The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (6 page)

Yet the Frisians lived well on these
difficult margins. They had a long record of being separate, and being independent.

They left their first traces on the east
shores of the Aelmere, a sealed freshwater lake that was later flooded from the sea and
became, for a time, the salt Zuiderzee and is now the freshwater IJsselmeer. They moved
as the other peoples of Northern Europe began to move: some pushed, some ambitious, some
displaced. They went east up to the River Weser, and west to the delta of the Rhine, the
Meuse and the Scheldt. As political boundaries shifted, as the Franks wanted a name for
their neighbours, Frisia grew. The islands and marshes of Zeeland, where the temple at
Domburg once stood, became the nearer part of Frisia.

As they were settling, the Germanic peoples
across the Rhine, famous for their seamanship, were also on the move. Many shipped out
to England: Angles, Saxons, Jutes. Some went overland into Gaul. Some of them chose to
stay in the new Frisian territory, which made them Frisian; before there were passports
and papers and notions of national identity, or even national history, you identified
with where you happened to be, not where your mother and father were born. Your identity
was lived in the present tense.

Since these Frisians spoke a language much
like Saxon they never had to lose touch with their countrymen and cousins now in
England. So these water people had connections in place over land and over the sea:
south to Gaul, east to Saxony, as well as north and west to Jutland and to England.

It took one other tidal move of human beings
to give the Frisians their living. Tribes who poured into Eastern Europe in the sixth
century blocked the old trading links between Scandinavia and Byzantium, the river
routes that tracked across what is now Russia. Any goods that Scandinavians wanted had
to come by some other route and from some other source, and so they came up from Frisia;
in the two centuries before the Viking times began around 800
CE
,
everything that we know reached Scandinavia came by
way of Frisian traders.
¹⁵
They had a monopoly without the need
to create it.

Along the coast the Frisians made slipways
so they could build their flat-bottomed boats, the kind that moved easily in the shallow
waters between the dunes and the coast. These boats could be beached on any stretch of
sand and their bows and stern came up sharply so the incoming tide could get underneath
to float them. Since the easiest trade routes were over water, the beaches were the
obvious places for markets. The markets led to year-round settlements, and those
settlements became quick, small and independent towns: ‘mushroom’ towns.

Inland towns depended on royal favour, or a
local lord who required taxes, or on the presence of a church or a monastery; these
economies were about supporting their masters. Monasteries were factories and farms and
workshops, turning out all kinds of goods: shoes for holy feet, saddles for holy riders,
swords and shields when needed, leather and cloth and gold. They had builders,
blacksmiths, glass-makers; but all this was so the monastery itself could be
self-sufficient. They did not make to sell or trade; and when they took goods from the
towns around them, they took them as tribute, not as business.
¹⁶

On the coast, individuals did business for
themselves. Frisians opened up the trade routes that had been dormant since Rome fell,
and added some: they sold pots, wine, human slaves. They shipped and sold whatever
people wanted. The name of Frisian came to mean merchant, overseas trader, the perfect
example of the long-distance seaman. The sea was truly ‘the Frisian
sea’.

The water people chose their place in the
world. It had once been possible to build directly on the surface of their salt marshes,
but that was five hundred years before Pliny passed by. When the sea rose again and
broke into the land, human beings were faced with a choice. The obvious tactic was to
run away, which is what happened almost everywhere else; water people could move like so
many other peoples who were moving across the face of Europe. Instead, the Frisians
chose to stay and keep their place on the edge of things.

For that, they had to build their own land. They heaped up
hillocks on the marshes, built on them, and the hillocks became permanent settlements
all the year round: the
terpen
. They owned the land outright as peasants never
could in the feudal systems around them, and they were settled and at home; you can tell
because houses were rebuilt again and again, twice or more in a century, but always on
exactly the same site.
¹⁷
They also had to co-operate, house
to house,
terp
to
terp
, if only because finding sweet water was never
easy, not even when wells replaced the old clay-lined reservoirs for collecting
rainwater; the supply of water to drink depended on the discipline of the community.
¹⁸
Co-operation, not always within the law, was a Frisian habit.

