The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (53 page)
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Authors: Michael Pye
Bacon understood that: ‘It is
unthinkable,’ he wrote, ‘that there is some boundary or farthest point of
the world; it always appears,
almost by
necessity, that there is something beyond.’ He understood the power of all the new
creatures, minerals, sights and information to be found; ‘They are capable of
shedding new light in philosophy,’ he wrote. ‘Indeed it would be a disgrace
to mankind if wide areas of the physical globe, of land, sea and stars, have been opened
up and explored in our time while the boundaries of the intellectual globe were confined
to the discoveries and narrow limits of the ancients.’
48
The landings on
Brazil and on Southern Africa, for example, flatly contradicted Aristotle’s
assumption that no living thing could survive in the burning world south of the Equator,
that the north was all there could be on Earth. The process of opening up the Earth
disrupted ideas of authority; man had to look for himself and think for himself. But
authority was already challenged by the saintly Bede, a loyal churchman, and his notions
of investigating the moon and the tides.
Travelling showed other ways of life, other
lengths of robe, other colours and styles: it bred fashion, and fashion implies choices.
Since it also involves change, it alarmed conservatives. A woman might choose to dress
above her station. A man might insist that he could choose how he looked. Every kind of
social confusion, even sexual confusion, could be read on the backs of the people in the
street. It was dangerous, even monstrous proof that people could choose, and an anxious
settled world could not ignore it.
At the edge of the world, the law written in
Rome never quite worked; instead law had to contend with custom, with habit, with the
Northern way of life. In doing so it became more flexible and perhaps more humane, more
able to handle a business dispute, more able to consider the state of mind of some
broken man who had done murder. Papers became all important with a special trust in the
written word, which brought out the very best forgers to change history the way they
wanted. On the edge of the world a profession of lawyers formed, to which we owe not
just the high self-importance of the law but also the idea of a profession that was not
priestly and its inevitable consequence: the idea of a middle class.
These changes were profound; they made
possible the bureaucracy which made possible nation states. The changes to the natural
world were arguably even more important.
On the fragile shoreline, broken by tides, buried in sand drifts, where a single storm
could change the whole shape of a community, man first came close to losing land in
order to fuel the new and growing towns, and then came to believe he could engineer his
world with dams, dikes, sluices. The forests, the clean waters gave way to a conditional
world, which was our fault and also our duty.
Alongside this need to control went a new
appetite for experiment: for finding things out and then testing and proving them. The
process that Simon Stevin would develop had already begun out of terror of Mongol hordes
and the end of the world. In the new universities mathematical thinking was tangled up
still with the idea of money, of moral trading and just prices: the connection that
began with the Frisians was still shaping minds.
Trading became a power in its own right. The
towns of the German Hansa formed an alliance which could make its own treaties, see off
kings, blockade a nation into starvation and force surrender. Money went to war with
political powers.
The modern world is taking its shape: law,
professions, the written word; towns, and what they do to the natural world; books and
fashion, business and its relationship to power. We are not on the margins of history
any more; we are dealing in the essential, the changes of mind that made our world
possible.
We’ve seen how women made their
choices, often surprisingly, and built worlds the way they wanted them. The possibility
of love, of truly choosing a partner, turned out to mean later marriage, and with it the
possibility of young people going about Europe and taking with them knowledge of all
kinds of technology. The edge of the world found some of its economic advantages in
bed.
We’ve seen how plague became the
reason, just like terrorism today, for social regulation, for saying how children must
behave, for taking away a worker’s right to choose what work he wanted, for
deciding which of the poor are worthy of help and which are just wastrels. Plague
enforced frontiers that were otherwise wonderfully insecure, and made our movements and
travels conditional. It helped make the state a physical reality, and give it
ambitions.
In Antwerp all this produced a glittering civilization which
spawned so many of our attitudes: to art, insurance, shares, genius, power as a great
show; to the possibility of engineering the world as we want it. When war broke up
Flanders, when the northern provinces broke away, those attitudes came to Amsterdam.
They came in glory. They look like something
both new and brilliant, but the truth is that they grew out of the light in what we used
to casually call the ‘dark ages’ and the central importance of what we used
to call ‘the edge of the world’. Around the cold, grey waters of the North
Sea, the old, the marginal, the unfashionable made us possible: for much better, and for
much, much worse.
It is time now to give them all their
due.
INTRODUCTION
1
Warwickshire Record Office (WRO):
CR1368/vol. I/66.
