The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (2 page)

The dead did not stay away. The cemetery
was uncovered again in 1749 and in 1817: twenty rough and worm-eaten coffins held
together with wooden pegs, no nails, and locked down in the sand by the sheer weight
of the old dunes. There were round brooches on the right shoulder of each body,
sometimes on the chest, which looked like money for a sea goddess to buy safety,
maybe treasure for a new life. One corpse was buried with a sword. But the locals
knew about buried things by now and what they might be worth, and they went through
the coffins secretly and wouldn’t say exactly where they found what. They were
busy selling to the Amsterdam collectors.

The shoreline kept changing with the
winds and tides, so when the low tide pulled back in 1832 it opened a quite
different site, one that would be seen again and for the last time in 1866: the
scattered outlines of houses, and a burial ground with the coffins laid out like a
star on the sand. There were now three different stories under the rough water.
There was a Roman temple to an unknown goddess which stood at the point where ships
went out into the open sea and looked as though it was abandoned very suddenly.
There were the remains of a settlement along the shore, a single road laid out east
to west with wooden huts for storing and sorting goods and enough coins to prove it
was a place of serious business. And there were graves that had to be un-Christian
because they were rich with pretty bronzes decorated with animal masks, and a
square-cut silver collar. These looked like Viking things.
¹⁰

The written record shows only faint
traces of all the life that the money and altars and grave goods suggest. Nobody
mentioned Domburg or anything like it in surviving Roman writings, but then Romans
were deeply provincial at the heart of their empire and quite usually ignored their
own rich provinces. When the scholar Alcuin
came to write the life of St Willibrord, he told of the
saint evangelizing on the island of Walcheren around 690
CE
, in a
town ‘where an idol of the old errors still stood’; this is the site of
Domburg, which was an island before man started reorganizing the coastline.
Willibrord smashed the statue in front of its guardian, who in a fit of mad anger
struck the saint on his head with a sword. ‘But,’ as Alcuin writes,
‘God looked after his servant.’ Magnanimously, the saint saved the pagan
from those who wanted to punish him, and from the demon occupying his soul, but the
man died anyway three days later, as persons who have been seized by angry crowds
tend to do.
¹¹

In the annals, the histories that monks
kept for their own use, there are references to a brutal Viking raid in 837 on
Domburg – ‘
in insula quae Walacra dicitur
’, on the island
called Walcheren – in which many were killed, many women taken off, and
‘countless money of various kinds’ was shipped out, and the Norsemen
were left with the power to organize regular payments of tribute. That single hidden
street on one great dune was evidently a rich little place, worth pillaging.

We read about raids and struggles, but
the ground itself tells a rather different story. When modern archaeologists
investigated sites around the beach, they found nothing much to suggest war, nothing
burned or smashed or piled up: none of the bloody events that make up the usual kind
of history, the events that people record. There were just centuries of life, and
its slow, sad retreat as the sand blew inland, with nothing much of value left
behind: except of course the dead.

All that vigour got itself buried on a
sandy bit of shore, where the bathers played and still play to this day.

This book is about rediscovering that
lost world, and what it means to us: the life around the North Sea in times when
water was the easiest way to travel, when the sea connected and carried peoples,
belief and ideas, as well as pots and wine and coal. This is not the usual story of
muddled battles and various kings and the spread of Christianity. It is the story of
how the constant exchanges over water, the half-knowledge that things could be done
differently, began to
change people’s
minds profoundly. This cold, grey sea in an obscure time made the modern world
possible.

Consider what had to change after the
end of the Roman Empire in order to take us to the start of the cities, states and
habits that we now know: our law, our idea of love, our way of business and our need
for an enemy in order to define ourselves. Traders brought coins and money, and with
them an abstract idea of value that made mathematics and modern science possible.
Viking raids built as many towns as they ruined, and towns free from bishops and
lords could start a new kind of trade. That created a community of people who did
business, strong enough and self-conscious enough to go to war with royal and
political powers: our world of tension between money and every other power.

Humans changed the landscape and, in the
course of learning to manage the damage to the natural world, they also spread the
idea of being free and having rights. Travel around the sea made fashion possible,
and visible, and desirable; we have not yet escaped. Women’s choices,
including celibacy or pregnancy on their own terms or else marriage, changed the
economic life of the North Sea in quite unexpected ways.

Law changed from the local customs
everybody knew to a language and a set of texts that needed lawyers: professions
were born, first priests, who had to stay out of the secular world, then lawyers,
who made law into a kind of religion, then doctors and all the rest. Without that,
we would have no idea of a middle class: people whose power came from being experts.
Plague began to separate the poor into the worthy and the unworthy, to allow
authorities to regulate the intimate stuff of life – how to raise children and where
to live – and eventually to put up barriers between cities and nations; all of which
was, of course, for our own good, just like airport security or constant
surveillance. Co-operating to save the land from flooding, to send out a ship with
many cargoes or insure it, to organize cash when taking fish to the Baltic and grain
back to Amsterdam: on this we built, eventually, capitalism. And all this time facts
and information were becoming one more commodity, just as they are today.

All this happened in the times that most
of us don’t really know:
the
millennium and more between what we all think we know of imperial Rome – armies,
straight roads, villas, temples, central heating and snails for dinner – and what we
think we know of Amsterdam in all its seventeenth-century imperial glory – fleets,
herring, gold, gin, paintings, gables and clean, swept streets. Between these two
visions, between roughly 700 and 1700
CE
, lie times that we still
unthinkingly call the ‘Dark Ages’ and then the ‘Middle
Ages’, which, as we all know, consist entirely of castles, damsels, knights
and lovely illuminated manuscripts. It is as though we imagine human invention and
perversity and will were suspended for centuries, as though life turned into
decor.

