The government of the Carolingian empire looks simple enough at first sight, but it worked in a way we now find hard to imagine, because almost nothing existed of what we take for granted under the word "state": no police, no standing army in most places, no civil service, hardly any written law in the hands of ordinary people. Power was not something impersonal proceeding from an institution. Power was personal, and it rested on loyalty.

The king and the counts

At the summit stood the king, anointed and set in place by God, at least in theory the source of all worldly authority. But the king could not possibly be everywhere at once, and so he ruled through men who represented him. The most important of these was the count (in Latin comes). A count was not a nobleman who owned a territory as a later nobility would own it; he was originally an officer of the king, appointed to dispense justice in a particular district — the county — on the sovereign's behalf, to keep the peace, to lead the men to war and to collect the royal dues.

In return for that service the count enjoyed income and standing, and often received land in fief — a benefice — which he might use for as long as he discharged his office and his loyalty. Here already lay the seed of a tension that would shape the whole Middle Ages: what the king intended as a temporary office and a loan, the counts tended to treat as a hereditary possession. As central authority weakened — and in the ninth century it weakened continually — the counts grew more powerful and more independent, and began to pass their office to their sons as though it were their property. In that development, which unfolded everywhere in the empire, lies the origin of the later territorial princes — and thus of the counts of Holland as well.

The bond of loyalty

What held all this together was the oath. The relationship between king and count, between lord and man, was one of mutual, personal fidelity, solemnly sworn and held to be sacred. The man promised his lord counsel and support, above all in war; the lord promised his man protection and maintenance. To break such an oath was not merely a crime but a mortal sin, an assault on the order God had established. That explains why treachery — the central theme of this novel — was held in this world to be so peculiarly abominable: it injured not only a man, but the very fabric by which society hung together.

At the same time, history shows how frail that fabric was in practice. The annals are full of broken oaths, of counts rising against their king, of allies betraying one another the moment it suited them. The murder of the Viking king Godfrid, of which more later, is a telling example: a man was lured to a meeting under promise of peace and killed there. The oath was sacred, and the oath was constantly violated, and both things were true at once.

Justice and the assembly of the people

Justice was not administered by professional judges but in public assemblies — in our regions called the thing — where the free men of a district gathered under the presidency of the count or his deputy. There disputes were settled, crimes tried and decisions taken. The law applied was not statute issued by the king in the modern sense, but inherited customary law, which the older and more experienced men were expected to know and to remember. The king could send out his envoys, the so-called missi dominici, to oversee matters and set abuses right, but in a remote coastal region such as Frisia such supervision was rare, and in practice the district largely regulated its own affairs.

The particular position of Frisia

Within this whole, Frisia occupied a place of its own. The Frisians were known as a comparatively free people, with strikingly little of the high nobility that dominated the land elsewhere. Many Frisians were free farmers who worked their own ground and acknowledged no one above them save, in the last instance, the king and the count he had appointed. The image of "Frisian freedom" would later, in the High Middle Ages, grow into a cherished myth, and one must be careful not simply to paste that later conception onto the ninth century. But it is true that social relations there were flatter than in the south, that the grip of prince and nobility sat looser, and that a local lord such as Gerulf derived his authority rather from personal ascendancy, ability and the assent of his people than from any inviolable hereditary right.

The revenues of power

How was a kingdom without a system of taxation paid for? Not out of a treasury filled with tax money, as in a modern state, but chiefly out of landholding. The king possessed extensive domains throughout the realm — the so-called crown lands — which supplied him with food, goods and income; on these he and his court lived, and out of these he rewarded his loyal men with grants and fiefs. In addition the sovereign had a right to certain services and levies — tolls on trade, a share in the administration of justice, hospitality and contributions from those beneath him, and above all the duty of military service. Whoever received land in fief did not receive it for nothing: he owed his lord service, in counsel and, above all, in war. The whole edifice rested on this exchange of land for loyalty and service.

The counts become princes

Within this system lay, as has been said, the seed of its own transformation. So long as the king was strong, the count remained his servant. But whenever central authority weakened — through a minor on the throne, a disputed succession, or the endless pressure of the Northmen — the independence of those who exercised power on the spot increased. The count who defended his territory for generations, who left his office to his son, who had his own warriors and strongholds, became in practice less and less an officer and more and more a lord in his own right. At the end of the ninth century, the time of our novel, that development was in full swing. It is precisely in this transition — from royal servant to hereditary prince — that the story of a house such as that of Egmond takes place, and that is why a royal charter carried such weight: it confirmed, in writing and under the seal of the highest power, what a lineage had won for itself with the sword.

