The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (46 page)

The Scottish authorities also understood
very well that plague came by sea and all the small east coast ports were at risk.
Quarantine was long and careful. Ships from Gdansk in 1564 were told to land at
‘quiet places’, not the main ports, and they were kept there for two months.
Some cargo could be kept on board, pitch and iron and timber and tar because nobody
could see how they could carry infection, but flax had to be destroyed at once. The
ships were half scuttled so that the tides could wash over the cargo; then it was
fumigated with burning heather. In theory ‘sick and foul people’ who broke
out of isolation were executed, although magistrates were usually lenient.
²⁰

In England, there were no general rules made
for another century. There were only emergencies: particular ships to be searched and
stopped from particular origins, ships from Lisbon in 1580, Bordeaux in 1585, sites of
plague and places under suspicion. It was not enough. Plague was imported into England
every time, striking first in a port, often London, sometimes Yarmouth, Hull or
Plymouth: a sea-borne disease, a product of travel. From the ports, plague went town to
town, market to market along the main routes inland on roads or rivers, wherever rats
and fleas could hitch a ride. Fleas travelled on humans as well as on rats – people said
they fell sick after sharing a bed with sick people – and perhaps sometimes mice and
rats went on wild runs across the fields and infected new villages; but mostly it was
the rats from the ships that settled in houses, infected other rats and infected
humans.
²¹
So the best line of protection was a little out to sea at the mouth of
rivers like the Thames, where a couple of warships and some customs officials could
interrogate every ship, give out passes to any coming from clean ports and turn the
others into
the creek at Holehaven –
‘a thing never done by us before’, as Samuel Pepys writes in 1663 – to spend
at least thirty days in quarantine. They were also to make sure that no passengers were
‘permitted to be wafted over into England in the pacquet boats’ from any
Dutch port.
²²

The blockade did not stop plague returning
to London. It did show seamen, forcibly, which side they were on.

Before there were solid, all-powerful
nation states, choosing and changing sides was always an option; you went where you were
known, where you could do the things you wanted to do and where someone would protect
you from being jailed, hanged or broken on the wheel for doing them. Even bureaucrats
could be flexible, if the situation allowed: Weland of Stiklaw was a canon at the
cathedral of Dunkeld before he entered the service of the Scottish king in the 1280s; he
was sent on a mission to bring the Maid of Norway back to her Scottish husband, the
king, but then, after her sudden death in Orkney, he turned back round, crossed the sea
properly and entered the service of the Norwegian king. Weland went back and forth
across the sea on diplomatic missions as though his real nationality depended on the sea
he sailed or the job he was doing. He certainly kept his distance from the situation in
Scotland, which was under English administration, perhaps an exile on principle; and yet
after the Norwegian king gave him control of the business of the earldom of Orkney, he
turns up doing homage to the English king just to make sure of his rights over the other
part of the earldom in Caithness. And then he may have offered safe refuge in Caithness
to the family of Robert Bruce in his war against the English. And then, having started
out as a foreign cleric, he turns up as a baron, ranking number five in the secular
hierarchy of the Norwegian court.
²³
Bureaucrats were technocrats, with
skills that could travel.

So were pirates. The Flemish seaman John
Crabbe is first recorded in 1305 for stealing 160 tuns of wine, burning a ship off La
Rochelle and kidnapping the sailors: he was being a good Fleming since the ship came
from enemy territory in Dordrecht. It proved difficult to arrest Crabbe in Flanders,
mostly because he was now in Scotland;
again, as a good Fleming he was supporting the Scots against
their English enemies, who were also enemies of Flanders, and making life hard for
English vessels on the North Sea. In 1316 he turns up in Rouen, stealing two English
ships full of victuals which were on their way to help out with the terrible famine in
Flanders – the English and Flemish were making up their quarrel at the time. The same
year, he intercepted a shipload of Bordeaux wine for the English market, and London
demanded that Crabbe be punished. Flanders said he had already been banished as a
murderer. London said he was well known in Flanders, where he lived ‘whenever he
wished’. They added that they knew the wine had been handed to the Count of
Flanders himself.

