The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (26 page)

If simple shepherd monks could fall into
this range of legal and financial trouble, imagine what could happen to the unholy. A
man claims he has been let down – by a horse dealer, a doctor, an innkeeper with
thieving servants or a courier who fails to deliver – and he goes to court. If he does
not have a
specialty
, a document written under seal to prove his arrangement
with the dealer, doctor, innkeeper or courier, then he can be answered by the
‘wager of law’, in which the defendant and eleven of his friends simply
stand up in court and deny any liability on oath. An old custom trumped new-fangled law,
unless you understood the magic of writing things down. Even judges could find this
unreasonable; in 1374 Justice Cavendish ruled that such a case could proceed even
without any document ‘because for such a small matter a man cannot always have a
clerk to make a
specialty
’.

Innkeepers all across Europe now had
responsibilities ‘so that no loss in any way shall befall [their] lodgers through
the default of the innkeepers or their servants’. If anyone stole your goods
during the night you could bring a writ of ‘trespass’. In a case from 1369,
a doctor who took a great part of a man’s salary to cure a wounded finger was sued
when the finger was lost; and in 1387 a horse dealer hid some infirmity of the horse he
was selling, and ended up in court. Anything that went wrong, and cost money, might now
end up in the paperchase of the law.

It was never a simple matter. A doctor made a promise in
London to cure a man, but he treated him in Middlesex; so, since medieval law wanted
juries who knew things first hand, to begin with there had to be hearings on where the
hearings could happen (the court settled on London). The same wrong, like not paying a
debt, could be either a breach of contract, in which case the debtor was safe from jail,
or a tort, a legal damage, in which case he could be jailed until he paid. (Damages for
a tort were meant to punish, but for a breach of contract they were simply
compensation.) Never mind that the plaintiff just wanted his money; the lawyers had
first to decide what kind of wrong had been done. The risks were not always to do with
common sense, since judges could disagree as late as 1482 on whether a man could be
liable for a debt without any fault of his own; Chief Justice Brian wrote alarmingly
that ‘if a man is bound to me on condition that the Pope will be here at
Westminster tomorrow, in this case if the Pope does not come, although there is no fault
in the defendant, still he has forfeited his bond’.
⁵⁹

The ordinary stuff of economic life required
tangles of paper that did not always do their job. Ulman Stromer of Nuremberg discovered
in the fourteenth century that hiring someone to work in a paper mill required written
contracts to prevent your skilled workers from running off with their skills to another
mill. Stromer needed a millwright on a lifetime contract, a paper expert on a ten-year
contract and an Italian family with arcane skills who were sworn not to teach anybody
else how to make paper or help any Italian who wanted to make paper in Germany; the
Italians ‘swore a holy oath’ and ‘the conditions of this contract are
registered
sub publica manu
’ (that is, on public record). They also
wanted more Italians to come from Lombardy to help them work the mill, and they had a
plan to make Stromer rent them the mill so they could operate it for themselves, and
despite all the oaths and papers the mill never did run properly. Stromer found it
necessary to arrest the lot of them and lock them in a small tower room. He had to wait
a while but after four days in the tower his men agreed to sign a whole new contract, in
which they agreed to obey the first contract and not go to law anywhere except
Nuremberg. That didn’t work, either. Within four
years, an exasperated Stromer decided he had had enough, and
leased the mill to someone else who would make him paper ‘in order that I have
nothing to do with that’.
⁶⁰

When cash was short, the law sometimes did
provide ingenious answers. At the end of the fourteenth century English grocers had
trouble finding enough coin to stay in the cloth business, especially since the Italians
had floods of silver out of Serbia and Bosnia. They needed credit on a generous scale.
To get it the grocer John Hall in 1396 made a deed of gift of all his goods and chattels
to someone else, a deed which was used most often to avoid some threat of confiscation
by the law or creditors; but Hall made his in return for a bond worth £500. He still had
the goods in his house, he was even allowed to sue anyone who damaged them or tried to
take them away – anyone except the holder of the bond, who could seize them if the money
was not paid back. He also had cash to buy and sell. This new use of an old kind of
paper was seen more and more from the 1440s, a way to compensate for the desperate
shortage of bullion: it made credit work.
⁶¹