The society of early medieval Frisia was not a society of equals, but neither was it a rigid order of estates such as later centuries would know. It knew a number of clearly distinguished layers, and it was held together by a network of obligations, honour and — where these fell short — violence.

Free, half-free and unfree

Broadly speaking, three groups were distinguished. At the top stood the nobles or leading men, the families of standing from which the leaders came. Beneath them, and by far the most numerous in Frisia, stood the free: farmers and fishermen who ran their own households, were allowed to bear arms, took part in the thing and conducted their own lawsuits. At the bottom stood the half-free and the unfree or slaves, who possessed no full rights and whose labour belonged to a master. Slavery was an ordinary reality of this world; prisoners of war, the condemned and the descendants of the unfree formed an underclass that is seldom given a voice in the sources, but without whose labour the households of their betters could not have existed.

The Lex Frisionum and the wergild

Frisian law has come down to us in part in the Lex Frisionum, a record of Frisian customary law set down in writing around the year 800, in the time of Charlemagne. It is a curious and illuminating document, for it shows how this society thought about right and wrong. Almost every form of injury and violence was expressed in it as a sum of money: so much for a severed finger, so much for an eye, so much for a killing. That sum was called the wergild — literally the "man-price", the worth of a human being.

The purpose of this system was not cruelty but the reverse: it was meant to contain the blood feud. For without such a regulated reconciliation, a killing led to vengeance, and vengeance to counter-vengeance, and so to endless feuds between families that could tear whole districts apart. By expressing the damage in money, the law offered a way out: the killer or his family could pay the injured family, and so restore the peace. That this by no means always worked, and that honour often weighed heavier than money, hardly needs saying — the whole heroic literature of the Germanic world is about men who preferred vengeance to payment.

Honour and oath

Above money stood honour, and in this culture honour was no incidental thing but the pivot on which everything turned. A man's worth, his place in the community, the trust others extended to him — all of it hung upon his honour, and that honour was continually tested and confirmed. In the absence of written evidence, the law itself rested largely on the oath: an accused man could clear himself by solemnly swearing his innocence together with a number of "oath-helpers" who vouched for his trustworthiness. Where the oath fell short, one could even resort to the ordeal, on the assumption that God would protect the innocent in a trial by hot iron or water. In such a world a man's word, and the trust it deserved, was a matter of life and death — and treachery was the worst crime imaginable.

The blood tie as building block

Anyone who wishes to understand the society of this age must grasp that the most important bond in which a person lived was not the state and not the village, but kinship — the extended family, the kindred. Your kin were your protection and your obligation at once. They stood by you in a lawsuit and swore alongside you in your oath; they took vengeance if you were killed and helped pay if you killed someone; they were the first and often the only ones you could count on in need. A person without kin was a person without a shield, defenceless before the world. This gave the family a weight we can scarcely imagine, and it made a rupture within a family — discord between brothers, treachery among blood relations — something peculiarly unnatural and terrible. A house divided from within lost precisely that which protected a person most in this world.

Marriage and kinship

Marriage in this world was seldom a matter of the heart alone, and among the great almost never. It was a bond between families, an instrument for forging alliances, uniting land and sealing peace. A marriage could end a feud or raise a lineage; it was too important to be left to the feelings of those who married. We see this too in the history that underlies our novel: that the Viking king Godfrid was married to a daughter of the Carolingian house was not love but politics, an attempt to bind a dangerous man to the empire through kinship. That such bonds were broken as often as they were made, and that the blood which sealed them could also be the blood shed over them, is one of the cruel truths of the age.

Behind the kings and the wars, ordinary life went on — the life of the great majority who were never named in a chronicle. It is this life that the novel tries to make palpable, and it is here that archaeology has most to tell us.

