The Edge of the World

Introduction

Cecil Warburton went to the seaside in the summer of 1700: two weeks at Scarborough on the east coast of England, north of Hull and south of Newcastle. He was not at all impressed.

He was a northern gentleman, son of a Cheshire baronet, and he did what gentlemen do at a spa: he drank down five pints of the famous waters almost every day, waters that smelled of ink and tasted of acid, and his system was duly flushed. He refused the full cure his companions took, which was four quarts a day. He wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘I was in hopes I might here have met with something would have made my letter diverting to you, but I find myself disappointed for I yet can see nothing but coarse hooks and drying fish which is all the furniture of both in and out side of their streets and houses.’ The streets were littered with ‘garbage of fish and Cods Heads … I wish you find no ungreatful smell inclosed, for I think it impossible any thing can go hence free from it.’¹

He’d chosen the town where the idea of seaside was starting, where the first changing huts were about to appear on the beach, where people came to flirt and be seen; he did not want reminders of all the uses of the working sea. People, ‘Nobility, Quality and Gentry’ according to the guide for 1733, were flocking to Scarborough: earls and baronets, misses and marchionesses. They drank and ate and drank, knowing the waters would wash them out and keep them well. They went swimming in the cold sea and horse racing on the long, wide sands and dancing in the evening.²

They chose to see the spa and not the working town, not the castle that had fired on enemy ships only fifty years earlier when the Dutch and English were at war, not the fishing fleet of maybe three hundred boats or the harbour, the only practical refuge in foul weather between the River Tyne to the north and the River Humber to the south. The town was a reminder of the web of connections over the water: food, trade, war and all kinds of arrivals and invasions, including the invasions of ideas.

Cecil Warburton, like millions after him, had no interest in all that. He had more immediate worries; as he complained in a letter to his sister: ‘am still as fat as ever …’³

This new idea of seaside came between us and the story of the sea.⁴ The seaside was becoming a destination, not a harbour on the way to somewhere else over the water; and it was a playground, not a place of work and war. It was hard to imagine that there had once been a world that centred on the sea itself. Over the years even the coastline was fixed in place as it never used to be when high winds could make a storm out of the sand, and high tides could break deep into the land. Stone and then concrete made sea walls, promenades, esplanades, a definite squared-off boundary between man and sea. Behind them, seafront hotels and villas could stare out with perfect indifference at the sea, which had made them so desirable in the first place.

That was just beginning in Warburton’s time. In Scarborough, a whole catalogue of grand persons paid their five shillings and signed the book to use the two rooms built on the beach for drinks and company and dressing and undressing. They came north from London by the York coach, or else by way of Cambridge for the sights, but only if they could tolerate the country inns. Otherwise they paid a guinea for passage from the docks at Billingsgate to Scarborough on one of the coal boats going back empty from London to the Tyne.

The women bathed discreetly with the help of guides. A local poet complained that ‘A spreading Vest the nymph secures / And every prying glance defies’. The men could either ‘retire and undress at some distance from the company, or … push a little off the beach in boats’ and then ‘jump in naked directly’. The sea was considered safe enough for brisk exercise or medicinal baths. Indeed, the anonymous author of A Journey from London to Scarborough insisted: ‘What Virtues our Physicians ascribe to Cold Baths in general are much more effectual by the additional Weight of Salt in Sea water, an Advantage which no Spaw in England can boast of but Scarborough.’

Seawater, like spa water, was meant to cure sickness. Doctors were immediately and deeply worried; water was a rival to the chemical medicines they prescribed. There was an obvious need for ‘more careful analysis of spa water’, as Dr Simpson wrote in 1669, a ‘chymical anatomy’ to show what chemical medicines it happened to contain; only then could the sea be approved and annexed by the medical men. When the analysis was done, in the 1730s, it became a matter of civic pride and general interest, something important about the friendly trivia of the seaside: Scarborough, tourists and residents, all went to public lectures about exactly what they were drinking.⁵

Now waters had once been a matter of another kind of faith: holy waters, holy springs and wells, found by saints and other amateur hopefuls. Scarborough’s spring was first found, or so a Dr Wittie wrote in 1667, by a Mrs Farrow, who was walking on the beach in the 1620s and noticed that stones had been turned russet by a noisy, bubbling spring at the foot of ‘an exceedingly high cliffe’. She liked the taste of the waters. She thought they would do people good.

