The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (7 page)

Since the sea was not a barrier like the
land, the world had a different shape. We would find it hard to recognize.

Suppose you crossed from Domburg to the
trading port at Ipswich on the east coast of England, newly opened in the seventh
century; your cargo might be pots from the Rhineland or glass or the hefty lava
quernstones used for grinding grain in mills.
³³
Stand on the banks of the River
Orwell and look out at the world. If you think in terms of the time it takes to get to
places, then Bergen in Norway is closer than York in England, even if your boat to
Bergen depends on the muscle power of rowers; but York is only 340 km away by road on
modern maps while Bergen is 510 km by sea. The coast of Jutland is closer, and better
connected, than an English Midlands city like Worcester. You could be over the water and
in the port of Quentovic, on the border between modern France and modern Belgium, in
half the time it took to get to London overland; and if you had a faster ship, under
sail, you could be in Jutland sooner than London. Travel by land had none of the
sea’s advantages, such as the prevailing summer winds that virtually blow a
Norseman home from around Calais; and at sea, despite the habit of clinging to the shore
for the sake of navigation and being able to sleep on dry land at night, it was
actually safer out in the open, away from the
shoals and currents of the English coast.
³⁴

It was easy for Scandinavians to be in York,
Frisians in Ipswich, Saxons in London, and the fact was so unremarkable that it is
hardly recorded. You didn’t need a harbour to land because you could beach a
flat-bottomed boat on any stretch of sand; so the great customs ports like Quentovic
were tucked into estuaries or else, like Dorestad, upstream on the Rhine. More, going
off to sea did not always mean building a huge ship and recruiting a large crew,
although having more men who could fight off raiders was often a good idea; there was no
need, on the coastal runs, to share the costs and risks because they were not that high;
an individual could do it for himself.

A sea change, if you like, was coming.

All through the seventh and even the eighth
centuries, much of the business across the sea looked like ceremony, a way of moving
around all those luxurious goods that a king, chief or emperor needed to ensure
alliances, make friends and keep his men loyal. Traders were more escorts than dealers,
transporting bribes and rewards, moving goods so someone else could give them away.
Again, the Frisians were different. They had their own tastes and they moved goods to
satisfy themselves. From the sixth century, they were buying pots for their own use from
the Frankish kingdom to their south, simply because they liked them.
³⁵
They bought
jewellery from England and Scandinavia, and they got their weaving battens made out of
whalebone from Norway. They may even have kept souvenirs: among their stashes of useful
coins are pretty cowrie shells from the Red Sea.
³⁶

Their kind of business required money: not a
heap of gold and silver wealth that would go well in your grave, but live money, coins
to use in trade. All through Gaul the only point of coins was an easy way to ship gold
about. In England it took two hundred years after the Romans left before coins were used
as money again. There were no mints at all east of the Rhine until Regensburg, and that
mint produced very little.
³⁷
It was the Frisians who reinvented
useful money, and taught their ideas to the Franks under Charlemagne.

For gold had always been about power,
ceremony, buying support
and paying taxes: the
currency of politics. Romans used it that way, the great landowners paying into the
state and a bit of subsidy flowing back (as usual) to the people who needed it least,
the great landowners. In the sixth century, gold still flooded into state coffers – the
ones belonging to the Frankish kings and no longer the Roman emperors – but it hardly
even dribbled back out; it was money that did not circulate, fit only to be kept,
counted, buried and, quite usually, stolen.
³⁸
Gold was often a gift, not always
entirely voluntary, which showed how and where you fitted: who were your allies, who
were your masters. You did not necessarily get anything in return: you couldn’t
give gold to a church and expect a measure of salvation. You certainly didn’t get
a load of grain or a shipful of amber or a posse of slaves for your gold; the return was
wonderfully abstract, an idea of yourself. In early medieval epics, its commonest form
is not even coins: it is small gold rings, against which the poets measured any other
gifts in circulation, however substantial, and ultimately the value and standing of the
people who got them and gave them.
³⁹

When the big Roman estates folded and the
diminished cities were no longer the focus of life, all of a sudden something smaller,
less valuable, more flexible than gold was required: a currency of trade. It was not
just the long-haul international trades which needed a token of value that made sense at
both ends of the voyage and everywhere in between. Peasant farmers taking their goods
into local markets needed some way to buy and sell with coins;
⁴⁰
they couldn’t
simply go home with more of the same kind of grain or cabbage or beans they’d
taken to market, even if that was what their neighbours had to sell; they needed a way
to buy cloth or pots, things produced in other places and by other kinds of people, and
in any case there was a limit to the beans or cabbage or grain that the cloth and pot
merchants wanted.

