The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (8 page)

Look a little closer, and the port is much
odder: a port that only men from the
terpen
could have imagined. The houses by
the Rhine were packed closely but each made itself into an island: there was a wood
palisade to mark its boundaries and a gallery that ran round the outside of the building
to look out towards the neighbours, all the connection and the isolation of the
terpen.
There was not just one well to provide water, but two: one for
humans, one for animals. In the north of the town there were substantial farms, linked
by wooden plank roadways, and they raised more meat than the town could possibly eat.
Each merchant house made things on a small scale, tanned leather or carved amber or did
basic blacksmithing, produced ropes and baskets and maybe also cloth. The warehouses
were storing
goods, but also producing more
goods than the town could use.
⁵⁵
Dorestad was a port and a market
town which kept the habits of the
terpen:
raise animals, make anything you can,
go into business with what you have and then go as far as you can with the business.

All this required organization. Frisians
sailed in convoys, which means they had to time and plan their voyages and share the
information; we know this because the priest Ragenbert was sent north to what is now
Sweden by way of Schleswig, ‘where there were ships and merchants who were to make
the journey with him’ (and it was just bad luck that he was set upon by robbers
and never made it alive).
⁵⁶
Later they definitely had guilds,
sworn brotherhoods; but perhaps they always had associations capable of keeping their
members informed of and organizing the convoys and also defending their interests. In
the Baltic in the eleventh century the Frisian guild at Sigtuna put up stones to the
memory of members who had distinctly un-Frisian names, as though by the eleventh century
‘Frisian’ meant simply merchant and ‘guild’ meant something very
close to Chamber of Commerce.
⁵⁷

They were also settled in Jutland, in the
port called Haithabu, or else Schleswig, where there were many Christians ‘who had
been baptised at Dorestad’;
⁵⁸
or else at Hamburg, where the
Frisians came and went. When the city of Worms on the upper Rhine burned down in 886 the
chronicler at Fulda reports the burning of the best part of town, ‘where the
Frisian merchants live’;
⁵⁹
they also had the best quarters of
Cologne and Mayence on the Rhine. They were settled enough to be buried abroad, although
it was always possible to take the bones back home after a decent time; funerals in
Yorkshire looked remarkably like Frisian funerals. They also left traces around the
Humber and in Northumberland, which may help explain why Northumbrian missionaries found
it quite easy, martyrdoms aside, to bring Christianity to their brothers in Frisia
itself.

They went to live even at the outer limits
of their trading world. There was a Frisian house in Kaupang at the mouth of the Oslo
fjord in south Norway, on the way from the North Sea to the Baltic through the Kattegat,
where the trade of the two seas criss-crossed in sheltered waters. The glass beakers
found there are like the ones
used by the
Franks and the Frisians, which means Southern drinking habits, and there are
double-ended dress hooks, which would have been useless on local clothes but which any
Frisian woman would have needed; there were copper brooches, which were pretty, but
nothing worth trading and certainly not worth stealing, so they were for use then and
there; there were loom weights, which might mean cloth was woven in the house, but on a
small scale. People were making a whole life onshore, women and men, sociable drinkers
who liked the styles familiar from home. The house is unusual because it has two side
aisles for sleeping, which take up much more space than in other houses around, as
though crews were coming in and going out with cargo and needed somewhere to stay
together: foreigners.

The house wasn’t used for very long,
just from the 800s to around 840, the time when Kaupang went from being a seasonal base
to a settlement where people lived all year round. Those are also the years when the
Frisians’ tight control of trade on the southern North Sea was at its height and
the time when it was starting to fray. The business of the house was basic goods, raw
materials, the perfect opposite of all those crafted, gaudy bits and pieces once shipped
about for the benefit of kings and grand persons. The Frisians dealt in ingots of copper
alloy, most likely for the craftsmen in Kaupang; and they left behind such a trail of
iron fragments that they may have been exporting iron. From Kaupang there were long
valley routes by water and then land, up onto the vast mountain plateau of
Hardangervidda, a treeless waste which produced remarkable ore; it made iron that was
much less brittle than other sources, which made better steel and famously better axes.
It was worth shipping out. They may have brought in amber, which commonly washed up on
the Frisian coast; they left behind a very little waste from cutting and carving amber.
They introduced hacksilver to Kaupang, silver goods chopped up to make them useable as
money; and they certainly brought north their great idea: money itself.
⁶⁰
The
quantity of hacksilver, mind you, implies that coins were still too strange for daily
deals.

Don’t think for one moment that trade meant peace, not
for the Frisians. The Franks to their south wanted their territory, their connections
and their business, and took all of them by force. Radbod, the last independent king of
Frisia before the Franks took over, sailed up the Rhine as far as Cologne, vengefully
ruining and wrecking most thoroughly as he went;
⁶¹
a few years later a chronicler
called the Frisians ‘
gens dirissima maritima
’
–
the hard
men from the sea, ill-omened and terrible.
⁶²

The Vikings came raiding in 837
CE
and found Frankish soldiers in Domburg to kill.
⁶³
They also took
away many women as captives and countless money of all kinds, and went up the Rhine to
overrun Dorestad, a victory which cost them many dead;
⁶⁴
they were stealing
the Frisians’ business, and the Frisians were murderously good at fighting back.
When there was a Danish ruler later in Frisia, the Frisians shipped out with the Viking
raiders when it suited them, even though the Vikings were taking over their bases, their
ports and their business; they adapted, but their dominance was over because, in a way,
they had taught their methods all too well.