Word spread.

Dr Wittie wrote a little book to make sure that it was doctors who prescribed them. He already believed in bathing because that was what the English did at spas: they drank the waters, but they also bathed in them, unlike the Europeans, who thought drinking was quite enough. He told men with a taste for port wine to go swimming in the sea because that was how he had cured his own gout, ‘frequent bathing in the Sea-water cold, in Summer time … after which I take a Sweat in a warm bed’. The summer months were the best; Dr Wittie was quite shocked that ‘in German spas, they drink in winter’.

He knew that ‘many go to the spaws not for necessity but for pleasure, to withdraw themselves a while from their serious imployments and solace with their friends’. But pleasure, too, was going to be the business of doctors: a modern profession staking claims on as much of life as possible. Swimming itself was no longer simple exercise. Dr Robert White wrote on the ‘Use and Abuse of Sea Water’ in 1775 to warn that ‘they who are in full health and strength should not sport with such recreations so freely’. They could perhaps bathe early in the day, but the more nervous cases should wait until ‘a little before noon’; ‘nobody should continue above a minute in the water’. Seawater might be less of a shock than the stone cold of spring water, but even so Dr White felt obliged to warn of the ‘Fatal Effects of Bathing in Healthy Persons’. He told how ‘a man, about 40 years of age, who had lived a sober and temperate life, was induced to bathe in the sea’. The man didn’t think of himself as a patient so he went into the water without being bled and without being purged, and without a doctor’s say-so; the consequence, so Dr White says, was ‘violent pain which shot through his head, great dizziness and a fatal Apoplectic fit’.

The sea was ‘useful’ against leprosy, he thought, ‘of great use’ against epilepsy, and able to take away jaundice. The sea could also cure gonorrhoea, which might be a comforting thought for randy gentlemen but no consolation at all for the next person they bedded. Even so, he reckoned people were not careful enough with ‘so general and popular a Medicine’ because ‘the Stomach and Bowels are kept in constant agitation’ by it. He recorded ‘the propensity which people of all ranks have discovered towards Sea Bathing’.

It was not only the English. The Dutch went walking on the beach in the seventeenth century, the boys throwing the girls in the sea at Scheveningen every spring, everyone drinking. Their prince-like stadhouder had a sand yacht with sails and wheels to bowl along the strand. The spas brought people to the seaside, but the seaside took on a life of its own: there were beaches that did not need a doctor’s licence, a new kind of resort like Norderney on the German North Sea coast, like Ostend and Boulogne, like Doberan on the Baltic, places you went simply for pleasure. Anyone could flirt with the water, visit and go home when they wanted. They turned the waves and currents into a backdrop for very urban ideas of how to be well, stay fit, look good and be amused. The old business of the sea was hidden away and the new business was holiday. The harbour at Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, had been famous and hustling for a thousand years, but in the nineteenth century the town faced only stagnation and oblivion unless it installed a bathing station, a place for bathers to change clothes and take a drink; or so the promoters of the bathing station claimed.⁶

Reality was screened off behind the bathing huts and seafront attractions and later the piers and donkey rides and fish and chip shops, behind archery stalls and bowling greens (as at Blackpool) and music halls and bright electric lights. The secret was secure. By the late nineteenth century Mr Baedeker’s Handbooks for Travellers, usually so meticulous on artworks and the cost of transport, did not seem to notice what was missing. His guide to the Netherlands gets after a while to Middelburg in the coastal region of Zeeland, and all the excursions possible from there.⁷ He noted the omnibus which ran twice daily to a ‘small bathing place’ called Domburg, ‘frequented by Germans, Dutchmen and Belgians’; he mentioned ‘pleasant walks in the neighbourhood’. He tells you the price of a two-horse carriage to get there, and full board at the Bad-Hôtel.

He does not mention what happened at Domburg, even though people still alive remembered. It was at that ‘small bathing place’, on a lovely beach, that the sea gave back its secret: its history.

