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

by Michael Pye

  23 Ibid., p. 115n.11; and cf. Gunnar Karlsson, Iceland’s 1100 Years: History of a Marginal Society (London, 2000), pp. 9–12.

  24 Francis J. Tschan (ed. and tr.), Adam of Bremen: History of the Archbishops of Hamburg–Bremen (New York, 2002), 4, 34, p. 215 for Orkney seas (in scholia) and ocean; 4, 35, p. 217 for the burning ice; 4, 38, p. 220 for Harold Hardrada’s voyage.

  25 Devra Kunin (tr.) and Carl Phelpstead (ed.), A History of Norway and The Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr (London, 2001), p. 4, lines 1–16, for icebergs and monsters; pp. 11–12 for volcanos.

  26 Tschan, Adam of Bremen, 4, 25, p. 206, for hoppers, cannibals, cyclops; 4, 17, p. 198, for dragons; 4, 18, p. 199, for blue men and Prussians; 4, 19, p. 200, for Amazons and their offspring.

  27 Cf. McGinn, ‘Ocean and Desert’, pp. 74–5.

  28 Aleksander Pluskowski, ‘What is Exotic? Sources of Animals and Animal Products from the Edges of the Medieval World’, in Gerhard Jaritz and Juhan Kreem (eds.), The Edges of the Medieval World (Budapest, 2009), p. 114.

  29 William Ian Miller, Audun and the Polar Bear: Luck, Law and Largesse in a Medieval Tale of Risky Business (Leiden, 2008), pp. 7ff.; p. 18 for the bishop and the Emperor and Icelandic law.

  30 J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford, 1998), p. 197.

  31 Kevin J. Wanner, Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia (Toronto, 2008), p. 82.

  32 Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times (London, 2013), pp. 150–51.

  33 See Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Transmission and Translation of Medieval Irish Sources in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Jan Eivind Myhre, ‘The “Decline of Norway”: Grief and Fascination in Norwegian Historiography on the Middle Ages’, and Peter Raedts, ‘A Serious Case of Amnesia: The Dutch and Their Middle Ages’, in R. J. W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal (eds.), The Uses of the Middle Ages in Modern European States (Basingstoke, 2011).

  34 Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (London, 1997), pp. 104, 172.

  35 G. Ronald Murphy SJ, The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth Century Heliand (New York, 1989), p. 6.

  36 See E. G. Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 20–22, and Valentine Anthony Pakis, Studies in Early Germanic Biblical Literature: Medieval Rewritings, Medieval Receptions and Modern Interpretations (Ph.D. thesis, Minneapolis, 2008), pp. 30–32 and 246ff.

  37 For example, Fritz Rörig, ‘Les Raisons intellectuelles d’une suprématie commerciale: la hanse’, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 2, 8 (15 Oct. 1930), pp. 481–98. ‘Derrière cette ensemble sont de puissantes forces spirituelles et intellectuelles …’, p. 486.

  38 David M. Wilson and Else Roesdahl, ‘Vikingarnas Betydelse för Europa’, in Svenlof Karlsson (ed.), Frihetens Källa: Nordens Betydelse för Europa (Stockholm, 1992).

  39 I’ve used the Loeb Edition of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (tr. J. E. King; Cambridge, Mass., 1930), which is a revision of Moberly’s 1881 Oxford edition. King’s translation is so eccentric at times – ‘batful’ for ‘fertile’ – that I have made my own.

  40 Bede (tr. J. E. King), ‘Praefatio’, in Historia ecclesiastica, pp. 4, 6.

  41 Quoted in Stephen Yeates, Myth and History: Ethnicity and Politics in the First Millennium British Isles (Oxford, 2012), p. 150.

  42 Bede (tr. J. E. King), Historia ecclesiastica, pp. 68–74, chs. XIV, XV.

  43 Ibid., pp. 66, 74–6, 76 for heresy; p. 80 for the speed of the conversions (‘raptim’); p. 98 for civil wars; chs. XIV, XVI, XVII, XXII for civil wars.