The house and the yard

The heart of existence was the farmstead, and its most important building was the longhouse: a long, low structure with walls of timber or wattle and a thatched roof, sheltering man and beast under one covering. At one end lived the household, around an open hearth fire that gave warmth, light and the means of cooking, and that was never allowed to go out entirely; at the other end the cattle were stalled in winter. The warmth of the animals helped to heat the house, and their dung was precious, both for the land and for the raising of the terp. There were no chimneys; the smoke drew out through the roof and hung blue beneath the rafters, so that everything and everyone smelled of woodsmoke — a scent that returns again and again in the novel as the emblem of home and safety.

Farming, cattle and the sea

The Frisian coast dweller lived from a combination of stock-raising, arable farming and fishing, with the emphasis on livestock. The rich salt-marsh soils were pre-eminently suited to keeping cattle and sheep, and so much of the region's prosperity turned on the herd. Sheep supplied not only meat and milk but above all wool, the raw material for the Frisian cloth that was known and sought after far beyond the region. Cattle were wealth on four legs: draught power, milk, meat, leather, and a form of savings that multiplied itself.

There was arable farming too, on the higher grounds — barley, oats, rye, and pulses such as beans — but the wet, salty soil made it an uncertain business. The sea and the creeks supplied what the land lacked: fish, shellfish, seals, and the countless birds of the salt marshes and their eggs. Whoever wished to survive on this coast had to be able to do a little of everything, and above all had to read the water — the tides, the currents, the signs of weather and wind. That knowledge, embodied in the novel by the old fisherman Eilert, was no book learning but an inheritance passed from parent to child, and it could mean the difference between living and drowning.

Food, clothing and health

Daily food was plain and monotonous: bread and porridge of barley or oats, dairy in the form of cheese and butter, dried or salted fish, pulses, and meat on occasion. People drank water, milk and above all beer, which was safer than water from doubtful sources and formed an important source of nourishment. Hunger was never far away; a failed harvest, a cattle plague or a storm tide could bring a district to the brink of starvation.

Clothing was made at home, mainly from wool and linen, woven and sewn by the women of the household — an endless labour that was never finished. People wore what was warm and sturdy, in the natural shades of the wool or dyed with what nature offered in the way of colouring. Of luxury the common man knew nothing; a good cloak, a metal buckle, a knife at the belt were possessions of value.

Health was fragile and life was short. Many children died young; a woman risked her life at every birth; and a wound that festered, a fever, a winter of hunger could fell an adult in the prime of life. Whoever survived childhood and had the good fortune to remain healthy might grow old, but average life expectancy was pressed down heavily by high infant mortality. Death was a familiar member of the household, present everywhere in a way we can scarcely imagine any more — and that constant nearness of death coloured everything, from faith to the manner in which people loved their parents, their children and their comrades.

Women, children and the household

Although it is the men who fight and rule in the sources, a great part of actual existence rested on the shoulders of the women. They managed the household, which was in fact a small enterprise: preparing food, brewing beer, making dairy, spinning and weaving wool and linen, caring for the young stock and the kitchen garden. In a world without shops, virtually everything a family used was made in and around the house. When the man was travelling or away at war, the running of the farmstead fell entirely to the woman. Although the law made her subordinate, a free Frisian woman in practice possessed considerable independence and standing, and the mother who dies early in the novel but lives on in Dirk's memory — a voice in the dark, the smell of wool and woodsmoke — stands for countless women whose names history has not preserved.

The farmer's year

Life was governed by the rhythm of the seasons, a cycle that repeated itself unchangingly and to which everything was attuned. Spring brought the ploughing and sowing, the driving out of the cattle to the green salt marshes, the mending of what winter had broken. Summer was the time of haymaking, indispensable if the cattle were to be brought through the winter, and of the watchful waiting for the harvest. Autumn was the high point and the turning point of the year: the bringing in of the grain, the slaughter of the beasts that could not be fed through, the salting and drying of meat and fish for the lean months. And then winter, the long dark waiting indoors, in which one lived off the stores and prayed that they would reach until the light returned. A setback in this cycle — a wet summer, an early frost, a cattle plague — could mean the difference between a district that survived and a district that starved.



Craft and skill

Although the household was in many respects self-sufficient, this world also knew proficiency and craftsmanship. The most important of all craftsmen was the smith, who worked with iron and fire and whose art — the making of tools and weapons — had something almost magical about it in the eyes of those who did not command it; the smith stood high in esteem, and his workshop was a place of power. Beside him were the woodworkers and shipwrights, indispensable in a world that floated on timber and on boats; the potters; the tanners; and above all the women at the loom, for the making of textiles was an endless, omnipresent labour. Many of these skills were not the business of full-time specialists but of people who practised them alongside their farm work, and the knowledge of them was learned not from books but passed from hand to hand, an inheritance of the body and the eye.