High winds tore up the dunes and made the sea wild in the first days of January 1647. The sand was forced out of the way to show something in the subsoil that should never have been there: stone. There is no stone at all on the coast near Domburg; there is only sand, peat, clay. So someone must have brought the blocks on the foreshore from far away – from seven hundred kilometres away in the quarries of northern France as we now know – and moving it must have been serious business; one stone weighed two tons and no machine in 1647 could shift it. An excited letter to Amsterdam, which went into print as a newsletter, reported: ‘About a fortnight ago some great stones of white limestone appeared on the beach near the sea.’⁸

There was also what looked like ‘a little house with the base of columns’. There were half-erased images on the stones, prayers to a goddess called Nehalennia, thanking her for success, for the welfare of a son, for the safe passage of goods across the sea. That made it likely that the ‘little house’ was some kind of temple. The remains of trees, petrified and salted, suggested the kind of grove that was often planted around temples. The newsletter was sure that what the sea uncovered was ‘a monument of greatest antiquity’.

Among the stones were altars to known gods – Neptune, of course, for the sea and sailors, and Hercules – but Nehalennia with her twenty-six altars had been unknown for more than a millennium. On the altars she sits under a shell-shaped canopy, which makes her a goddess of Heaven like Venus or Juno or Minerva, or she stands on the prow of a ship on an unquiet sea; she sometimes has a throne, often there is a basket of apples around, and there is always a fine-faced dog gazing up at her. Ships were not always just a means of transport; they have a curiously deep connection with fertility in people’s minds, especially Northerners’, so it seems she was the local goddess of good harvests, good luck at sea, even good connections like carts and roads.⁹ She had once been everything to the people around Domburg, and she had been entirely forgotten.

There was huge excitement across learnèd Europe: something unknown had come out of the sea. Now the past began to come back and wash away and come back again as though history itself were a sea in motion. Peter de Buk, an old man from Domburg, remembered that in 1684, ‘during the very cold winter, when the ice piled up very high on the beach’, the immovable stone started to loosen and then shift and then ‘gradually it moved to the sea’. The ballplayers who had used the stone for years, so the local Minister said, had to find somewhere else to play.

Three years later there was a storm so violent that in the morning there were bodies on the beach: ancient bodies, each in a coffin of wood a couple of centimetres thick. The skulls all faced west. The coffins were full of sand. There were slim, ornate chains around the necks with coins hanging on them; one skeleton had a goblet stacked on its chest, another had a silver dagger at its side. Christians were not supposed to bury goods with the dead, so the graves must have been made before the coast started to turn Christian round 700 – or after Christians had been beaten inland a century and a half later by Viking raiders. 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.

In 1715 a very low tide stretched the land out so far that there were the remains of wells to be seen, and the foundations of buildings. One more statue appeared: a great headless Victory, in the middle of what was certainly a temple of some sort, paved with round and square stones. Victory stayed stranded for years until she was carted bodily inland and parked in the local church. She survived, turning green now that she was out of the salt water and in the rains, but she was ruined when lightning brought down the church in 1848. The remains of this ancient Domburg were reduced to a few damaged pieces and two cubic metres of rubble dumped in the garden of the town clerk.

The dead did not stay away. The cemetery was uncovered again in 1749 and in 1817: twenty rough and worm-eaten coffins held together with wooden pegs, no nails, and locked down in the sand by the sheer weight of the old dunes. There were round brooches on the right shoulder of each body, sometimes on the chest, which looked like money for a sea goddess to buy safety, maybe treasure for a new life. One corpse was buried with a sword. But the locals knew about buried things by now and what they might be worth, and they went through the coffins secretly and wouldn’t say exactly where they found what. They were busy selling to the Amsterdam collectors.

