ‘Death or glory.’

  The raider went out one last time. Again, he had bad luck in the Hebrides, where everyone was ready for him, but he sailed on to Ireland, looting everywhere he could. He came to Dublin, to the town that was founded by Vikings like him, walked through the walls almost without resistance; the settled people, the traders busy with business, were not ready for him. He owned the city that day. He put in his own men to run it, named his price for leaving the city in peace, left the townspeople to choose hostages and went back to his ships in triumph.

  But the fact of settlement was very strong, and the Dubliners were not prepared to give up what they’d built. They’d had enough of this old anachronism and his kind, even if only a few centuries back his kind had been the necessary condition of their way of life.

  They thought of Svein and his men as dangerous, disruptive animals, and hunted them the same way: digging pits in the ground, disguising them with straw and waiting to see if the Orkney men would fall into the trap.

  They did. They say Svein was the last of them to die.48

  5.

  Fashion

  The night was dry and the fire blazed out in one of the long wooden warehouses on the waterfront at Bergen. This is 1248 on the coast of Norway. The king was in the town with his bodyguard, the town was full, but despite all the people fighting the fire they ‘could get no hold on it’. The steeple of the great church of St Mary went up in flames, and ‘the force of the fire was so great that it was tossed up into the castle and that began to blaze. Many men were burned inside before they could get out.’1

  ‘The force of the sin-avenging flames,’ the English chronicler Matthew Paris wrote with the great moral certainty of a man who was safely offshore, ‘flew like a fire-breathing dragon, dragging its tail after it.’ He diagnosed ‘the severity of divine vengeance’.2

  The king went out in a boat to the barges lying offshore, and ‘got there great kettles. They were filled with sea-water, and so hauled up onto the wharves, after that the sea-water was poured onto the fire and so it was quenched.’3 But his stone castle was ‘for the most part reduced to ashes’, Paris wrote, and all that remained of eleven parishes was four religious houses and the ‘palace, chapel and lodgings of the lord King’.4

  A few days later, Paris was celebrating Mass when lightning tore off the thatched roof of the loft that sheltered the king’s son and then struck Matthew Paris’s ship and ‘dashed the mast asunder into such small chips that they could scarcely be seen anywhere. One bit of the mast did hurt to a man who had got on board the ship from the town to buy finery.’5

  We’re three days after a fire that ruined a town, in the middle of a storm that is tearing off roofs, and someone is busy buying ‘finery’: clothes, and fine, fashionable clothes at that. Fashion must have a longer, stranger history than we thought.

  The great sagas from Iceland have everything you expect: heroes, killings, dragons, feuds, great voyages and great horrors. They also have something less likely: they have dandies.

  Consider Kali in the Orkneyinga Saga who comes back from five weeks away from Norway at a large, muddy gathering in the port of Grimsby in northern England, where he’s been meeting men from the Orkneys, the Hebrides and mainland Scotland. He starts a round of the taverns back in Bergen to show off what he’s learned. ‘Kali was something of a dandy and was stylishly dressed now that he was just back from England,’ the saga says; he saw style abroad and brought it back. He wasn’t alone. His new mate Jon, son of Peter Serksson, ‘was a great one for clothes’.6 Bergen, the saga says, was full of people from abroad and the men needed an audience for what they were wearing. Kali and Jon later started a blood feud, as you might expect, and were devoted to drunk and murderous brawling and campaigns of revenge; but they also had style.

  In the Saga of Olaf the Gentle, the thirteenth-century storyteller Snorri Sturlson tells how rich men started to settle in Bergen when it was still a new town, a hundred years or so before; how clubs were started and drinking bouts were common; and ‘at that time, new fashions in dress made their appearance’. Men wore tight breeches, gold rings at the ankle, gowns that trailed and were laced with ribbons and high shoes embroidered over with white silk and gold laces: wilfully impractical for sailors, traders and warriors in a port in a cold climate, which was the whole point. Bergen men were already wearing the long, draped robes that would soon be the mark of the aristocracy further south. They matched their fashions with new and pretentious manners: King Olaf had cup-bearers to pour the drink at dinner and a candle-bearer with lit tapers beside each one of his guests.7 Within a hundred more years – in 1174, because for once the sagas give an exact year – it was possible for a man to be damned socially for wearing clothes that everyone knew were out of date. The dreary statesman Erling, according to the Saga of the Sons of Harald, ‘wore old-fashioned clothing – kirtles [long overshirts] with long waists and long sleeves, and likewise shirts and doublets with long sleeves, French cloaks and shoes coming high up on the calves’. This was when he was a kind of regent and the saga disapproves of the way ‘he had the king wear similar clothes when he was young’. The king grew up correctly, even so: ‘When he became independent, he dressed with much finery.’8

