The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (24 page)

Then there were runes cut into stones: to
carry the memory of the dead, to honour great travellers or to claim their estates when
they were gone. Runestones were an archive that stood along roads, at bridges or on
causeways to say who built them, and in whose honour: at Dynna in Norway a woman honours
her lost daughter by building a bridge and putting up a runestone covered with
new-fangled Christian images, since Christians disapproved of making actual graves look
grand. This daughter, Astrid, was ‘the most gifted with her hands’, the
stone says; she made tapestries in honour of the Christmas star, the Baby Jesus and the
Wise Men on their way to the stable, and versions of her pictures are carved onto the
stone.
¹⁶
Often runestones were stone prayers, a way of talking directly to God
or the Virgin Mary, or even Thor, although in Norse tradition it could be considered
dangerous to address a Norse god directly.
¹⁷

On one stone at Hillersjö in Sweden, the
runes are cut into the body of a twisting snake and they carry a whole family history,
including who died too young and who inherited, with the single word
‘interpret’ carved in the snake’s eye.
¹⁸
Travellers were
honoured with runestones when they failed to return, which was a way of certifying their
death; absentees did the same from far away, honouring the dead to make sure of their
part of the inheritance.
¹⁹

Runes carry fragments of stories, too, very personal stories
of loss or anger or sometimes ambition. We can’t know who the Hrossketil was who
‘broke faith and deceived his sworn friend’, but that treachery is his one
mark on history because it was carved in stone.
²⁰
We can only guess why Thorir carved
the words ‘death of a mother is the worst that can happen to a son’,
²¹
or
why a widow called Ragnelf asked God to help the soul of her only son ‘better than
he deserves’.
²²
Something happened in the family of
Mael Lochon on the Isle of Man so that he honoured his adoptive mother, Malmura, and
added: ‘Better it is to have a good foster son than a bad son.’
²³

The stones honour the dead, which means they
have to lay out the story of lives. Some died in the course of raids, some on Viking
expeditions, or in battles raging between the various kings; once, the stone says that
its sponsor and its subject ‘went out to meet the warriors of Frisia and split the
booty of war’.
²⁴
Some died as mercenaries out of
Byzantium, fighting the Lombards; at least one, a man called Ragnvald, ‘was in
Greece the head of the armed troops’, which means he was in charge of the
mercenaries at Byzantium.
²⁵
Some were glorified tax-farmers,
like Ulf who three times sailed to England and raised the tribute the Danes reckoned was
their due.
²⁶
And many were traders, going out with partners on voyages which could
prove as dangerous and end as badly as war. Sons honour a father who died on board his
freighter; a wife has the runes carved to say that her husband ‘drowned in the sea
of Holm’. His
knørr
, his ship, ‘went down and only three men were
saved’.
²⁷
And if sometimes there are stones which say they mark the place
where a boat full of gold is buried, brought back from the land of giants in the far
north, others mark tragedy. A trading ship went out perhaps to the worst side of
Greenland: ‘Gone far out to sea, sadly without food or dry clothes, they washed up
on a great plain of ice blasted by cold winds, a desert where nothing could live.
Happiness can be wrecked by an unhappy fate and then a man finds death all too
early.’
²⁸

These are public statements out on the open
road, which means readers were passing. In time readers learn to write, and the skill
becomes more general. Runesticks were used for labels to show who owned which sack of
goods in a warehouse, and then for much
more. In Bergen some time around 1170 a lover scratched on a
runestick: ‘I love that man’s wife so dearly that fire seems cold to me. And
I am that woman’s lover.’ Someone else, perhaps, wrote: ‘I love that
man’s wife.’ And someone boasted: ‘Ingebjörg loved me while I was in
Stavanger.’ A few years later someone carved out a plea: ‘Love me, I love
you Gunnhild. Kiss me. I know you well.’ Maybe these are only graffiti, but they
sometimes seem like messages; so maybe Gunnhild could read. It’s true that the
next century there are runesticks that read like bathroom walls – ‘Smith lay with
Vigdis’ is just a boast, and ‘The cunt is delightful, may the prick fill it
up’
²⁹
is a hope – but there are also curiously domestic messages. Some
time in the first half of the thirteenth century, someone wrote on the back of a stick
already used for a message: ‘Gyda says you must come home’ and added
something else that nobody can now read. Someone thought the easiest way to send a
message, maybe to a boozing husband in the pub, was to write it in the knowledge he
could read.
³⁰