The shoreline kept changing with the winds and tides, so when the low tide pulled back in 1832 it opened a quite different site, one that would be seen again and for the last time in 1866: the scattered outlines of houses, and a burial ground with the coffins laid out like a star on the sand. There were now three different stories under the rough water. There was a Roman temple to an unknown goddess which stood at the point where ships went out into the open sea and looked as though it was abandoned very suddenly. There were the remains of a settlement along the shore, a single road laid out east to west with wooden huts for storing and sorting goods and enough coins to prove it was a place of serious business. And there were graves that had to be un-Christian because they were rich with pretty bronzes decorated with animal masks, and a square-cut silver collar. These looked like Viking things.¹⁰

The written record shows only faint traces of all the life that the money and altars and grave goods suggest. Nobody mentioned Domburg or anything like it in surviving Roman writings, but then Romans were deeply provincial at the heart of their empire and quite usually ignored their own rich provinces. When the scholar Alcuin came to write the life of St Willibrord, he told of the saint evangelizing on the island of Walcheren around 690 CE in a town ‘where an idol of the old errors still stood’; this is the site of Domburg, which was an island before man started reorganizing the coastline. Willibrord smashed the statue in front of its guardian, who in a fit of mad anger struck the saint on his head with a sword. ‘But,’ as Alcuin writes, ‘God looked after his servant.’ Magnanimously, the saint saved the pagan from those who wanted to punish him, and from the demon occupying his soul, but the man died anyway three days later, as persons who have been seized by angry crowds tend to do.¹¹

In the annals, the histories that monks kept for their own use, there are references to a brutal Viking raid in 837 on Domburg – ‘in insula quae Walacra dicitur’, on the island called Walcheren – in which many were killed, many women taken off, and ‘countless money of various kinds’ was shipped out, and the Norsemen were left with the power to organize regular payments of tribute. That single hidden street on one great dune was evidently a rich little place, worth pillaging.

We read about raids and struggles, but the ground itself tells a rather different story. When modern archaeologists investigated sites around the beach, they found nothing much to suggest war, nothing burned or smashed or piled up: none of the bloody events that make up the usual kind of history, the events that people record. There were just centuries of life, and its slow, sad retreat as the sand blew inland, with nothing much of value left behind: except of course the dead.

All that vigour got itself buried on a sandy bit of shore, where the bathers played and still play to this day.

This book is about rediscovering that lost world, and what it means to us: the life around the North Sea in times when water was the easiest way to travel, when the sea connected and carried peoples, belief and ideas, as well as pots and wine and coal. 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.

Consider what had to change after the end of the Roman Empire in order to take us to the start of the cities, states and habits that we now know: our law, our idea of love, our way of business and our need for an enemy in order to define ourselves. Traders brought coins and money, and with them an abstract idea of value that made mathematics and modern science possible. Viking raids built as many towns as they ruined, and towns free from bishops and lords could start a new kind of trade. That created a community of people who did business, strong enough and self-conscious enough to go to war with royal and political powers: our world of tension between money and every other power.

Humans changed the landscape and, in the course of learning to manage the damage to the natural world, they also spread the idea of being free and having rights. Travel around the sea made fashion possible, and visible, and desirable; we have not yet escaped. Women’s choices, including celibacy or pregnancy on their own terms or else marriage, changed the economic life of the North Sea in quite unexpected ways.

Law changed from the local customs everybody knew to a language and a set of texts that needed lawyers: professions were born, first priests, who had to stay out of the secular world, then lawyers, who made law into a kind of religion, then doctors and all the rest. Without that, we would have no idea of a middle class: people whose power came from being experts. Plague began to separate the poor into the worthy and the unworthy, to allow authorities to regulate the intimate stuff of life – how to raise children and where to live – and eventually to put up barriers between cities and nations; all of which was, of course, for our own good, just like airport security or constant surveillance. Co-operating to save the land from flooding, to send out a ship with many cargoes or insure it, to organize cash when taking fish to the Baltic and grain back to Amsterdam: on this we built, eventually, capitalism. And all this time facts and information were becoming one more commodity, just as they are today.

All this happened in the times that most of us don’t really know: the millennium and more between what we all think we know of imperial Rome – armies, straight roads, villas, temples, central heating and snails for dinner – and what we think we know of Amsterdam in all its seventeenth-century imperial glory – fleets, herring, gold, gin, paintings, gables and clean, swept streets. Between these two visions, between roughly 700 and 1700 CE, lie times that we still unthinkingly call the ‘Dark Ages’ and then the ‘Middle Ages’, which, as we all know, consist entirely of castles, damsels, knights and lovely illuminated manuscripts. It is as though we imagine human invention and perversity and will were suspended for centuries, as though life turned into decor.