2
For Scarborough’s visitors and
their pastimes passim, see:
A list of the Nobility, Quality and Gentry at
Scarborough
(1733);
The Scarborough Miscellany for the year 1733
;
A Journey from London to Scarborough
(1734). For the discovery of the
spa: Robert Wittie,
Scarborough-Spaw: or a Description of the Nature and Virtues
of the Spaw at Scarborough, Yorkshire
(1667). For the debate about the use
and value of sea water: W. Simpson,
Hydrologia Chymica: or the Chymical Anatomy
of the Scarborough and other Spaws in Yorkshire
(1669); Anon.,
A
dissertation on the Contents, Virtues and Uses of Cold and Hot Mineral Springs,
particularly those of Scarborough
(1735); Robert White MD,
The Use and
Abuse of Sea Water Impartially Considered
(1775).
3
WRO: CR1368/vol. I/67.
4
For a fuller sketch of this argument,
see R. Dettingmeijer, ‘The Emergence of the Bathing Culture Marks the End of
the North Sea as a Common Cultural Ground’, in Juliet Roding and Lex Heerma
van Voss (eds.),
The North Sea and Culture 1550–1800
(Hilversum, 1996), pp.
482ff.
5
Peter Shaw’s analysis of the
waters was read as a lecture in Scarborough in 1733, then sent in a letter to the
recorder of the corporation, then published in its own right in 1735. See Peter
Shaw,
An enquiry into the contents, virtues and uses of the Scarborough
Spaw-waters: with the method of examining any other mineral water
(London,
1735).
6
David Kirby and Merja-Lisa Hinkkanen,
The Baltic and the North Seas
(London, 2000), p. 53.
7
Baedeker’s Belgium and Holland
(Leipzig and London, 1894), p.
255.
8
See Ada Hondius-Crone,
The Temple of Nehalennia at Domburg
(Amsterdam, 1955), p. 7, and for a facsimile of the newsletter.
9
Marie de Man, ‘Que sait-on de la
plage de Dombourg?’, in
van het Nederlandisch Genootschap voor Munt- en
Penningkunde
(Amsterdam, 1899); Marie de Man, a most remarkable numismatist
and local historian, describes all the revelations on the beach over two centuries
and catalogues the coins found. She also reports the sporadic pilfering from the
gravesites.
10
Stéphane Lebecq,
Marchands et
navigateurs frisons du haut Moyen Âge
, vol. 1:
Essai
(Lille,
1983), pp. 142–4 for an account of Frisian Domburg; p. 144 for the specific
discoveries.
11
B. Krusch and W. Levison (eds.),
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
,
Scriptores rerum
Merovingicarum
, vol. 7:
Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici
(Hannover/Leipzig, 1920), p. 128, ch. 14, lines 4–13.
12
Ephraim Emerton,
The Letters of
Saint Boniface
(New York, 2000), letter XV, pp. 27–8.
13
Cf. John E. Pattison, ‘Is It
Necessary to Assume an Apartheid-Like Social Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon
England?’,
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences
275,
1650 (7 November 2008), pp. 2423 ff.
14
Quoted in Sebastian I. Sobecki,
The Sea and Medieval English Literature
(Cambridge, 2008), p. 30.
15
John Trevisa’s translation of
Bartholomaeus Anglicus,
De Proprietatibus Rerum
, in my modern version:
Trevisa quoted in Sobecki,
Sea and Medieval English Literature
, p. 39.
16
Martin W. Lewis: ‘Dividing the
Ocean Sea’,
Geographical Review
89, 2 (April 1999), pp. 192–5.
17
Cf. Rosemary Muir Wright, ‘The
Rider on the Sea-Monster’, in Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (eds.),
The North Sea World in the Middle Ages
(Dublin, 2001), pp. 70ff.
18
Bernard McGinn, ‘Ocean and
Desert as Symbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition’,
Journal of Religion
74, 2 (1994), pp. 156, 157.
19
For a full discussion, see Barbara
Hillers, ‘Voyages between Heaven and Hell: Navigating the Early Irish Immram
Tales’,
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium
13 (1993), pp.
66ff.
20
‘The Voyage of St
Brendan’, in J. F. Webb,
The Age of Bede
(London, 1965), p. 236.
21
Ibid., p. 261.
22
Dicuil (ed. J. J. Tierney),
Liber de mensura orbis terrae
, 7, 15 (Dublin, 1967), pp. 72–3.
23
Ibid., p. 115n.11; and cf. Gunnar
Karlsson,
Iceland’s 1100 Years: History of a Marginal Society
(London, 2000), pp. 9–12.
24
Francis J. Tschan (ed. and tr.),
Adam of Bremen: History of the Archbishops of Hamburg–Bremen
(New York,
2002), 4, 34, p. 215 for Orkney seas (in scholia) and ocean; 4, 35, p. 217 for the
burning ice; 4, 38, p. 220 for Harold Hardrada’s voyage.