  Remarkably, the people of Bergen were doing much the same. The town was a port tucked into a fjord on the Norwegian coast, a mass of wood buildings that burned down often and left behind whole tracts for archaeologists to investigate. In the layers from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, there are shoes – shoes for women, men and children – and a startling number of them are decorated with embroidery in silk. Now, Lucca was beginning to produce silk in the twelfth century, and grumpy Paris clerics had begun to denounce the wearing of ‘worm’s excrement’, but silk still seemed a luxury to Southerners, mostly imported from the Middle East. In later illuminated manuscripts embroidered shoes are worn by grand and powerful people to show rank and to show money. But the Bergen evidence does not come from the parts of town with castles or riches; it is everywhere.9 There are so many shoes, even old grown-ups’ shoes cut down for children, that it’s clear that silk yarn was being brought in quantity to the Norwegian coast long before it was the mark of social-climbing persons in Paris, a full century before the Queen of France, Jeanne of Navarre, became so famously angry at the glamour of women in Bruges and in Ghent for their silks and jewels; ‘I thought I was the only queen,’ she snapped, ‘and here I see queens by the hundred.’10

  Trade was stirring up the world, making new things available to new kinds of people for a price. Silk belongs to that world in motion: carried up Russian rivers from the east and across the Baltic or in Venetian galleys to the Flemish coast. So does fashion itself: it belongs to people who know something different from their settled ways and can imagine taking on other people’s customs, other people’s style. It is not about uniforms, as a monk or a courtier might wear; it is about ch
oosing to reinvent yourself and your status. It didn’t start at great courts when there were artists to record the tilt of a bosom or the length of a skirt, and it was never a woman’s matter; it was of interest to the men brawling in the mud of Grimsby.

  It left traces on Greenland, far out on the wild sea beyond Norway, even as the ice began to creep onto the meadows and start the process which drove the settlers out in the late fifteenth century. Long before the earliest-known patterns for cutting out clothes, which come from Germany and Spain in the sixteenth century, the Greenland settlers knew enough to cut clothes in new styles and they cared about doing so;11 yet their lives were as raw and careful as could be. They didn’t waste a single sinew, bone or organ of their sheep; scrotums became small bags for storage, horns became eating implements, some bones turned into reels for storing spun yarn and the tibia sometimes became flutes. They didn’t waste wool, either, since they depended on it for sails to travel and clothes to keep out the cold. They paid their priests in the cloth known as vaðmál, and that name means a ‘cloth measure’ because cloth often worked exactly like money: a way to pay bills.

  So they learned rather early not to waste cloth and they knew the old ways could be wasteful, making a shirt the width of the cloth coming off the loom and not bothering with seams or careful cutting. Instead they shaped clothes to the body, cut very carefully, sewed together the elements to make a shirt or a shift; in an astonishingly short time, your farmer and your farmer’s wife in the blind Arctic winters had tailored clothes. It was a matter of sense and economy. Clothes were mostly pulled on over the head, but they had buttonholes which were an innovation and even a scandal further south, they had distinct collars, they were flared out from the shoulders, they could be dyed with borders of madder red, which had to be imported. Everyone wore a hood. These were not choices born of necessity, like the fur of arctic hare woven into cloth for warmth in the harshest months of winter; the Greenlanders brought in cloth when they did not need to, a reddish diamond twill from England, a rough weave from Ireland, because they liked and valued them. They sent away their own cloth for sale in distinctive stripes and checks and patterns, so other people could make choices.

  When the settlers had been frozen out, chased out and starved, one last ship worked along the Greenland coast, captained by a man called Jon the Greenlander. He was blown off course deep into one of the fjords and there he found a body lying face down among the remains of deserted settlements: the last of the colonists. ‘On his head he had a well-sewn hood,’ Jon noticed, ‘his other clothes were partly of vaðmál, partly of sealskin.’ Even at the miserable end of a colonial experiment as far west from Europe as Europeans had ever managed to settle, what he noticed and reported was a ‘well-sewn’ hood.12

  Fashion, choosing how to dress and changing it at will, was not just on Paris streets or in the flamboyant court of Flanders, places where people had rank to show, money to spend and time to waste. It is much more than those lovingly painted robes in illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth century, those ladies posing very carefully because it would clearly be difficult to move. The shoes in Bergen, the shirts on Greenland, mark it as one of the aspirations born of the rough business of trade.

  Since trade was involved there was one consolation: the ships that brought the material also delivered someone to take the blame. It was usually the French. Robert I, King of Naples, blamed the French for the bumfreezer styles of the 1330s, even though he was himself from Anjou. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Florence banned deep V-shaped necklines on a woman’s dress just on the suspicion of being French. And the English, like the priest Alexander Barclay in his Ship of Fools of 1509, reckoned fancy clothing all came from France, as he said, ‘like the pox’.13

  There had once been a time when parents could bequeath clothes to their children knowing they would be wearable long after their deaths and, even more important, they would still have the same significance. A couple of aristocrats drawing up their will in 863 – the Emperor’s sister and an Italian count – made a point of leaving to their oldest and second-oldest sons their clothes that were woven and decorated with gold; they were handing on badges of rank that everybody could understand, and they were sure their sons would be able to go on wearing them.14 The social order was fixed, after all, and everyone knew how to read the clothes on other people’s backs.