Documents do get lost or burned or rotted, of course; the written record is bound to be imperfect. Documents keep best when some long-lived institution needs them in a building like the cathedrals which can survive a thousand years or so. A letter about planting crops or buying shirts may disappear along with love letters and old court records; but a charter for land belonging to the Church is very likely to survive. Only bits of life are written down and kept, and they are recorded for very particular reasons and only from some special viewpoint – judge or bishop or king or abbot. They leave out what everyone knew at the time, what nobody wanted mentioned at the time. Even written histories with great authority, based on all the written histories before them, are best treated only as clues to the past.

We have great good luck, though. We now have a whole new kind of evidence to fill some of the gaps, and watch as our view of history changes almost beyond recognition. Archaeology uncovers and reveals, just like the sea at Domburg; but unlike the sea, it does so systematically, providing evidence to set alongside the written record. The picture is suddenly wider; we see life and connections. Sometimes what’s dug up will be a flat contradiction of familiar texts and the archives we would like to trust because they are what we have. Sometimes, it will be hard to interpret because each pile of objects grubbed out of the ground makes sense only when it is put into context, and deciding on the context means we have to rely on what we think we already know from other finds in other places.

Bring the words and the objects together, though, and the new story is much more convincingly human. Life no longer stops dead when Rome falls and the empire collapses and the tradition of classical Latin writing comes to an end, not even when the Saxons and Vandals and Goths and Huns make their various pushes to the west. Human beings didn’t lose their ability to connect, trade, fight wars and generally move about to change their lives just because there are so few surviving documents; indeed, they didn’t lose their ability to write and read those documents. Life goes on; we just need different tools to find and describe it.

Roman towns sometimes survived, but they changed. Roman roads still worked, as did the old Roman system of posthouses where you could rest on a long journey, change horses and ride on. Useful ploughs and workshop tools didn’t disappear from the land because historians decreed a change of era; indeed, some rather advanced devices like horizontal watermills were built centuries before we can trace them in documents. The technology of travel – from the hogging trusses that ran the length of a boat to make it seaworthy by tightening bow and stern, to the sun compasses which allowed navigation out of sight of the shore – was always developing; people wanted to move and were thinking hard about how to do it. The very shape of the world and its limits were shifting in people’s minds.

Take away the idea of dark times and ruin and you begin to hear other voices. Women were not always silent, or without the power to make choices – we may just have been listening in the wrong places; the erudite and holy Hildegard of Bingen lived out most of the twelfth century as a nun, had visions, was a mystic, wrote music appropriate for her convent life, but she also wrote letters all round Europe at the heart of a learnèd conversation. She knew how to make contraception work, and she wrote about that, too.

To find this story means burrowing through libraries and staring at ploughed fields, both. It means close attention to what people recorded of the stones on the beach at Domburg and then imagining all the connections that the story contains: human beings in movement, along with anything they can make, think or believe. Nothing is ever quite new, or settled, or empty. Frontiers shift. Languages change. Peoples migrate. The Romans built a temple to send their merchant ships out to the sea, then merchants made a trading town whose name we’ve lost, then the Vikings who were famous for raiding and pillaging settled down here; this one beach holds the story of a world always changing, always on the move. There are also the weapons that invading Frankish soldiers left behind around 800 CE. Armies travelled and power shifted; but sometimes the biggest changes came when peoples travelled, and not always when and why the schoolbooks told us. Identity became a matter of where you were and where you last came from, not some abstract notion of race; peoples were not separated sharply as they were by nineteenth-century frontiers, venturing out only to conquer or be conquered. Indeed, quite often they ventured out to change sides.

Instead of the dark mistakes about pure blood, racial identity, homogeneous nations with their own soul and spirit and distinct nature, we have something far more exciting: the story of people making choices, not always freely, sometimes under fearsome pressure, but still choosing and inventing and making lives for themselves.

The idea of ‘darkness’ is our mistake. What our forefathers lived could better be called the ‘long morning’ of our world.

