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

associations capable of keeping their
     members informed of and organizing the convoys and also defending their interests. In
     the Baltic in the eleventh century the Frisian guild at Sigtuna put up stones to the
     memory of members who had distinctly un-Frisian names, as though by the eleventh century
     ‘Frisian’ meant simply merchant and ‘guild’ meant something very
     close to Chamber of Commerce. 57
    They were also settled in Jutland, in the
     port called Haithabu, or else Schleswig, where there were many Christians ‘who had
     been baptised at Dorestad’; 58 or else at Hamburg, where the
     Frisians came and went. When the city of Worms on the upper Rhine burned down in 886 the
     chronicler at Fulda reports the burning of the best part of town, ‘where the
     Frisian merchants live’; 59 they also had the best quarters of
     Cologne and Mayence on the Rhine. They were settled enough to be buried abroad, although
     it was always possible to take the bones back home after a decent time; funerals in
     Yorkshire looked remarkably like Frisian funerals. They also left traces around the
     Humber and in Northumberland, which may help explain why Northumbrian missionaries found
     it quite easy, martyrdoms aside, to bring Christianity to their brothers in Frisia
     itself.
    They went to live even at the outer limits
     of their trading world. There was a Frisian house in Kaupang at the mouth of the Oslo
     fjord in south Norway, on the way from the North Sea to the Baltic through the Kattegat,
     where the trade of the two seas criss-crossed in sheltered waters. The glass beakers
     found there are like the onesused by the
     Franks and the Frisians, which means Southern drinking habits, and there are
     double-ended dress hooks, which would have been useless on local clothes but which any
     Frisian woman would have needed; there were copper brooches, which were pretty, but
     nothing worth trading and certainly not worth stealing, so they were for use then and
     there; there were loom weights, which might mean cloth was woven in the house, but on a
     small scale. People were making a whole life onshore, women and men, sociable drinkers
     who liked the styles familiar from home. The house is unusual because it has two side
     aisles for sleeping, which take up much more space than in other houses around, as
     though crews were coming in and going out with cargo and needed somewhere to stay
     together: foreigners.
    The house wasn’t used for very long,
     just from the 800s to around 840, the time when Kaupang went from being a seasonal base
     to a settlement where people lived all year round. Those are also the years when the
     Frisians’ tight control of trade on the southern North Sea was at its height and
     the time when it was starting to fray. The business of the house was basic goods, raw
     materials, the perfect opposite of all those crafted, gaudy bits and pieces once shipped
     about for the benefit of kings and grand persons. The Frisians dealt in ingots of copper
     alloy, most likely for the craftsmen in Kaupang; and they left behind such a trail of
     iron fragments that they may have been exporting iron. From Kaupang there were long
     valley routes by water and then land, up onto the vast mountain plateau of
     Hardangervidda, a treeless waste which produced remarkable ore; it made iron that was
     much less brittle than other sources, which made better steel and famously better axes.
     It was worth shipping out. They may have brought in amber, which commonly washed up on
     the Frisian coast; they left behind a very little waste from cutting and carving amber.
     They introduced hacksilver to Kaupang, silver goods chopped up to make them useable as
     money; and they certainly brought north their great idea: money itself. 60 The
     quantity of hacksilver, mind you, implies that coins were still too strange for daily
     deals.
    Don’t think for one moment that trade meant peace, not
     for the Frisians. The Franks to their