The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (42 page)

The fact that marriage was tangled up with
money did not make it less affectionate. True, in Douai the legal documents that allowed
childless couples to leave each other their worldly goods only
mention ‘love and conjugal affection’ from the
1550s; but those are legal documents, which do not need sentiment.
³⁷
A better test is
what happens after death, and whether couples choose to stay together. Most people until
the thirteenth century ended up anonymous in mass and unmarked graves; but in 1374 one
man wrote a will in Douai to ask that he be buried alongside his wife in the nave of a
church. Graves were marked with marble slabs with carvings of the couple who lay there,
sometimes their children as well, on one occasion a man lying between two wives. After
plague came in 1400, one third of wills in Douai said exactly where the grave should be,
and who should be near: spouse, father, mother. Again there is a frontier across Europe:
in Italian towns, men wanted to be buried with their ancestors, with as much of a male
line as they could find and if necessary some invented coats of arms. Around the North
Sea, it was the marriage and the children that mattered.
³⁸

Out of that doctrine of ‘marital
affection’, William Aungier’s hope, came unexpected consequences. The custom
of the North was reinforced: property was shared in a marriage, not separate, and women
could expect their share. Women could do business, and it was worth their while. Women
could take their time choosing a husband, wait at least until they were eighteen or
twenty and more likely into their mid-twenties; they took responsibility for the
marriage and they had a degree of equality within it. At the very least, they had a
negotiating position. Women and men needed the time to get together the resources to
start an independent life because being an adult in Flanders meant having a household of
your own; just marrying, or reaching a certain age, was not enough. You were a minor if
you ate your parents’ bread,
en pain de père et mère
, and adult when you
could keep yourself,
hors de son pain
. Real life took its time to begin.
³⁹

So there were years in their lives when
young people could go into service as maids, or become apprentices, or work as
journeymen hiring on by the day. Most of all, they could move. By the late thirteenth
century, there are references to journeymen, to young and unmarried workers on short
contracts who had special skills and travelled to find the demand for them. They had
their own networks, often
family
connections, in building and shipping and mining; and quite soon they had more formal
arrangements, the first masons’ lodges in England and the franchises that Edward
III of England offered John Kempe from Flanders in 1331 to come and show the English how
to weave, full and dye cloth and so defy the guilds, who thought they already knew. The
same privilege was on offer to ‘all the clothworkers of strange lands of
whatsoever country they be’.
⁴⁰
German-speaking workers were
tramping from Riga in the east to Bergen in the north, and the bakers went south to Rome
because Romans, it turned out, loved German bread. Much later, some of these serious
tramps would write down their own stories: like Emmanuel Gross in the seventeenth
century, a shoemaker from Baden who went walking as a journeyman from Lithuania to
France, from Sweden to England.
⁴¹

These men were knowledge marching. They
didn’t like the idea of being used by officials, or made to hide from officialdom,
so they shifted about in small groups in Flanders, and in Germany they kept crossing the
boundaries between the various princedoms to stop any one authority coming down hard on
them. By the fourteenth century they could get work by showing certificates of service,
or proof of their indentures; they had hostels where they could stay, and special
fraternal handshakes; and often they organized things so that if there was no work they
could at least be given a bed for the night and enough money to travel on. Shoemakers in
Troyes, just south of Paris, reported in 1420 that ‘many compagnons and
workmen … of a variety of tongues and nations, came and went from town to town
to learn, discover, observe and see what others did’. Learning and tramping were
so close that London became a kind of training centre for the whole of England.
⁴²

A man whose life was tied to land and early
marriage and a single place and his father’s authority could never have gone away,
let alone stayed away so long; but these men were free to travel to make a living. They
carried with them facts and techniques. Their predecessors took the windmill out of
England into Flanders, or just possibly, if you reckon the date 1114 carved on a beam in
a windmill just south of Dunkirk really does show when it was first built, out of
Flanders into
England. Either way, the idea
of the windmill crossed the sea with alacrity. The first one recorded in England goes
back to 1155 when ‘Hugo de Plaiz gave to the monks of Lewes the windmill in his
manor Ilford, for the health of the soul of his father.’ By 1200 there were at
least twenty-three mills working from Sussex to Northumberland, with a sizeable number
in East Anglia, just over the sea from Flanders. By then there were at least four
windmills in Northern Europe, at the mouth of the Somme, just inland at Ypres, and at
Silly and Wormhoudt: close enough to the coast to suggest the idea came by water.

We can’t tell who first shipped the
idea, but we do know why it was needed. In the lowlands, peat for burning was running
short, and waterpower was not strong enough in the flatlands to be useful energy.
Besides, the owners of the rights to use riverbanks wanted high fees from anyone who
used the flow of the river water to power a mill. Windpower was not entirely reliable,
and it required careful engineering to gear the vertical sails to the horizontal shaft
that worked the grinding stones, but it was wonderfully available; and only in the
Netherlands did a man have to pay a ‘wind brief’, a tax to the lord or king
who thought he owned the weather. Elsewhere, a windmill let a man step outside the
feudal order for a while. Dean Herbert built a mill for himself at Bury St Edmunds in
1191, which infuriated the abbot, who owned two local mills and the feudal rights to
grind corn. The moment he heard, the abbot ordered carpenters to take the mill down
‘and place the timber under safe custody’; he tongue-lashed Dean Herbert,
told him: ‘I thank you as I should thank you if you had cut off both my
feet.’ The dean said he wanted the mill only for himself, but the abbot could not
tell the local farmers where to grind their corn, so the dean was competition. He was
alarmed enough at the abbot’s fury to tear down his mill even before the
abbot’s servants could arrive, so they found nothing to demolish; but he also had
the technical knowledge to build the mill himself, and he must have learned from
travellers.
⁴³

