The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (23 page)

He mocked, of course. Those ‘great and
monstrous Ruffs’ around Elizabethan necks were fine until the rain caught them;
‘then their
great ruffes set sail and
down they fall like dishcloths fluttering in the wind, like windmill sails’.
People’s hats matched ‘the fantasies of their wavering minds’. A man
in slippers went ‘slipping and sliding at every pace, ready to fall
down … they go flip flop up and down in the dirt, casting mire to the knees of
the wearer’. As for doublets, they were useless for work and useless for play
because they were too stiff and too hot.

Stubbes didn’t mean to be a satirist
so much as a preacher. He was horrified by the sheer effort that went into all these
absurdities: ‘millions of suits of apparel lying rotting by them,’ he wrote,
not being a man to understate things, ‘when as the poor members of Jesus Christ
die at their doors for want of cloathing’. He hated the way women coloured their
faces and frizzled and crisped their hair ‘like grim and stern monsters rather
than chaste Christian matrons’; he told stories about the Devil himself being
caught starching ruffs and frizzling hair. He told other stories about the fashion for
fair hair, quite alarming ones: ‘if any children have fair hair, they will entice
them into a secret place and for a penny or two they will cut off their hair.’

His alarms were about a world that he was
sure was being shaken off its foundations: a world where everyone’s daughters all
want fine clothes ‘notwithstanding that their parents owe a brace of hundred
pounds more than they are worth’. He saw the sin of Pride in
‘wearing … Apparel more gorgeous, sumptuous and precious than our state,
calling or condition of life requireth’. He complained that it was ‘very
hard to know who is noble, who is worshipful, who is a Gentleman and who is
not’.
⁴⁷
The settled order of society was supposed to be reflected in
dress, but it was wrecked when anyone could buy the look of privilege; and this was the
time when even the mighty codpiece was sliding down the social scale, going from aristo
crotches to the private parts of even quite unrich and ungrand men.
⁴⁸
An outraged
Stubbes insisted that ‘all may not look to wear like apparel but everyone,
according to his degree, as God has placed him’.

The other certainty dissolving around him,
so he feared, was sex. It wasn’t just the wearing of soft shirts that concerned
him, although he reckoned they made men ‘weak, tender and infirm’. He saw
men in general becoming effeminate, by which he meant all too inclined
to the company of women and the pleasures of bedding them;
he thought women were dressing as whores; and even children looked like ‘whores,
strumpets, harlots and bawds’. He was horrified to see women walking out in public
in the same way men did. More than anything, he feared the corruption of all the
distinctions between the sexes, which he seemed to think depended largely on what people
wore; and he was especially aggrieved at the sight of a woman in a doublet. Such women,
he said, ‘may not improperly be called Hermaphroditi’.
⁴⁹

He was, of course, quite right as well as
being wrong. Clothes were no longer decreed by court or convent, except at court and in
convents. Something had unsettled some perfectly acceptable social order that Stubbes
was almost sure he once knew, and clothes showed that. Class, position, power and money
could no longer be taken quite for granted.

In doing so, he helped set the agenda for a
thousand moralistic outbursts, a thousand secular sermons against fashion and the
breakdown of comforting, solid hierarchy and the unkind way the young sometimes confuse
the old about their gender. He taught hacks and preachers that they could always howl
against anyone wearing fresh, unfamiliar clothes, that there was virtue in wearing what
your father wore. He made change and choice seem like sin.

He’s been three days in the church,
living on watercress and water and bread without yeast. It is Sunday now and time for
Mass: the time of his ordeal.

He comes out shaved, barefoot, wearing only
a wool shirt.
¹
The men around help strip him and then they put new linen on him for
the sake of decency. They truss him, hands behind his knees, and leave an end of the
strong rope free, with a knot tied in it as far down as the man’s longest hair
would reach. They lower him very gently by the rope into a pool of holy water that has
been blessed and blessed again.

The ceremony at the church door could be
some rough prison version of a baptism, and the onlookers and the lawmakers saw the
connection;
²
but this is about justice, not salvation. This man has sworn an
oath that he is innocent of the crime with which he is charged. If the water accepts
him, if he sinks at least to the length of his longest hair, he is innocent. If he
floats, it must be because the holy water refuses to take him. His oath was false. His
guilt is proved.
³

The charge might be something desperate like
sorcery or murder, or the perjury that made nonsense of trials when a man and his
friends all swore on oath that he was innocent. He might be a man
‘much-accused’, whose reputation was so bad that nobody was prepared to
swear to his innocence. He might be trying to clear his name, or prove he was not a
liar, that he was telling the truth about a claim to land. In a world without the files
and archives we take for granted, without a paper trail to check a story or establish a
precedent, the
ordeal could be a way to
establish a fact and even stop scandal among the powerful.

Like court trials later, the ordeal is full
of ritual and meant to look as sure as magic. The difference is what it claims, which is
the direct participation of God, and what it lacks, which is an over-riding idea of
human law and the state machinery to back it.

No judge and no jury sort out facts and
decide who is right and who is wrong, there is no public process of testing evidence and
challenging witnesses. Instead, ordeals demand that God show what He alone knows: who is
telling the truth. The advantage is that God’s verdict is unanswerable, so ordeals
settled cases that nothing else could resolve: cases where the evidence wasn’t
quite good enough and a bad man was about to go free, cases
per notorium
, where
otherwise a man would have been condemned just by the fact that everyone was absolutely
sure that he was guilty. The problem was that ordeals treated God rather like a hostile
witness; they demanded something that He hadn’t volunteered.