The scale of trade across the seas created
even more complications, and the law was not good at keeping up. Consider the ships
carrying freight in Danish waters from the eleventh century onwards; their wrecks lie
out in the open sea, which suggests they were working the long sea routes, and many are
real sailing ships with no room for rowers on board, built large to carry as much cargo
as possible, fifty to sixty tons. That means professional merchant seafarers, who almost
always needed to do deals before they set sail: the ship and its cargo might belong to a
list of shareholders, and before sailing there might be a crude kind of insurance to
organize, in which the shipmaster put up some money which the owners of the cargo would
keep if he failed to get their goods safely to their destination. Whatever rules and
customs covered all this, however it was organized, the law itself was not codified
until the thirteenth century, which is hundreds of years after the ships were out
sailing, and sinking.
⁶²

Partnerships in a ship once lasted for just
one voyage and they could be settled on the docks; but by the middle of the thirteenth
century they were the basis for big trading companies in Italy whose
shares could be bought and sold, with responsibility for
loss and profit, sale and delivery shared among people who might simply be trading the
paper on the shores of the North Sea and might not know each other. This idea of
shareholding was not entirely new; there was a kind of limited company operating
windmills on the Garonne in France from the twelfth century, with shares that could be
dealt in the marketplace at prices that varied according to the strength of the river
currents, the state of the harvest, the likelihood of floods.
⁶³
But that was local
knowledge; now an investor needed to know about storms, pirates, the price of goods in
two or three markets and the value of money. The small-town medieval markets ran on
credit with not much coin in circulation, depending instead on the stallholders knowing
by name, address and credit each customer for eggs or bread or cabbage; now credit was
needed on both sides of seas, in different languages and in different moneys, for goods
whose price and value were constantly changing.
⁶⁴

The world felt the need of law to manage all
this: to file the proof when properties did change hands, to check the contracts, to
deal with the aftershocks of contracts that went wrong, to handle mortgages and credit
and risk; later, much later, they would also be needed to organize proper insurance for
sea voyages. Lawyers made things run, including royal courts and growing towns that were
now more important than any rural, feudal territory. The age of the single Frisian boat
owner, plying up and down the coast and the Rhine with goods, was a distant memory, and
there were distinct classes of stay-at-home merchants and financiers, the shipowners and
shipmasters who moved the goods, and the agents in distant ports who did the buying and
selling. They needed a crude kind of accountancy, reliable information and lawyers to
make them a little safer.

Writing it all down was vital. Only then
could the serious talking begin.

The very best proof of how much writing
mattered was the forgeries. Forgery had been an ecclesiastical habit for centuries. St
Anskar made rather a mess of his mission in the 840s to turn Scandinavians into
Christians, and he needed political backing to carry
on with his work; so he faked documents to support his
useful fiction that he had Charlemagne’s permission for a diocese in the North,
Hamburg and Bremen combined. He also used false documents to prove he was an archbishop,
which he did not need to do; he was indeed an archbishop at some point in his career. He
still needed written proof, though, and he wrote it. His disciple Rimbert also wanted to
be in charge of the diocese of Hamburg–Bremen, so he invented the story and the proofs
all over again: as though forging documents was like writing a kind of revisionist,
hopeful history.
⁶⁵

There was in the ninth century an enthusiasm
for the monks at certain monasteries – Corbie in France, for instance – to help out
history by writing down the decrees and orders they felt popes and councils had always,
obviously, meant to issue. Two centuries later, faking had become a monastic speciality;
the fine, distinguished houses at Westminster, Canterbury, Durham and later Glastonbury
offered less grand houses a forgery service when they needed charters to prove their
title to land. They were told again and again that fakery was a menace to authority, in
the Church and in the kingdom; a false papal seal, as John of Salisbury wrote, ‘is
a peril to the universal church since by the marks of a single impress the mouths of all
the pontiffs may be opened or closed’.