  44 Pattison, ‘Is It Necessary to Assume’, pp. 2425–6.

  45 See Yeates, Myth and History, for a survey of how Bede’s history is challenged by archaeological techniques. His bibliography may be stronger than his arguments.

  46 Bodley MS Canon Misc 378, from Cosmographia Scoti … (Basel, 1436) for a map of the forts and an account of the forces the Comes (or Count) commanded.

  47 Cf. Régis Boyer, Les Vikings, premiers Européens, VII–XI siècle: les nouvelles découvertes de l’archéologie (Paris, 2005). In the preface Jean-Robert Pitte, president of the Sorbonne, announces that ‘La construction européenne a permis enfin à toutes les ethnies et à toutes les nations d’Europe de s’unir dans la partage féconde de la diversité. Grâces soient rendues à nos ancêtres vikings …’ (p. 5).

  1. THE INVENTION OF MONEY

  1 Plinius Secundus, Naturalis historia, book 16, sections 2, 3, online at www.penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Pliny the Elder.

  2 Wilhelm Levinson, Vitae Sancti Bonifatii (Hannover/Leipzig, 1905), p. 68 for the text of Vita Altera Bonfiatii, Auctore Radbodo qui dicitur Episcopo Traiectensi (or, as we say, Utrecht).

  3 See Gustav Milne, ‘Maritime Traffic between the Rhine and Roman Britain: A Preliminary Note’, in Seán McGrail (ed.), Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons (London, 1990), p. 83; and H. Wagenvoort, ‘Nehalennia and the Souls of the Dead’, Mnemosyne, 4th series, 24, 3 (1971), pp. 278–9.

  4 H. Wagenvoort, ‘The Journey of the Souls of the Dead to the Isles of the Blessed’, Mnemosyne, 4th series, 24, 2 (1971), p. 153.

  5 On pirates, see Stéphane Lebecq, ‘L’emporium protomédiéval de Walcheren-Domburg: une mise en perspective’, reprinted in Lebecq, Hommes, mers et terres du Nord au début du Moyen ge, vol. 2: Centres, communications, échanges (Lille, 2011), p. 134.

  6 L. Th. Lehmann, ‘The Romano-Celtic boats from Druten and Kapel-Avezaath’, in McGrail, Maritime Celts, pp. 77–81; and Milne, ‘Maritime Traffic’, in McGrail, Maritime Celts, p. 83.

  7 Bede (tr. J. E. King), Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 122–4, ‘vendidit eum Lundoniam Freso cuidam’; ‘indubitanter’ is how Bede qualifies the story. For commentary on this, see Stéphane Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons du haut Moyen ge, vol. 2: Corpus des sources écrites (Lille, 1983), p. 232.

  8 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, p. 109, for text: ‘Fresones festinaverunt egredi de regione Anglorum, timentes iram propinquorum interfecti juvenis.’

  9 Michael Swanton (tr. and ed.), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), p. 90.

  10 ‘Tam Saxones quam Frisiones vel alias naciones promiscuas’, in Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, p. 402.

  11 Paraphrased from Wandalbert, Miracula S. Goaris, in Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, pp. 153–5.

  12 Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ch. 8, in Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, p. 85; and at p. 81 in George Washington Robinson’s translation (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), but this is my translation.

  13 For dunes, the unusual pattern of tides and the death toll, see G. Waitz (ed.), Annales Bertiniani (Hannover, 1883), p. 18. Waitz leaves the account at the end of 839 but I have followed Lebecq in combining it with other reports for the end of 838.

  14 B. De Simson (ed.), Annales Xantenses et Annales Vedastini (Hannover/Leipzig, 1909), pp. 9, 10, 26.

  15 Detlev Ellmers, ‘The Frisian Monopoly of Coastal Transport in the 6th–8th Centuries’, in McGrail, Maritime Celts, p. 91.