Right up to the start of the thirteenth
century, ordeals seemed to make perfect sense. Imagine a world without the kind of state
that we know, the power that can police and judge and make war on its own account.
Imagine, instead, a world of small communities, where people knew each other and each
other’s circumstances almost too well, where reputation was like life itself
because you weren’t going to move away and it was hard to settle disputes or
reason out crimes when everyone was involved with everyone else. Family ties could be so
close that the Church had to change the rules about ‘degrees of
consanguinity’ in 1215, how close a relative you could marry, because there were
villages across Europe where nobody could legally marry anybody else at all.
⁴

In such a world writing was only starting to
be all-important. There were few records and few lawbooks. The questions of guilt had to
be quite simple, and the proof had to be immediate and dramatic. Ordeals were a custom
that communities could accept, and nothing like the sophistications of the system of
common, universal law that once ran the Roman Empire and was only just being
rediscovered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

That kind of law needed an author and an authority, king or
Church, to draft one law for everyone, and books to hold the law so it could be
consulted anywhere and shipped and shared, as well as learnèd men to interpret it. Such
a law inevitably jarred against old habits and certainties. The point of ordeals was the
same everywhere even if the ritual changed from town to town, and everyone could see
what was happening; the rediscovered Roman law was a kind of mystery, requiring lawyers
who had studied at university, been initiated into a different way of thinking and cut
away from the customs of the places where they started. The only professional at the
ordeal was the priest, and he was not there to judge or decide; in local courts that ran
on custom, nobody brought down a book of laws to make sure they were doing the right
thing. There was no great abstract noun – the Crown or the Law or the Empire or the
Nation, all the different names of power – to take the blame for bringing charges.

Lawyers’ law meant a change of mind
that may be even more profound than it seems. In a trial by evidence, the whole point is
to judge; so what seems strangest of all is the Gospel passage that always had to be
read before the ordeal among the Franks.

It is: ‘Judge not that ye be not
judged.’
⁵

Lawyers’ law was Roman law
rediscovered by a Roman Church, but that is not the whole story. Lawyers’ law
begins in Ireland, and Wales, and in newly settled Iceland, all of them well outside the
Roman Empire.

All three trained up lawyers; the
monasteries of Cloyne, Cork and Slane had something like law schools, and not just for
monks, priests and clerics. Even though most manuscripts get lost or ruined with time,
there are still seventy-seven legal texts surviving from Ireland between the seventh
century and the start of the eleventh, traces of a formidable legal scholarship and a
devotion to writing things down. And lawyers were taken just as seriously as lawyers
like. Minor court workers counted only as farmers in the social order, but the grandest
‘advocates whom judgement encounters’ were considered among the high
nobility. In a time when crimes had to be compensated, and the price of a stolen pig had
to be judged on age, weight and health,
there was a sliding scale for killing a man depending on his
value. Killing a judge was very expensive.

This law was about words on the page. There
had always been records, charters and conveyances and histories, and literacy was much
more general in the Middle Ages than we used to think from the pages that survive; but
the ability to write, not just read, was still a matter of privilege, something you
often paid someone else to do properly. Anything written had an almost magical quality;
it became more right, more real and always more essential than anything a live witness
could say. Royal governments, Church governments, began to surf on a great tide of
parchment and paper; and lawyers managed the flow. By the time lawyers’ law was
fully established, every law case required a regimen of writing, a suite of formal
documents: written complaint, formal denial, proof of resources to pay all the bills,
then a written rejoinder and a written counter-reply before the case was defined enough
to go to court, where the lawyers presented all manner of written position papers.
Witnesses had to be listed along with the questions to be asked and the answers that
were expected; and when the witnesses were finally allowed to speak, a notary wrote down
everything they said so that the parties to the case, or usually their lawyers, could
mark up their copies in red ink to show the points they reckoned helped their case, and
those that hurt the other side.

So the first condition of lawyers’ law
is writing: its magic and its uses.

The power of writing is as old as the runes,
the early alphabet of the North Sea, which are almost as old as the Common Era: marks
easy to carve, roughly based on Roman and imperial writing, useful but also
extraordinary because of the magic they could carry. They were cut into wood or stone,
they were stained a reddish colour, they had to be interpreted with great care;
‘few folk have mastery of runes’, as the old poem said.
⁶
To know runes well
was a matter of pride, one of Kali Kolsson’s nine skills before he came to power
in the Orkneys in the twelfth century, along with chess, skiing, music, shooting and
sculling, reading and writing and verse (‘runes I rarely spoil …’ he
sang
⁷
); he carved in stone his claim to be the greatest expert in runes in the
Western Sea.
⁸

There were victory runes cut on the blade or the hilt of a
sword
⁹
and sea runes on a ship’s prow and rudder to make sure of a safe
voyage,
¹⁰
runes for giving birth and runes for being strong-minded and sensible
when dealing with someone else’s wife. Runes could be ‘very great symbols,
very strong symbols’.
¹¹
They could curse an unwilling woman
with unbridled lust and a three-headed ogre for a lover,
¹²
they could make a
woman speak when she was struck dumb with grief.
¹³
A malicious man would spoil the
runes a good wife carved to help her menfolk on a sea voyage,
¹⁴
and unknown runes
could be downright alarming – one Viking poem tells of a sinister cup cut with the signs
for entrails of animals, a snake and seaweeds, which contained a drink that had the
power to blot away the past.
¹⁵
Just writing out the
futhark
, all sixteen Viking runes in order like an alphabet, was a
good-luck charm: so alphabet sticks had to do with life, and risk, not the
schoolroom.