The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (5 page)

The Roman army on manoeuvres: first century
CE
, on the North Sea coast, roughly where Belgium now stops and the
Netherlands starts. Plinius Secundus was one of the commanders, and when he came to
write his famous natural histories, he remembered what he had seen.

There were wide salt marshes and he saw no
trees at all. He could not make up his mind if he was on the land or on the sea. There
were houses built on hillocks and he thought they looked like ships in the water, or
maybe more like shipwrecks; he reckoned the houses must be built that way to escape the
worst daily surges of the tides. He sounds almost nervous in this strange marsh
landscape, being an inland Roman and used to having the ground stay firm under his
boots; now he was looking out at a landscape of shifting clay, all cut up with creeks
and gullies where the tides pushed salt water in and out. He might as well have left the
empire altogether because this coast was cut off from the mainland by lagoons and
brackish peat, as good a frontier as the forests that kept whole peoples apart, better
than any river. To reach the marshes, and the water people who lived there, you had to
know the marshes. You also had to be welcome, because you would be seen.

Pliny considered the water people and he
decided they were not worth the bother of conquering. Fish, he wrote, was all they
had.
¹

Seven centuries later opinions had not much
changed. Radbodo, Bishop of Utrecht, was most uncharitable about the Frisians, the
people of these marshes: he wrote that they lived in water like fish and they rarely
went anywhere except by boat. They were also crude,
barbarous and remote: sodden provincials.
²
And yet between the
writing of those two accounts the Frisians reinvented all the links and ties across the
North Sea, as far as Jutland at the northern tip of Denmark and even beyond. They
founded a new kind of town on the coast that thrived as the old Roman towns were in
decline. They made themselves a capital on the left bank of the Rhine at Dorestad, just
where the river divides to run down to its delta, which became the turntable of all
Northern trade. And they ruled the North Sea, dominating all the trade that went by
water, so for a time its name was changed: the Frisian Sea.

They did something else which helped to
shape our world: they reinvented money. They took coins with them on their trading
voyages, money for buying and selling and doing business. Other territories had run out
of cash, or lived off gifts and barter, or stopped using money for anything except tax
and politics, but the Frisians carried the idea of using money wherever they went. It
was not at all a trivial idea. With it came ideas of the value of things and how to
calculate that abstract value on paper – the value that objects in the real world share,
a pot with a pile of grain with a fish with a plank with a place in a boat going up the
Rhine, even when it seems obvious they have nothing else in common at all. The idea of
value had to work wherever the Frisians came ashore. Trading meant taking that value and
working with it, even experimenting with it: seeing the world in mathematical terms.

Money was going to change people’s
minds.

That story is easy to miss, but then it is
extraordinary how much Pliny missed and he was there. He saw ramshackle shipwrecks on
the little hills, most likely fishermen’s shacks, and missed the solid houses with
their sod walls a full metre thick. He didn’t notice the real business of the
marshes.

He says nothing about the two temples facing
each other across the water at the start of the open sea, on the very last point of the
land: Roman temples dedicated to Nehalennia, a goddess of death and trade and fertility,
almost everything that matters. On her altars, salt merchants gave thanks for voyages
she had made successful, and so did men who dealt in potter’s clay and fish sauce,
wine, cloth
and pottery and anything that was
going out to England across the sea; sometimes the same merchant thanked her on both
sides of the river.
³
At the temple in Colijnsplaat, to the north, the goddess was all
business; the one to the south, at Domburg, where the stones later came back from under
the sea, makes clear her darker side. Here she has a hound sitting by her, as she stands
by a set of curtains that screen away a passage to the next world; she is watching over
the dead as they go out to sea, sailing west to the isles of the blessed.
⁴
Practical
cargoes and magical journeys, life and death, were all going over the beach at
Domburg.

A hundred years later there would have been
nothing much for Pliny to miss. Domburg was abandoned. Pirates moved in, some of them
local and Frisian, some of them from the Frankish kingdoms to the south.
⁵
Rome began
to lose control. Then the water took over by force: the sea rushed in and drowned the
temples around the end of the second century. The dunes moved, the channels for boats
changed, and the site became impossible. All that was left was a fragile stretch of sand
which a single wind storm could skirl into a new landscape, a coastline where a surging
sea could wash away all the business that had made so many merchants give thanks to the
goddess. There was no sign of life or business there for almost four centuries until the
story began over again.