  16 See Joachim Henning, ‘Early European Towns’, in Joachim Henning (ed.), Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, vol. 1: The Heirs of the Roman West (Berlin, 2007), pp. 19–21.

  17 D. A. Gerrets and J. de Koning, ‘Settlement Development on the Wijnaldum-Tjitsma Terp’, in J. C. Besteman, J. M. Bos, D. A. Gerrets, H. A. Heidinga, J. De Koning (eds.), The Excavation at Wijnaldum, vol. I (Rotterdam, 1999), p. 111.

  18 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, p. 137.

  19 See William H. TeBrake, ‘Ecology, Economy in Early Medieval Frisia’, Viator 9 (1978), p. 16; and also H. A. Heidinga, ‘The Wijnaldum Excavation: Searching for a Central Place in Dark Age Frisia’, in Besteman et al., Excavation at Wijnaldum, p. 10.

  20 G. Waitz (ed.), Vitae Anskarii et Rimberti (Hannover, 1884), p. 72
.

  21 J. P. Pals, ‘Preliminary Notes on Crop Plants and the Natural and Anthropogeneous Vegetation’, in Besteman et al., Excavation at Wijnaldum, pp. 145, 147, 149.

  22 Ellmers, ‘Frisian Monopoly of Coastal Transport’, p. 91.

  23 John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers (London, 1989), pp. 211–12.

  24 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, pp. 37–9; the translation is mine, but see L. Whitbread, ‘The “Frisian Sailor” Passage in the Old English Gnomic Verses’, Review of English Studies 22, 87 (July 1946), pp. 215–19 for a more stylish English version and a discussion of Frisian morals.

  25 William Levison (ed.), Vita Willibrordi …, in B. Krusch and W. Levison (eds.), Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum VII (Hannover, 1920), pp. 123–5.

  26 Georg Weitz (ed.), Ex Miraculis S. Wandregisili, in Scriptorum … Supplementa Tomorum I–XII (Hannover, 1857), pp. 406–9.

  27 Job 41:34, 33, 31, 14, 21, 32, quoting the Authorized Version.

  28 Stéphane Lebecq, ‘Scènes de chasse aux mammifères marins (mers du Nord VI–XIIème siècles)’ (1997), in Lebecq, Hommes, mers et terres du Nord au début du Moyen ge, vol. 1: Peuples, cultures, territoires (Lille, 2011), pp. 244ff.

  29 Joe Flatman, Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts (London, 2009), pp. 50ff.

  30 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, pp. 185–8.

  31 Levison, Vitae Sancti Bonifatii, p. 20. I’ve read ‘trepidantibus’ for ‘trepudantibus’ as Levison’s note allows because I can’t quite imagine sailors rowing and dancing all at once as some translators (e.g. George Washington Robinson, 1916) can.

  32 Ibid., p. 52.

  33 See Keith Wade, ‘Ipswich’, in David Hill and Robert Cowie (eds.), Wics: The Early Medieval Trading Centres of Northern Europe (Sheffield, 2001), appendix 1, pp. 86–7.

  34 M. O. H. Carver, ‘Pre-Viking Traffic in the North Sea’, in McGrail, Maritime Celts, pp. 119, 121.

  35 See Heidinga, ‘Wijnaldum Excavation’, in Besteman et al., Excavation at Wijnaldum, pp. 9, 10.

  36 Egge Knol, ‘Frisia in Carolingian Times’, in Iben Skibsted Klæsøe (ed.), Viking Trade and Settlement in Continental Western Europe (Copenhagen, 2010), p. 47.

  37 Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 9, 41.

  38 Ibid., pp. 9, 15.

  39 See Florin Curta, ‘Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving’, Speculum 81, 3 (2006), p. 683.

  40 Spufford, Money and Its Use, p. 25.

  41 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 1, pp. 54–6.

