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

south wanted their territory, their connections
     and their business, and took all of them by force. Radbod, the last independent king of
     Frisia before the Franks took over, sailed up the Rhine as far as Cologne, vengefully
     ruining and wrecking most thoroughly as he went; 61 a few years later a chronicler
     called the Frisians ‘
gens dirissima maritima
’
–
the hard
     men from the sea, ill-omened and terrible. 62
    The Vikings came raiding in 837 CE and found Frankish soldiers in Domburg to kill. 63 They also took
     away many women as captives and countless money of all kinds, and went up the Rhine to
     overrun Dorestad, a victory which cost them many dead; 64 they were stealing
     the Frisians’ business, and the Frisians were murderously good at fighting back.
     When there was a Danish ruler later in Frisia, the Frisians shipped out with the Viking
     raiders when it suited them, even though the Vikings were taking over their bases, their
     ports and their business; they adapted, but their dominance was over because, in a way,
     they had taught their methods all too well.
    They ending up doing their business on the
     very edge of the law. In Tiel, between Utrecht and Arnhem, the merchants complained that
     the Frisians were hard men with no respect for the law, working with robbers in the
     woods so that it was no longer possible to sail safely out to England or to have the
     English come with goods. The monk Alpert also noticed that, apart from being drunk in
     the morning and being unnecessarily tolerant of adultery (as long as the wife kept
     quiet) and running off at their filthy mouths, the Frisians were unusually tight-knit.
     He noticed they were sworn to support each other’s stories even if it meant lying.
     They co-operated; they pooled their money at their drinking bouts, to pay for wine but
     also to share the profits of business. They kept their
terpen
principles even
     when the imperial army finally drove them out of their woods and their trade runs, and
     faced them down among the ditches and moats close to modern Rotterdam: the battle was
     the last, great Frisian victory, 29 July 1018. 65
    But the Frisian Sea: that already had new
     owners.



2.

The book trade
    There was nobody else alive, nobody who could
     read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who
     was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called
     Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not
     yet.
    In 686, the sun went dark behind the moon.
     When the eclipse ended the plague came suddenly from the sea. It broke into the
     monasteries like this double house at Jarrow and Wearmouth in Northumbria and all the
     little ports along the coast. It killed quickly. The old abbot, Eosterwine, was sick and
     dying and he called all the monks to him. ‘With the compassion that was second
     nature to him, he gave them each the kiss of peace,’ Bede remembered. 1 Nobody
     worried then about touching the sick; sickness was known to come in an impersonal
     miasma, a kind of mist; so the abbot’s kindness killed almost all of them.
    The deaths left a quiet in the stone church
     that was as bad as the sight of walls stripped of pictures or a library without books:
     the house was reminded that it had lost its glory. Music was not yet written down; it
     lived only in men’s minds and could be learned only by ear; if it was not sung, it
     was lost. The monks had been taught ‘at first hand’ by the chief cantor of
     St Peter’s in Rome, 2 and plainsong was one of great riches
     of the house; they were the first to sing Gregorian chant in Britain. But now the
     familiar antiphons, the sacred conversation of voices answering each other back and
     forth across the choir, were gone.
    Ceolfrith was miserable, even tearful, and he stood the quiet
     for only a week. He needed to begin the familiar services again. He began by singing on
     his own, and then the