The monks persisted. They were the
archivists, the keepers of records, and they were quite prepared to improve on history
to keep the record straight. The monks of Crowland in Lincolnshire invented thriller
detail for the story of how fire took down their monastery in 1091; they had a hero
abbot dodging streams of boiling lead and molten brass to wake up sleeping monks and
save them from the flames. The hero also, naturally, had already saved the vital
charters so that junior monks could have a chance to learn Saxon script; those charters
survived the fire, the fake history said, which was convenient since they proved fake
title to valuable lands.

The more respect for the written word, the
more fakes. Of all the official documents of William the Conqueror, roughly a third were
written down in the twelfth century long after his death, and more than a third of those
had absolutely no basis in anything earlier.
Sometimes the riskiest faking was for the grandest causes.
Austria tried to bargain its independence from Emperor Charles IV in 1360 by producing
proofs signed by Julius Caesar and Nero; but, unluckily for them, the Emperor knew the
humanist Petrarch, and Petrarch had several letters of Julius Caesar in his library, so
he could compare them. The fake Caesar used the plural in the wrong places, ‘we
Julius Caesar’ in the royal ‘we’, which was not a Roman style.
‘This ox,’ Petrarch wrote, ‘did not know this.’

Forgery was some men’s habit. Over
forty years in the fifteenth century the soldier John Hardyng produced at least twenty
documents meant to prove that Scotland was subject to England, of which seventeen, at
least, are forgeries. He has Scotland acknowledging the English king as liege lord in
the eleventh century, he has treason charges dropped against Scots who claimed it was no
treason to serve the King of England, and various Scottish kings swearing various oaths,
all with carefully faked seals: documents whose falsity, nineteenth-century scholars
said, ‘was most apparent’. There is no evidence any English king used the
documents, but Hardyng still thought them worth the work; he had been in the service of
various northern English lords who had lost their lands in Scotland and remained ever
hopeful. He was acting like an enthusiast for a cause who self-publishes a book of
history, except that he had to fake the handwriting, the wax, the parchment.

There was also the matter of Cambridge
University’s forgeries: its claim on an ancient past. The dons in 1381 had been
forced by a local mob to give up ‘all kinds of privileges and franchises granted
to them by all kings of England since the beginning of the world’ and agree to be
ruled by the local citizenry, who, for the sake of certainty, took a knife to the seals
on the old charters and then burned them in the marketplace. In 1429 the university
wanted to be free of interference from archbishops, bishops or archdeacons, or any of
their many officials, but they had no charters left; so they took refuge in fantasy. The
university actually began in the thirteenth century, a refuge from Oxford and from Paris
when both schools were having brief but heartfelt crises; but Cambridge offered papal
letters from the seventh century. They did not, unfortunately, have the originals, but
they had very old copies, they said; and
apart from anything else the letters showed that Pope Honorius himself had studied at
Cambridge, about six hundred years before anybody else.

The deception worked. The university now
produced a wonderfully mythomaniac history which involved Alcuin, Charlemagne and King
Arthur, who was supposed to have guaranteed in 531 ‘the study of learning
undisturbed’ on the grounds that the King of Britain had been converted to
Christianity ‘by the preaching of the doctors of Cambridge’. The fantasy was
meant to align Cambridge with the fantasies of other universities, with a dream of the
vivid intellectual life of ancient Britain, with all kinds of comfortable thoughts about
the primacy of the university whose start was now put back so far it might seem as
remote and wonderful and even mysterious as the start of the world itself. Besides the
ambitious self-inflation, the documents also had the very practical effect of getting
the bishops out of the university’s affairs.
⁶⁶