  42 Spufford, Money and Its Use, p. 28.

  43 Pieterjan Deckers, personal communication.

  44 Hans F. Haefele (ed.), ‘Notker the Stammerer’, in Gesta Karoli Magni Imperatoris, vol. II (Berlin, 1959), ch. 9, p. 63.

  45 Curta, ‘Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving’, p. 688.

  46 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 1, p. 264.

  47 Ibid., p. 76.

  48 Peter Sawyer, The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2013), pp. 98–9.

  49 Spufford, Money and Its Use, p. 35.

  50 Dirk Jan Henstra: The Evolution of the Money Standard in Medieval Frisia (Groningen, 2000), p. 263.

  51 Ernst Dümmler, Epistolae Karolini aevi, vol. II (Berlin, 1895), letters 18ff., p. 145.

  52 W. J. H. Verwers, ‘Dorestad: A Carolingian Town?’, in Richard Hodges and Brian Hobley (eds.), The Rebirth of Towns in the West AD 700–1050 (London, 1988), pp. 52ff.

  53 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 1, pp. 149ff.

  54 Lebecq, ibid., vol. 2, p. 21, for text of poem.

  55 Verwers, ‘Dorestad’, in Hodges and Hobley, Rebirth of Towns, pp. 54–5.

  56 Charles H. Robinson (tr.), Vita Anskarii (London, 1921), p. 104.

  57 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 1, p. 259.

  58 Ibid., p. 30.

  59 Ibid., p. 28.

  60 Based on Dagfinn Skre, ‘Town and Inhabitants’, in Skre (ed.), Things from the Town: Artefacts and Inhabitants in Viking-Age Kaupang (Norske Oldfunn XXIV; Aarhus/Oslo, 2011), esp. pp. 411ff. for the plan of the house and 431ff. for the use and inhabitants of the house.

  61 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 1, p. 30, for Schleswig; p. 28 for Worms; p. 90 for Yorkshire; pp. 112–13 for Radbod.

  62 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 258, quoting the Chronicles of Pseudo-Fredegaire.

  63 ‘Normani in Walcras interfecerunt Francos’, in Annales S. Martini Tornacensis for 839, quoted in Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, p. 341.

  64 ‘Interfecta est de paganis non minima multitudo’, in Annales Xantenses for 835, quoted in Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, p. 335.

  65 Lebecq, Marchands et navigateurs frisons, vol. 2, pp. 285–7.

  2. THE BOOK TRADE

  1 Bede, Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ch. 8, in J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer (trs.), The Age of Bede (London, 1988), p. 195.

  2 Bede, Lives of the Abbots, ch. 6, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, p. 192.

  3 The Anonymous History of Abbot Ceolfrith, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, p. 218.

  4 Bede, Lives of the Abbots, ch. 17, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, p. 205.

  5 Bede writes of visiting Bishop Egbert for study, and meaning to do so again; see the Epistola ad Ecgbertum, in Bede (tr. J. E. King), Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), p. 446.

  6 See Fiona Edmonds, ‘The Practicalities of Communication between Northumbrian and Irish Churches c.635–735’, in James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan (eds.), Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations before the Vikings (Oxford, 2009), pp. 129ff.

  7 Bede, Lives of the Abbots, ch. 13, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, p. 200.

  8 George Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 7–8.

  9 Bede, Lives of the Abbots, ch. 4, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, p. 190.

  10 Bernard Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne (Cambridge, 2007), p. 15.

  11 Bede, Lives of the Abbots, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, pp. 192, 193.

  12 Bede (tr. J. E. King), Historia ecclesiastica, book II, pp. xxiv, 382, 384.

  13 Bede to Acca, Bishop of Hexham, quoted in Rosalind Love, ‘The Library of the Venerable Bede’, in Richard Gameson (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. I: 400–1100 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 606.

  14 Richard Gameson, ‘Anglo-Saxon Scribes and Scriptoria’, in Gameson, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, p. 103.