To be clear: none of this is at all modern, because it belongs to a time of quite different thinking and behaviour. Distance wasn’t the same, the maps of the world were not the same, the institutions may have similar names but they were quite different from the ones we know. The necessary conditions of the world we know could have grown into a quite different world. But if we can tease out what happened, and why, then we can begin to see how our modern ways and times became possible – from the calendar to a futures market, from the first publishers of holy manuscripts to experimental science.

There is one more complication in this story: how we tell it, usually. We see the glories of our past through the screen of the Southern Renaissance, when civilization was rediscovered, they say, on the shores of the Mediterranean in pages that had been written a thousand years earlier around the same sea. The law that started to order societies in a way we find more familiar is called Roman law. The Church across Northern Europe was organized from Rome. It seems downright obvious that the North was just waiting to be civilized from the South; after all, Christianity came from there. As early as 723 a bishop called Daniel was telling a saint called Boniface that his best argument against Northern pagans was to point out that the world was becoming Christian and their gods were doing nothing at all about it; ‘the Christians possess lands rich in oil and wine and abounding in other resources, they have left to the pagans lands stiff with cold where their gods, driven out of the world, are falsely supposed to rule’.¹²

When we talk of ‘Dark Ages’ we emphasize war, invasion, raids and conquests, even genocide; but we have all that at home, in our own time, and we still live our lives. Until quite recently it was possible to write of ‘mass exterminations’ when the Anglo-Saxons crossed the North Sea to take power over Britons and Britain, a wiping away of one people by another, even though the evidence suggests a far longer, gentler and more friendly process.¹³ We were in danger of forgetting what really happened around the sea, in its zone of trade and faith, which stretched at least from Dublin to Gdansk, from Bergen to Dover. Around the Mediterranean we take for granted links and influences, back and forth: the biblical stories, the epic voyages in Homer and Hesiod, the trade routes from east to west and back again. The North Sea had most of those things, and the consequences were remarkable.

I mean to tell that story as best I can find it in the sources and in the work of scholars round the sea. This is not a chauvinist exercise; the South is no less important because we remember what happened in the North. This is an attempt to paint a fuller, more colourful and more precise picture of where we come from.

The seaside mob never went very far beyond the comforts of the shore. We’re going out further, even if it means going out of our depth.

There was a time when nobody could imagine going further: the northern sea was the very edge of the world. In 16 CE the Roman Drusus Germanicus tried to take his fleet north and was beaten back by storms; the poet Albinovanus Pedo was with him and wrote that the gods were calling them back to stop them seeing the very end of everything. Pedo wondered why their ships were violating these foreign seas and stirring up the quiet homes of the gods. For the northern sea was not just, as the Arab geographer Al Idrisi wrote, ‘the sea of perpetual gloom’,¹⁴ it was the place where the oceans clashed, where the tides were made as the waters rushed in and out of bottomless caves and the waters fell away into ‘primordial and first matter, that was in the beginning of the world … called the abyss’.¹⁵

The seventh-century Isidore of Seville thought the known earth ‘was called orbis because it was like a wheel with the ocean flowing all around it’. This ocean had to be much smaller than the dry land, because the apocryphal Book of Esdras told God so: ‘on the third day, You ordered the waters to collect in a seventh part of the earth; the other six parts You made dry land.’ But it was also a formidable obstacle, a barricade around the continents; perhaps too wild, but more likely too shallow, too muddy, too full of weeds to be crossed. It might just be possible to pass through the hot and torrid zones to the south, but the frozen north was the very end of the world.¹⁶

The barrier was not just physical. The sea was a place of evil, where lived the biblical Leviathan, monster of the deep. The Antichrist, the ‘man of pride’, rode backwards on the head of a sea dragon just as the Vikings rode on ships with snakes’ heads for prows.¹⁷ Genesis and the Book of Job confirmed what the geographers agreed: that the sea was unruly, that the dragon who lived there was the dragon of chaos, that the abyss lay in wait. When the Book of Revelations promised that the sea would be no more, it was understood to mean the end of evil itself.¹⁸

This was a sea that was hardly known, waiting to be explored: a zone between Heaven and Earth, between the familiar coastline and whatever lay out in the waters. The Irish told extraordinary holy tales about sea voyages, called immrama,¹⁹ which means ‘rowing about’; they told how hermits took to the sea because they wanted to settle somewhere far away and entirely peaceful. Saints sailed off to find the promised land to the west, the islands of the blessed.

