A review by tamarant4
The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are by Michael Pye

challenging informative medium-paced

4.0

This is not the usual story of muddled battles and various kings and the spread of Christianity. It is the story of how the constant exchanges over water, the half-knowledge that things could be done differently, began to change people’s minds profoundly. This cold, grey sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible. [loc. 165]

This excellent book has an alternate subtitle in some editions: "A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe". This may be more accurate, and more inclusive (who's the 'us' who've been made who we are?) but less poetic.

Pye's thesis, illustrated by examples from archaeology and geology as well as textual sources, is that the countries around the North Sea developed an international trading network in the early medieval period, re-introducing coins as an alternative to barter. He points out that from a port on the east coast of England, in medieval times, it was quicker to sail to Norway than to travel overland to York or London. Trade wasn't restricted to North Sea coasts, either: there is evidence of 'fishwives eating pomegranates and figs, one of them had gold velvet from Genoa, they used the fierce red melagueta peppers in their cooking and they had dishes, plates and cups of Spanish majolica' [loc. 3325]

There's a lot about seafarers (especially the Vikings) and religious communities, including the beguines (women leading a religious life without the usual restrictions of nunneries). Indeed, Pye is as interesting on the subject of womens' lives as on everything else. He suggests that priorities were different in societies where the men were away on voyages for extended periods: the women took care of business at home, and family ties became more flexible. "... in Italian towns, men wanted to be buried with their ancestors, with as much of a male line as they could find and if necessary some invented coats of arms. Around the North Sea, it was the marriage and the children that mattered." [loc. 4473].

The aspect of the book that interested me most, though, was the sense of temporary landscape, from the drowned houses which could be glimpsed at the lowest tides to the network of dikes, drains and ditches that kept the land more or less dry. I was hooked by Pye's opening narrative about Domburg, where in 1650 a storm revealed wooden coffins, the skulls all facing west, the dead buried with grave goods in a most unChristian way. 'For a few days the past was as solid as a coffin, unexplained like a ghost; and then the waters swept back and hid the dead before anyone could find out who they were.' [loc. 130] I learnt more about the ceaseless shifting of the balance between land and sea; the terpens, or mounds, built by the Frisians in the marshes, and the constant work of holding back the tide. I hadn't recognised that after the Black Death, there weren't enough able-bodied people to maintain pastureland (the ground being too salty for crops) or to keep the sea defenses intact. 'Sand, silt and sinking land were problems all around the North Sea. From now on, there could be no more unconsidered landscape...' [loc. 3015]

This is a fascinating book full of rabbitholes: the Heliand, an Old Saxon poem which retells part of the Bible in a distinctly Northern idiom; the initiation rites of the Hanseatic League; the Italian sumptuary laws aimed at women because 'their clothes cost so much that men couldn’t marry, which was leading to sodomy, so fashion was distracting everyone from the serious business of replenishing the population'; the absence of rats in the archaeological record around the North Sea, until 'the early Middle Ages'... I found the later chapters, focussed on trade and politics, less enthralling than the medieval parts, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Fulfils the ‘calendar’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge. '[Bede] had to find names for years that were still in the future, something which neither Germans nor Romans did ... We still date events from the ‘year of Our Lord’, Annus Domini, the year of Christ’s birth; that was Bede’s invention – part of his solution to the problem of the calendar.'