The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (33 page)

Yet when the seas boiled around Iceland,
fire belched from the earth and a mountain surged quite suddenly out of the water, the
author of the
History of Norway
, writing around the start of the thirteenth
century, refused to see omens of the last days. He preferred to go back to the Latin
writer Solinus, who said there was a deep crack in the earth, and caves full of the
winds created by the breathing of the water, which sucks the sea through hidden passages
and starts surges and waterspouts and makes the earth roar and tremble. That breath
muddles with the hot heart of the earth and pushes smoke and sulphurous flames out in
the middle of the ocean. It is an elaborate explanation, which acknowledges the heat at
the centre of the earth but otherwise is pure invention out of an old book; but it is a
mechanical explanation, which is remarkable. ‘Although we do not clearly
understand these marvels in the world, or others greater still,’ the author of the
History
says, ‘they are not therefore to be taken as omens or
reckoned portents foreboding the deluge.’
²³

Roger Bacon, even though he was a friar,
went further. ‘We do not see the wonderful actions of nature that are all day
brought about in
us and in things in front
of our eyes,’ he complained, ‘but we judge them to be brought about either
by a special divine operation, or by angels, or by demons, or by chance and fortune. But
it is not so, except insofar as every operation of a creature is in some way from
God.’
²⁴

Human beings set out to test the world,
using their own eyes and minds, and mathematics; they were still tangled up with
invisible, mysterious, metaphysical things but the relationship had changed. Science
could be separated out. A man looking at the stars was no longer obliged to do
metaphysics, not even to hunt out an astrological meaning for an eclipse; he could do
astronomy. Mind you, a kind of astrology mattered to doctors well into the seventeenth
century; it was always possible the stars still ruled men. But a man seeing some new
volcanic island come up out of the sea was looking now at physical changes in the earth
that he might be able to explain, not trying to decode some message from God about the
end of time. That did not diminish the sense of wonder. The remarkable Dominican
Albertus Magnus thought there could be no philosophy found in the details of specific
things, like the species of plants. But he was still curious, and he went on writing
down specifics. He showed by experiment that turtles won’t drink sea water; he was
told that ostriches eat metal, but they turned down the snacks of iron that he offered;
he cut off the head of a cicada and heard it sing on and on. He also insisted that toads
crack emeralds just by staring at them, which suggests he was a collector of everybody
else’s wonders, too.
²⁵

Even magic was becoming self-conscious. In a
twelfth-century manuscript there is a kind of experiment: split a green hazel rod while
saying the Lord’s Prayer, then have two men make the sign of the cross and take an
end of the rod, then say a spell: ‘Ellum sat upon ella and held a green rod in his
hand and said Rod of green unite again.’ The rod should come back together to make
a magic wand. By the start of the thirteenth century William of Auvergne said he had
seen this happen, but he wrote that the rod put itself back together, naturally and of
its own accord, and all the ceremony and all the words, even the holy ones, were of no
significance at all. When it came to explaining things, magic and its paraphernalia were
fading.
²⁶

God wasn’t; and so a kind of scientific thinking could
be comfortably bundled together with theology, sometimes metaphysics, mathematics and
inspiration. It was easy for new thinkers to be smeared, accused and ruined for heresy,
so it was also useful to invoke God. The mathematics was new, as was the rediscovery of
texts in ancient languages that had nothing to do with the Bible, but they were tools to
do an old job.

Robert Grosseteste launched the science of
optics, which was known as
perspectiva
, and he drew out diagrams and used
mathematics to try to show how we see things; but he saw light as the cause of
everything, something from God that multiplies itself and produces matter that takes up
space in the world. His geometry was a way to put the intangible on paper, to get a
physical grip on mystery; physical fact and spiritual visions were both in his mind.
²⁷
Roger
Bacon thought optics was a useful science precisely because it gave men access to the
miraculous in nature. ‘There are,’ he writes, ‘an infinite number of
truths in living things.’
²⁸