These are fables full of wonders, but also very practical advice. In the eighth-century Voyage of St Brendan, a holy saga about going to Heaven and the gates of Hell, there are also instructions on how to make a boat for such a voyage, a coracle built of oxhide and oak bark on a wooden frame and then greased with animal fat. We are told that the saint and his fellow voyagers took along spare skins and extra fat.²⁰ The sea was there to be used, even if it took a saint to make the attempt, and although some of the marvels are doubtful – like being stranded for months each year on the back of a highly complaisant whale – some of the ones that seem most fanciful are teasingly likely.

The sailors see a high mountain rising out of the sea behind sheer black cliffs, its peak hidden in what looks like cloud but turns out to be smoke. The mountain vomits flames sky-high and then seems to suck them back. The rocks, right down to the sea, glow red like fire. Here Brendan and his crew find Judas Iscariot crouching on a bare rock, waves crashing over his head, which he says is a grateful respite; at night he goes back to the mountain, the home of the great Leviathan, where demons torture him for his sin and he burns ‘like a lump of molten lead in a crucible, day and night’.²¹

The sinners and demons, the notion that the mountain welcomes damned souls with a joyful blast of flames, do not make a historical record, although they make a very powerful lesson for the faithful. But we’re told that when Brendan turns away from the mountain island he is heading south; that implies the island must lie far to the north. Far north of Ireland, where the Voyage was written, is volcanic Iceland, and seas where small islands do indeed suddenly come smoking up out of the water along one of the major fault lines of the Earth. Brendan’s voyage is a voyage to known places after all.

The monk Dicuil wrote about all the islands to the north of Ireland: ‘Among these, I have lived in some, and have visited others; some I have only glimpsed while others I have read about.’²² Most likely he never got further than the Hebrides or maybe the Orkneys, but others went much further: as far as Thule, the half-mythical island to the very north of everything. Dicuil quotes classical writers who knew about an island which in summer ‘shines both by day and by night under the rays of the sun’ and in winter has no day at all. He also writes that ‘clerics, who had lived on the island from the first of February to the first of August, told me that [around the days of the summer solstice] the setting sun hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no darkness in that very small space of time’. He says a man had enough light to pick the lice out of his shirt at night.

This Thule sounds very much like Iceland.

More, the early-twelfth-century Book of the Icelanders says that when the Norsemen first began to settle Iceland around 870, they found priests already living there, but the priests refused to live with heathens and they went away, leaving ‘Irish books and bells and croziers from which one could know that they were Irishmen’.²³ So for all Dicuil’s other stories of men born with horse’s feet, others with ears large enough to cover their whole bodies, and elks whose upper lip hangs down so much they can eat only if they walk backwards, not to mention the difficulty of trapping unicorns because they make so much noise, there is fact here: the fact of constant, eager movement on the sea.

The sea was not yet criss-crossed with long established trade routes and war routes like the Mediterranean; in the North, the sea was still full of legend, so when men went sailing they knew they were testing the edge of the world. Around 1075 the bishop Adam of Bremen wrote his dubious history of the previous archbishops of the northern German town of Bremen. He was writing from a seaport where he could listen to what sailors thought they knew about the sea. He reckoned the way north went through the seas around Orkney, water so thick with salt a ship needed strong winds to pass, and led on to Iceland with its black ice so old it would burn. ‘Beyond Norway, which is the farthermost northern country, you will find no human habitation, nothing but ocean, terrible to look upon and limitless, encircling the whole world.’ Black mist would come down here, the seas would go wild, and you would come to the point where all the tides of the sea are sucked into the deeps and then vomited back. If you still kept sailing, sailing, as King Harald Hardrada did, you would come to the ‘darksome bounds of a failing world’; ‘by retracing his step he barely escaped in safety the vast pit of the abyss’.²⁴

Men wanted to cross that abyss, to find what lay beyond. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth century, the anonymous author of the History of Norway thought he knew all about the dangers and the wonders of the north. He knew there were whirlpools and frozen headlands which send huge icebergs headlong into the sea; and sea monsters that swallow down sailors, horse-whales with spreading manes and giants without head or tail.²⁵ He says that in living memory the sea came to boil and the earth gave out fire and a great mountain came up out of the waters; but he is a sophisticated man, and he doubts that this is any kind of evil omen. He says only that God understands it; and we don’t.

