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

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 bythe 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 crashingwaves,
     shipping water, and he had to wait