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Peoples of the North Sea
                        June 2022
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My late younger brother Jim sent me a book from the UK world for Christmas 2021: The Edge of The World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are, by Michael Pye, Penguin Books, 2015. It gives a wealth of intriguing information about the people and the seas around England and Northern Europe from Roman times.

 

Introduction lets readers know the book looks at peoples in the north and their stories, mainly 600 – 1550 AD. There are group stories and individual stories. There are the beginnings of seaside visits by gentry in the 18th century, in particular to Scarborough. The sea was medicinal. One drank several quarts of sea water per day and bathed in it from early beach shelters. Across on the Belgium/ Holland shore, during the 18th century, the beach revealed its own story. After storms near the bathing spots at Domburg, signs of a pre-Christian Roman temple emerged where an island had been in earlier times. After one storm, huge limestones appeared; after another, a headless goddess statue. Once coffins appeared. When archeologists got involved, there was evidence of a Roman and a subsequent Viking settlement. The post-Roman era Frisians of marshy coastlands near the Belgium/Holland border traded up rivers there. The later Vikings raided monastery islands and more. They sailed into fearsome northern zones, settled Iceland, then Greenland, and discovered ‘Vineland’ in North America. The story of the Saxons in England comes with the stories of monasteries, the monk Bede, manuscripts and books.

 

Chapter 1, The Invention of Money, gives the story of the Frisians of the marshy shores. They reintroduced coin money in trading, using silver and their own minting. They dominated northern sea lanes from 500 to about 1000 AD. They lived in those marshes - lands accessible only by boat. They heaped mounds on the marsh and built homes on them. The homes were vulnerable to storms and changes in shore lines and the marsh. They raised cows, sheep and goats in the marsh, but had to trade for grain and other needs. To travel, they used flat bottomed boats that could be pulled up on a beach. They were traders who travelled to Ipswich, Jutland and even to Norway. The sea was known as the Frisian Sea. Initially pagan, the Frisians became reluctant Christians in the empire of Charlemagne.

 

The Frisians established a capital, Dorestad, on the Rhine. At the height of their importance, this served as a point for the empire to collect customs as well as a centre for their trading both up the Rhine and out to the sea. There were small Frisian communities at ports around the sea area including one at York and one at Oslo.

They were not unchallenged. The Franks from the south wanted their land and took over Domburg and Dorestad. Then Vikings came raiding in 837 AD and found Frankish soldiers in Domburg to kill, women to enslave, and goods to steal. The Vikings went on up the Rhine to Dorestad which they took but with heavy losses because Frisians were fierce fighters when their business was being stolen. Later, under a Danish leader, the Frisians would sometimes travel with the Vikings. Finally, the imperial army of Charlemagne chased the Frisians out of their woods and trade runs and faced them down among the ditches and moats near today’s Rotterdam. There the Frisians had their last great victory in 1018 AD. However, it was pyrrhic. By then their sea belonged to others.

 

Chapter 2, The Book Trade, tells the story of Bede who at age 7 was taken to the Jarrow Monastery in Northumbria, linked to Rome. In 686 AD he survived the year’s plague. Bede knew the world by the manuscripts at Jarrow. Bede read, annotated, extracted, added explanations and corrected translations. He published works collected at Jarrow for other houses that did not have a big library. He knew about writing: the black ink from oak galls, the crushed shells, the gold and silver leaf and the goose quill pen on vellum. He played a role in the gift Bible for the pope, Codex Ammianus. The decoration reveals connections to Coptic art and insights into Jewish customs. Bede knew what went on in the world. The monasteries were markets and hubs for trade in salt, and they were connected to great villages and estates.

 

Bede also wrote De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) about nature. He looked and he asked questions. He wrote an account of how Anglo-Saxons came to Briton. His commentaries on Scripture, maths and astronomy were in demand. He measured tides against the phases of the moon and he corresponded with monks in other places about tides. His work on the calendar was important for establishing the date for Easter each year, reconciling Jewish and Roman calendars and then reconciling the Irish Easter with that of Rome. Before Bede, dates were reported as a year in the reign of an emperor or monarch. Bede was first to use “AD” to describe years into the future.

 

Bede found in books that the sun and moon came together every 19 Roman years and he published that. He observed tides and moonrise and refined Irish work, noting the rising of the moon determined the rising of the tides – as if the moon were tugging the tides. He knew that the tide began its rise in one place as it began its ebb in another. He had to have known the earth was round. His work remained popular centuries after his death – it was published in Basel in 1529 AD!

 

Writing and reading existed in Ireland before missionaries. Ireland was not part of the Roman Empire, but the Irish traded with the Empire. The Irish needed to see the words as well as to hear them read, and this led to the invention of punctuation! Books could be written quickly and clearly. The Irish trained the Anglo-Saxons; then missionaries took the method to Germanic lands.

 

At the time, books held a special place as gifts in exchanges between notables. Also books moved around as texts to be copied by church leaders, monks and scribes. There was an interest in books that were the legacy from Rome – for example Virgil for poetry. These were in Monastery libraries, but not advertised. Laymen owned books about laws, charters, God, farming, war, and often books about history. In their wills books were left to their children. Books could be heirlooms, assets, and be stolen by pirates. Laymen could hire scribes to copy one or they could copy one themselves! Books required a lot of things – the inks, the vellum and the craft. Beyond the decoration, the content came to matter.  Books were worth burning as the monk Gottschalk found out in Picardy. In 849 the synod of clergy accused him of heresy for his essentially Calvinist ideas. He was ordered to keep silent and his books were burned. “Nothing about a book was safe any more.”

 

Chapter 3, Making Enemies, is the story of the Vikings from 700 AD. They came south to find a regular connection with people who wanted skins, fur, walrus ivory and luxuries from the eastern Baltic and the rivers of Russia. They knew where there were riches near the coast. They were mercenaries for Byzantium, traders of Kiev, and capable of putting to shore on the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Spain, and North America. Their boats were big and powerful, with many oarsmen plus large sails that could tack into the wind. They used a sun compass that worked over water in the long northern days of summer. They raided, plundered and enslaved. They were an enemy to many. Some Vikings were linked to Denmark and the Danes were unsettled by the northern spread of the Frankish empire that took Frisia in 734.

 

The finding near Stockholm of a Coptic bronze ladle from Egypt and a Buddha reminds one of early travel. Around 750, Scandinavians began moving through the river systems of what is now Russia, using armed guards to prevent them from becoming prey in unpopulated areas and amid great poverty. The lure was silver coins travelling north from the Arab Caliphates. Opening a trade route for furs, amber and slaves to bring back silver was valuable. Also they could sell their services as mercenaries in Byzantium or beyond. Vikings, culturally willing to be unsettled, did this.

 

King Alfred in southern England in the 9th century spoke with the Viking Ohthere about his travels. He lived on the coast of Halogaland by the Western Sea. He had cattle, sheep, pigs and reindeer, and he could fish cod in winter. He knew Vikings had settled Iceland and he wanted to go north to see how far the land extended and so he sailed to the furthest zone for whale hunts and then 3 days further. The land turned west, and he followed it when the wind turned. At the edge of the White Sea, he waited for the wind and then sailed south. There were no settlements. When he came to a river mouth, the land at the other side was settled. He knew the settlers were not friendly, so he turned back. On his way he had circumnavigated Iceland. The Vikings moved for profit, as an occupation, and to escape kings (if lords) or lords (if commoners). Escaping mattered because human beings were merchandise to be ransomed or used for service, or sold on a huge scale. The Arab world was desperate for people to work and they went to slave markets like Venice. Merchants in Charlemagne’s empire traded, and the Vikings wanted their share of trade. They had a route from the Baltic past Novgorod to western Russia, then south to the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea and beyond. There is a report on the lifestyle of Viking men holding feasts with liquor and public sex with their slaves. Their sick were separated. Their dead were put in a boat that was then burned, together with a raped and butchered volunteer from the slaves of the dead owner.

 

In 795 a royal official heard 3 ships were in the harbour at Portland in the English Channel. He rode to tell them they were to announce themselves in the town as required. He was slain on the spot. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle goes on to say these were the first ships of Danish men on the land of the English. Three years later some Vikings found the monastery of Lindisfarne, an island off Northumbria, and devastated the place with looting and slaughter. The next year Offa, the King of Mercia, gave tax benefits to churches and grants of land with obligations to fight the seafaring heathen. It was a state of war.