Documents do get lost or burned or
rotted, of course; the written record is bound to be imperfect. Documents keep best
when some long-lived institution needs them in a building like the cathedrals which
can survive a thousand years or so. A letter about planting crops or buying shirts
may disappear along with love letters and old court records; but a charter for land
belonging to the Church is very likely to survive. Only bits of life are written
down and kept, and they are recorded for very particular reasons and only from some
special viewpoint – judge or bishop or king or abbot. They leave out what everyone
knew at the time, what nobody wanted mentioned at the time. Even written histories
with great authority, based on all the written histories before them, are best
treated only as clues to the past.

We have great good luck, though. We now
have a whole new kind of evidence to fill some of the gaps, and watch as our view of
history changes almost beyond recognition. Archaeology uncovers and reveals, just
like the sea at Domburg; but unlike the sea, it does so systematically, providing
evidence to set alongside the written record. The picture is suddenly wider; we see
life and connections. Sometimes what’s dug up will be a flat contradiction of
familiar texts and the archives we would like to trust because they are what we
have. Sometimes, it will be hard to interpret because each pile of objects grubbed
out of the ground makes sense only when it is put into context, and deciding on the
context means we have to rely on what we think we already know from other finds in
other places.

Bring the words and the objects together, though, and the
new story is much more convincingly human. Life no longer stops dead when Rome falls
and the empire collapses and the tradition of classical Latin writing comes to an
end, not even when the Saxons and Vandals and Goths and Huns make their various
pushes to the west. Human beings didn’t lose their ability to connect, trade,
fight wars and generally move about to change their lives just because there are so
few surviving documents; indeed, they didn’t lose their ability to write and
read those documents. Life goes on; we just need different tools to find and
describe it.

Roman towns sometimes survived, but they
changed. Roman roads still worked, as did the old Roman system of posthouses where
you could rest on a long journey, change horses and ride on. Useful ploughs and
workshop tools didn’t disappear from the land because historians decreed a
change of era; indeed, some rather advanced devices like horizontal watermills were
built centuries before we can trace them in documents. The technology of travel –
from the hogging trusses that ran the length of a boat to make it seaworthy by
tightening bow and stern, to the sun compasses which allowed navigation out of sight
of the shore – was always developing; people wanted to move and were thinking hard
about how to do it. The very shape of the world and its limits were shifting in
people’s minds.

Take away the idea of dark times and
ruin and you begin to hear other voices. Women were not always silent, or without
the power to make choices – we may just have been listening in the wrong places; the
erudite and holy Hildegard of Bingen lived out most of the twelfth century as a nun,
had visions, was a mystic, wrote music appropriate for her convent life, but she
also wrote letters all round Europe at the heart of a learnèd conversation. She knew
how to make contraception work, and she wrote about that, too.

To find this story means burrowing
through libraries and staring at ploughed fields, both. It means close attention to
what people recorded of the stones on the beach at Domburg and then imagining all
the connections that the story contains: human beings in movement, along with
anything they can make, think or believe. Nothing is ever quite new, or settled, or
empty. Frontiers shift. Languages change.
Peoples migrate. The Romans built a temple to send their
merchant ships out to the sea, then merchants made a trading town whose name
we’ve lost, then the Vikings who were famous for raiding and pillaging settled
down here; this one beach holds the story of a world always changing, always on the
move. There are also the weapons that invading Frankish soldiers left behind around
800
CE
. Armies travelled and power shifted; but sometimes the biggest
changes came when peoples travelled, and not always when and why the schoolbooks
told us. Identity became a matter of where you were and where you last came from,
not some abstract notion of race; peoples were not separated sharply as they were by
nineteenth-century frontiers, venturing out only to conquer or be conquered. Indeed,
quite often they ventured out to change sides.

Instead of the dark mistakes about pure
blood, racial identity, homogeneous nations with their own soul and spirit and
distinct nature, we have something far more exciting: the story of people making
choices, not always freely, sometimes under fearsome pressure, but still choosing
and inventing and making lives for themselves.

The idea of ‘darkness’ is
our mistake. What our forefathers lived could better be called the ‘long
morning’ of our world.

To be clear: none of this is at all
modern, because it belongs to a time of quite different thinking and behaviour.
Distance wasn’t the same, the maps of the world were not the same, the
institutions may have similar names but they were quite different from the ones we
know. The necessary conditions of the world we know could have grown into a quite
different world. But if we can tease out what happened, and why, then we can begin
to see how our modern ways and times became possible – from the calendar to a
futures market, from the first publishers of holy manuscripts to experimental
science.

There is one more complication in this
story: how we tell it, usually. We see the glories of our past through the screen of
the Southern Renaissance, when civilization was rediscovered, they say, on the
shores of the Mediterranean in pages that had been written a thousand years earlier
around the same sea. The law that started to order societies in a way we find more
familiar is called Roman law. The Church across Northern Europe was organized from
Rome. It seems
downright obvious that the
North was just waiting to be civilized from the South; after all, Christianity came
from there. As early as 723 a bishop called Daniel was telling a saint called
Boniface that his best argument against Northern pagans was to point out that the
world was becoming Christian and their gods were doing nothing at all about it;
‘the Christians possess lands rich in oil and wine and abounding in other
resources, they have left to the pagans lands stiff with cold where their gods,
driven out of the world, are falsely supposed to rule’.
¹²