The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (28 page)

1 October 1250, a new moon rising huge and
red: a sign of storms to come – or so Matthew Paris wrote. There was dense mist. There
were violent winds tearing down leaves and branches. The sea rose far above its usual
level, the tide swept in and swept in again, there was a terrible, unfamiliar roaring
like nobody could remember. ‘In the darkness of the night,’ Paris wrote,
‘the sea seemed to burn as if set on fire and waves joined with waves as if in
battle.’

Strong ships foundered. Houses and churches
were broken down by the violent rise of the sea. In Flanders and in England there was
damage beyond repair in areas that were low-lying. Rivers were forced back from the sea
and flooded the land so that meadows, mills, houses were destroyed and ‘the corn
not yet stored in the barns was swept away from the flooded fields’.
¹

This is the usual story: how nature makes
life difficult for man. Sand drifts and smothers, water breaks into the land, shorelines
where people live are washed and battered into new shapes and sudden storms like the
night of the red moon take a whole harvest and leave hunger behind. Nature is arbitrary
and man is her victim. It is also much less than half the story: the more important half
is what man did to nature. Deliberately, carelessly, accidentally, catastrophically man
began to remake whole landscapes and change the balance of half a continent. In doing
so, he turned the effect of wind and tide into a disaster.

Of course, it did not seem that way at the
time. New towns wanted food, and couldn’t grow it for themselves: no room, no
time. New
towns and their new industries
needed fuel, more and more of it. Those two appetites began chains of change with
consequences from floods and ruin to the careful cleanliness of streets in Holland and
the first model of how to organize a limited liability company. Man imposed himself on
the world, sometimes without meaning to.

These are the chronicles of the war between
man and the natural world.

There were new dunes forming along the
shore of the Netherlands, great loaves of sand, and so there was less land to plough and
plant. Human beings started to quit the coast in the tenth century, and they moved
inland to the peat zone. The domes and cushions of peat, standing four metres proud of
the bog itself, looked like the
terpen
, the kind of hillocks which they had
used as refuges before. A century of drought made the bogs seem almost accessible, and
if drought could do that, man could do better. All it took was ditches and canals to
drain off the water from the high peat domes to the pools that pockmarked the low bog,
and you can dig a ditch with the tools any peasant owns: no new technology required.
Once drained, the land could be farmed. All the sodden peat in Waterland, which is just
north of Amsterdam, became land for farming in this way.

The first problem was this: the new system
for drainage worked too well.
²
Peat that is wet will hold plant
stuff without letting it decay, it keeps in the carbon dioxide essential for
photosynthesis and it keeps back the rush of storm water. Peat without water is a fluffy
thing, and almost nothing, a tenth of its original volume. As the floor of the bog dried
and shrank, it sank closer and closer to the water level underneath, going down by as
much as two centimetres a year. A whole landscape was dropping dangerously close to the
level of the sea beyond the dunes. It was also growing hostile; without water, the top
layer oxidized, letting off the carbon it stored and also turning sour. The cattle
brought in to work the dried peat pastures only trampled the land down further.

The town of Medemblik sat in Waterland on
the side of the Almere lake. It was a transit town for freight coming from the Rhine and
heading to the North Sea on its way to Scandinavia and England.
It seemed almost secure. The more the peat sank, the higher
stood the ridge of sand where Medemblik was built. Storm surges brought in sandy clay to
bind and cover the sand. The town was surrounded with cornfields, with oats and barley,
which could stand the occasional flood of seawater, with salt marsh where cattle and
goats, some sheep and the occasional pig could graze; from their remains we know the
sheep died old, which means they were raised for wool, not mutton. There was always more
peat to reclaim, so it seemed, when the old land became too sour and salt for corn.

Then the waters turned on the land.

At first an old ridge of peat kept the North
Sea out of the Aelmere lake, but the peat was becoming sour and it was unsettled by the
sinking land. Storms beat it right down. The sea broke into the lake, and turned it
brackish and tidal: what used to be called the Zuider Zee. The sunken land flooded. The
south bank of the Middenleek River, where the town stood, was partly washed away; the
empty north bank simply disappeared in the wind and waves and tides.
³

Men are obstinate: Medemblik was built
again, plot by plot. The ground was raised with peat and clay, the embankments were made
to slope steep on the water side, gentle on the land side so there would be a barrier
against water seeping through. A line of houses stood unbroken on the ridge. But trade
routes were shifting; now the townspeople had to go out to trade rather than simply wait
for the trade to come to them. The reclaimed land was almost ruined. Salt-marsh plants
took root in the old bog. Farming stopped; cattle and sheep took its place. Villages
moved to higher ground, sometimes built higher ground for themselves, or else were
washed away as Medemblik so nearly was.