25
Devra Kunin (tr.) and Carl
Phelpstead (ed.),
A History of Norway and The Passion and Miracles of the
Blessed Óláfr
(London, 2001), p. 4, lines 1–16, for icebergs and monsters;
pp. 11–12 for volcanos.
26
Tschan,
Adam of Bremen
, 4,
25, p. 206, for hoppers, cannibals, cyclops; 4, 17, p. 198, for dragons; 4, 18, p.
199, for blue men and Prussians; 4, 19, p. 200, for Amazons and their offspring.
27
Cf. McGinn, ‘Ocean and
Desert’, pp. 74–5.
28
Aleksander Pluskowski, ‘What
is Exotic? Sources of Animals and Animal Products from the Edges of the Medieval
World’, in Gerhard Jaritz and Juhan Kreem (eds.),
The Edges of the
Medieval World
(Budapest, 2009), p. 114.
29
William Ian Miller,
Audun and
the Polar Bear: Luck, Law and Largesse in a Medieval Tale of Risky Business
(Leiden, 2008), pp. 7ff.; p. 18 for the bishop and the Emperor and Icelandic
law.
30
J. R. S. Phillips,
The Medieval
Expansion of Europe
(Oxford, 1998), p. 197.
31
Kevin J. Wanner,
Snorri
Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval
Scandinavia
(Toronto, 2008), p. 82.
32
Eric Hobsbawm,
Fractured
Times
(London, 2013), pp. 150–51.
33
See Bernadette Cunningham,
‘Transmission and Translation of Medieval Irish Sources in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries’, Jan Eivind Myhre, ‘The “Decline of
Norway”: Grief and Fascination in Norwegian Historiography on the Middle
Ages’, and Peter Raedts, ‘A Serious Case of Amnesia: The Dutch and Their
Middle Ages’, in R. J. W. Evans and Guy P. Marchal (eds.),
The Uses of the
Middle Ages in Modern European States
(Basingstoke, 2011).
34
Patrick McGilligan,
Fritz Lang:
The Nature of the Beast
(London, 1997), pp. 104, 172.
35
G. Ronald Murphy SJ,
The Saxon
Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth Century
Heliand
(New York, 1989), p. 6.
36
See E. G. Stanley,
Imagining the
Anglo-Saxon Past
(Cambridge, 1975), pp. 20–22, and Valentine Anthony Pakis,
Studies in Early Germanic Biblical Literature: Medieval Rewritings, Medieval
Receptions and Modern Interpretations
(Ph.D. thesis, Minneapolis, 2008),
pp. 30–32 and 246ff.
37
For example, Fritz Rörig, ‘Les
Raisons intellectuelles d’une suprématie commerciale: la hanse’,
Annales d’histoire économique et sociale
2, 8 (15 Oct. 1930), pp.
481–98. ‘Derrière cette ensemble sont de puissantes forces spirituelles et
intellectuelles …’, p. 486.
38
David M. Wilson and Else Roesdahl,
‘Vikingarnas Betydelse för Europa’, in Svenlof Karlsson (ed.),
Frihetens Källa: Nordens Betydelse för Europa
(Stockholm, 1992).
39
I’ve used the Loeb Edition of
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
(tr. J. E. King; Cambridge,
Mass., 1930), which is a revision of Moberly’s 1881 Oxford edition.
King’s translation is so eccentric at times – ‘batful’ for
‘fertile’ – that I have made my own.
40
Bede (tr. J. E. King),
‘Praefatio’, in
Historia ecclesiastica
, pp. 4, 6.
41
Quoted in Stephen Yeates,
Myth
and History: Ethnicity and Politics in the First Millennium British Isles
(Oxford, 2012), p. 150.
42
Bede (tr. J. E. King),
Historia
ecclesiastica
, pp. 68–74, chs. XIV, XV.
43
Ibid., pp. 66, 74–6, 76 for heresy;
p. 80 for the speed of the conversions (‘raptim’); p. 98 for civil wars;
chs. XIV, XVI, XVII, XXII for civil wars.
44
Pattison, ‘Is It Necessary to
Assume’, pp. 2425–6.
45
See Yeates,
Myth and
History
, for a survey of how Bede’s history is challenged by
archaeological techniques. His bibliography may be stronger than his arguments.
46
Bodley MS Canon Misc 378, from
Cosmographia Scoti …
(Basel, 1436) for a map of the forts and an
account of the forces the Comes (or Count) commanded.
47
Cf. Régis Boyer,
Les Vikings,
premiers Européens, VII–XI siècle: les nouvelles découvertes de
l’archéologie
(Paris, 2005). In the preface Jean-Robert Pitte,
president of the Sorbonne, announces that ‘La construction
européenne a permis enfin à toutes les ethnies et à
toutes les nations d’Europe de s’unir dans la partage féconde de la
diversité. Grâces soient rendues à nos ancêtres vikings …’ (p. 5).