Hospitality, feasting and the spoken word

Against the harshness of existence stood the moments of community, and these were held in high honour. Hospitality was a sacred duty: to refuse a traveller shelter, food and protection counted as a disgrace. The great feasts — at the harvest, at a marriage, on the high days of the church year — were the summits of existence, on which people ate and drank, gave and received, and renewed the bonds of the community. In the lord's hall the beer was poured freely on such occasions, and there too lived the oral culture that in a largely unlettered world carried the memory of a people: the stories, the lines of descent, the songs of heroes and forefathers. What was not written down had to be remembered, and the man or woman who knew the old tales preserved a treasure no less valuable than gold.

Death, present everywhere

Death was, as has been said, a familiar guest, and people dealt with him differently from us. He was not hidden away but surrounded with custom and prayer; the dead were buried in consecrated ground beside the church, in the trust of the resurrection, and care for the souls of the departed — through prayer, through gifts to the Church — was a serious matter that bound the living to the dead. At the same time there lived on beneath the Christian forms an older, heathen sense of the ancestors as a near presence, and of the necessity of honouring them. That a person lived so close to death did not make him unfeeling; it made the bonds between the living, one may suppose, more intimate rather than looser, because everyone knew how frail and how precious they were.

Children and growing up

A child grew up quickly in this world, for childhood as we know it — a long, sheltered time of play and learning — scarcely existed. Whoever survived the first, dangerous years was drawn young into the work of the household: herding cattle, helping in the fields, carrying, fetching, learning by doing. There were no schools for ordinary children; one learned what one needed from parents and elders, with the hands and the eye, and the knowledge of a craft, of the water or of the land was thus passed from generation to generation. By the time a boy was twelve or thirteen — the age of Dirk at the opening of this book — he stood on the threshold of adulthood, old enough to march out, to bear responsibility and, if it came to it, to fight.

That also explains something of the tension that hangs about the young protagonist of the novel. In our eyes a boy of twelve is still a child; in his own he was half a man, waiting impatiently for the moment at which he would count as grown, and pulled back and forth between the protection of childhood and the demands of a world that had little patience with the weak or the wavering. The passage from child to man was no slow, self-evident growth but a border that had to be crossed, often through ordeal and loss — and it is that crossing, with all its pride, fear and ambition, that forms the core of Dirk's story.

War in this century was not an exception but a fixed component of life, and for a border region such as Frisia, harried by the Northmen, that was doubly true. Yet the warfare of that time differed utterly from what later centuries understood by it. There were no standing armies, no uniforms, no campaigns lasting months with thousands of trained professional soldiers. War was the business of free men who, when it was needed, laid down their tools, took up their weapons and marched.

The levy: the people in arms

The backbone of the fighting force was the levy, the heerban: the duty of every free man to come out armed when his lord or his community was threatened. It was not an army in our sense but a summoned people, a gathering of farmers, fishermen and craftsmen who fought alongside the few professional warriors — the men of the lord's household — who did devote their lives to the weapon. The quality of such a force depended entirely on the men who led it and on the place and the moment they chose. A summoned levy of farmers was no match for seasoned Northmen in open battle; its strength lay, as the novel repeatedly shows, in knowing its own country, in cunning and ambush, and in the ability of a shrewd commander to force the enemy to fight where and when it suited him.

Weapons and equipment

Armament was simple and reflected the wealth of the bearer. The weapon of the common man was the spear, cheap to make and versatile, and the round wooden shield, often with an iron boss at the centre. Those who could afford it also carried a knife or an axe. The sword was a costly weapon, the work of skilled smiths, and therefore the privilege of the well-to-do; a good sword could be worth a fortune, sometimes received a name of its own, and was handed down as an heirloom from father to son. Protection consisted, for those who could pay for it, of a helmet and a mail coat or a leather war-tunic; most fighters, however, had to make do with no more than their shield and their agility.