In the war between the English and the
Scots, Crabbe skippered a fleet which tried to wreck the English in the Firth of Tay,
but failed. He escaped, but not for long; he was captured and handed over to the English
forces, led as it happened by a soldier from Flanders. Everyone English wanted him
punished; they remembered the sailors he hanged from the masts of their captured ships.
He was guarded well and kept in chains. The English were marching on Berwick, where
Crabbe had lived and his son still lived, so he was offered to the town on payment of a
ransom. The town declined, so Crabbe the villain changed sides one more time. He knew
Berwick well and he traded his information to the English: a full pardon for everything
else he’d done in return for what the king called ‘his good service in the
siege of Berwick’. We can’t know what exactly he revealed, but it was worth
his life.

And now the English started to use Crabbe,
the man they had meant to hang. He helped get their ships and weapons ready for action.
He used his pirate’s knowledge of the coasts around the North Sea to keep France
out of the sea lanes between England and Flanders; for the French and English were now
at war. At the battle of Sluys in 1340, he led forty ships on the English side in the
hectic chase after another Flemish pirate on the French side, Spoudevisch: pirate
against pirate under cover of war.
²⁴

Nobody thought such a man was a traitor; he
was just available.

Ordinary sailors also had skills which could be useful to
either side in a war between nations; so they could choose sides, sometimes freely,
sometimes under pressure. It helped that there was a whole seaman’s vocabulary
that worked in Dutch or French or English. The Dutch United Provinces in 1672 issued a
decree deploring the fact that ‘inhabitants of these Provinces doe dayly in great
numbers quitt their country to serve on foreign ships … to the great damage
and prejudice of this state, most of them leaving their wives and children to the charge
of the places where they lived’.
²⁵
When in 1667 the Dutch captured the
flagship of the British fleet, the
Royal Charles
, it was an English captain
sailing for the United Provinces who accepted the surrender while an English trumpeter
in his crew sounded out an English bawdy song called ‘Jumping Joan’ about a
girl who also liked surrendering.
²⁶

After the Battle of Portland in 1653, the
British took so many Scots and English prisoners of war off the Dutch ships that the
numbers became a scandal. In 1667 when the Dutch were planning the Battle of the Medway,
they had no difficulty recruiting pilots from the Thames and Medway to guide them;
treason was a much better prospect than being shackled and cramped in the stinking holes
where prisoners of war rotted away. What’s more the British had a very casual
attitude to paying actual wages to their men; they much preferred to hand out IOUs of
doubtful value. After the great Dutch victory at the Medway Pepys wrote in his diary
that ‘in the open streets of Wapping, and up and down, the wives have cried
publicly: “This comes of not paying our husbands; and now your work is
undone.”’ His office at the Admiralty needed extra guards, ‘for fear
of firing of the office’; and the town felt, he said, like the time when London
itself was on fire, ‘nobody knowing which way to turn themselves’.
‘The people that I speak with are in doubt how we shall do to secure our seamen
from running over to the Dutch.’
²⁷

Lives were still so fluid that nationality
could not keep a bureaucrat, a pirate, a sailor in his place; cross the sea, and you
could change your loyalty, your paymaster or your role. Such times were coming rapidly
to an end. There was a new enthusiasm for papers, and new difficulty getting them:
certificates of health, exit permits, passports,
visas and personal letters of recommendation in case all the
other papers failed. Without papers, anyone could be anything, on any side; so without
papers nobody moved. It took a certificate of health, in the plague years, to come
within miles of the city of Geneva.