 

The Orkney Viking fleet went through the Hebrides and there was devastation on all the islands. However, when the Vikings entered the Tyne estuary and attacked the monastery at Jarrow, the monks were ready. The Viking leaders were killed, the crews fled on the ships but were forced ashore at Tynemouth and slaughtered. The church saw the Vikings as a proper enemy. Yet Charlemagne’s armies also had to be supported out of whatever they could steal and whatever tribute they could demand. Charlemagne’s troops ravaged the land they crossed, in order to feed themselves! Like the Vikings - they looted. The Vikings were just other players of the same game. Their raids began as Charlemagne had broken the Saxons in order to control the Rhine. By 800 Charlemagne had done well. That Christmas he went to Rome where, to his supposed surprise, the Pope crowned him Emperor of the Romans. The new Emperor then attacked with a new law he established – pagan ways meant death.

 

Creative missionaries to the Saxons rewrote the gospel stories in Saxon and in terms relevant to their northern context, The Gospel according to Heliand. The poem is not for ordinary people - Mary and Joseph become nobles and baby Jesus has jewels. Perhaps this approach paved a way towards war with chivalry and rules as the author hints! But none of this affected the Vikings who struck where they wanted and took what they wanted.

 

Charlemagne ordered ships in 802, 808 and 810 and had fleets in all navigable rivers. Just as Charlemagne was considering a serious expedition against the Danish King, a fleet of 200 Norse ships wrecked the islands off the coast of Frisia, went ashore, fought the Frisians and took 100 pounds of silver as tribute. Later that year Charlemagne made peace with Danish King Hemming. “The Christians wailed” – they lived with the dangers. The shrine and abbey at Iona off Scotland were raided in 795, 802, 806 and 807, after which the monks were relocated to the relative inland safety of Kells in Ireland.  Yet the bright new towns being attacked were serving an old kind of power, with their churches, monasteries, convents and feudal powers. Amid their wrecking and burning, the Vikings were accidentally bringing into being a new kind of town, the merchant town.

 

Chapter 4, Settling, centres on Ireland where Vikings and Irish mixed. The Viking attacks on Ireland and its settlements were frequent in the last 15 years of the 8th century when Iona was being attacked repeatedly. St Patrick’s Island was burned, the Innismurray monastery went up in flames. After a pause, Howth was plundered in 821. Then the Monastery at Clonmore was burned to the ground. By 837 there were 60 ships on the Boyne and on the Liffey from the Norse bases in Scotland. Each fleet carried at least 1500 men. They battled through the kingdoms of east coast Ireland. It’s not clear whether they wanted plunder, territory or both. Irish provincial kings noticed Vikings were turning into neighbours. Nonetheless, the Irish came together to fight a common enemy and had some success, providing a foundational narrative for Ireland! In 849 a fleet of 140 ships of the King of the Foreigners arrived. The Irish found the foreigners came in two varieties. They had known those from Norway. Now fleets came from the settled Danish king out of bases in England and Scotland. There was a period of struggle for who would rule, but by 853 the Norwegians prevailed and controlled Dublin.

 

Goods began to move. Irish metalwork went north and the walrus ivory, amber and furs came south. The Irish sometimes had to pay tribute, but the Vikings gave hostages. And marrying a Viking became thinkable among nobles. Coexistence had begun. Viking plundering continued and they were accused of being anti-Christian. But the Irish King Cashel, scribe and anchorite, also felt free to burn a monastery in 822. These routine attacks were in a Christian society in which Vikings were beginning to convert.

 

Monasteries were associated with towns, forts, and strongrooms rather than with holiness. Nonetheless communities could gather around them. The southern part of the settlement at Armagh was a holy community. There was a relic, 2 churches, clergy, monks, nuns and lay people. It included the sick, disabled, and children unwanted by their families. Some such communities had remarkable engineers. The monastery at Clonmacnoise in the centre of Ireland built kilometers of road through bog with a bridge 160 meters long and 5 meters wide over the River Shannon. There was room for carts and animals as well as walkers and riders. They built millponds that filled at high tide, whose waters rushed back through stone channels to turn a water wheel that worked a millstone above. The first such mill was built there around 620. The monastic role of giving sanctuary made them vulnerable to pursuers who equally torched a wooden home or a wooden church. In dangerous times monasteries were seen as a safe place for people to take their wealth – even their cattle. Sadly, the imagined safety was not there.

 

The Vikings were settling, but they feuded. Some started settlements and had flocks worth stealing, and so they were stolen. Dublin was at the centre and the king of Dublin claimed to be overlord of all the new settlements and trading depots and in time head of all Vikings in the British Isles. Dublin was only a set of waterfront rows of houses and trading depots but it was beginning to look different from other towns. It was a base for trade. Craftsmen and merchants were moving in. Settled Dublin was a turntable for Viking trade with goods coming in and going out. Cattle became a source of food and not a way to store wealth. Silver coins now stored wealth. With Dublin secure in the middle of the ninth century, the Vikings started settlements in Scotland. The offshore islands offered them much land with timber for ships and sheep for wool to export. Women, men and children landed and stayed.

 

In Ireland it became harder to tell the Irish and Vikings apart. Two kings had suspicious Norse names. Yet the Vikings were never secure – their empire was always elsewhere or on the seas and their towns looked outward. In 866 their army broke into England and took Eoforwick, a tiny town that was the religious centre of Northumbria. It had a school, an archbishop and a port. When the Vikings left, it was Jorvik, now York. In less than a century it had grown into a city where hot metal industries were thriving. There were craftsmen, saddlers, shoemakers, jewellers. The houses on open spaces were organized into streets and plots. The Vikings needed Jorvik as a military base, but the Anglo Saxon Chronical 876 reported they were ploughing and providing for themselves. The town offered a wide range of foodstuffs and crafts from Scotland but it also offered exotic items from the East via Denmark and the Viking river links to Byzantium. There was a point on the river near Jorvik marked for Dublin ships. Dublin remained the closest thing to a Viking capital. Yet the Irish wanted Ireland back. After the battle of Limerick 968 it was the Irish who took away slaves; then Dublin was attacked and raided by the Irish. The Viking king in Ireland fought the Irish at the battle of Tara 980 and lost. That ended Viking power in Ireland but the Vikings remained in every other way.

 

The Vikings had changed reality all around the North Sea and broken the limits of the usual world with their pirate raids - sometimes as far as the Chinese empire on the Black Sea. They connected Norway with the Russian badlands and Constantinople, where they became Varangians, the guards who did odd jobs for the emperor. They were riotous drinkers - eliciting poems. Some had amazing stories - like Harald Hardrada, previously self-exiled, who forced his boat over the chains in the harbour of Byzantium to return to take the Norwegian throne. He was considered a good king. However, in 1066 he fought the Anglo Saxons at Stamford Bridge for his claim to the English crown and lost. The winner of that battle marched on and lost his next battle to William the Conqueror at Hastings. The changes were happening during the warm years when the northern seas were open and the northern lands looked green before ice returned. The Vikings had settled empty islands like Iceland and the Faroes. Societies slowly evolved, written language arrived, and then first the Norwegian King followed by the Danish King ruled and taxing arrived in Iceland. Some Vikings had ventured much farther.

 

During those warm years, Erik the Red left Norway for Iceland on account of a murder, then left Iceland for lands beyond for more murder. He found uninhabited land with pasture for sheep and maybe cattle, and rich fishing - Greenland. It would be two centuries before the Inuit got there. He thrived – says the Saga of the Greenlanders. They didn’t intend to go farther, but did by accident. Erik’s son Leif got blown off course from Norway to Greenland and found himself travelling along an unknown shore. Curiosity called. Three ships explored and landed on a flat shore. Then sailed on south for three days and stopped at an inlet on an island with fish, deer, butternuts and wild rye. Exploring on foot, they found grapes. They called it Vineland – they had reached America.