Silver worked: small, thick silver coins
that were often minted locally. The Frisians minted them with the old god Wotan on one
side, with spiked hair, a drooping moustache and eyes that stare out like goggles; and
on the other side a serpentine kind of monster with clawed feet and a high tail. The
Anglo-Saxons in England imitated the Frisians, and put a creature like a porcupine on
their silver, or sometimes a king.
⁴¹

These silver
deniers
were scarce in all the wide
Frankish territory until the Franks grabbed Frisia and its mints in the 730s. After
that, mints were most common along the Frankish route into Frisia; even from around 700
CE
there are
deniers
scattered about the stops on that trade
run. The most commonly found ones were struck in Frisia, although it is not always easy
to tell them from the Anglo-Saxon kind made across the water. The record buried in the
ground suggests that Frisia was the centre if not the home of practical cash.
⁴²
But it
wasn’t the countryside, the inland territory, which had money; it was the trading
ports. The sands at Domburg gave up almost a thousand of the early pennies, the
sceattas
,
⁴³
and from there the coins went where
merchants went: to the Frisians’ cousins and their trading partners in England,
but also all the way up the run of the Rhine as well as south to Marseilles and the
Mediterranean. In Aquitaine Frisian coins were much preferred to the debased money
coming from what is now France.

The silver had to come from somewhere else
since there were no mines in Frisia. To be able to manufacture this money, the Frisians
had to make money in the first place and they got it by selling to the Franks, who
wanted slaves and furs and fish and Frisian cloth, especially cloth of many colours. The
white, grey, red and blue kinds were expensive and much appreciated in the East – so
Charlemagne thought when he gave some to the Caliph of Baghdad, along with fierce and
agile dogs for catching lions and tigers.
⁴⁴
Frisian cloaks were mostly for the
mass market, given away by the Emperor Louis the Pious to the lower orders in his court
at Easter, while nobles got belts and silks, and the grooms, cooks and scullions got
linen, wool and knives.
⁴⁵

The Frisians were notorious for cashing in
on style; in Gaul, when shorter tunics were in fashion, the Frisians sold them but at
the price of the longer, old-fashioned kind, and the Emperor had to intervene.
⁴⁶
On the
Rhine and round the Baltic they distributed tiny bronze ‘keys to Paradise’
with a round handle and a cross cut out of the metal, a Christian talisman; the Frisians
may have resisted conversion manfully, but they worked out how to profit from it.
⁴⁷
With
all the cash they raised, they could buy what the Franks had to
offer, which was corn, wine, metal, pottery and glass; and
the rest of the silver, whatever form it took, could be turned into their own coins. It
was not just that trade gave coins a use; the Frisians would not have had the metal to
make them in the first place without trade.

In turn, the Franks had to get their silver
from somewhere, and they found it in the East: the Middle East, in Byzantium and beyond.
At the start of the eighth century, even the monks at Corbie in Picardy expected an
allowance of exotic Eastern goods from the Frankish royal warehouses: pepper, cumin,
cloves and cinnamon, dates and figs, rice and papyrus. Northern Europe liked drugs from
the East, camphor in particular, to sort out various ailments that their local medicine
did not seem to touch. The Franks had to trade to pay for that kind of luxury. They had
little that the Middle East needed except bodies to labour, so they sold slaves, and
they took back the silver
dirham
s from the caliphate in the East. Coins from
Aleppo turn up all round the North Sea.

