For example he came to understand and predict the tides and established the correct date for Easter. Bede is the best known of these, and he not only copied Bibles and other texts but created new knowledge making use of observations from his network of colleagues from as far away as Ireland and the Faroes. The book trade is about the church and monks who preserved and copied religious and other texts, valued as gifts to nobility and as information. The invention of money, takes us deeper into the intriguing lives of the Frisians, seen by the Romans to be too poor to be bothered conquering, yet they reinvented money and were great traders making use of their own resources to aquire food and building materials they could not get at home. Pye wants us to think of this broad period into which he will paint as not the Dark Ages but 700, of the Frisians from the intertidal marine marshland of what is now the Belgian coast. Beginning with the seaside in the early 1700s changing from an industrial zone to a playground for the idle English upper class then a story from the start, ca. The Introduction is a big mouthfull to begin with, a veritable Wagnerian prelude, a rich and compelling exercise in world-building.
The list of chapter titles gives an indication of the scope and of the momentum of the narrative, and indeed of the trajectory of the North Sea lands through this period: The invention of money, The book trade, Making enemies, Settling, Fashion, Writing the law, Overseeing nature, Science and money, Dealers rule, Love and capital, The plague laws, The city and the world. Pye’s method is to connect quotes from original manuscripts with his own interpretation of what the original material says about the environment and cultural setting.
The book is deeply researched and has extensive endnotes but unlike many others of similar depth, is still a pure pleasure to read. He aims to dispel the myth that this is a dark age in which nothing much happened, to offer a counter-point to the history of the Mediterranean countries and the Italian renaissance. Michael Pye’s wonderfully readable history is about the North Sea lands in the period after the retreat of the Roman empire and up to the Dutch renaissance of the 1700s.
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