What interests him now is not the terror of the sea, but what you find when you get across it. Adam of Bremen filled the north with men who never walked, only hopped on one foot, and those who ate human flesh (‘as they are shunned, so may they also rightfully be passed over in silence’). There were Goths and blue men, worshippers of dragons and Prussians who seemed ‘a most humane people’. There were dogheaded men and men with one eye in the middle of their foreheads; and when the Amazons gave birth, which they did after seducing passing merchants, or forcing their male captives, or perhaps just by sipping water, the boys that resulted had their heads on their chests and the girls became beautiful women who drove away any man who even came close. The edge of the world was also the edge of reason.²⁶

Between the time the story of Brendan was first composed and the writing of the History of Norway many ships had been sailing out north and out west, carrying people and cargoes and using the sea that once had been a source of pure, holy terror. The change is profound, but not at all complete: there was still a great unknown beyond the ice in the north, a place to be filled up with stories. Yet the mystics of Germany and the Netherlands, who once used the sea as a symbol of hostile, purifying space, now start to use the desert as their metaphor instead. The sea is too busy, too practical; the desert is still pure and utterly strange. The sea was beginning to be known. When the mystic Hadewijch writes about water in the thirteenth century, she does not see it as the terrifying prospect it once was; the abyss is no longer a threat to life or the end of the world, for her it is a way to think about the tempestuous nature of God himself and the way you can be lost in love. Leviathan has, for the moment, gone away.²⁷

There were other monsters still present and they travelled. Polar bears and their pelts hardly ever turn up in customs records, but the ferocious live beasts were brought to Norway as bribes, and successful ones: they even turn up, but not often, at the French and English courts.²⁸ The edgy North had become like Africa and Asia: a distant place, a strange place, but a source of wonders that could be known, traded and used.

Take the medieval tale of Audun: a man with almost nothing, who had to work and live with relatives in the Westfjords of Iceland and had a mother dependent on him. He did have luck, though, and it got him a bear. In Iceland almost everything was sold on credit, because people had to be able to eat in spring even if the wool and the cloth that they traded for food would not be ready until summer. They depended for supplies on sea captains from Norway, who had a pressing interest in knowing who was truly creditworthy. Audun helped one captain so well that he was offered passage to Greenland. He sold off his sheep to support his mother, because by law he had to provide her with enough to take her through six seasons – three winters, three summers – and he sailed out.²⁹

On Greenland he met a hunter with a polar bear that was ‘exceptionally beautiful with red cheeks’. He offered the man all the money he had to buy the bear; the man told him that wasn’t wise, and Audun said he didn’t care. He wanted to make his mark on the world by giving the bear away to a king: a gift as exotic, as rare, as any rhinoceros given to a Pope in later centuries.

Shipping a polar bear for days out at sea in a small boat is wild, but not implausible. A bishop on his way from Iceland to the mainland to be consecrated took with him ‘a white bear from Greenland and the animal was the greatest of treasures’; the beast ended up in the Emperor’s menagerie. When Greenlanders wanted a bishop of their own in 1125 they sent a bear to the King of Norway to encourage him, and the ploy worked.³⁰ Bears went much further, in fact. King Håkon of Norway sealed his deal with King Henry III of England with gifts of falcons, furs, whale tusks, a live elk and a live polar bear.³¹ The monsters of the North start to seem almost domestic; the law in Iceland, where any polar bear at all was a rare sight on the floating ice, laid down that ‘if a man has a tame white bear then he is to handle it in the same way as a dog’.

Audun found himself penniless, in the middle of a warzone, with a starving bear who could be forgiven for considering his minder as lunch; his journey south took so long that even if the bear was a cub in Greenland it must have been big and hungry now. The King of Norway offered to buy the beast, but Audun refused and kept moving. He made it across to Denmark, but now he had quite literally nothing except a bear that was starving to death; a courtier offered both of them food, on condition he could own half the bear. Audun had no choice.

This is a story, so naturally the Danish king saves Audun and his