The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (29 page)

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-water 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