  The sober, simple clothes of a monk had enormous significance to laypeople. Wearing the same clothes as a holy man was a kind of magic: for two centuries people reckoned they ought to wear monastic clothes when dying so as to be in the right style for the Last Judgement, until the Lay Folks’ Catechism of 1357 found it necessary to point out that a man can’t be guaranteed a place in Heaven even ‘though he had upon him in his death the clothes that Christ wore here on earth in His manhood’. Nicholas of Bruère, who paid ten marks for a chance to live in a monastery and wear ‘at my latter end the habit of St Benedict’, was entirely out of luck.15

  It was different if you were the ones obliged to wear these plain and meaningful clothes; even holy men revolted. Monks on Lindisfarne, Bede says, had to be ‘discouraged from wearing expensively dyed cloth and are expected to be content with natural wool’.16 In one of Alcuin’s letters to Higbaldus from the court of Charlemagne, he worries about the manliness, the modesty and propriety of the church, which had just been wrecked and burned by Vikings; Alcuin denounces excess and display and he insists that ‘vanity in dress is not fitting for men’.17 Church councils in the ninth century had to order nuns and monks to wear their habits; twelfth-century monks were told off for going to Mass ‘indecently dressed – in lay garments – open in front and behind’; and in the thirteenth century the punishment for taking the habit off at all was excommunication. Monks were particularly forbidden to wear anything split, tight, short, pleated or, worst of all, with the new-fangled buttons. It was not easy to insist on this because if someone in holy orders had a sizeable income – two hundred marks a year or more, itself an affront to vows of poverty – he was entitled to wear the same splendour as ‘knights of the same rent’. Money has a way of dissolving the rules.18

  Noble and royal courts, meanwhile, required liveries to identify who was who and show their loyalties. By 1303 the French were making uniforms to define everyone entitled to attend the opening of the Parlement: fashion had its bureaucratic uses. Students and professors at Paris University could be picked out in a crowd by the way they dressed, which was soberly. The fur you wore became an exact marker of your standing: ermine for princely families, because white was such a rare colour, down to lambskin for the king’s fool and the children’s servants. Rules could change, though, as they did when lambskin, always natural and never dyed, was taken up by the elegant people after 1430.

  At fourteenth-century tournaments, the women all wore the same colour, had the same devices embroidered on their sleeves, led the knights out to the jousting field with colour co-ordinated ribbons, as consciously designed for a deliberate effect as any chorus line in a modern theatre; at Saint-Denis in 1389 the frocks were a rich dark green, the left sleeves were embroidered in silver and gold with the king’s device of a broom pod set in May foliage, and the ribbons were green silk splashed with gold. The ladies became a walking sign of solidarity, nothing individual about them, and a flattering background to the queen who chose to wear scarlet from head to toe.19

  A man displayed his class walking down the street. A professional wore a long robe, but nobles could afford to flaunt their buttocks with a short doublet as they did in thirteenth-century Flanders. Ordinary people weren’t meant to change styles at all or even have an idea of style; or so the privileged thought. In Flanders, most women wore the same for centuries, and the only change for most men in the fifteenth century was that they brought their belts up from buttock level to the waist.20 The problem was that rules could fall into disuse. Long robes were once reserved for the literate, for lawyers and priests, but in 1467 Jacques du Clercq noti
ced ‘there wasn’t a journeyman, however minor, who didn’t have a long robe down to his ankle’.

  For if clothes had such clear meaning, they were dangerous: anyone could open the wrong wardrobe and put on a different status, a different class. In the thirteenth-century Le Roman de la Rose there is a character called Faker who says he’s good at changing clothes, so he can be ‘now a knight, now a monk, a bishop, a chaplain, now a clerk, now a priest, or a student or a master or the owner of a proper castle or just a man who works in the forests. In short, I can be a prince or I can be a page, whatever rank I like.’21 Clothes defined him, and he chooses how he wants to be defined: which is the essence of fashion, which means changing the way you dress just because you want to; and also means having a shrewd idea of what your time and place require so you can be defiant.

  In a more settled society that might just seem absurd, suggesting kids out clubbing or some carnival queen in her crown and robes. In a time when rank and status and money were all shifting, the easy changes of fashion were alarming. All around the North Sea the old kind of manor was disintegrating, which meant that noble lands were losing their old value. Cities were growing where once there had only been a market. Nobody had to stay in place any more; if you left the land you had a good chance of work in the new workshops and manufactures in those cities. Some men were making serious money, merchants or manufacturers, and they wanted the glory that goes with being rich. They dressed like nobles.

  These issues were so tangled that the law was invoked to make things at least seem simple. If law laid down who could wear what, and who was forbidden what, then perhaps all the other issues would somehow resolve themselves. So when the law started to regulate how people dressed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and tried to put down excess, there was always a common heart to the message: go back in time, know your place and dress it. Power did not like rivals. The King of France in 1279 issued an ordinance that no noble could own more than four robes made of miniver, the fur of squirrels, and none at all of cloth that cost more than thirty sous tournois the Parisian yard; the king wanted to go on standing out as king.22