 

On Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows, close to the sea, they established a camp for about 100 people. It was a foothold and on the broad entrance to the St Lawrence. Sailing to the south brought the shores with grapes and rye. The style of the halls dates the camp as 11th century – as do the sagas. The scale of the settlement presupposes a decision to open the new world. But the Vikings were exploring, not settling. Usually that meant 3 years. The site says no more than ten. They left in an orderly manner. It seems that relating to the local people was a turning point. The local people were curious, numerous, wanted trade, and were in the area with the grapes, nuts and rye. But the sagas report a violent battle. It seems this was the turning point. The sagas add an additional story that seems to relate to the internal tensions between the groups which travelled on each of the 3 ships  and between those accompanied by wives and those not.

 

The Viking world was closing. In 12th century Orkney, Sven Asleifarson had 80 followers spending winter in his huge hall who needed meat, drink and money. So he would go raiding after the spring sowing. He made a last raid to Ireland. His men walked easily into Dublin where he made his demands and went to wait. But the Dubliners were not about to give up what they had built. They regarded Sven and his crew like animals and dug pits and covered them with straw, as they captured animals. Then they waited to see if they would fall in. They did. Sven was last to die.

 

Chapter 5 is Fashion. Three days after a fire burned and ruined the wooden city of Bergen and a storm was tearing off roofs, someone was on a ship looking for fashionable clothes. The Vikings also had dandies. The 13th century Saga of Olaf the Gentle tells how rich men had come about 100 years earlier when Bergen was newly formed. New fashions in dress made their appearance: high shoes embroidered with white silk; and long draped robes. These were impractical for sailors and traders! Also, new and pretentious manners were introduced, like King Olaf’s having cupbearers and candle bearers for his guests. The frequent burning of wooden Bergen left a treasure trove for archeologists including many ill-suited shoes covered in white silk. Such expensive fashion was broadly spread and not just for a few nobles. Silk is part of a world set in motion by trade and so is fashion itself. It is not about a uniform like a monk’s habit. It’s about reinventing yourself and your status. It didn’t come from the courts, but from men brawling in mud in places like Grimsby, England.

 

Fashion left traces on Greenland even as the ice began to creep again over the green meadows. The settlers used everything from their animals including making cloth, and they could cut stylish clothes. Everyone had a hood. It was a necessity like the hare fur lining attached to clothes. Some clothing was imported but some was exported. When the settlers had been frozen out, Jon the Greenlander sailed the last ship along that coast. Once, blown off course into a fjord, he found a body floating in one of the deserted former colonies. From this finale to Europeans’ farthest reach, Jon noticed and reported “a well-sewn hood”. Fashion and well-made current clothes were not just in Paris, they were in Bergen and Greenland.

 

Status could be read in clothes. In wills in 863 two aristocrats left clothing to their children - woven and decorated with gold. They were passing on a rank. The simple clothing of monks held enormous significance for laypeople, but it was not always as appealing to the Monks – as Bede reports about Lindisfarne, where monks had to be encouraged to wear plain wool. In the nineth century monks and nuns had to be ordered to wear habits to mass. They were told not to wear anything split, tight, short, pleated or with the new-fangled buttons. Nobles and royal courts wore liveries to know who was who and their loyalties. Students and professors at Paris University wore distinctive clothes. The fur you wore became a sign of standing – ermine for the princely, down to lambskin for the children’s servants. A professional wore a long robe, but nobles could flaunt their buttocks with a short doublet. Ordinary people weren’t supposed to change styles. People might open the wrong wardrobe and put on a different status! In a time when money, rank and status were changing the easy changes of fashion were disturbing. The old manors were going, the nobles’ lands were falling in value, and the cities were rising. In the 13th and 14th centuries the law tried to regulate who could wear what. Meanwhile the technology of clothes allowed all sorts of choice. Cutting cloth for fitted clothing went back in London to the 13th century. The laws kept coming but the “wrong” people had the cash and they looked better than they were supposed to!

 

Fashion became a talking point and a moral issue. Up to the 15th century woman were tailored to show high round firm breasts, ample haunches, tiny feet and a prominent belly that masked pregnancy. Those with ample breasts bound them. Blond hair was favoured so of course colouring developed. St Birgitta of Sweden said the outrageous clothes had caused the plague. Multi-coloured cloth and stripes came to stand for evil – in a Danish church Cain wore multicoloured socks. In the 1390s Christine de Pizan complained the ever-changing styles for men and women would ruin people trying to keep up. Dress was politics, showing changes and tensions in society; it was moral, revealing pride, greed and waste. Not surprisingly, the merchant drapers were the richest people in town. And fashion traded. There were Milan caps or French glasses, and London did well making expensive worsted stockings that were in demand.

 

In the 16th century printed books about fashion arrived full of pictures of people in other times and places, fostering a desire to be a someone – or to be a someone else. The books tell how people lived. And extensive records of moralising were produced.

 

Chapter 6, Writing the Law, tells of the tests supposed to prove guilt or innocence. For example, the man who swears he did not commit a crime is lowered into holy water. If he sinks he is innocent. If he floats, guilty. Like the later court trials, the ordeal is full of ritual. But this trial is up to God to show what he alone knows: whether the man tells the truth. Up to the start of the 13th century this made sense. It was a world where writing was only just starting to be important. Questions of guilt had to be simple and proof immediate and dramatic. This is far from the universal law of the Roman Empire that required an author and an authority like a king or church to draft one law for everybody,   and books on how to apply it. Re-discovered Roman law was a mystery. For trial by ordeal only the priest was around. Lawyers’ law was about judging evidence. Hence for trial by ordeal, the biblical text that was read out was: judge not that ye be not judged.

 

Roman law was discovered by the Roman church in Wales and Ireland. Wales and Ireland had been outside the Roman Empire. Monasteries at Cork, Cloyne and Slane had something like law schools that were not limited to monks and priests. There are still seventy-seven legal texts surviving from Ireland 7th – 11th century. There are traces of legal scholarship and devotion to writing things down. And lawyers were taken seriously – the grandest advocates were treated like high nobility. The law was about words on a page in an age when the ability to write was a privilege. It was about formal documents, witnesses and questions that were listed.

 

The power of writing is as old as the runes, the early alphabet of the North Sea dating from 1 AD (the Common Era). They are marks easy to carve that are based on the Roman and imperial writing, useful but extraordinary because of the magic they could carry. Carved in wood or stone and stained reddish, they had to be interpreted with care. To know runes well was a matter of pride. They could be great and powerful symbols – a curse, a slander, or a label of who built a bridge. Runes cut in stone could memorialise the dead or honour someone, so they can say something about a life – such as reporting a Viking expedition left or someone was a mercenary in Byzantium or someone’s ship went down. Runes could be set along a public road. Runesticks could show who owned which sack of goods in a warehouse. Sometimes they could be like washroom walls, a sort of graffiti!

 

The ordeal tests and their theatre survived the arrival of the law, and the battle between law and the local customs went on for centuries. The ordeal tests were not seen as torture, but the higher the rank the lower the suffering. Nobility preferred duels where God made the better man win. The church could not approve. Ordeals were local and variable and the church wanted universal and written laws. Towards the end of the 11th century there were the beginnings of legal textbooks for church, for canonical law and for lay courts. Decretum was produced by Gratian, a Bolognese teacher. It was a collection of documents like papal statements that might affect a decision. Yet local custom played a role. The emperor had no incentive to assist the spread of what began as church law. His power depended on people who valued customs.

 

In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council condemned duelling and in 1222 Pope Honorius III banned ordeals from secular law, giving the law an advantage. A key factor was the changing perception of the priest into a man apart from secular issues. The absence of the priest ordeal undermined the ritual. Stripped of its holiness and link to the church the logic of the test as a ruling by God left.

 

By 1230 a profession for lawyers had formed, with training in the new universities – Oxford or Paris. Qualification took 3 years of serious study. There was an issue of social status, but the professional notion was powerful, depending on the university teachers who banded together and the degree. Judges would only hear the qualified. That gave a class of lawyer licensed to talk in courts, leading to the idea of a professional class and a middle class between knight and peasant.