  15 For a brief account, see John J. Contreni, review of Martin Hellmann, ‘Tironische Noten in der Karolingerzeit am Beispiel eines Persius-Kommentars aus der Schule von Tours’, Speculum 77, 4 (2002), pp. 1305–7.

  16 In the introduction to his Commentary on the Gospel of St Luke, Bede says that, tied down by monastic chores, he worked as ‘dictator, notarius, librarius’. See J. A. Giles, The Complete Works of the Venerable Bede (London, 1844), vol. X, p. 268.

  17 Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries, p. 7; Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘“All that Peter stands for”: The Romanitas of the Codex Amiatinus Reconsidered’, in Graham-Campbell and Ryan, Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations, pp. 367ff.

  18 Michelle P. Brown: The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Early Medieval World (London, 2011), pp. 143–8.

  19 Michelle P. Brown: The Book and the Transformation of Britain c.550–1050 (London, 2011), p. 54.

  20 Sr Winifred Mary OP, ‘The Medieval Scribe’, Classical Journal 48, 6 (1953), pp. 207ff.

  21 Bede, Life of Cuthbert, ch. 33, in Webb and Farmer, Age of Bede, p. 86.

  22 O’Reilly, ‘“All that Peter stands for”’, in Graham-Campbell and Ryan, Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations, p. 379.

  23 Brown, The Book and the Transformation, p. 19 for marks; p. 95 for binding; p. 55 for lightbox.

  24 Diarmuid Scully, ‘Bede’s Chronica Maiora: Early Insular History’, in Graham-Campbell and Ryan, Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations, p. 48. />
  25 Bede (tr. J. E. King), Historia ecclesiastica, book IV, ch. II, pp. 10ff.

  26 Faith Wallis (ed. and tr.), Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool, 2012), p. 202.

  27 See John Maddicott, ‘Plague in Seventh Century England’, in Lester K. Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 171ff. (p. 184 for Bede).

  28 Wallis, Bede, p. 78.

  29 Wesley M. Stevens, ‘Sidereal Time in Anglo-Saxon England’, in C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells (eds.), Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of Sutton Hoo (Minneapolis, 1992), p. 130.

  30 Wallis, Bede, p. 260 for fifty-nine-times table; pp. 255ff. for finger calculations.

  31 Cf. Pope Gregory’s letter making Boniface a bishop, 1 December 722, in Ephrain Emerton, The Letters of St. Boniface (New York, 2000), p. 22.

  32 Wallis, Bede, pp. lxxiff.

  33 Paul Hughes, ‘Implicit Carolingian Tidal Data’, Early Science and Medicine 8, 1 (2003), p. 20 for the round Earth; p. 18 for Bede’s Irish predecessors.

  34 Wesley M. Stevens, Bede’s Scientific Achievement, Jarrow Lecture 1985, rev. 1995; in Stevens, Cycles of Time and Scientific Learning in Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 1995), II, pp. 27ff.

  35 Hughes, ‘Implicit Carolingian Tidal Data’, p. 12.

  36 Bede’s letter to Plegwin is in Wallis, Bede, pp. 405ff.

  37 For the whole issue, see Jane Stevenson, ‘The Beginnings of Literacy in Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 89C (1989), pp. 127ff.

  38 Ludwig Bieler (ed.), The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979), p. 122 for Patrick’s books; p. 94 for the contest with the druid; p. 126 for the alphabet in Tírechán’s Life.

  39 Boniface to Eadburga, 735, in Emerton, Letters of St. Boniface, pp. 42–3.

  40 Boniface to Bishop Daniel of Winchester, 742–6, in ibid., p. 94.

  41 M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot, 1992), p. 23.

  42 Brown, The Book and the Transformation, p. 30.

  43 Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries, p. 17.

  44 Brown, The Book and the Transformation, p. 45.

  45 Parkes, Pause and Effect, p. 30.