There was a lesson in this: water had to be
managed, not just drained.
⁴
There were ditches and canals to make
the water flow where it was needed, or at least harmless, but there also had to be dikes
and dams to keep the water out. Every detail of slope and gradient mattered. Between
1100 and 1300 most of the Zuider Zee was lined with dikes to stop the land washing away:
dikes made of cut peat and clay, sometimes with mats of reeds, sometimes with seaweed.
The land was not all sinking at the same rate: it made a patchwork landscape
with indentations, like a floor with tiles
missing. To stop flooding from one level to another, all the land had to be pumped dry
and the drainage canals had to run on embankments higher than the fields so there was
enough of a gradient for them to drain. The Rhee, the same kind of high, narrow canal,
was built across Romney Marsh in England above land that had been reclaimed, just to get
a run of water which could break and move the silt in the harbour at Romney.
⁵

Sand, silt and sinking land were problems
all around the North Sea. From now on, there could be no more unconsidered landscape;
even doing nothing to the land was a strategy and a plan.

The Dutch already had a reputation for
managing water, even before 1250. They were invited to North Germany in the twelfth
century to drain the peat bogs, to start the ‘golden ring’ of dikes on the
North Sea coast. Their expertise was not even especially in building dikes, since the
first to go north were men from Leiden, where dikes had not yet been built on any scale;
they were simply thought to understand how water worked. They were invited by local
lords, once by the Bishop of Bremen and Hamburg, and they carried with them much more
than their expertise; they were allowed to settle and maintain their own Dutch laws,
were granted fen and undrained land, and were accepted as freemen for centuries. They
disrupted feudal rules entirely, and they did so in territory where land drainage had
often begun with the collective efforts of local farmers rather than orders from above.
When Germans drained land, with or without Dutch help, they were often allowed the
rights the Dutch claimed: ‘free ground with free people’.
⁶

They would go travelling later for land or
for money, to Prussia and to what is now Poland, but the knowledge of how to manage
water also became a passport for Anabaptists going east, and Catholics who were
uncomfortable when the Netherlands became the United Provinces under Protestant rule in
1581. They seem to have inspired the later reclamation of land from the sea in
Ostfriesland on the North Sea coast where modern Germany meets the modern Netherlands;
again, it was a scheme organized by local farmers, which led to the
‘farmers’ republic’ of Dithmarscha. The Dutch took a certain style of
landscape with them: houses strung out along a
road, for example, and lines of houses on a dike with
reclaimed land behind, but their politics were even more important. The word
‘free’ started to matter where they had been.

At home, everyone knew that water had to be
watched and controlled. Everyone co-operated. Everyone also knew, unfortunately, that
the towns needed more and more peat. Holland was beginning to have breweries on an
almost industrial scale, and they needed peat as fuel to keep their fires burning. There
were the furnaces of brickworks, the heat needed to dye cloth and later there would be
the sugar works in Amsterdam. Dutch peat was being sold as far south as Antwerp. Where
there was still peat it was first mined dry from the edges of the bogs, but the demand
kept growing. Hollanders had to learn from Norfolk in England, where the miners were
already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries going deep for the brushwood peat buried
under a scant surface of turf. Around 1300, the peat pits had filled with water, and the
ponds began to flood together; water began to block the mining. It was necessary to find
ways to dredge peat out of standing water and ferry it to dry land using boats;
‘the ferrying of fen’. A new landscape formed in the Norfolk Broads, streams
between marshy islands in an unsettled wetland. It should have been a warning of what
would happen when the Dutch ran out of the easy stuff and started to use the same
techniques.
⁷

Peat-mining was an industry, not a sideline
for small farmers and peasants any more; it needed more and more hands. The old drains,
the small dikes, dams, sluices and canals that kept the land clear and accessible, also
needed constant work. The situation would have been difficult in any case, but it was
compounded by the appalling mortality from the Black Death: there were not enough strong
backs to keep the land safe.
⁸

Already in Flanders there was a new kind of
authority: the water board, whose job was to protect the land from flood and the surges
of the sea. The boards in other places only inspected what landowners had done, approved
or condemned, but along the Flemish coast they started to organize the work themselves
from the second half of the thirteenth century. They hired labourers, often whole
families, including women and children; they hired contractors; and
they levied a water tax on every landowner according to the
size of his lands.

All this is remarkable because it could not
start without capital, often raised from rich abbeys but later from investors:
essentially a private company for a public good. Bruges had a money market sophisticated
enough to hand out malignly expensive short-term loans, which was a start, but the cost
of the money was far too high and over time the control of water required more and more
spending: on new ways to make dikes solid, on sluices made of brick and stone with
double doors with copper fittings, on the mechanization of the sluices that let water
out and back to the sea. Landowners invested in the water boards to protect only the
land which could make them money, and they were hard-headed enough to abandon whole
islands, even small towns like Biervliet that had once been famous for salt and herring
but now was cut off from the shore and subject to tidal plagues of rats. Land became an
investment for city people, not the basis for a man’s whole identity and his place
in the world. Water boards, too, were an investment, and the shareholders had liability
limited to the amount of land they owned in the board’s area.

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.