Bow and arrow were used, chiefly in hunting but also in war, to strike the enemy at a distance before it came to close quarters. In a world without medicine worth the name, every wound was dangerous; it was not the blow itself but the fever that followed which felled many a warrior days later.

The shield wall

When two forces did meet head on, they generally resorted to the shield wall: a dense rank of men who set their shields against one another so as to form a single unbroken wall, shoulder to shoulder, spears forward. It was not a matter of individual feats of heroism but of cohesion and steadfastness; the rank that stayed a rank longest won. Whoever fell or gave way tore open a gap through which the enemy could penetrate, and once a shield wall broke, an ordered fight turned into a slaughter of fugitives. That is why the hardest virtue of the warrior was not the courage to attack, but the courage to stand — to remain standing in the fear and the noise, shoulder against shoulder, while everything in him screamed to run.

The landscape as a weapon

For a region that was outmatched by the Northmen in manpower and training, the landscape itself was the mightiest ally. The tidal creeks, the mudflats that fell dry and flooded again, the peat that swallowed a careless man, the mist that took away the lines of sight — all of this, in the hands of one who knew it, could be deadlier than any sword. To lure an enemy into the marsh and let the tide do the work, to lay an ambush where the land made flight impossible: that was the warfare in which the Frisians were masters, and by which an outnumbered defender could break a stronger attacker. It is no accident that the decisive battles in this novel are fought not on an open field but at the water's edge; that is how men really fought in these regions.

Strongholds and protection

Besides cunning and landscape, fixed defences were known as well, though in these regions they were simple compared with the stone castles of later centuries. Protection was sought in earthen ramparts, timber palisades and ditches, in fortified halls and in the natural seclusion of the terrain. Some communities threw up ring-shaped enclosures within which man and beast could withdraw in time of danger; a lord strengthened his hall with a fence and a moat. Stone was rare and costly, and castle-building proper would only get under way later, partly as an answer to the very Viking threat this century had so painfully exposed. For the moment one had to make do with timber, earth and water — and with the oldest defence of all: being warned in time. A chain of lookout posts, a beacon lit at the approach of disaster, a rider crossing the district to raise the alarm: such simple means, and the unremitting vigilance they demanded, often meant the difference between a village that brought itself to safety in time and a village overrun in its sleep.

To place ourselves in this century, we must also understand something of its tempo. It was a slow world, endlessly slower than ours, in which distance was a serious matter, news moved at the speed of a rider or a ship, and time itself was measured in an altogether different way from the one we are used to.

How time was measured

There were no clocks, no minutes, no hours in our sense. Time was measured by the heavens and by the prayer of the Church: the rising and setting of the sun, the angle of the light, the tides for those who lived on the coast, and — for those who lived near a monastery or church — the fixed hours of prayer by which the clergy divided the day. The year was lived to the rhythm of the seasons and of the church feasts, which marked the agricultural calendar: one reckoned not in dates as we do, but "about Easter", "towards harvest", "after Martinmas". For the farmer the most important calendar work was not that of the numbers but that of nature — when to sow, when to reap, when the cattle must be stalled, when the storms would come.

The years themselves, too, were seldom counted as we count them. Events were dated by the regnal year of a king, or by some memorable occurrence — the year of the great storm tide, the year the Northmen came. An awareness of a continuous, numbered chronology was almost entirely the preserve of the lettered clergy who kept the annals.

Travel and distance

Travel was slow, exhausting and dangerous. Overland one went on foot or on horseback, along roads that were little more than muddy tracks, through woods and marshes where robbers and wild beasts lay in wait and where a traveller was cut off from the outside world. Far quicker and safer was the water: in a land of rivers, creeks and sea coast the boat was the natural means of transport, and the Frisians were pre-eminently a people of the water. But the sea too had its dangers, from storm and fog to the ships of the Northmen.

The consequences of that slowness were profound. A journey we make in an hour cost a day; a trip to the king's court in the south, such as Dirk and Gerulf undertake in the novel, was an enterprise of weeks, a journey into a world that for most coast dwellers was as far off and as unreal as another country. Most people never left the district of their birth; their whole world consisted of the area they could reach on foot and leave again between sunrise and sunset.