It was beginning to be agreed that
observation was not enough, though. Logic and calculations were needed, too: a way to
order what you sense so you can think more clearly about it. Mathematics was
all-important, and especially the idea of finding proofs for rock-solid general ideas
just like the ones Euclid found in geometry. There were new tools for examining the
relationships and the ratios between things – quadratic equations, finding the roots of
numbers, trigonometry. Lines and points and numbers became as important in philosophy or
theology as they were, more obviously, when it came to measuring the rates at which
objects fall, or trying to draw diagrams to show the lines by which the eye sees.
‘The usefulness of considering lines, angles and figures is very great, since it
is impossible to understand natural philosophy without them,’ Robert Grosseteste
wrote. Roger Bacon called mathematics ‘the gate and key of these sciences’;
he said the Devil found it most convenient when people ignored maths ‘since that
made theology and philosophy useless’.
²⁹
All the effort of measuring the
ages of the world in the expectation of the end of the world had the unexpected effect
of getting mathematics off the page and into the real world, where its
effects were radical. Number became more complicated, more
subtle and more useful. Thomas Bradwardine took Aristotle’s formula for speed,
force and resistance, the theory of how objects move, and respectfully showed that its
plain arithmetic was far too simple, and needed a kind of geometric thinking (which in
modern terms is logarithmic).
³⁰
That was a whole new way to work
figures, and to see unfamiliar shapes and structures in the well-known world.

This was classroom stuff, mostly reserved
for those who could read and afford to buy books. It ought to have been hedged about by
older ways of thinking, which by now had the power to call new thinking
‘heresy’. Yet this change of mind proved so powerful that we’re
allowed to wonder: had it already begun outside the classroom, in the world? Was the
scientific, the logical, the ability to see reality in an abstract ratio, simply the new
form of something that was already built into everyone’s everyday lives around the
northern sea?

It was. The sheer scale of the change
can’t have depended on what we might expect: the traffic in secret books,
communities with esoteric knowledge, ideas of divine inspiration or plain human terror
at the prospect of the end of the world. All those mattered, but this change of mind
goes much further back. Remember those Frisian traders working the coasts, and how they
carried with them a way to put ideas of price and value on paper, along with coins to
settle their deals whose meaning was something abstract, not the market value of the
metal they contained. They dealt in ratios between shiploads, ratios between wood and
wool, grain and pots, wine and iron, so that everyone could understand them and use them
the next market day. They calculated the content of their ships, their goods at a fair;
they turned the very physical world of barges and cargo into numbers. The sea which
carried their business also brought ideas, books, thinkers back and forth; but, more
than anything, it carried the idea, the fact, the use of money.

Consider this: from the 1330s, Paris
theologians could talk in terms of calculating and measuring ratios for grace and love
and charity, virtues written down almost as sums. Just before they began this, the Pope
had published a kind of price list for indulgences, which laid down how much each year
of pardon cost: one penny from Tours.
Salvation was priced. An
Ordonnance
of 1268 in
France condemns ‘those who blaspheme against God, the Virgin and the Saints’
and lays down penalties that carefully match the poison in the blasphemy
(‘horrible’ blasphemy cost between twenty and forty pounds) and also the
ability to pay.
³¹
When both virtue and sin can be turned into numbers, and
calculated and assessed, mathematics has entered the minds of theologians and
philosophers and not just engineers and merchants; and it did so because it already
permeated their whole world every time they bought something, sold something, paid the
rent or taxes or fees. They knew just how complicated were questions of finding the
right price. In the 1300s the philosopher Jean Buridan imagined being given ten pounds
by a stranger and thanking him, ‘
Grates domine
’, which sounds a
quite unfair exchange; the money will buy things, but the words are lost on the wind.
Buridan pointed out that maybe the stranger was grossly rich, but much in need of
respect and honour; and maybe the man who said ‘thank you’ was known to be
particularly honest and good. The rich man’s needs and the virtue the poor man had
to share became a matter of market forces, and the price turned out to be right.

The Frisians went trading and they brought
money with them, which is a way to bring very different objects into one equation and do
the sums. Now that same kind of equation took in music, blasphemy, pardon from Hell,
love and charity: it took in the world.

This isn’t a simple story, no
revelations, no discoveries, and it may be easiest to begin with what science is not. It
is not just experiment, otherwise we’d honour Eilmerus, that old and most learnèd
monk at Malmesbury, a man who had great difficulty walking, and everyone knew the
reason: when he was young, he thought he knew how to fly.