They ending up doing their business on the
very edge of the law. In Tiel, between Utrecht and Arnhem, the merchants complained that
the Frisians were hard men with no respect for the law, working with robbers in the
woods so that it was no longer possible to sail safely out to England or to have the
English come with goods. The monk Alpert also noticed that, apart from being drunk in
the morning and being unnecessarily tolerant of adultery (as long as the wife kept
quiet) and running off at their filthy mouths, the Frisians were unusually tight-knit.
He noticed they were sworn to support each other’s stories even if it meant lying.
They co-operated; they pooled their money at their drinking bouts, to pay for wine but
also to share the profits of business. They kept their
terpen
principles even
when the imperial army finally drove them out of their woods and their trade runs, and
faced them down among the ditches and moats close to modern Rotterdam: the battle was
the last, great Frisian victory, 29 July 1018.
⁶⁵

But the Frisian Sea: that already had new
owners.

There was nobody else alive, nobody who could
read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who
was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called
Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not
yet.

In 686, the sun went dark behind the moon.
When the eclipse ended the plague came suddenly from the sea. It broke into the
monasteries like this double house at Jarrow and Wearmouth in Northumbria and all the
little ports along the coast. It killed quickly. The old abbot, Eosterwine, was sick and
dying and he called all the monks to him. ‘With the compassion that was second
nature to him, he gave them each the kiss of peace,’ Bede remembered.
¹
Nobody
worried then about touching the sick; sickness was known to come in an impersonal
miasma, a kind of mist; so the abbot’s kindness killed almost all of them.

The deaths left a quiet in the stone church
that was as bad as the sight of walls stripped of pictures or a library without books:
the house was reminded that it had lost its glory. Music was not yet written down; it
lived only in men’s minds and could be learned only by ear; if it was not sung, it
was lost. The monks had been taught ‘at first hand’ by the chief cantor of
St Peter’s in Rome,
²
and plainsong was one of great riches
of the house; they were the first to sing Gregorian chant in Britain. But now the
familiar antiphons, the sacred conversation of voices answering each other back and
forth across the choir, were gone.

Ceolfrith was miserable, even tearful, and he stood the quiet
for only a week. He needed to begin the familiar services again. He began by singing on
his own, and then the boy Bede joined in: two voices instead of a dozen taking the
parts. It was a thin sound in the small stone chancel, but they did what had to be done:
they kept the music alive.
³

The plague went away almost as suddenly as
it had come, and Bede lived to see the monastery thriving again. A whole new generation
of novices arrived. There were new political crises, especially a tyrant king called
Osred, which made the monasteries into a most welcome refuge. When Ceolfrith decided to
go to Rome in 716 he left ‘behind him in his monasteries brethren to the number of
around six hundred’.
⁴

And this was all the world that Bede ever
knew. He’d been taken to the monastery at the age of seven, and dedicated to the
Church by parents who may have been quite grand and certainly lived close by. He hardly
ever left, except for study in another monastery;
⁵
he never went on pilgrimage; he never
travelled the fixed route from his home in the north-east of England to Ireland, which
other men used in order to study or to escape the world or go out missioning. He could
have gone overland from one church guest house to another, taking the usual three days
and nights in each; he could have met up with the professional sailors who worked in the
monastery on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland; he could have followed
the tracks of his colleagues and predecessors to the Firth of Forth and then to the
Firth of Clyde and then across to Derry. Those were regular routes even after the strong
connection between the Christian communities at Lindisfarne and Iona was broken.
⁶
Instead,
Bede lived almost always inside his new, closed family. He shared all its high
emotions.

Before Ceolfrith there had been two abbots
for the two monasteries, one at Jarrow and one at Wearmouth: Benedict Biscop and
Sigfrith. The two men were deathly sick at the same time and Bede remembered how
Sigfrith had to be carried on a pallet to see his friend, and set down to lie side by
side on the same pillow. Their two faces were close, but the men did not even have the
strength to kiss;
the monks had to reach down
to turn their heads towards each other. Bede found it, he wrote, ‘a sight to move
you to tears’. When Benedict decided that the two houses should be run by one man,
and that man should be Ceolfrith, Bede tells how their virtues bound the two men
together ‘more closely than any family relationship’.
⁷
This Ceolfrith was
central to Bede’s life, the father who never sent him away, and when Ceolfrith
decided he would go again to Rome, this time to die, Bede had the one moment of crisis
he acknowledges in all his life. In the preface to one of his biblical commentaries he
writes of the consternation he felt, the ‘sudden anguish of mind’.
⁸

Being shut in by the monastery walls, the
only way Bede could know the world outside was to read, study and ask; he had to build
his whole world with books. The library Bede knew, some two hundred manuscripts, had
been assembled by men who thought books for reading were just as important as pictures
or relics or music. Benedict Biscop, the founder of the house, brought back ‘a
large number of books on all branches of sacred knowledge’ from his third trip to
Rome, ‘some bought at a favourable price, others the gifts of
well-wishers’.
⁹
The book trade was flourishing and it
was complicated: Bede could read at Jarrow a codex of the Acts of the Apostles, Greek
and Latin versions, which had been in Sardinia until the seventh century and ended up
later in Germany.
¹⁰
On Biscop’s next trip, he brought back ‘spiritual
treasures of all kinds’ but ‘in the first place he returned with a great
mass of books of every sort’. Everything else – relics of the saints, holy
pictures, music in the Roman manner and even a promise of perpetual independence from
any outside interference – comes further down the list in Bede’s account. His
friend and mentor Ceolfrith, the third abbot, ‘doubled the number of books in the
libraries of both monasteries’, he says, ‘with an ardour equal to that which
Benedict had shown in founding them’.
¹¹