How news travelled

In such a world knowledge too moved slowly and unreliably. There was no post, no written news for ordinary people, no way of reporting quickly across a distance. News travelled from mouth to mouth, with merchants, pilgrims, soldiers and messengers, and it changed along the way, as news does. A king could remain for weeks in ignorance of what was happening on his distant frontier; a border count could wait months for an answer from the south. That slowness of communication was no incidental thing but a fundamental feature of power: it forced the king to rule through men on the spot whom he had to trust, and it gave those men — the counts at the edge of the realm — an independence that would in the end break up the empire itself and bring new, local powers to the fore.

The world in the mind

With all this went a wholly different sense of the world from ours. For most people the known earth reached little further than their own district, the neighbouring villages, the market they went to and the places the stories told of.

Beyond that began a twilight zone of hearsay, and beyond that again lay the utterly unknown: distant realms, half-legendary peoples, and finally the edge of the world itself, about the contents of which the learned differed. Maps as we know them did not exist; one oriented oneself not by a picture of the land but by the route, by the succession of landmarks, by the knowledge of someone who had travelled the way before.

For a boy growing up on a terp on the Frisian coast, the king's court in the south was therefore not merely far away in distance but almost far away in reality — a place out of the stories, as unreal as heaven or the land of the heathens, until the moment he should see it with his own eyes. The journey Dirk makes in this novel is thus more than a movement across a map; it is a step out of the enclosed, comprehensible world of his own country into the great, bewildering world of power — a world whose existence he knew of, but whose reality he only learned when it took him in.

The picture of the early Middle Ages as a time of nothing but poverty and isolation is mistaken. The North Sea was not a barrier but a highway, and along its shores moved a lively trade that made Frisia one of the most prosperous regions of the north.

Dorestad, the window on the world

The shining centre of that trade was Dorestad, lying on the river near present-day Wijk bij Duurstede, at the point where the roads of the interior and of the sea crossed. In the eighth and early ninth centuries it was one of the largest trading places in north-western Europe, a sprawling settlement of timber houses, quays and warehouses, where merchants from the Frankish empire, England, Scandinavia and the Rhineland traded their wares. Here came wine from the south, querns and pottery from the Rhineland, wool and cloth from Frisia, amber and furs from the north, and — a less handsome side of the trade — slaves.

The Frisians were pre-eminently the seafarers and merchants of the north; "Frisian merchant" was almost a set phrase, and Frisian cloth was a byword in far-off regions. Through this trade silver flowed into the region, and the prosperity it produced was part of the reason why the Northmen preyed so eagerly on Frisia.

Coin and exchange

Money existed, but it worked differently from now. In the earliest period small silver coins circulated, called sceattas; later, under the Carolingians, the silver penny (denarius) became the standard. Yet by no means all trade was money trade. Much exchange took place in kind or in silver by weight, and the value of things was often expressed in cattle or in current goods. Coins were also more than a means of payment: the right to strike coin was a sign of power, and whoever put his name on a coin showed that he ruled.

The fall of a trading city

The glory of Dorestad did not last. From the 830s onwards the town was repeatedly plundered by the Northmen, and at the same time natural causes played their part: the course of the river silted up and shifted, so that the harbour lost its function. By the end of the century — the time of our novel — great Dorestad was no more than a shadow of itself, a name recalling a prosperity that had passed. Its decline is the emblem of a whole century: of a flourishing, connected world impoverished and driven in upon itself by violence and disruption.

The Frisian merchant and the wic towns

Dorestad did not stand alone. It formed part of a network of trading places around the North Sea and the Baltic — the so-called wic or emporium towns, such as Quentovic in the north of present-day France, Hamwic near English Southampton, and further off Hedeby and Birka in the Scandinavian north. Along this chain of harbours moved the trade of the north, and the Frisians were its undisputed masters. Their name was so bound up with commerce that in distant parts "Frisian" became almost a synonym for "merchant", and Frisian cloth — the fine woollen stuff of their looms — was worn as far away as the courts of princes well beyond their own coast.

This world of trade linked Frisia to a far larger world than one would expect of a remote coastal region, and it explains an apparent contradiction: that the same district could be at once poor and rich, an outpost at the edge of the inhabited earth and a crossroads of international trade. It was precisely that wealth, and the stream of silver it brought with it, that made Frisia so tempting a prey for the Northmen — and that, once the Viking threat had been mastered, would help lay the foundation of the prosperity on which the later counts of Holland could build their power.