For a long time, silver wasn’t mined;
it was circulated, passed hand to hand. Only in the 960s were veins of silver discovered
in Saxony, and suddenly there were new riches in Germany, enough to buy furs from
Scandinavia and make money worth something again in England.
⁴⁸
By then, silver
coins had gone from being a convenient way to carry a valuable metal to a symbol in
their own right. Coins were value you could carry about, which other people recognized
the same way you did. They didn’t need to be sheltered and fed like cattle, or
ploughed and reaped like fields, and best of all they didn’t die; their value
persisted. They could be buried in times of trouble and dug up to spend later. The laws
of the Franks show, equivalent by equivalent, how gold and goods gave way to silver and
this idea of value. For example, a murderer was obliged to pay off the heirs and
survivors of the man he had killed, and the rate of the blood money,
wergeld
,
was fixed. At first it was set in gold
solidi
, with an equivalent in goods and
perishables: a cow for 3
solidi
, a horse for 12 and a sword and sheath for 7.
Once silver money was in use, the exchange rate was about coins, not solid goods: 12
silver
deniers
to the
solidus
.
⁴⁹
The value of money was a theory that
everyone accepted, and it was anchored in the real world in the most surprising ways.
Life itself had a price:
roughly 1,664 grains
of fine silver in the form of coins. To make that kind of equation you have to have the
habit of paying off every kind of debt with silver money.
⁵⁰

It’s hard to overstate just how
radical this idea was going to be. It wasn’t just that money made two quite
different things into equivalents: a barge full of timber equal to a barge full of salt,
say, at least in value. You could take that abstraction, put it down on a small bit of
parchment or a tally stick and work with it: calculate, estimate, add, divide and
subtract, and, if you were lucky, multiply. Buyer and seller had to have the same idea
about what money means: a measure and a concept of value more than a thing of value in
itself. Merchants found that out later under Charlemagne when coins were clipped and
adulterated and were still supposed to be worth the same.

There had to be a way to say how one thing
was equal to something quite different and then make calculations: so buying a fish or a
glass meant using a kind of equation. A new way of thinking became possible.

The men who sailed out were professional
merchants and mariners now, not farmers with boats who sometimes went away on business.
They were a class of persons to be watched. Charlemagne approved of true pilgrims, he
said in a letter to the Saxon king, Offa of Mercia, who carried with them all the things
they needed for their journey; but ‘we have found there are some men who mix
fraudulently with the pilgrims for the sake of business, chasing profit and not serving
religion’.
⁵¹

The merchants made an inland headquarters at
Dorestad, some two hundred kilometres upstream on the Rhine where the river splits in
two. They had a natural beach at first, perfect for landing their boats, but the river
was beginning to meander and it formed a wet, slippery shoal between the water and the
land; so they built causeways into the river, one jetty to each house, jetties which
grew longer over the years as the bed of the river dodged to the east. Roadways of
wooden planks ran over the causeways so goods could be loaded and unloaded. Those goods
were rich: elegant glass and expensive weapons, pots of the style that buyers wanted
wherever it was made,
and not the rough local
stuff. Even the wood barrels that lined their wells were imported: from Mainz up the
river. The houses were long and boat-shaped, wider inland and narrower on the waterfront
where they stood at right angles to the water, each claiming a private, personal access
to the business of the river.
⁵²

Dorestad was so important to making money
that it had the second most-active mint in the empire after the one in
Charlemagne’s own court.
⁵³
In Charlemagne’s time so much
business passed through that the town became one of the main customs posts for the
empire; most likely, it was along its harbour that cargo was shifted from sea-going
boats to river-going boats, which would make it much easier to check value and take the
Emperor’s share. The town was a turntable for travellers, too, on the long haul
from the upper Rhine to the sea, which implies some sort of schedule for services and a
fair amount of traffic, and maybe somewhere to stay while you waited. Not all travellers
found the welcome they expected. The scholar Alcuin of York told his friends in a poem
to raise their sails and get out of Dorestad quickly because it was very likely a
merchant called Hrotberct wouldn’t open his house to them, just because
‘this greedy merchant doesn’t like your poems’. Alcuin clearly
expected merchants to do their duty and offer a bed to distinguished strangers, so
‘
niger Hrotberct
’, ‘wretched Hrotberct’, let
everyone down.
⁵⁴
In doing so, mind you, he got a minor kind of immortality; his
very Frankish name is the only name we have for a merchant in Dorestad.