 

The law and lawyers were needed. A merchant class was developing, and nobles were not the only people with money. Cities were growing with former peasants now freemen and with foreigners from trading. Owning land was an issue for the newly rich, but land had hardly ever been sold. Family quarrels were about which heirs inherited land or what was on land. The law was also needed for risky businesses like monasteries in Yorkshire. They were raising sheep for mutton and wool but got involved in business. It began with the monasteries’ lending or advancing money to farmers or other landowners. Then bishops and royals left money with them. The monasteries ended up in banking: providing strongrooms for kings, merchants and popes, and sources of credit for farmers. If things went wrong it could lead to disaster. Without resources, ideas or cash the monks made mistakes and things crashed. Eighteen monasteries including Fountains Abbey itself were mortgaged and foreclosed at one time or another.

 

Legal issues could also extend to doctors, innkeepers, and their servants. All over Europe innkeepers and their servants had responsibility to ensure that no loss should befall a lodger from any default of theirs. And the law required things in writing. The scale of overseas trade from the 11th century brought complications, but legislation did not arrive until the 13th century long after boats began sailing and sinking. There were sailing galleys for maximum goods – no rowers now. Professional merchant seafarers needed to make deals before they left, with lists of goods and owners, and with a crude insurance where shipmasters put some money in the hands of owners in case the goods did not reach the destination.

 

By mid-13th century, partnerships were the basis for the big trading companies in Italy, whose shares could be bought and sold with responsibility for loss and profit, sale and delivery shared among people. The world felt the need to manage all this. Lawyers made things run, including royal courts and growing towns - now more important than feudal territory. Writing it all down was crucial.

 

The best proof of the importance of writing is perhaps forgeries! Forgery was an ecclesiastical habit for centuries. In 840 St Anskar forged documents whereby Charlemagne gave permission for a Diocese of Hamburg/ Bremen combined. A ninth century wave of enthusiasm in French monasteries wrote decrees and orders of popes and councils. Two centuries later several English monasteries forged documents giving them title to lands. Cambridge university forged documents making it free of interference by archbishops and church officials on down – with letters from the 7th century. (Cambridge started in the 13th!) The bishops did leave the university alone!

 

When the ordeal was made un-Godly, the church was left with crimes to resolve and the pope insisted that crimes not go unpunished. A new procedure was prosecution for the public good. The accuser became a witness who swore to tell the truth, not to swear his innocence. The judge had to reason a way to a verdict, testing the evidence. The campaign for a common law had always been against the power of local customs. Rulers put in place a bureaucracy of written records and general rules as the pope did for the church. There was some bluffing – like putting reference to laws and customs of citizens into a city charter, then dropping customs but allowing citizens to propose changes from time to time. Then laws were made for criminal affairs like taking people to court to get the money if they had promised surety but failed to pay up.  Then this was made to apply to all transactions – meaning the law applied to private deals and business where custom had reigned. After a century or two, laws became customs and could be written down as such alongside the law of Rome.

 

When merchants wanted to resolve a business quarrel or clerics wanted to prove title and income, they wanted results more quickly than courts could act. Then the ancient system of arbitration could be used. This mattered when foreigners were involved around trade fairs and their ships could be freed to leave. Local courts like Bruges could speed up to give a decision in three days. But for merchants in town arbitration was best because paper matters less than talk. Justice was private because arbitration relies on both sides agreeing to the outcome with no prosecutor and no idea of public good. Meanwhile the law became more nuanced – for example in order to deal with murder committed by someone who was “mad” and tests for evidence of mental condition.

 

At one time the ordeal had settled innocence or guilt. Now it was a law that was no longer just about who did what. It was about why, in what state of mind and with what intent and how the person acted before and after and during.

 

Chapter 7, Overseeing Nature, is the story of the development of techniques for making the marshes and coastal flatlands from Belgium to Holland more comfortable for human habitation. There, nature made life difficult: sand drifts and smothers, sea water breaks into the land, shores where people live are battered into new shapes, and sudden storms take a whole harvest and leave hunger. Yet humans imposed themselves - sometimes without meaning to. New towns wanted food but had nowhere to grow it. New towns and their new industries needed fuel and more of it. The chapter shows how the quests for food and fuel brought changes including floods and ruin but also the careful cleanliness of streets in Holland and the first model for organizing a limited liability company.

 

People moved inland from the shores to the domes and cushions of the peat – some 4 metres above the bog itself became almost accessible after prolonged drought.  The peat could be drained with ditches and canals. All the sodden peat in Waterland north of Amsterdam became land for farming this way. It worked too well. Wet peat will hold plants without decay and will hold back storm waters. Dry peat is fluffy and 1/10 the volume. So the land sank. The upper layer of peat oxidized and turned sour. Grazing cattle flattened the peat to sea level and below. The town of Medemblik was in Waterland – a transit town for things transported down the Rhine for England or Scandinavia. It seemed secure. As peat sank leaving the sand ridge with the town, storms brought clay to bind the sand. The cornfields with oats and barley around it could take the odd flood of seawater. But then the sea broke past an old ridge of peat and flooded the lake with seawater turning it brackish and tidal – into what used to be called Zuider Zee.

 

The sea had to be managed, not just drained. Medemblik was rebuilt plot by plot. Between 1100 and 1300 dykes and dams were built around the Zuider Zee. Irregular drying out led to varying levels. To stop flooding from level to level, all water had to be pumped out. Sand, silt and sinking land were all around the North Sea. There could be no more landscape untreated. The Dutch were invited to help with problems in Germany, Bremen, Poland and Prussia. The Dutch took politics with them. The word “free” started to matter where they had been.

 

Then there was the demand for peat – a fuel – for the growing breweries and brickworks. Peat was mined first from the edges. Eventually, in Norfolk England, the mining grew deep then peat had to be dredged from under water and taken to dry land in boats. Peat mining was an industry for small farmers, not a sideline. The dams, dykes, sluices and canals needed constant work to keep the land safe – difficult in the labour shortage of the Black Death. Flanders already had a water board to inspect, advise, hire workers and levy taxes to maintain the essential water control system. And such water boards became places for investment by landowners who had a taste for flooded land drained to their specifications. There they built estates with gratuitous villages and churches hoping such generosity would bring them titles in the social world - at cut prices given such cheap land!

 

Trade created new cities. The dams protecting fields blocked transport on rivers from the sea so that cities were needed to move cargoes from one boat to another. Demand for peat fuel ruined the land, leading to new dams and to new towns like Amsterdam around them. Peat mining continued creating mires of stagnant water. Then storms 1506-1509 broke mire edges and merged the waters into huge lakes, like Haalemermeer south of Amsterdam that lasted 400 years. Now land needed windmills to pump water out. Waterland was marginal and remained so until the 17th century when city money paid for new dykes and windmills to make pasture so that cheese and milk could go to Amsterdam daily. Travellers noted a passion for cleanliness and tidiness in the Dutch provinces in the early 1500s that is said to have started in response to the spoiled peat. After the Black Death towards the end of the 14th century killed so many, peasants could not make a living growing grains and their families depended on other things – like being captains of boats, or having crafts such as spinning,  or raising cows allowing dairy products. Dutch cleanliness made it possible to produce butter for export as well as cheese.

 

There are signs of a spread of Herring to Ipswich, London and York and then the spread of eating Cod as tastes moved from freshwater fish to sea fish. There was early evidence of this change in Scotland, perhaps with the coming of the Vikings, since cod is caught in the open sea. The block to sea fishing in the 10th century was the need for a large boat, and these arrived in the 11th century. New towns needed food that they did not grow. In Northern Europe salted herring and dried cod began to edge out fresh fish. The use of ‘stockfish’, cod dried to a board, began early in Norway and it was a source of money since it was in demand for trading in the Baltic by merchants of the Hanseatic League. Bergen, in Norway, was a source for German merchants. Herring was a free market in various places. Cod needed ships, but not herring. Anyone with a small open boat could catch them in a seasonal rush of herring off the shore. When boats came back there was a rush to them to check the catch and make bids. Behind the sea wall was a fixed settlement where merchants could buy just enough land for a hut. Fish were gutted by women just inland. They packed a precise number into a barrel and covered them with brine. Barrels were inspected, stamped and sealed. A commercial machine moved them throughout Europe.

