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

by Michael Pye

  What started with peasant families determined to stop floods from taking everything they owned became a device for merchant investors to make their money grow. These new gentry had a taste for flooded land that could be drained to their exact specifications. The high bureaucrats among them particularly liked creating estates, magnanimously building villages and churches, getting titles and moving ever upwards in the social world: being cut-price grand.9

  Man made the land vulnerable in the first place, and then invented limited companies, people borrowing money to buy safety, to save the situation. It was a crude first draft of capitalism, not the real thing. Economics now determined which towns breathed and which towns drowned. Trade also created new kinds of town. In Waterland, dams were built to protect the fields from the invading salt and tides, but they also blocked the freight-carrying rivers from the freight-carrying sea; cargoes had to be hauled over from one ship to another. A town could make serious money out of that kind of business. At Monnickendam, the citizens built higher ground for themselves, and then a dam, and they were so infuriated by the prospect of a new dam at Nieuwendam that they fired cannon at the rival builders and formed an armed scrum to run at them; for that, one of their mayors was beheaded in The Hague.10 The towns had ruined the ground with their appetite for fuel, and now the fact that the ground was spoiled led to the building of dams and the new towns around them: towns like Amsterdam.

  The process was unstoppable and it got worse. The drying peat formed mires, shallows full of stagnant brown water that kept changing shape as plants grew and plants died. The peat miners drove their canals into the heart of the peat, sometimes right through dikes and embankments, and the mire water went into the peat domes along with the miners’ boats; in a bad storm, whole fields of peat were torn away and for months they floated about as islands on the newly open water. Between 1506 and 1509 there were terrible storm surges, enough to break the soft, vulnerable edges of the mires and merge the waters into lakes. Just south of Amsterdam a new lake was born, the Haarlemermeer, which lasted four hundred years and grew to more than 40,000 acres: big enough for the sea winds from the north-west and south-west to rush the water as much as a metre up the shore. Gravity was no help any more in draining the lakes; what was needed now was wind in the right direction to power the windmills required to pump the fields dry. Land itself became a technical achievement.

  There was some unexpected profit in this. The sluices for controlling the waters helped fishermen because they funnelled the travelling eels right into traps and nets. Between ten and twenty tons a year were taken at the sluices between the Haarlem lake and the IJ by Amsterdam, and shipped out to London by a new class of entrepreneur. What had once been a basic, domestic kind of fishing had turned into an international business.

  As for Waterland, it was marginal land. It was not until the start of the seventeenth century that money from the towns paid for new dikes, new windmills, the draining of lakes to make new pasture, and the farms began to make cheese and send milk down to Amsterdam twice a day.

  The cutting of peat went on but now it looked like clearing away the past, a physical kind of forgetting. The new landscapes, entirely artificial, have become modern nature reserves.

  Ruined land became pasture over all those centuries and that started changes which had one unlikely consequence: the scrubbed stoops, the polished windows and the swept streets of Holland.

  The neat cleanliness of the province of Holland was notorious among travellers who did not always speak so kindly of the Dutch themselves. In 1517, the Italian Antonio de Beatis went round the Low Countries as chaplain to a cardinal, and what he most noticed were the doorstep cloths for wiping your feet, the floors that were sanded. In 1567 the Florentine Ludovico Guiccardini noticed ‘order and tidiness everywhere’. In the countryside foreigners reported that cattle and carts were not allowed on the streets. This passion for cleaning has connections with the moral pressures of Calvinism, but foreigners describe it even before Calvin was born, and when de Beatis went travelling Calvin was still only eight years old. When Guiccardini was in Holland, the territory belonged in theory to Flanders, and Amsterdam was a Catholic city, proud of its very own miracle which involved the saving of a consecrated Host from the fire. Calvinism gave cleaning significance, but it was not the cause.

