The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (31 page)

The sea gave the village of Walraversijde a
living. The towns of Ghent and Bruges wanted herring and had rules to make sure it was
always fresh; the counts of Flanders wanted new kinds of business from the people on
their lands; the new floating nets made it possible to catch herring close to the shore
and even in deep waters. Walraversijde obliged. From the eleventh century there were
‘herring fishermen’,
piscatori de harenga
, along the Flanders
coast. They needed settlements where they could beach their boats and make a life. They
lived on the shore because fishing was a constant process of going away, again and
again, even if it did not involve being far out at sea.

The fishermen were just across the dunes
from great sheep farms, which had once been more than enough to support a family; but
the farmers were brought down by taxes they paid for works to keep the water off their
land, and the division of land into smaller farms to raise food for the towns. Their
homes were now, in tax returns, just ‘the places where they live’, no more
than shelters. Such men needed work: fishing, digging peat, burning peat to get out the
salt to preserve the fish. They were lucky that in the twelfth century the tug of the
tides had shifted the sandflats and exposed the peat below and given Walraversijde
something to mine.

That was, however, where their luck ended.
By 1394 they were living in the wreckage of a civil war, they could see that war and
overuse had weakened the sand dunes so that sand was drifting, and they had every reason
to be afraid of flood and storm. On St Vincent’s Day, 29 January, in 1394, the sea
came in like armies and the whole village, streets and houses, found itself on the sea
side of the dunes.

There was no money for the works needed to
repair what the sea had done to the land. All around tenants were late with the rent, or
unable to pay at all ‘given the poverty of the people’ as the accounts of
the Abbey of St Peter say. The village had to be rebuilt on the safe side of the dunes,
but the people were pushed to the sea to make a living. At least herring was still in
demand, and a herring boat needed twenty men. The ships were partnerships, with each man
bringing his own net as his investment, and taking a share of the profits at the end:
shareholders in a company. When there were no fish, there was peat to dig on the shore,
so saline that it could be burned and the ashes washed to produce a commercial quantity
of salt. There were also fleets passing by, wide open to pirates striking out from the
shore; the fishermen were enthusiastic raiders, a little too enthusiastic for the Duke
of Burgundy when they stole from ships that were not, at the time, enemy ships. The
aldermen of Bruges had to warn that ‘nobody should set sail to sea to plunder or
damage ships, unless if ordered by our redoubtable lord’.

All this time the water pulled back at each
low tide to show the broken square foundations of the old village houses, the outlines
of the old peat pits in the sand: a reminder of impermanence. On the margins, only the
present mattered.

Fishermen were known for being violent, for
being away from home too much and not always following the law, not being properly
settled and landed like farmers and landsmen. They lived with terror out at sea, carried
crosses and wore amulets against water demons and sea devils, built a chapel so holy
bells could ring out to drive off storms, and went to shrines of the Virgin Mary to pray
for protection or thank Her for it. The settled rhythms of the land were not where their
minds played. They, or rather the women they left onshore, had no fields or gardens, no
stables, none of the things that seemed essential inland. Instead they had pigs to
gobble up the prodigious quantity of fish guts spilled in the business of cleaning and
preserving plaice and herring. They had weapons – crossbow bolts, daggers and cannon
shot – to steal other people’s ships and keep their own from being stolen. More
than anything, they had their work: the ground was scattered with cork floats for the
nets, weights to make them hang in the water, wooden needles for mending them, which
were often carved with the owner’s sign or name.

They also had games when they came back to
shore, not just dice but also an early form of golf; the butt ends of the clubs survive.
Sailors carried the game all around the
North Sea, so that even now the old great courses are usually close to shore. They had
spectacles with frames of bone, and styluses for writing and booklets made of wood: they
could read and they could write.

Their village, by the thirteenth century,
was already much more than a seasonal camp because it had distinct streets. By the
fifteenth, thanks to herring, theft and peat, it was a proper settlement. The houses
were made of brick, some of it glazed green from the peat and laid to make patterns in
the floors and walls, plastered over inside and sometimes outside. There was glass in
the windows; some of the houses even had brick latrines. At night the close-packed
houses, a hundred of them with no great differences in size, must have looked like a
town waiting for the sea, the candles and oil lamps glinting in the windows.

There were all the amenities of a town: a
brewery, a chapel and a brothel. Inside the houses there were even luxuries. Everyone
ate meat because they had the money to get it, and only a little fish; they could always
fall back on fish if they had to. They had curtained beds and wooden chests. There were
fishwives eating pomegranates and figs, one of them had gold velvet from Genoa, they
used the fierce red melagueta peppers in their cooking and they had dishes, plates and
cups of Spanish majolica, painted brightly and glazed to look like porcelain. Fishermen
travelled, after all, and they could bring back tastes. Pirates found such things on
ships coming up from Spain to ports at Bruges or Ghent; and it seems things fell off
ships as easily as once they fell off lorries onto the stalls of some London
markets.

The village knew the advantages of being
marginal; it never tried to be official. There was a chapel with three aisles and family
monuments and a solid, monumental tower, but Walraversijde was never a parish in its own
right. It was not even an independent village because it was always subject, in theory
anyway, to the farming hamlet of Middelkerke. It was a place for people who needed
nothing more. Their real world was the water, in the open sea, off the coasts of England
and Scotland where they went to fish. Water and the shore made them valuable; towns like
Bruges needed them to pilot ships in
and out
of the rapidly silting estuary of the Zwin and for the salt they had to have to preserve
their fish.

It was a balance more delicate than anyone
could know. What storm had started a century earlier the market now finished.