As the farms on
terpen
disposed of
their rubbish, the
terpen
grew taller. Each hillock started as a single farm,
but as they expanded they merged one into another to form villages on higher ground:
communities of houses built round an open space at the top of the
terp
, the
back doors for the cattle and sheep to wander out onto the salt pastures, the front
doors facing each other across the common space.

Anyone who lived there had to be a boatman,
or they were trapped; they were peasants raising beasts because the salt land would not
support most grains. Their situation gave them the advantage over inland farmers who
ploughed and sowed and tended and reaped and were generally busy all year round. As
cattlemen and sheep herders they weren’t tied to the land day by day, always
working to make the next crop happen. Ram and ewe, bull and cow, would do that for them.
They were left with the luxury of time.

Their kind of farming had other advantages.
The rest of Europe around them lived on cereals, on bread and beer and gruel, and a pot
kept permanently bubbling on the fire with anything sweet or savoury or fleshy that
would help the gruel down. A poor harvest meant starvation, and crop yields were low at
the best of times, just enough to keep people alive. The Frisians were rich by
comparison. They had grazing for their animals, mostly cattle; so they had milk and meat
as well as fish and game, a diet that was nourishing twelve months a year. For a while,
the marshes that Pliny dismissed were more densely populated than anywhere else in
Western Europe except for the Seine around Paris and the Rhine around Cologne.
¹⁹

The marshes weren’t barren, of course. There were
sedges and rushes, and enough grass to make haystacks; obstinate pagans went out to cut
hay on a fine, still Sunday when the saintly Anskar was preaching and missioning, and
saw their disrespectful work go up in spontaneous fire as punishment.
²⁰
The hides from
their cattle became leather and, conveniently, sea lavender grew on the marsh, its root
used for tanning. The salt peat made sod for the walls of houses. There was common
grasswrack, the sea grass whose ashes produce a salt to preserve meat and whose stems,
up to a metre and a half long, had a dozen uses: stuffing mattresses, making the seats
for chairs, thatching houses, lining ditches, even as a kind of woven fence that would
keep back the drifting sands. It made excellent litter for the animals in the byre and,
dug into the ground of the
terpen
afterwards, it fertilized the gardens.
Turnips grew there alongside broad beans and oilseed rape, barley and a few oats.
²¹

The people on the
terpen
couldn’t produce everything they wanted, not even everything they needed. They
couldn’t make wine and they couldn’t produce much grain, but they wanted
both; they were prepared to ship out down the rivers to Alsace for wine and as far as
Strasbourg for grain. They also needed timber for the roof frames of their sod houses.
So they had to do business to get necessities: to send out anything they could produce
from animals – parchment and bone, leather and wool, cloth woven from the wool – in
order to buy what they couldn’t grow. They already knew all about adding value to
their basic products, starting a kind of Frisian brand; one farm close to modern
Wilhelmshaven kept two different breeds of sheep for two different kinds of wool so as
to make all kinds of fine cloth.
²²

The
terpen
must have worked a
little like islands, holding people’s fierce local loyalties. They seem isolated
but they are often full of sailors who have been away to everywhere. Frisians became
famous for travelling, and for their women who waited behind and their constancy. There
is a ninth-century poem in
The Exeter Book
that turns Frisian marriage on the
terpen
into a moral example, and perhaps a report of a loving ritual.
‘He’s so very welcome, so dear to his Frisian wife when his boat is
back,’ the poem says. ‘He’s the one who provides for her, and she
welcomes him, washes his clothes dirtied by
the sea and gives him clean ones. She gives him on dry ground
all that his love could wish: the wife will be faithful to her husband.’