  The itch for scrubbing, brushing, washing started out in the fields of spoiled peat, and the fact that they turned to pasture. From the fourteenth century, after the Black Death killed so many, peasants could not make a living from growing grains for bread. On their tax returns, farmers pleaded poverty, but with unusual conviction: ‘we can hardly get the hay properly off the fields once every three years’ and ‘yes, we do keep cattle but we can’t make a living out of that’. A farm family was likely now to include the captain of a ship – half of the Dutch skippers in the Baltic trade came from Waterland – and craftspersons so skilled in spinning and sewing clothes that they made the neighbouring towns nervous.

  They also, mostly, kept cows, and that changed everything. One or two milk cows could produce enough butter to send to market, and now that townspeople had the money to pay for it, business was good. New weigh houses appeared across the northern part of Holland from around 1375, and some were designed particularly for the weighing of butter and cheese. The accounts for Kampen, on the German North Sea coast, mention 400 tons of butter a year passing through the toll, and 425 tons of cheese; Holland cheese was sold at the fairs in Brabant in the late fifteenth century; it was on the market in Denmark by the start of the sixteenth century. Milk made a living for half the houses in Holland spread through three-quarters of the villages. Guiccardini reckoned all this dairy produce was worth as much each year as all the shiploads of exquisite spices that came from Portugal to the Low Countries.

  Butter has to be made in immaculate conditions, or else it spoils; it is not as forgiving as cheese. In England, butter was usually made for local markets, which was easier, but Holland was sending it out of the province and even out of the country. Dairy rooms had to be kept perfectly clean, and since often a family had only a pair of cows, the dairy was domestic, an extension of the house. When small farms began to be swallowed by larger landowners, when women and men moved from the countryside into all the new towns that were thriving, they naturally brought the habit of careful cleanliness with them. The burghers of Amsterdam hired girls to clean their houses who already knew what it took to make butter that would keep.11 Calvinism gave cleaning a spiritual dimension, but for Hollanders it was already a matter of faith.

  A seemingly simple activity, the digging of peat, changed a culture, redefined how the world thought of a people, changed the way money makes things happen, remade a whole landscape and turned peasant farmers into men with international connections, at least in the eel and butter trades. There never was a truly simple change.

  Take fishbones, for example: the bones found when archaeologists sift through middens and try to work out what people ate. Around 1000 CE in England there is a noticeable shift from eating freshwater fish to eating fish caught at sea. Herring went inland and upstream in quantity, not just the occasional bones found in earlier years in York and London and Ipswich. Anglo-Saxon did not even have a word for cod, but within a couple of decades of the millennium cod was being eaten across England. In what is now Belgium, the herring and cod arrive around the middle of the tenth century, in Poland herring is traded inland from the eleventh century, and in France sea fish is much more common from the thirteenth century. Fishing at sea was, for the first time, feeding the land.12

  There was early evidence of a coming change, but it was not easy to read. In Scotland the Picts ate fish they could catch close to shore, rod and line, but when the Vikings came around 800 CE somebody’s diet changed: there are suddenly bones of cod, fish that have to be caught in open water, not to mention seabirds like gannets, cormorants and shags, which nested on the further islands. The question is whether the Picts learned about deep-wat
er fishing and changed their tastes in food, or if the Vikings arrived in such numbers after their long deep-sea voyages that they alone explain the difference. A whole history of migration and conquest rests on the reading of those bones: food as culture.13

