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

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