 

The countryside was scrubby after the Romans left. Then trees were cut, forests cleared and fields grew larger. The plough made dust of topsoil. Rain or snowmelt washed off thin topsoil. Silt entered rivers in the upper Thames and in the River Zwin in Bruges. This silting affected fish and so did the water mills grinding the grain, because the weirs dammed the river. Sturgeon and salmon need to move upriver to breed, and to the sea after. Scotland made laws the dams have an opening for fish. Cologne dumped its cesspits into the Rhine and Paris its garbage into the Seine. Worse, rotting hemp and the remains of slaughtered animals were added. Fresh water fish became scarce, but people of status sought to establish fish ponds of great size or depth near the edge of their inland estates. Like deer, the fish were for show rather than for food. Yet fish could be business. The Fens in the east of England were fished day and night in the 14th century and still produced fish to sell. Things changed in the 15th century with the introduction of carp. Fishponds became practical carp fattening places.

 

Life on the shorelines remained uncertain. A storm surge could change everything.

That happened twice to the Belgian village of Walraversijde, whose ruins were discovered in 1992. After it found itself on the seas side of the dunes, it rebuilt. The second time was after war and raiding by mercenaries, when the village was abandoned to nature. Nature had the last word.

 

Chapter 8, Science and Money, introduces the Mongols who arrived unexpectedly in 1241 taking Hungary, Poland and Russia - except Novgorod, which became a vassal. Calls for help came from Ismaili Muslims of Syria, the Duke of Austria. Travellers reported signs of the carnage at Kiev. The Mongols were brilliant tacticians relying on swift lightly armoured horsemen and flexible light siege weapons. They were connected by courier and by signalling systems of flags and torches. The Mongols had politics as well as magic. Just as Ogedai Khan was poised to take Europe he died – likely from his heavy drinking. Camps were dismantled and the Mongols left.

 

There were beginnings of science. Franciscan Roger Bacon valued secret things, his experiments and science. Adelard of Bath wrote dialogues with an imaginary inquisitive nephew. He did experiments of sorts and argued that when human knowledge increases, we should listen to it. He also looked into the works of the Arabs who had conserved Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s will to investigate. Robert Grosseteste, bishop, scientist, teacher in the 13th century, thought knowledge came from the mind looking out on the world and making sense of it. Knowledge of this world was worthwhile in itself. Human beings test the world with their own eyes. When a new volcanic island rose from the ocean it was now a change to try and explain rather than some portend to interpret. Early scientific thinking could be bundled with theology and sometimes metaphysics, mathematics and inspiration.

 

Robert Grosseteste began the science of optics with diagrams and mathematics to show how we see things. Robert Bacon thought this a useful science. Observation was not enough. Logic and calculations were needed. Mathematics, lines, angles and numbers grew in importance. Thomas Bradwardine took Aristotle’s theory for speed, force and resistance in how objects move and concluded the arithmetic was too simple. The change of mindset was so powerful that perhaps changes in the world paved the way – the Frisians ability to write a price and having made coins to pay, and their ratios between shiploads and ratios between wool and pots and pans and grain. But by the 1330’s theologians were talking about ratios for grace, love and charity; and the pope published a price list for indulgences – how much each year of pardon cost.

 

Grosseteste has quite a story. He was born a simple person in Suffolk, but someone in Lincoln paid for him to go to the local school. He had experience in the bishop’s household in Lincoln plus access to the school and library at the cathedral in Hereford. There is evidence he spent time in Paris and had a family there. When he turned to light and rainbows, he figured the colours came when white light passed through the drops and spheres of water. He was inventing our idea of science, drawing on ancient writers and testing theories. Roger Bacon was a follower. Both were Franciscans.

 

Money shaped the new universities, as seen from a student’s listing of his accounts. This student was comfortable enough to dine out with friends and stand his teacher to a drink. But he also knew about debt, moneylenders and business. Paris University was run by its teachers, whereas Bologna law school had students contracted directly with teachers and paying them, so that students controlled the rules. Some Italian universities were run this way. Paris, Oxford, Orleans and then Cambridge were different. They were teaching theology, philosophy and liberal arts as well as a professional grounding in law so the sense of training people to make good money was less. Here, the ambitions and standards of professors prevailed. There were fees for everything from salaries of the beadles to seals on diplomas; for copying books or having them copied. There were costs of student gowns. Fees related to one’s bursa or weekly living money and their collection was complex and they were often paid at students’ doors.

 

Aristotle’s notion prevailed even in the new world of trade: doing something just to make money was wrong. Yet some noted that profit happens. There was a particular moral issue with just reselling something at a profit without adding any value to it in any way. This is not really economics, but fierce disputes about the economic world continued. By now, profit was not always usury, and owning property was fine - even if theologians could agree it didn’t exist before the fall ended the Garden of Eden.

 

When Nicholas Oresme went to Avignon and preached fiercely before Pope Urban V about priests caring for their own interest rather than that of their flock, money was his issue. The church was selling pardons and positions, and making money was the reason for doing it. Men who should be holy were burning with passion for the grand, the luxurious and the rich. Oresme was the author of Essay on Money. As a bishop and learned man he also wrote about the mathematics of the sphere. He examined the movement of the heavens and whether they could be measured. He started a movement against astrology. Beyond his academic and intellectual insights, he managed to stop the clipping and muddling of metal in French coins. Money was an issue for him when the money in the market place was different from the official rate and when silver was cut with copper to make more coins. He saw money as a stable reference point for the many products and items fluctuating in the markets. Certainly money is different from other merchandise. Metal could be melted, but when it became money, it became the measure of things. In his science, as here, he wanted to do what was just, and do it in numbers.

 

Chapter 9, Dealers Rule, tells the story of the merchants and their organization – the Hansa – its time, and the ending of its time. In 1284, threatening sturdy ships of the Hansa in a strange situation were doing police work in the narrow waters between Sweden and Denmark to stop ships from sailing to stop Norway from starving. Winter was coming and Bergen in Norway waited for the last shipment to get through winter. The ships from Lubeck took their exports of butter, dried cod and furs and brought back basics from the Baltics – grain, peas, beans, malt and flour. They once traded with the English. Now they depended on the Lubeck merchants of the Hansa. The Hansa was just a loose arrangement between merchants and their trading towns, with no flag, no king, no responsibilities and no territories to defend. For some time, kings in Bergen tried to get the basics delivered, but the merchants liked to bring in beer and bits and pieces. Moreover, they stayed and traded on the streets. Germans were installed, with craftsmen setting up their own associations. Norway tried to make a rule: bring the basics or leave town in winter and the king sent a noble, diplomat (and thug) to do injustice in a small private war in which at least one ship was wrecked. So Hansa banned the sale of the winter essentials, policed their own members and wrote to Edward I of England and Emperor Rudolf I and to his imperial city of Lubeck to help. A terrible famine resulted in Norway. Within a year Norway begged Sweden to help resolve things. They paid a price and became more dependent on the Hansa.

 

The Hansa merchants flourished when nations were struggling for frontiers and their kings were trying to establish rule. A cartel of towns in the north, mostly Baltic and German-speaking, banded together to keep merchants’ ships safe, make sure they were well-treated in foreign ports and strive for a monopoly of trade. The Hansa was townspeople with a mind for trade and profit, and they mostly agreed. As long as the ships sailed on Hansa’s terms, there was no need for talk. The power of a Hansa city like Lubeck was location: at the end of a slow canal and river that cut across the neck of Denmark where ships could be pulled across the inland route from the Baltic to the North Sea to avoid the challenging seas around Jutland. Hansa towns lived from the water. They were sea ports like Hamburg or river ports like Cologne. The towns were new and dependent on trading.

 

The merchants dealing with Bergen were more toughs than upright citizens. As boys they went through brutal extended initiation rituals in Norway and came back self-made men. They had a tough apprenticeship. They made voyages their fathers no longer did and in Norway, as newcomers, they went through the initiation, the games. These lasted to the 16th century!

