How the North Sea made us who we are, by Michael Pye

Ignorance is a wonderful thing: it stings you into writing books. Knowing you don’t know something and wanting to know it is a force which will take you through a dozen libraries, into the archives and the stacks and the deep dark vaults of the internet, will carry you north into Norway, west to Dublin, east to Gdansk and south to Calais, will get you talking to historians, translators, to archaeologists and museum people, to curators and diggers and people who just think.

At least, that’s what it did for me.

I was brought up on the edge of the North Sea, but I was a seaside kid: I stopped just out of my depth. I knew about shingle beaches, seaweed in the water, ice cream, games on the pier and those tiny, brown North Sea shrimp. The sea was a destination, and the sea meant the shore.

The seaside is something trivial, but the sea has a history of its own and I didn’t know it. I started to wonder about other gaps in my knowledge: in particular, the chasm that stretches from the fall of the Roman empire to the rise of the great trading cities on the North Sea, to Antwerp’s blowsy glory, to Amsterdam’s gilded power. The question: what happened between the fall of one empire and the start of the great European empires that went out across oceans?

It had to be something remarkable, and it happened somewhere and somehow around the North Sea. Now I do know some history, but none of it started to answer my questions. I had to go out and find out and since that can be an exhilarating business, I wasn’t sorry for the chance.

The start was in the Netherlands, at the beach by Domburg: a seaside place, kids and waves, but a remarkable place because long ago, in the 1640s, the winds got up and the tide pulled back and uncovered a history that nobody had bothered to put in writing. There were stones on the beach, and there is no stone on that coast. Some of the stones were carved as thank offerings for good voyages or good business, and addressed to a goddess whose name nobody knew: Nehalennia. There was a Roman port which Romans did not bother to record.

The tide and wind kept playing tricks at Domburg. One year, the sand moved and there was a line of wood huts along the shore, just the foundations, like the small warehouses of a working port; and they were after Roman times. Then the dead came visiting: a cluster of coffins on the beach, stuffed with sand, all the skulls facing West. Then the dead came again, different bodies, different coffins, this time laid out in the shape of a star, and buried with grave goods which meant they could not be Christians; and yet they came from a time after the missionaries arrived.

History after history, one community after another, was briefly on show on the sands. And none of them was written down in the annals or the chronicles, none of them was mentioned. There was talk of raids, killings, Vikings who came ashore after money or women, but nothing about this constant steady life around the sea. When later archaeologists did the sea’s work, but scientifically, there was the same remarkable absence: some weapons, but no burned houses, no ruined places, no graves that suggested the end of battles.

There was life that we’d forgotten. The usual histories – marauding Vikings, warring tribes, unpronounceable kings doing a vague kind of politics – seemed to fade away. I looked at the Domburg story, I read the archaeologist’s reports, and I started to realise there was a whole new history to tell.

This history doesn’t treat the sea as a barrier, because it wasn’t. Travel over the sea was far easier than rocking along rotten roads on a cart without springs. There were pirates, but there were robbers on land. There were bad winds and bad currents, but you could always keep close to the shore or stop shipping out in winter. The sea connected peoples and it made the idea of frontiers irrelevant.

Then things started to happen in quite surprising ways. Marsh people out of Frisia wanted grain and wine and timber, and they had to go trading, rowing and poling their flat-bottomed boats from the English Channel to the coasts of Norway. To trade, they had to use cash. After the fall of Rome, money was mostly gold for paying taxes but they brought back silver in small coins to pay for the goods they wanted. They used money every day and that meant they had an idea of value, what made this heap of sheepskins the same value as this jar of wine. They were bringing mathematics into life.

In time, that changed how people thought, made it possible to imagine a new kind of science, made people open when the great Greek texts of the likes of Euclid were rediscovered.

Meantime, people went about and saw how other people dressed and wanted to dress the same way. Fashion got started, and not in great courts with fancy ladies; it started on the docks in places like Bergen, where the same brawling killers from the sagas started fretting about the length of their robes and the height of their shoes.

The more I looked, the more I saw all the necessary conditions for a modern world being invented in the rush of traders and raiders around the North Sea. I also began to realise that the sea mattered wherever people from around the sea could travel. The Vikings came to Ireland and left behind a new kind of town, an independent sort of place, the start of Dublin and Cork and Waterford. It was a town traders made, not dependent on a church, a convent or a lord.

There’s wonder and excitement in the documents, in the digs, in piecing together the story that they tell; but there’s even more when you start to see the connections from Dublin to Gdansk. The world was in motion, long before we settled for frontiers and nations and passports. There was change at the edge of the world, born of friction, clashes, co-operation, seeing how other people do things and wondering why.

I’d started with what seemed like simple questions and found myself in the middle of a glorious, Technicolor, wide-screen epic of a world that I had never guessed might have existed. It made those memories of stopping at the seashore seem very far away.

The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (Viking Penguin £25) by Michael Pye