1
Plinius Secundus,
Naturalis
historia
, book 16, sections 2, 3, online at
www.penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Pliny
the Elder.
2
Wilhelm Levinson,
Vitae Sancti
Bonifatii
(Hannover/Leipzig, 1905), p. 68 for the text of
Vita Altera
Bonfiatii, Auctore Radbodo qui dicitur Episcopo Traiectensi
(or, as we say,
Utrecht).
3
See Gustav Milne, ‘Maritime
Traffic between the Rhine and Roman Britain: A Preliminary Note’, in Seán
McGrail (ed.),
Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons
(London, 1990), p. 83;
and H. Wagenvoort, ‘Nehalennia and the Souls of the Dead’,
Mnemosyne
, 4th series, 24, 3 (1971), pp. 278–9.
4
H. Wagenvoort, ‘The Journey of the
Souls of the Dead to the Isles of the Blessed’,
Mnemosyne,
4th
series, 24, 2 (1971), p. 153.
5
On pirates, see Stéphane Lebecq,
‘L’emporium protomédiéval de Walcheren-Domburg: une mise en
perspective’, reprinted in Lebecq,
Hommes, mers et terres du Nord au début
du Moyen Âge
, vol. 2:
Centres, communications, échanges
(Lille, 2011), p. 134.
6
L. Th. Lehmann, ‘The Romano-Celtic
boats from Druten and Kapel-Avezaath’, in McGrail,
Maritime Celts
,
pp. 77–81; and Milne, ‘Maritime Traffic’, in McGrail,
Maritime
Celts
, p. 83.
7
Bede (tr. J. E. King),
Historia
ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
(Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 122–4,
‘vendidit eum Lundoniam Freso cuidam’; ‘indubitanter’ is how
Bede qualifies the story. For commentary on this, see Stéphane Lebecq,
Marchands
et navigateurs frisons du haut Moyen Âge
, vol. 2:
Corpus des
sources écrites
(Lille, 1983), p. 232.
8
Lebecq,
Marchands et navigateurs
frisons
, vol. 2, p. 109, for text: ‘Fresones festinaverunt egredi de
regione Anglorum, timentes iram propinquorum interfecti juvenis.’
9
Michael Swanton (tr. and ed.),
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(London, 1996), p. 90.
10
‘Tam Saxones quam Frisiones vel
alias naciones promiscuas’, in Lebecq,
Marchands et navigateurs
frisons
, vol. 2, p. 402.
11
Paraphrased from Wandalbert,
Miracula S. Goaris
, in Lebecq,
Marchands et navigateurs
frisons
, vol. 2, pp. 153–5.
12
Willibald,
Vita Bonifatii
,
ch. 8, in Lebecq,
Marchands et navigateurs frisons
, vol. 2, p. 85; and at
p. 81 in George Washington Robinson’s translation (Cambridge, Mass., 1916),
but this is my translation.
13
For dunes, the unusual pattern of
tides and the death toll, see G. Waitz (ed.),
Annales Bertiniani
(Hannover,
1883), p. 18. Waitz leaves the account at the end of 839 but I have followed Lebecq
in combining it with other reports for the end of 838.
14
B. De Simson (ed.),
Annales
Xantenses et Annales Vedastini
(Hannover/Leipzig, 1909), pp. 9, 10, 26.
15
Detlev Ellmers, ‘The Frisian
Monopoly of Coastal Transport in the 6th–8th Centuries’, in McGrail,
Maritime Celts
, p. 91.
16
See Joachim Henning, ‘Early
European Towns’, in Joachim Henning (ed.),
Post-Roman Towns, Trade and
Settlement in Europe and Byzantium
, vol. 1:
The Heirs of the Roman
West
(Berlin, 2007), pp. 19–21.
17
D. A. Gerrets and J. de Koning,
‘Settlement Development on the Wijnaldum-Tjitsma Terp’, in J. C.
Besteman, J. M. Bos, D. A. Gerrets, H. A. Heidinga, J. De Koning (eds.),
The
Excavation at Wijnaldum
, vol. I (Rotterdam, 1999), p. 111.
18
Lebecq,
Marchands et navigateurs
frisons
, vol. 2, p. 137.
19
See William H. TeBrake,
‘Ecology, Economy in Early Medieval Frisia’,
Viator
9 (1978),
p. 16; and also H. A. Heidinga, ‘The Wijnaldum Excavation: Searching for a
Central Place in Dark Age Frisia’, in Besteman et al.,
Excavation at
Wijnaldum
, p. 10.