But in the marshes there were heavy barges
which had come down the Rhine from the middle of Europe, boats thirty metres long and
three metres across, steering oars forward and steering oars aft: solid, flat-bottomed
craft made out of thick slabs of oak. They were rowed and hauled down the river,
carrying loads of slate and stone, or wine or pots, and when they reached the marshes,
they moved their cargo onto sea-going ships.
⁶
From the marshes, the goods could go
north or south by sea in the lee of the islands along the coast, down to where Calais
now stands to cross to England or directly across the sea to markets where York and
London and even Southampton stand now, or up to the start of the Danish peninsula, where
they could cross by land and river into the Baltic and reach up to Birka and Helgö in
Sweden. The marshes held the trade of half a continent.

All this is unfamiliar in part because there
is so little written
evidence. We
wouldn’t know that ‘Frisian’ meant ‘merchant’ in
seventh-century London, except that Bede mentions in his
History
that some
young aristo from Northumberland ended up in Mercian hands, and was sold in the market
to ‘a Frisian’. This Frisian couldn’t manage to keep the kid safely
tied up, and so allowed him to go off and ransom himself.
⁷
Bede says he checked
the story with particular care, so we can assume that Frisians were practical merchants
who did not deal in bothersome merchandise. We would find it hard to prove that there
was a Frisian colony in eighth-century York, except that Altfrid wrote the life of a
saint called Liudger and mentions the time a Frisian merchant happened to brawl with the
young son of a local duke and the boy ended up dead; at which point all the Frisians,
Liudger included, got out quickly for fear of the anger of the young man’s family.
Frisians stuck together, like any expatriate community.
⁸
We owe the idea that
Frisians had a distinctive kind of ship, nothing like the Viking ships, to the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, which mentions in the entry for 896 that King Alfred
ordered fast, steady longships to be built with more oarsmen than ever before, and
‘they were neither of Frisian design nor of Danish’.
⁹

The abbey at Saint-Denis, close to Paris,
has a royal document which guarantees that its monks will keep all the revenue from
selling wine at their annual fair and also extract a kind of commission from the
merchants ‘Saxon or Frisian or people of other indeterminate nations’.
¹⁰
So the
Frisians were important in the wine trade. It is likely that the Bishop of Liège in
modern Belgium had to send to Domburg for his German and his Alsatian wine.

The stories of saints, meanwhile, bear
traces of how the Frisians worked up and down the Rhine. St Goar was a hermit left in a
cell by the Rhine not far from the alarming Lorelei rocks, where the river was
twenty-seven metres deep and the surface was a roil of violent currents; passing
travellers might well be in need of miracles. One Frisian merchant was carried
downstream onto the rocks, asked the saint for help and was saved; he had on board a
garment of silk splendid enough to be his offering of thanks, so he must have been a
middleman shipping exotic and valuable goods since Frisia produced wool, not silk.
Another was being hauled upriver by porters, alone in
his boat with one servant, and refused to stop to pray to St
Goar. He couldn’t steer on his own, the current dragged him over to the dangerous
side, all the porters managed to drop the rope except for one. The boat smashed on the
opposite shore, and the body of the last porter was found, drowned, at the end of the
rope. The merchant now thought that a prayer might be in order. The drowned man revived,
stood up, coughed some blood and went back to leading the porters who were hauling the
barge. The grateful merchant left a full pound weight of silver to thank the saint,
which must mean he was carrying much more than a full pound weight of silver coins;
business was good.
¹¹

This sparse patchwork of clues can now be
combined with the physical record, the evidence that has been dug out of the earth or
washed up on the beaches. Together they tell a story that was almost lost, as the story
of losers tends to be. The old Frisians were enthusiastic pagans, so when they stopped
smashing the skulls of passing saints and accepted Christianity, they were not supposed
to honour their pagan past. They were subjects inside the Frankish empire that
Charlemagne was building, whose pride in their separate identity and their past had been
known to send them on murderous raids up the Rhine against the imperial powers;
defeated, they were supposed to adopt the empire’s history. Worse, they did not
have a land fit for monuments. They lived in a water world where high tides and
sandstorms could cover or ruin their past: ‘a pagan people divided by the
intervening waters into many farming hamlets, with all kinds of names but belonging to
just one people’.
¹²
Even in the years when they owned
the sea lanes, the sea could ruin them. The water swept back over the land at full moon
in 834, flooding the land strongly; and again in 838 when the earth shook, the sun
burned the earth, there were dragons in the air and around Christmas high winds broke
the usual pattern of the tides and whipped the sea inland, wrecking houses along the
coast and levelling the high dunes; more people died than it was possible to count,
although there were curiously precise reports that 2,437 people died.
¹³
Being out at
sea, with all kinds of choices to make, was sometimes more secure than staying on land
with none at all. Again in February 868, when a comet passed
overhead, the winds got up and a vast flood killed many who
were not prepared for it. That year, the famine was so terrible that men ate human flesh
to survive.
¹⁴