  Fishermen in the tenth century still took and sold mostly eels and pike, minnows and burbots, trout and lampreys, ‘and whatever swims in the rushing stream’; or so the fisherman tells the teacher in Aelfric’s Colloquy, which is a Latin primer of the time. Asked why he does not fish in the sea, he says: ‘Sometimes I do, but rarely, because a large ship is necessary on the sea.’14 Those larger ships start to appear around the millennium, growing from a maximum of twenty tons or so around 1000 CE to sixty tons or more by 1025 CE. If you sift the fishbones on archaeological sites, the link between the ships you have and the fish you eat begins to seem obvious. The new towns emerging around this time were hungry for food, which they did not grow, and so diet changed all across Northern Europe: the salted herring and the dried cod with their long, long life began to edge out fresh fish, which was trickier to ship and keep and could be foul in the wrong season. The fisheries that supplied this new appetite were long established. Herring was a catch you could hardly miss; the fish were plentiful, and they thrashed enough to make the shallows boil in the right season. We can be sure that Norwegians had been eating them at least since 600 CE all over the country; settlements with the most men seem to have eaten the most fish. They also ate a bit of cod, and assorted meats, which suggests they were farmers bringing supplies with them down the fjord so they could catch the herring when the fish came close into shore to spawn.15

  As for stockfish, the cod that is dried to a board, it was being hung out to dry along the Norwegian coast from the Iron Age, and it was part of a very important trade-off: chieftains who gave their men stockfish to eat did not need to feed them on barley, which meant they had barley for making beer. Without drink, no feast was worth while and no chieftain could expect loyalty. Stockfish, indirectly, was a pillar of political power.16 Business and power started their long, intricate dance. Norway acquired kings, and kings thought they had acquired Norway. Stockfish was a very useful way to get money, mostly from the Baltic merchants of the Hanseatic League, who were eager to ship and trade it. The kings needed cash to hold their kingdoms together; the Hansa knew that stockfish could be sold anywhere. What had been a matter of prestige became a matter of business.

  The way the German merchants of the Hansa organized things, stockfish was mostly taken from Bergen after being landed there by fishermen from the North. It was a credit and cash transaction mostly in one port, arranged so the fishermen were never quite clear of their obligations to the merchants and could never sell elsewhere: a classic company store. Herring, on the other hand, was a free market in various places, most of them along the southern shore of Sweden, in Scania. It opened on 15 August, on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin, and ended, depending on how the season went, either on 9 October, which was St Denis’s day, or on 11 November, which was Martinmas. It was a new kind of commerce: open, international, outside the usual rules.

  Cod required ships, but anyone could go out to catch the seasonal rush of herring along the shore. A farmer could do the job after harvest, or a student or anyone with working muscles. The fishermen worked from the beach, from huts built of wood and rush mats where they could dry their nets. Each day, or each night, they set off in small open boats with crews of five to eight men who had formed a kind of ad hoc company: a notlag. They weren’t allowed, by royal decree, to use drag nets along the bottom, which would have scooped up flatfish and young fish, but they otherwise could net the fish as they wanted. They were obliged to land the fish at one of a half-dozen beaches where royal officials would claim their tax, but these places were already much more than customs houses. Merchants waited for the fish in their more comfortable quarters behind the sea wall – at Skanör or Malmö, for example – because they were forbidden to row out to try to do deals or fix prices before the catch came ashore. They waited for the signal the moment the first boat landed, and they were off running to the sand to check the fish and make their bids. The auction was open and brisk.

  This was only half the market. Each of these fish towns had a fixed settlement behind the sea wall, a sort of colony: streets, shops, bakers, brothels, drapers, churches, anything they had at home, all set out in wooden huts. The merchants were allowed by the king to buy just enough land to build the huts, and they made sure they had a great deal to offer in return for fish: fine cloth, fine wine, all kinds of luxuries to get a fisherman through the winter, and his family, too. The beaches became an exchange where the herring was like currency, but rather more reliable than most coins.

  The fish were gutted by women just inland who packed a precise number into each barrel – between 830 and 840 – and covered them in brine. The barrels were inspected, sealed and stamped; whoever bought this fish, however far away, would know who took responsibility for their quality. The Scania fish was a known quantity, so much so that one fishmonger in Maastricht in 1395 had to put a palm frond in front of his door as a kind of confession that he was selling some other kind.17

  A great commercial machine was moving fish through Europe, buying it fresh, processing it in a standard way, packing it so that anyone could recognize it, branding it and standing by its quality, and sending it by sea, by river, by road; and, because the fish shrank and the brine evaporated on the way, making arrangements to repack it when it landed close to its final destination. Fish was business now, not just a matter of survival for the fishermen, food for their family; the lines of supply cut across the frontiers of a continent. Chiefs who had relied on stockfish to help keep their men in beer and maintain their standing now saw the dry cod making taxes for the king; money values were edging out the old forms of prestige.