It could also be tricky to get away from
Geneva, as Sir George Courthop found in the 1630s. He was ‘searched … in
relation to my bodily health before I was suffered to come into the town’ and when
he wanted to leave for Italy he found ‘the city of Geneva being so visited with
the Plague no other place or town will let us come into it, unless we lay in a Lazaretto
forty days to air ourselves without the town’. To get away, he persuaded a
secretary to the Duke of Savoy that he could add one or two Englishmen to his party and
give them the cover of the duke’s own papers. He slipped out of Geneva and met up
with the duke’s men three leagues away, and went on south. He had trouble again
when landing on Malta, where the ship’s captain had to go ashore ‘to show
his certificate that he came from a place that was not affected with the Plague’.
Despite the certificate the Governor of Malta sent men to go on board the ship to check
the health of the English passengers.
²⁸

Politics, too, made the paperwork for travel
essential. The royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe was lucky: he got himself out of
Commonwealth England just after Oliver Cromwell’s death with a passage specially
arranged to take an earl’s son to school in Paris. He was free at last to contact
the exiled Charles II and take up his cause, and he wanted his wife, Ann, and their
three children to join him, to find a school for his oldest son alongside the son of the
earl. Ann’s problem was that she had money to travel at a moment’s notice,
but she did not have the pass for Paris, and without that she could not even board a
ship at Dover. After Richard’s escape, she counted as a
‘malignant’.

She tried connections first, went to her
cousin at the High Court of Justice, but he was not helpful; he said her husband had got
out of England by a trick, and ‘upon no conditions’ should she try to join
him. She sat down for a moment in the next room ‘full sadly to consider what I
should do’ because she knew that ‘if I were denied a passage then, they
would ever after be more severe upon all
occasions’. She decided she would go down to Whitehall
to the office for passes and she would cheat. She went ‘in as plain a way and
speech as I could devise’; she left behind her maid ‘who was much a finer
gentlewoman than myself’. She went in to ask for her pass ‘with many
courtesies’.

The official asked: ‘What is your
husband and your name?’ and she told him; she was Ann Harrison – her first son was
called Harrison – and she was married to a young merchant. He raised no questions and he
said the fee would be a crown; she said ‘that is a great sum for me’ but
perhaps he could put a man, a maid and three children on the same pass. He did so, and
he added that any ‘malignant’ would give him five pounds for such a
paper.

In her lodgings, Ann took a pen to change
the pass, to write over Harrison letter by letter and turn it into Fanshawe. She was
sure ‘none could find out the change’ but she also knew she had to move at
once: hire a barge to take her to Gravesend, take a coach to Dover. Even so the
‘searchers’ caught up with her at the port and took the pass for their
records. ‘I little thought,’ one said, ‘they would give a pass to so
great a Malignant, especially in such a troublesome time as this.’ At nine at
night she was on board the packet boat, at eight the next morning she was ashore in
Calais and the news that the English authorities were looking for her became a laughing
matter.
²⁹

The English also worried, occasionally,
about infiltration, especially by Jesuits. The traveller Fynes Moryson came back to
England in Italian clothes in 1597 and was mistaken for a Roman priest, but the
innkeeper was able to persuade the constable that he was, in fact, an overdressed
Englishman. The French and Spanish were all too close on the other side of the Channel,
which made papers essential. The diarist John Evelyn found in 1641 that crossing south
from the United Provinces of Holland to the territory of Spaniards who considered the
northerners still rebels could be very complicated. Evelyn had the right pass for
leaving the north, issued at Rotterdam, but the commander of the border castle refused
to recognize it; indeed, ‘in a great fury, snatching the Paper out of my hand, he
flung it scornfully under a table’. A little money sorted things out. Evelyn,
meanwhile, had to hide his pass for entering Spanish territory, ‘it
being a matter of imprisonment, for that
the States were therein treated by the names of Rebels’.
³⁰

Travel was always conditional; it could be
blocked by war, opened by a bit of corruption. Plague helped change the conditions of
movement around Europe, just as it policed laws about where anyone could live or travel
inside England, what she or he was obliged to do for work and for how much pay. Such
laws were not just the answer to an emergency, they persisted through the reign of
Elizabeth I, into the first years of the nineteenth century. At frontiers, in the
fields, plague changed the way a person’s life was checked and trammelled, made it
subject to official scrutiny from how you looked after your children in Edinburgh to
what you were paid as a thatcher to whether you were worth helping when you were in
trouble.