Of course, lawyers’ law needed much
more than the magic and usefulness of the written record. Lawyers’ law had to be
able to do what custom did: reflect the shape and nature of all the connections and
powers in a community, account for who owned what and who was free and the ranks of
society, so it would somehow seem natural and essential. The tussles between law and
custom went on for centuries because custom, in its way, worked.

The ordeal survived the coming of the
lawyers, even when the experts made it seem blasphemous or an empty superstition. The
ordeal was theatre, after all; it expressed the conflict between accuser and accused and
then the moment of decision, it made an audience wait for the verdict. It was decisive
where law was all too often conditional. It was also very public, with the community
looking on, with all its layers of privilege and standing, just like in life, while the
law put justice away in a closed room, to be handled carefully by outsiders.

There were dozens of local rules for the
rite. A free man, not subject to a feudal lord, usually had to pull a stone out of
boiling water
or else grab red-hot metal,
often ploughshares, from a fire and carry the glowing metal at least nine paces
(‘measured nine feet by the feet of the man who undergoes the ordeal’;
justice was tailored). The hot iron was cooked red in a fire that could not be stoked
once the consecration started, and then it had to lie on the embers until the last
prayer had been read.
³¹
The ploughshares were ‘on
fire to discover the truth’.
³²

The water had to boil, and it had to be
checked by two men for the accused and two men for the accuser; everyone had to see the
tests and know. The accused plunged his hand up to the wrist for a single offence, or up
to the elbow for three charges;
³³
and then his hands and arms were
bound up and sealed with wax. The test was how he healed. In three days he ought to be
almost mended, or else he was guilty; and again, everyone could see.

A man who was not free, who belonged to a
feudal lord, was trussed up and thrown naked into cold water because bare skin stopped
the possibility of trickery. The verdict was immediate, as though there was no point
wasting three whole days on a man who wasn’t free; he either sank or he floated.
That wasn’t torture, because the pain had nothing to do with the result, although
it might well lead to a confession. Pain was reserved, enthusiastically, for
punishment.

The higher your rank, the less you suffered.
The Church rulings were various, but the Council of Tribur in 895 laid down that greater
men just needed twelve men to vouch for them by swearing oaths; servants, on the other
hand, could suffer either the ordeal by cold water or the ordeal by hot iron.
³⁴
Priests were never tested with fire or water; monks and priests who were accused of
crimes, maybe theft inside a monastery, were told to take the bread of the Mass in their
mouths because a guilty man would choke on it. Knights were exempt from ordeals after
1119, unless they were accused of heresy, in which case they carried hot iron like
everyone else. Nobility preferred duels in which God would make the better man win, a
moral test that survived long after any other kind of ordeal; of course, nobles could
always hire champions to do the actual dying for them. Social climbers wanted the same
privileges as the grandees, and from
the
twelfth century the burghers of the newly flourishing towns were trying to insist on
exemptions.