 

Hansa merchants bought houses in Lubeck on the streets leading to the sea. They got respect so long as their trading connections were intact, especially when they dominated trade to England. Then they could join the best clubs and even seek positions of status. When English ships began sailing again, (hmmm – why had they stopped?) their social standing fell and they had to make do with the second-rate clubs. Hansa merchants settled at Bergen but were meant to keep a distance from the town in their own cramped district on the docks. They had long wooden buildings with a lower-level warehouse, an upper-level living quarters and balconies for air. This was a Kontor, now Bryggen. There were 3 other such places – one at Novgorod, one at Bruges, one at London. They were defensible positions which could act as a kind of embassies issuing judgments and rulings. They were governed by secrecy. Hansa was a kind of guild or union that depended on knowing each other to do business. Marrying was difficult in the Kontor, but there is evidence that children and teens lived there. Women could come, but there were bans on prostitutes in the Kontor on the four holy nights. There is evidence of women and children away from home being thought of in wills.

 

Hansa ships were more organized than the general ships of a country. They operated under their own rules where the merchants made key decisions. And unlike some others who might be expected to farm land during summer, for the Hansa men business, making money trading, was their whole life.

 

By the 1400s there were factions among the Hansa, with some approving the holding of  land. There were uprisings in Lubeck, then Hamburg, about trading versus land. Hansa members could always sail away from land-based troubles. In all these instances, the merchants prevailed. Emperor Frederick II aimed to rule Italy and so he allowed feudal lords the freedom to raise money for that and he largely left the towns to themselves. The Hansa had gone to autumn beach fairs to buy herring in Scania, southern Sweden, and they took over the fairs. In 1189 they signed their first treaty with a foreign prince: trade and profits for their privileges. The Hansa had no centre, but in practice Lubeck called a meeting of its Hansa council. Then there were pirates.

 

In the 1380s the German Duke of Mecklenberg was trying to use pirates in a war against the Danes and the pirates got safe haven in the Duke’s towns Rostock and Wismar.   They raided many places including Bergen and the Hansa Kontor there. The pirates left Rostock and became a freebooting scourge, occupying islands and attacking passing ships. Like the Hansa, the pirates were single-minded. When Wismar and Rostock were on better terms with the Danes, the pirates sailed on to Russia, spoiled the Hansa trade, sailed to the Caspian, to the Holy Land and beyond.

 

Hansa towns often went different ways as Bremen did in the 1440s when the Dutch were working their way back into the Baltic, England and France were in the 100 years’ war, and the Scots took some ships from Flanders. Bremen became a pirate port! Somehow Hansa survived these divisions. Law also divided Hansa. Lubeck law applied to 43 Hansa towns, Frankfurt law ruled in 49 and there were some towns that took their law from Hamburg or Bremen. Some towns simply did their thing, for example when Hamburg blockaded the English out of Bruges and the Cologne merchants dealt with the English in Antwerp. The epic Danish war involved less than a dozen Hanseatic towns.

 

Language mattered and all the Hansa countries understood the same Low German. Taste travelled with the Hansa ships so that the towns developed similarities. Then there was the violence, an immediate Hansa common response to any threat or rival. This violence seemed old fashioned after a while when rivals began to deal with problems by making the issues matter to nations now that nations were getting stronger. Rivals fitted into the new emerging system of states.

 

In 1484 Amsterdam town council complained to the Bergan Kontor about German trouble making. ‘All good merchants should support each other’ Amsterdam wrote, ‘they should not scare each other or resort to violence’. That hadn’t occurred to the Hansa! And in Amsterdam they faced a major trading power. The Hansa was going out of style before it went out of business. The legend of Hansa is more golden than the reality. Those ships were chasing profit by rigging a market; they were trying to enforce an arrangement Norway did not want and they expected to kill people on the way. They starved women, children and men. Money ruled.

 

Chapter 10, Love and Capital, begins with an account of a holy woman, a beguine, kidnapped from her order in Bruges for a rape that would force her to marry despite beguine protection from the Count of Flanders. A posse caught up and those involved were arrested. They were well-to-do and the kidnap and rape was a tactic. Katelijne, the woman, was taken back to the beguines. The punishments were harsh: life banishment with death on return. The beguines asked for an official record, and so the story is known.

 

They beguines were women who made their own living working fields or making cloth. Their independence disrupted other people’s plans to use them for alliances by marriages to get money or land. They spoke and taught in the vernacular and they spoke of God known without an intermediary Priest. The order flourished across the lands of northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. It was a time when women flowed to towns from the countryside. A beguine woman did not fear hunger. She could survive with her trade even if she became sick. Sometimes they shared a single house or a courtyard, like a village inside the town. Pious duty led them to tasks like preparing a corpse for a grave or tending the living dead, lepers or sick women in hospitals. They were teachers and sometimes even house managers. They went out from the edge of the city to herd animals, grow vegetables and raise chickens. Some traded very successfully and generated resentment in Ghent in 1306.

 

They were chaste, but rules varied. At Mechelen around 1290, they had to leave if obviously pregnant, but could return after a year and could raise a child for 6 months after that in a compound. In other places they could be banned for life. The tolerant rules were practical, but resulted in mockery and beguine characters in theatre plays. There was moralising by beguines who thought their fathers’ loans with interest were sinful. They needed a history so priests and other sympathisers generated stories that lifted their reality out of this world. Elizabeth of Spalbeek, who had stigmata, became a phenomenon.  And there are a range of stories of particular situations.

 

Women could make such choices in northwestern Europe and nowhere else. The merchant business crossing the seas made families more flexible. Men still ruled, but non-royal and non-noble women had chances.

 

The impact on Jewish women was that they took care of the business when their husband was away. That required doing business with men, not normally approved, but religious authorities turned a blind eye. Then there was a shift in how men looked at their marriages. The Rabbis said marry one woman, don’t stay away for more than eight months and don’t go at all when not getting along with the wife. Marriage was a chosen companionship – not a contract. But the edging towards equality hit a terrible historic time: the crusades and the butchering of Jews along the Rhine. Forced conversion made women the choosers – kill their children and themselves or convert. Whole families ended up in suicide as fathers discovered dead wives and sons.

 

Thirteenth century Douai, in northern France, addressed both men and women drapers, tanners etc. And in Bruges they addressed city officials as masters and mistresses. Then, as now, when women ploughed, killed pigs or made ale their wages were lower than men’s. For a woman, the pull of the town, other than more pay, was to change her job or start her own business with the hope of starting her own household down the road. Women worked a full range of trades, including shipbuilding, and had a hierarchy in the market. They could be sureties of others’ debts and live apart from the husbands because each had their own trade and kept their monies separate. However, the women did not travel so much as men and they tended to run the hostel, shop, warehouse, and money business while the husband was away the women acted as money changes and bankers. Women shared. They had authority over children just like the father. Whole families took the father’s name but the mother could head the household and business in the world. Indeed, this was the world around the beguines.

 

After the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 English priests taught that marriage is a matter of consent and the choice must be mutual. Intended for Christendom, the doctrine fitted the North Sea, but in France a priest symbolises spirit and in Italy a notary symbolises a contract. In the south, a woman brought a dowry. In the north, the woman could inherit, so a couple got money only when her parents died and the pot of money went to both husband and wife. The husband controlled the pot while he lived, then the wife inherited and she could do business with her share. Marriage contracts in Douai in the 15th century show women could have a long economic life in the north where her husband’s death was not the end of things and a woman could do well without being married. The doctrine of mutual affection is hard to trace, but it is known that people arranged to be buried alongside their spouses and children. People married later and were in a better placed to do an apprenticeship and so better placed start their own families.

 

There were years when young people could get an apprenticeship or go into service or work as journeymen by the day. By the 13th century young people could travel to find demand for their skills using their own networks, but soon there were formal possibilities. The first Mason’s lodges began in England. There were groups moving around and working in the network of North Sea cities travelling from north to south, east to west and back. By the 14th century they could work by showing certificates of service, with hostels where they could stay and fraternal handshakes, and that brought learning. London became a kind of training centre for all of England!

 

The windmill first appeared in England in 1155 and in Flanders shortly before or after. Either way, it moved across the seas and lands quickly. It was timely. Peat burning was running out of peat and water power was not viable on flat lands. Wind power depended on the wind and required a gear to drive the vertical grinding stone. It was hard for landowners to charge for wind power and it could compete with others who paid for  access to water power. A century or so later windmills were draining land near Amsterdam and a number of attempts followed to use the wind power for draining and other tasks. Fens were drained from Prussia to England. The windmill made mills work across the nations for grinding rape seed for rape oil. New land was created from marsh and sea and industry was powered.