When fishermen started heading far out into
the North Sea, to the Dogger Bank that lies between Jutland and England, they needed
more capital for stronger, larger ships. To get the money, they ran up debts with the
fish merchants in town, and quite often they could not pay and they lost their ships; or
else they had to take jobs on the ships owned by the fish merchants. In Walraversijde
only those locals who dealt in salt and peat, the van Varssenare family, had the money
to run ships of their own. Everyone else had to stop being the great man he once thought
himself to be. Captains became contractors, crewmen were no longer partners in the
business but working for a wage. Fishermen who had once been their own financiers now
depended on financiers in the towns.

The sea was not safe from war, either.
Throughout the sixteenth century the various wars and rebellions made the sea so
dangerous that fishing boats went about in convoy with an armed escort. There was no
refuge inland; the country was torn up by the revolt against the Spanish rulers that
would eventually make the Netherlands to the north an independent country. When
mercenaries came to the shoreline around Walraversijde they came to wreck and to steal,
to take away all the comfort that the people of Walraversijde had made for themselves.
Fishermen lost their sense of owning their trade, of being independent rather than
borderline. The heart of the place died.

Some of the houses at Walraversijde, a whole
quarter of the village, were abandoned suddenly and left to rot. The brewery closed. By
the time peace returned, the wind had pushed the dunes over the sea-dike and changed the
shoreline again. Nothing could come back except as memories, and when the people who
remembered were gone, as ruins. Nature has, as always, the last word.
²⁷

They were not just different: they were the
opposite of everyone else. Flat noses, little eyes far apart, prominent chins, eyebrows
from their foreheads to their noses and an absolute refusal to wash their clothes
‘especially in time of thunder’; their thick, short thighs, their short feet
and pigtails made them seem ominously different from people who imagined they had noses
like Roman statues, big blue eyes and long legs to show off with short clothes. The
faces of the Mongols were ‘contorted and terrible’, so the archbishop Ivo of
Narbonne heard from an Englishman who had lived with them.
¹

They were nomads, always moving, just when
Europe was netted with solid towns. They didn’t use money as Europeans did for
almost everything from buying a better afterlife to settling the account on a market
stall; William of Rubruck said ‘there was nothing to be sold among (them) for gold
and silver, but only for cloth and garments’, and if you offered them a gold coin
from Byzantium ‘they rubbed it with their fingers and put it to their noses to try
by the smell whether it was copper or no’.
²
They hadn’t got the point of
money at all, the Westerners said; they still thought it was a kind of barter.

They were single-minded drunkards and
‘when any of them hath taken more drink than his stomach can well bear, he casteth
it up and falls to drinking again’. They ate their dead, and even the vultures
would not touch the bones they left; they gave their old and ugly women to the
cannibals,
³
and subjected the better-favoured ones to ‘forced and unnatural
ravishments’. They seemed to be doing their best to be appropriate for the world
east of the Baltic and the
Caspian, which
Europeans had populated thickly with their own fears and legends, with dog-headed,
ox-hoofed men who hopped on one foot and lived on the steam from their soup.

They were a surprise, because nobody had
known about the Mongols. They were appalling because they were winning.

Even the Assassins, the Ismaili Muslims of
modern Syria who were famous for their courage, their ingenious killings and perhaps
their smoking habits (although the name ‘assassin’ probably does not come
from ‘hashish’), sent ambassadors to France and England to ask for help in
beating them back. By 1241, Mongol armies had taken Hungary, taken Poland; they had all
of Russia except for Novgorod, which was their vassal. They had defeated the Teutonic
Knights, they were harassing the borders of Bohemia and Saxony. Their spies were all
around Vienna, but when the Duke of Austria asked for help from the West, there was
silence. Indeed, for all the flurry of talk and arming and planning in various castles,
there seemed to be nothing that could stop them moving west as far as the edge of the
world. Christendom was cut up between factions, between the friends of the Pope in Rome
and the friends of the Roman Emperor, and there was no time to spare from that struggle
just to save Christendom itself. The Pope declared a crusade, but nobody came. The
Emperor was suspected of making it impossible to help the Hungarian king unless the king
became his vassal, and the chronicler Matthew Paris thought it possible the Emperor had
somehow ‘plotted this infliction … and that by his grasping ambition he
was like Lucifer or Antichrist, conspiring against the monarchy of the whole world, to
the utter ruin of the Christian faith’.

This is after the time of the great Genghis
Khan, the ‘mighty hunter’ who ‘learned to steal men and to take them
for a prey’. His successor, his son Ögedei, also knew how to hunt and trap human
beings, and when Franciscans on a papal mission reached Kiev they saw for themselves
what it meant to be defeated by the Mongols: ‘an innumerable multitude of dead
men’s skulls and bones lying upon the earth’. ‘They have no human
laws, know no mercy, and are more cruel than lions or bears,’ Matthew Paris
wrote.
⁴

Also, they were quite brilliant fighters.
They were better, suppler
horsemen than the
Europeans, which was hardly surprising since they almost lived on horseback; they were
manoeuvring while the Westerners were still charging forwards in a fixed line.
⁵
They
fought in lighter armour than the clanking mail of the West, and the backs of the
armour, Ivo of Narbonne reported, ‘are only slightly armed, that they may not
flee’; anyone running away was shot. They had the distinct tactical advantage in
an age of siege warfare that, as William of Rubruck reported after his mission there,
‘they have in no place any settled city to abide in’; so they had no special
place to defend, no sense of loss if they moved on. William regretted that his best
metaphors were spoiled by their way of life; ‘neither know they of the celestial
city to come’.
⁶