  Hunger changed much more than the social order. Growing towns needed grain as well as fish, bread and beer and oats as well as assorted herbs and vegetables for making a good thick pottage over the fire. To eat, man had to change the landscape.

  The countryside looked scrubby after the Romans left, woods filled in with underbrush, sometimes forests and sometimes thickets, the line of the rivers marked by the taller, grander trees and bushes that grew alongside the water: a system that man was not yet trying to reinvent. Water ran clear, because the woodlands drew up the rainwater and held the soil in place, and in the wetlands, there was enough plant growth to absorb the solid matter. Floods did not scour off the rich soil and send it downstream.

  Then the trees were steadily cut, the forests cleared, the fields began to grow larger and there were crops growing where the riverside thickets had been. Grain was king, and to grow it the ploughs made dust out of topsoil. The farming system meant that a third of the cultivated ground lay fallow and exposed at any time. Rainstorms or snowmelt sent water sluicing over the bare ground, and took the soil with it, and the shape of the land began to change. Valleys in Saxony have heavy deposits of topsoil that go back to the eighth century; the process is most dramatic in the upper Thames basin just around the time the Normans arrived in the eleventh century, by when the mouth of the Oude Rijn in the Netherlands was silted shut and the run of the Rhine changed for ever. The bay between Gdansk and Elblag was filled as the delta of the Vistula expanded. In time, Bruges would lose its battle against the silting of the River Zwin.18

  None of this was good for fish like salmon that depend on fast, clear streams, but there was another obstacle which made things even worse. To turn all that grain into food required mills, usually watermills. Each had a reservoir of still water made by damming a river or making a weir, so there was always enough water to release into the buckets at the top of the millwheel and make it turn. A one-metre dam and gate and raceway could back up two metres of silt and gravel; it did at one twelfth-century dam on the Derwent in the English Midlands. It also blocked those fish that need both sea and fresh water, which breed in one and mature in
the other: sturgeon, salmon, trout and shad. Along with herring, these were the staples of royal feasts – Henry III of England had them all for Christmas in 1240 with a dish of lampreys as well – but their spawning habits and the cycle of their lives were being blocked by dams and heavy millwheels and still, deep pools.

  The effects were obvious. The draining of the Rhine delta for farmland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries meant dikes in the way of flowing water, and the sturgeon population collapsed. The great fish came back only after violent storm tides broke the barriers around 1400. To save the salmon, the Scots made laws so that all dams would have an opening for the fish, and all barrier nets would be lifted on Saturday; the law, under the early-thirteenth-century King Alexander II, demanded that ‘the stream of the water shall be in all parts so free that a swine of the age of three years, well fed, may turn himself within the stream, round about, so that his snout nor tail shall not touch the bank of the water’.

  The hungry towns were a problem in themselves: Cologne dumping its cesspits into the Rhine just downstream of the city, the garbage of Paris making the Seine downstream ‘infected and corrupted’ by the early 1400s. The pollution was compounded by work: the process of rotting raw hemp and flax to get out the fibres, the slaughter of animals with the blood and guts tipped into the river. People noticed what was happening, but not what had happened before: the shortage of fish, but not the various causes. Instead they chose to blame fishermen. Philip IV of France made rules in 1289 for the size of nets, for the size of fish that could be caught and the months when fishing was legal and outside the spawning season. He complained that ‘today each and every river and waterside of our realm, large and small, yields nothing due to the evil of the fishers and the devices of their contriving and because the fish are prevented by them from growing to their proper condition.’