The poet’s realistic; he knows some
women are constant, and some want novelty, the available stranger when the husband is
away; indeed the laws of Frisia that Charlemagne codified suggest a tolerance for brisk
infanticide to dispose of the evidence of indiscretion.
²³
But he remembers the
sailor, too. ‘He’s at sea a long time, always thinking of the one he loves,
patiently waiting out the journey he can’t hurry. When his luck turns again he
comes back home – unless he is sick, or the sea holds him back or the ocean has him in
its power.’
²⁴

The sea could kill, and yet it was the easy
route: the connection, not the barrier. The network of Roman roads survived, but they
were broken and rutted and hard work for a loaded waggon in many months of the year. The
Roman system of posthouses was in place so you could change horses on a long ride, but
it was a cumbersome business compared with going by sea or river; and it was slower, and
often less safe than the water. It is true there were pirates, but the reason pirates
went on working the North Sea from Roman times to the seventeenth century was that they
knew civilians were always willing to risk being raided for the ease of a sea crossing.
There were also storms, but there were prayers and saints to calm them: the lives of
saints tell so many stories of miracles at sea that they tend to prove the general
terror of foul weather. Believers clung to the Church as sailors cling to a ship, and
ships came to be signs of faith.

Even saints knew that no voyage was ever
quite certain. Willibrord was a missionary, the first Bishop of Utrecht, and he had
thirty convert boys to ship down from Denmark to Frisia. He made sure to baptize them
all before setting out, because of the ‘dangers of such a long sailing and the
attacks of the ferocious natives of those parts’ and the awful possibility that
they might drown and be eternally damned despite all his good work.
²⁵
The prefect Grippo,
returning from a diplomatic mission to some kings in England, faced the violence of the
storm and learned it was best to let the ship drift until there was calm. He suffered a
night of furious wind and crashing
waves,
shipping water, and he had to wait for the sun to rise before he could see the
old-fashioned lighthouse up ahead, probably the Roman tower at Boulogne that Charlemagne
had rebuilt. Only then did he hoist again the sail that must have been lowered hours
before.
²⁶

All this was a gloriously alarming muddle of
the practical and the fearful. On one hand fresh water was supposed to be Godly and
good, renewing and refreshing life itself, while salt water was a desert, a cliff off
which ships could fall; it was an abyss where Leviathan lived with other terrible
creatures, ‘a king over all the children of pride’, according to the Book of
Job, ‘made without fear’ and able to make ‘the deep boil like a
pot’, with terrible teeth, breath to kindle coals and the power to lay a trail of
phosphorescent light behind him on the water.
²⁷
On the other hand, you could always
hunt the smaller terrible creatures and eat them; St Bridget of Kildare fed her guests
fresh seal, the same St Cuthbert who was famously kind to ducks sometimes existed on the
flesh of beached dolphins, and St Columba prophesied the coming of a gigantic whale off
the island of Iona but said God would protect his fellow monks from its terrible teeth.
He did nothing to save the whale.
²⁸

For Christians, as you can see in the vivid
pages of some Psalters designed on Frisian territory, the land was almost Heaven and the
sea was Hell, full of beasts and tortures and also temptations to sin; the coastline was
a kind of battleground between the two, and inland was where good people could get on
with their industrious and virtuous lives.
²⁹
Sea was where holy men might go and
put away the rudder and trust to God, knowing they were at risk. The sea, after all, was
where pagan heroes went, where unfamiliar and unholy things abounded. But it was also
the Frisians’ workplace, and they saw no reason to rush conversion to Christian
attitudes. They were used to working together on their boats so they held to the old
view that shipping out implied all sorts of virtues: loyalty, trust and competence.

They used anchors on their boats, as the
Romans did, with heavy chains to pull them up and let them down in shallow water or on
the sands. Once the anchor was raised, their flat-bottomed boats might still be settled
in the sand, so they carried a gaff in the shape of a metal
V at the end of a wooden pole to push themselves clear.
³⁰
The
main power was muscle power, rowers sitting on sea chests, which was the kind of power a
captain could control; but there were also sails to help out the oarsmen, and since
nobody could yet tack into a headwind, each journey had to wait for the right wind to
blow the ship forwards. Boniface shipped out from England on his mission to convert the
Frisians in 716, clambered up the side of a quick ship with the sailors bustling about
and had to wait for the great sail to be puffed out with the right winds;
³¹
or so
Willibald says in his life of the saint. Willibald refers to the sail as
‘
carbasa
’ in the Latin, which more usually is a word for
linens, even though we know most sails were sewn from lengths of woven wool. When
Boniface’s body was shipped over the Aelmere on a more ordinary ship with
‘swelling sails’, the word used this time was ‘
vela
’,
the more common word.
³²
Did fast ships need a different kind
of sail?