A century or so later, the first windmills
for draining polder land started turning at Alkmaar, just north of Amsterdam; within
twenty years the magistrates at Saint-Omer, close to Calais, needed to drain
their marshes and they sent a delegation to
Holland for the plan of a mill ‘pour vider les eaux’, to drain off the
waters. The mill was running by 1438, but it was never effective, and it was abandoned
twelve years later, but a process had begun: bringing in plans and workers with the
expertise to build new technologies. Since mills were a source of power, that power
could be applied in a hundred ways. Over the next centuries, it drained fens in the
Polish part of Prussia, in Schleswig-Holstein in the late sixteenth century, in
Friesland and around Norfolk in England. It made oil mills work across Northern Europe
from Ireland to Sweden and Germany, crushing the seeds of rape; it milled paper in
England and the Netherlands; it ran hulling mills in Germany and saw mills as far away
as Portugal and Russia.
⁴⁴
It created new land out of marsh
and sea, it kept industries running, and all because the idea had journeymen to bring it
where it could be most useful.

The pattern of marriage had one other
side-effect: the very beginning of financial markets, of pension plans and annuities and
trying to save your life by investing. When people marry late and set up their own
households, they move away from their families and their obligations to them. They may
leave town altogether, or even the country. They may decide not to marry at all. Even if
a couple had children and grandchildren, they could still not be absolutely sure of
their support in old age. Just as a couple had to save to set up their household in the
first place, so they had to save to protect themselves when work and business no longer
seemed possible; instead of protecting the future by keeping everything in the family,
which was often the pattern in the South, they put their money out to work with
strangers. So in Flanders, Brabant and Holland the main source of money to run the
affairs of cities and towns was people worried about old age, who bought
renten
from the councils: annuities that paid out a heavy rate of interest on the amount
invested for as long as the investor was alive. Sometimes, as in the cheese town of Edam
and in East Anglia, these annuities were what parents got back when they handed over
land and assets to their children, who then organized their pensions. Already by the end
of the thirteenth century roughly four out of ten people in East Anglia, both women and
men, had pensions to draw on.
⁴⁵

This idea of ‘marital affection’ changed the
structure of families and the shape of people’s lives in the North, which helped
send ideas and technology across the continent and gave money quite surprisingly modern
uses. The personal isn’t just political; it is economic.

You will, of course, be wondering about sex.
In marriage it was a legal duty to be available on demand to make love or something
similar, so much so that the famous Héloïse wanted to be the girlfriend of the famous
Abelard, even his whore, so she could express all the love she felt without compulsion;
married love was an obligation, she said. The simultaneous orgasm was much touted by the
influential medical books from Salerno, very widely read in the North, because it causes
such delight that the married couple want sex again and again; it was also, for a while,
a moral good, since man and woman were both supposed to come at the same time in order
to have a baby, and babies were the whole point of sex. The return of Aristotle to
libraries and to favour across Europe rather scuppered this happy moment, since he
reckoned a woman could conceive without feeling pleasure. And there was always the
question of how to get where you meant to go: Ovid suggested gentleness, caresses and
murmurs, but his thirteenth-century French translator suggested biting like a dog.
⁴⁶

At least we know the rules and duties of
marriage, and sometimes the troubles: the courts acknowledged cruelty as a reason to end
a marriage while canon law was still limited to adultery, or spiritual fornication,
which is heresy, or proven attempts to kill your spouse. But we don’t know the
reality of people’s sex lives, and we don’t know exactly what happened
before all those late marriages in Northern Europe: what everyone did, and nobody talked
about.

Our evidence comes from sermons and law
courts, so what we know is a tabloid world.

Eleanor was not a lady, not if she was
working Cheapside when the light had gone on a Sunday night in December in 1394. Mind
you, Eleanor was not a woman, either.
⁴⁷

John Britby thought she was a woman, went to
talk to her, asked her if she’d have sex with him; Eleanor wanted money, and
Britby
agreed. They went down Soper’s
Lane and found a stall there and got down to business. They had just got properly
detestable, unmentionable and ignominious when city officials spotted them, and Eleanor,
still in all his finery, came before the Mayor and the aldermen of London to explain
himself.

Her name was John Rykener, he said, and he
blamed a certain Anna, ‘whore of a former servant’ of a gentleman, who
taught him to practise this vice ‘in the manner of a woman’. He didn’t
mean dressing as a woman, though, because he said a woman called Elizabeth Brouderer had
taught him that. This may be Elizabeth ‘the embroiderer’, in which case she
may be Elizabeth Moring, who set up a school of embroidery with resident girls, who were
then encouraged to stay out all night with friars and clerics. Elizabeth had some
difficulty reminding the amateur girls they were supposed to bring home rewards for what
they had done;
⁴⁸
in Eleanor’s case, she evidently did better.

Rykener had a talent for shakedowns.
Elizabeth would put her daughter into bed with a customer in a darkened room, then get
her to leave before dawn; in the morning, the punter woke up to face Eleanor. Eleanor
was, to put it gently, self-assertive. One vicar had sex with him, after which Eleanor
removed two of the vicar’s robes; and when the victim wanted them back, Eleanor
insisted his husband would be all too willing to take the vicar to court.

Sometimes, though, Eleanor was just a tart.
He had three ‘unsuspecting’ scholars in the marshes at Oxford while working
there as an embroiderer, and in Burford he notched up two Franciscans and a Carmelite
friar. His best price was two shillings, his best gift a gold ring and he said ‘he
accommodated priests more readily than other people because they wished to give him more
than others’. At Beaconsfield he seduced a certain Joan, ‘as a man’,
and two foreign Franciscans ‘as a woman’. He claimed a vivid heterosexual
career with nuns and ‘with many women both married and otherwise’ and he
couldn’t count the priests who had had him.