 

Concerns for income on old age gave rise to a pattern in the north that invested money with other people. In Flanders and Holland people put money into cities that paid them renten – a kind of annuity while they remained alive. Sometimes, as in East Anglia and Edam, renten were what parents got back when they gave their assets to their children.

 

There is evidence that married sex for a time put a premium on simultaneous orgasm. Some like Heloise preferred the romance of love with a desired Abelard rather than married love that was an obligation. Then there are accounts of Eleanor, John Rykener trans-dressed, who had sex with flair and for pay. He slept with priests and also with nuns. He liked to keep track of the status of those he slept with! On one occasion city officials spotted him in the act in a stall on Soper’s Lane with a man. They took him before the mayor. The mayor was perplexed because the church dealt with sodomy. In the end the city let him go.

 

There has always been a business in sex and it went beyond selling partners to providing a chance to meet, a place to make love, and perhaps dinner too. Bruges had a sizable prostitution business. Women and men bathhouse customers sat down to wine and dinner at a common table in a large wooden bath tub. Women were naked with veiled faces until they stepped down to the floor then went to bed. It was reported that women could sleep with any man they wanted so long as the man never saw her face or knew who she was. The penalty for being known was death. The bathhouses were by the port for merchants and sailors. However, brothels in town were largely women’s businesses.

 

The church considered a couple married if they had consented to each other and made promises, although banns and making promises before a priest were preferred. However, there is some evidence of abuse!  Fornication could bring a public whipping. Worse, an unmarried mother would get no sympathy, risked being cut off by charitable agencies and being thrown out of town. Women were aware of how to avoid babies, and so were rather holy persons. Abortion was wrong and yet manuscripts written in 9th century German monasteries give instructions. Hildegard of Bingen wrote about some relevant herbs.

 

Chapter 11, The Plague Laws, tells stories of the greatest natural disaster of the millennium - the Black Death – in which English villages lost 4 people out of 5 in 1400 AD. Over 2 years, 1 person out of 3 across northern Europe was dead. The Sorbonne doctors told the French king to get out of Paris quickly, go far and keep going. Corruption of the air seemed a possibility, and in 1415 the butchers were moved to the then edge of Paris. Nobody knew of fleas, or that they carried the disease. In time quarantine and isolation might have helped. The disease began to disappear accidentally.

 

In the 18th century plague threatened again, but by then people changed clothes when they went to bed and they washed with serious soap which limited fleas and lice. The price of arsenic fell so there was a poison for rats and mice. More importantly, the virus mutated to one that was far less deadly and rats caught the mutant. The increasingly dominant northern rats in Europe did not carry the plague, but the rest of the world did not share that luck. Before then, there was no solution.

 

A mythologies and superstitions developed around the plague, some featuring black mist, blue haze, or two children walking or an old woman raking leaves before a house. Ships ran aground with a dead crew and, more recently, Dracula came ashore from a silent ship in Whitby. The stories agreed the plague came from the sea. Although we cannot know the plague, we can agree that rats carry infected fleas and rats can move by ship. Rats are missing from the archeological record into the Middle Ages. To thrive they need storage cupboards and places tightly packed with people and food. The growing cities and towns with their narrow streets and dense populations with warm buildings offered perfect places. The almost universal curfew overnight helped. The clearing of forests removed the rats’ predators. The Viking routes offered rats transport from Byzantium and the East. The remedies developed were of doubtful value, although opium may have relieved anxiety for the dying.

 

The Black Death of 1348-9 followed a failed harvest in 1346-7 and threat of famine. There was hunger. Rural life was disrupted by a weak and scarce workforce. The death toll of the plague made labour scarcer, and that produced people who thought they had choices. A poet wrote that there were fewer but they had more than water to drink, decent food and good wages. They dressed well and had money for bed and pillows. They even went poaching and hunting. Moreover, it was easier for them to move. Who would grow the food for the cities? All this led to questions of the changing role of serfs, who were supposed to endure their lot wherever they were. It also led to some comments that sound strangely modern like Piers Ploughman’s reference to the supposedly feigned limps and shirkers. There is even a link to lawlessness. At that point workless was lawless and some of the poor are undeserving. In 1349 the harvest was rotting in English fields as a result of the many dead. The answer: law.

 

There was the Ordinance of Labourers and the Statute of Labourers. Wages and prices were to be controlled and labour contracts were to be long, public and unbreakable. The rules were directed at ploughmen, country workers and those that paid them. Others were mentioned but regulated elsewhere. The extraordinary provision: anyone with nothing else to do could be ‘bound to serve anyone who required his or her services, as long as the service is appropriate to his or her estate. Anyone under 60 had to obey and accept the wages offered before the plague. Anyone who failed to accept went to jail until they changed their mind.

 

There were some limits. Nobody owns slaves, but nobody controls his own labour anymore either. Some were exempt since they already had work obligations. Peasants might hold land in exchange for doing work – a kind of payment on a lease. There was a means test: anyone who did not have enough land, money or goods could be pushed into service – not paid work. In service you got shelter and food and, if lucky, a bit of cash when the contract ended. People who had servants themselves could be caught and pushed into service. Neighbours could be labelled vagrants, and those happily working daily but without a long-term contract could be judged idle.

 

There was an additional idea: summary punishment - with no need for a trial. There needed to be two witnesses, but once they had told their story, a person could be put in the stocks or jail. New Justices of Labour were furiously busy in Essex in 1352. When they were eliminated and replaced by justices of the peace in 1360 and then by the King’s Bench, the records go silent. There is enough evidence that the law was used against those who wanted more money. It wasn’t limited to those with no work – it was used against a thatcher who went thatching around Lincolnshire instead of thatching his own village – presumably at the old prices. The law could be twisted and abused, but also defied. Sometimes even constables went before courts for refusing to apply the law. There was resistance from clerics – one excommunicated constables for applying the law. Surprisingly, there was resistance from those paying, some of whom who found ways to pay for extras and give gifts! And there were additional laws about buying clothing – an attempt to prevent people buying their way out of their station! People who travelled had to return to the same place and work or face a kind of branding. These kinds of laws went all around Europe following the plague to try to ensure labour was accomplished without more money flowing to the lower number of workers.

 

Capital punishment was reduced – one didn’t want to lose workers! In Antwerp the notion of deserving and undeserving poor took root so that by the 16th century virtue was being policed. Anyone pub crawling joined public sinners like adulterers in being denied any public help. In Hamburg the plague was said to stem from beggars in the street so they were bundled off to plague hospitals. In London, the poor were sent to work in a ‘house of labour and occupation’ in Bridewell in 1552. Within 30 years it became a house for petty offenders. The poor house was meant to cure the poor of poverty. It was almost medical. Plague, like terrorism in our time, provided a rationale for supervising people’s lives. Edinburgh pioneered a slew of rules: cutting tavern hours; requiring children to be under perpetual supervision; stopping fairs and markets; requiring a license to house an outsider. No one could travel without explanation or arrive without being checked. A case of plague had to be reported immediately. The city was repeatedly cleaned and streets scrubbed. Arrivals at ports were quarantined.

 

In these times people could move to somewhere on the other side of a war or conflict where they were better known and could expected greater freedom. But controls on such travel went on with the plague. There were bureaucrats who were employed by one king then the another. There were pirates hired by one side then another like Crabbe who moved among French, Flemish and English who ended up leading a fleet of English ships in the battle of the Sluys in 1340.

 

This sort of thing continued right up to the 1630s by which time there was an enthusiasm for papers and difficulty getting them: certificates of health; exit permits; passports; visas and, if all else failed, personal letters of recommendation. A royalist got to France upon the death of Cromwell to contact the exiled King Charles. His wife and children in England struggled to join him – eventually with a pass she forged. Chasers caught up with her at Dover. However, she was able to get on a paquet boat to Calais. Travel was always conditional. War always interfered, but the plague had changed the rules for travel.