He ‘used some skill to weave feathers
into his hands and feet’, William of Malmesbury records. ‘Then he took to
the air from the top of a tower, but he began to shake because the winds were so strong
and turbulent, and also because he was all too aware of what a foolhardy thing he was
doing. He fell, broke his legs and was crippled ever after.’ He imagined man could
fly like the birds, he made an
experiment to
test it, and afterwards he had his explanation for what went wrong with the experiment;
but he had no general principles, no general theory, he was testing and he made no
calculations and no diagrams. ‘He used to say,’ William writes, ‘the
cause of his catastrophe was that he forgot to put a tail at his rear end.’
³²

We might say: he didn’t experiment, he
just tried.

Robert Grosseteste, Robert ‘with the
big head’, helped begin the move from writing about
experientia
, which
means experience, to becoming an experimenter who staged tests and experiences to prove
theories. He came to the bishop’s household at Hereford, with a brilliant
testimonial from a man who had known him in the bishop’s household at Lincoln:
‘will be a great support to you’, the letter promised, ‘in various
kinds of business and legal decisions, and in providing cures to restore and preserve
your health’. He had ‘highest standards of conduct’, he had
‘wide reading’ and if he was going to cost money then the bishop was
reminded that he knew branches of learning, law and medicine, which ‘in these days
are most highly rewarded’.
³³

This Grosseteste was a remarkable man. He
was the first to look closely into the role of experiment in science, to think that
falsifying an idea could be quite as important as proving it. Other people were looking
carefully at the stars, the world, the rainbow or comets, just as Grosseteste did, but
he insisted that ‘those who form their own opinion from their own experiences
without any depth of reasoning will inevitably fall into wrong opinions’.
³⁴
Add
mathematics to what you see and sense, make big general ideas that are supposed to work
in any circumstance, and you have the groundwork for science.

Matthew Paris thought Grosseteste was
‘a man of too much learning’, who must have been in the schools ‘from
his earliest years’; and by ‘the schools’ he meant the formal debates
and seminars of the new universities, Paris or Oxford. Grosseteste certainly lectured at
Oxford, taught with the Franciscans there and was so closely linked to the university
that scholars used to assume he must have been its first chancellor. But his background
was rather different, which may explain why he thought so fiercely for himself: he knew
Paris, but he started in provincial England.

He was born in a small Suffolk village with Stow in its
name, brought up for a while by a widowed mother, whose death left him begging on the
streets. Some civic grandee in Lincoln paid for him to go to a local school, which may
not have taught him all that much of what he needed to know; to the end of his life he
needed help translating Greek, so Roger Bacon wrote, and although he had a passion for
languages, he knew very well he had started them too late.
³⁵
His learning was
founded in Lincoln in the bishop’s household, and in the school and library at the
cathedral in Hereford, where he could learn from foreigners, outsiders, men who were
trying things out.

It took money to study in Paris, which would
have seemed the next likely move for him, but he had no money and he never formally
enrolled to learn or teach there. A certain Robert Grosseteste did write a will in Paris
in 1224, leaving to his children a lifetime interest in a house in the courtyard of the
church of Sainte-Opportune, a holy island just off the Rue Saint-Denis and a bit south
of Les Halles. When his children were gone, the house was to go to the church; and in
1249 his children were evidently gone because his grandchildren went to law to hold on
to their property.
³⁶
This is extremely curious on the face of it: Grosseteste was a
serious cleric, who should not have been married, let alone involve a Paris church in
providing for his children. But at the time of this bequest, which is just before
Grosseteste turns up again in England, he was not yet a priest or even a deacon. In
fact, he was not ordained until very late in life. Having been married could explain
that delay, and not being ordained would help explain why he could not formally study or
teach in Paris. But he was there; one witness of the bequest is William of Auvergne,
Bishop of Paris, and when Grosseteste wrote to William in 1239, recommending a clerk who
was coming to Paris, he calls him with unusual intimacy his ‘dearest
friend’.
³⁷
If Grosseteste did live in Paris, did he take the learning of
Hereford to the learnèd schools in the big city?