Women usually had to carry hot iron because
the ordeal by water was not modest enough; there was criticism of ‘priests who
peer eagerly with shameless eyes at the women who have been stripped before they enter
the water’.
³⁵
Even so, women might choose ordeals to prove their virtue; a woman
charged with adultery had no other way to establish her innocence. It might be hard to
find two credible eye-witnesses to an affair and a carefully closed door or a muffling
curtain could spoil the whole case, but that would not save a woman’s honour. When
the legendary Isolde was accused of adultery with Tristan, her husband, the king, made
her prove her innocence with hot iron.
³⁶
She carried the glowing metal, had
her hands bound up and sealed with holy wax, and after three days the bandages were
opened to see if the wound had healed the way an innocent person’s should.
³⁷
Gudrun in the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde proves she is not an adulterer with the
‘sacred boiling pot’, ‘plunging her bright hand down to the
bottom’ and snatching at the precious stones lying there; the servant who falsely
accused her also faced the ordeal and was scalded badly. She was taken off to be
properly suppressed in a peatbog, alive for a while under a mesh of wattle.
³⁸

Virtue meant much more than an absence of
sin. A cleric called Poppo, at the court of the Saxon king, Harold, around 963, kept
arguing out loud at public banquets that there was only one God, and finally the king
told him to prove it. The priest was arrested overnight and the next morning was shown
the glowing piece of iron ‘of huge weight’ which he was to carry for the
sake of the faith. He did so, without hesitation according to his biographers,
‘and carried it for as long as the king himself determined. He showed his unharmed
hand to all; he made the faith credible to everyone.’
³⁹

The ordeal also stopped trouble by making a
decision Godly and therefore final; or so even emperors hoped. When Charlemagne divided
up his kingdom in his will, he specified that ‘if there is any dispute over the
limits and boundaries of the kingdom that the testimony of men cannot clarify or
resolve, then we want the question put to the judgement of the Cross’. That meant
his rival heirs
standing in church during
Mass, arms stretched out like crucified men, until one collapsed and the other won. The
Emperor was trying to keep the peace in territory with enemies all around; he wanted a
verdict everyone could accept so that at least within the empire there should be
‘no combat of any kind’.
⁴⁰

All this depended on a holy process that
took its slow, deliberate time right up to the moment when the body hit the water or the
hand closed on the hot iron. When the ordeal was just putting holy bread in a
man’s mouth to see if he choked, the bread had to be properly consecrated. When
there was fire involved, there was time for the priest to warn any guilty man to stay
away from the altar, to insist he remove every charm and talisman he might be carrying:
to make sure he put away ‘the workings of foul spirits, no hurtful sacrileges, no
magic acts’.
⁴¹
The hand that was to be plunged into boiling water had to be
washed carefully first, with soap.
⁴²
The water itself was exorcized so
it could ‘judge the living, judge the dead, judge the human race’. The
ground at the church entrance was sprinkled with holy water before the fire was lit; the
men who lowered the accused into the water had to take the time to kiss the Gospel
reverently;
⁴³
the men who lined the church for an ordeal by fire had to go
without food and sex, to be clean enough to taste holy water.
⁴⁴

There was none of the law’s
impersonal, almost mechanical process. The ordeal was full of time for accuser or
accused to think again.

The Church could not approve. Ordeals were
local and variable; the Church wanted universal and written laws. They could find no
commandments in custom.

Besides, ordeals were Germanic and faintly
pagan, and quite un-Roman, which caused great offence to those legal scholars who were
putting together ancient Roman texts about law and trying to make them fit their very
different modern world.
⁴⁵
A sixth-century manuscript turned
up in Pisa, a kind of legal scrapbook of the writings of the great Roman jurists:
Justinian’s Digest
. Chapters and fragments of the same collection
turned up in Bologna, where the law school fell upon them eagerly. By the last quarter
of the eleventh century there was the start of a legal textbook, used first for Church
and
canonical law, but also for the lay
courts.
⁴⁶
Priests had Scripture, lawyers had Justinian, and the church courts
had the
Decretum
of Gratian, a twelfth-century Bolognese teacher whose
anthology included anything that could affect a decision in canon law, from papal
letters to the writings of the Church fathers to scraps of actual Roman law; quite a
number of the canons were even genuine. Gratian’s book was copied again and again;
it has been called ‘one of the most widely read books in Western
history’.
⁴⁷