 

The final chapter, 12, The City and the World, uses the study of a traveller to focus on Flanders, the Duke of Burgundy, and their relationship. Our traveller was on a quest from Bohemia and arrived in Brussels for “the show that was the Duke of Burgundy”. Everything appeared enormous and magnificent. The spectacles turned a flimsy Dutchy into a “soft power”. In 1369 the Count Louis of Flanders had married his daughter to the Count of Burgundy, a first peer of the ruling house of Valois in France. Louis extended his territory marriage by marriage. His daughter Margaret was heir apparent to Brabant, next to Flanders in what is now Belgium. In 1404 Flanders annexed Brabant. However, in 1428 Philip the Good of Burgundy became Lord of Holland and Zeeland to the north, now the Netherlands. In 1430 the Duke of Brabant died and Philip Duke of Burgundy inherited Brabant. Would you say that at that time the Duke of Burgundy ruled Flanders, which then included part of France, what is now Belgium, and what is now the Netherlands.

 

To succeed, Dukes of Burgundy had to be noticed – hence the show. Burgundy made itself the fashion around Europe. The skyline of Bruges, the Duke of Burgundy’s base, was widely known from paintings in the churches, halls and mansions in Europe. Painter Jan van Eyck and later Rubens became so well known they could be sent as diplomats and their paintings were copied to be background for a lot of portraits by other painters. Burgundy had a knack of showing how it wanted to be seen. The gold and silver metal work from Burgundy was famous, as were the tapestries and the early polyphonic music. Netherland teachers were hired for choir schools in Italy and northern boys were hired to sing there.

 

The traveller saw the ‘theatre’ in Charles the Bold’s son’s return from Paris. Guilds and councillors greeted him in the streets of Bruxelles with lines of lighted candles and stately tableaux. A century later when Calvinists ruled Antwerp, they maintained civic processions to substitute for banned religious ones. Burgundy itself was artificial with much land man-made and dependent on constant work and artifice to prevent it from going under water.

 

A report from 1417 when the new Dauphin of France visited Flanders described a land rich with goods that came by sea from all the Christian world. They make good cloth and they have two very good towns: Ghent and Bruges. The people are honest but rebellious. It is a poor country because it is all water and sand. If the dykes ever broke the land would be in the sea. Within the show the riches were dazzling. Bruges was described as one of the best markets in the world. At the great Antwerp fairs anyone desiring to see the greater part of Christendom assembled in one place could do so. And yet, inland there could be famine. Visitors noticed the difference between the ports and inland. Flanders only had cloth to trade for everything else. The Dutchy had to buy food and often could not feed itself even while profitable business was going on at its ports.

 

Everything passed through Flanders and everybody took their cut. When Philip the Good made his triumphal entry into Bruges in 1440 there were a huge number of merchants in the parade and they understood the value of this theatre. Kings were there too. Edward IV of England spent a year in exile. Mulay Hassan, deposed Bey of Tunis, lived there in exile. The kings came for safety on French territory that was not French. Later, they came for Hapsburg territory that was not Spain. People were impressed by the shows of wealth – the number of courses at dinner and the amount of silverware left on the table, the ceremonies for the Order of the Golden Fleece and a banquet hall hung with cloth of gold.

 

In 1474 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, rode in Dijon in armour covered in rubies, diamonds and large pearls. Three years later he died in similar armour trying to take back the city of Nancy in Lorraine. He was found in the snow stripped of his armour and so badly mauled his doctor had trouble identifying him. In less than 3 years the Hapsburgs inherited Flanders by marriage and the Flemish were in full revolt against the new rulers – a rehearsal for the final break a century later. The first revolt was for 15 years; the second began an 80-year war involving the Calvinist - Catholic religious divide. Our traveller from 1465 went on to London and found the court impressive – the king introduced by trumpets plus a choir and stringed instruments. This was an imitation of Burgundy whose master of ceremonies advised the English king.

 

Albrecht Durer came to the low countries in 1520 and kept a journal. Antwerp had artists and could supply their needs with its imports of sources of colours. Like Venice, but nowhere else, Antwerp had 4 shops selling only colours. Works from Flanders had life, light, vividness and the use of oils. Paintings sold – as did paintings on cloth! The rooms of the Medici were wrapped in Flemish taste. Works were done by artisans in guilds but some famous individuals were recognised like Jan van Eyck. He is one said to have invented oil painting – mixing colours with oil. Copying was popular in order to give people what they wanted at a price they could pay. When Charles the Bold was killed and the Hapsburgs arrived in Flanders, the demand for quality pictures fell. But commissioned pictures for middle classes remained. They provided a background for contemplation and prayer at home.

 

The Bourse in the middle of Antwerp opened in the 1530s and all the merchants met. They had papers: a claim on money left in Spain or in Cologne; credits; and debts. They traded them. In Amsterdam, before an Exchange, merchants met on a street or in a church. The Exchange or Bourse was born in Bruges where merchants met outside the hostel of the Van der Buerse family – hence Bourse. The city provided a Bailiff to stand watch and keep order. The model was set. Antwerp had the first built exchange, one that became a model for the Royal Exchange in London. You could lend money, insure a life, insure a ship for a voyage as far as the East or West Indies. To get prices right traders had to know about the supply of solid physical money, the silver flowing from Spain, whether the land route from France was open for couriers with safe conducts etc.

 

In Antwerp in August 26, 1566 the statue of the Virgin Mary was booed and pelted with rubbish as it was processed down the streets. A day later, people jeered at the statue and a crowd gathered around the Cathedral with axes, hammers, ropes and ladders. Then, inside, the men went to work on all images, wood or canvas, and statues. Windows were broken. Then the crowd went on from chapel to chapel down the road. Clerical robes and monastery libraries were burned. By the end of the night nobody was hurt, nothing was stolen and a few works of art survived. This was a war starting, but not with the ruling Hapsburgs. The lines ran between the Calvinist and Catholic, and the Dutch and Spanish in the Netherlands.

 

It was a campaign of sieges, with cities changing sides one year and back the next. It was ruinous for the Bourses and the trading. Royal finances were frozen shut and angry army veterans ransacked Antwerp. Merchants fled north from the war zone. The refugees who emerged resented the Spanish and defined themselves as anti-Catholic. They carried with them the experience of the Bourse and trading –the basics for the capitalism that emerged. Capitalism was free of any particular religious connection –trading went all ways. Going north made sense for refugees - wars seldom went as far north as Amsterdam. The anger with Spain led to the formation of the West Indies Company for revenge in the Caribbean in 2 parts, trade and war. Among these moving was Simon Stevin a Bruges taxman and cashier in a merchant house who enrolled in Leiden University. He wrote a book on double entry book-keeping, and one giving tables for calculation of interest payable on borrowed money. Meanwhile, refugees were fleeing in the other direction.

 

Richard Versegan fled the danger of being hanged in England. In Antwerp he became a dealer in propaganda in the Catholic cause, writing brilliant newssheets. He also worked to smuggle priests, books and letters by ship to England when the Jesuits restarted there, using great care, coded letters and often separate drop-off points for people and documents. After Elizabeth I died in 1603 the Spanish needed Versegan’s help and he changed business. He used contacts to get a monopoly on importing English cloth to Flanders and other schemes. He took up journalism and poetry and was a humorist. His timing was good. An English language newspaper began in Amsterdam in 1632.

 

Simon Stevin, an engineer, created a sailing chariot that could be steered alonga beach with Prince Maurits whom, as a student, he had tutored in mathematics and physics. That same year 1584, a fanatic shot Maurits’s father who died. It could have been serious for the rebels because his father had been leader of the revolt against the Spanish. But Maurits took over bit by bit – as ruler of 2 United Provinces, then as general of the army, then as ruler of them all. His life was formed by war and needs. Stevin became an army engineer producing sluices, pumps, dredgers and windmills and tools for soldiers. He wrote books in Dutch - rapidly translated by others. Maurits saw a need to train engineers. Stevin planned the school, organized it, then taught in it in Dutch, which made it accessible to anyone. A final legacy was Stevin’s thinking about town layout – from drains to rectangular streets, with concern for the people in the towns.

 

The world could have worked out very differently. The North Sea stories show how its peoples played an active part in shaping the world both in the North Sea and places far from it like Byzantium.

 

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