North Sea

The peoples of the North Sea coasts buried their dead in boats. The mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk covered a ship some twenty seven metres long, filled with weapons, silver and gold, and the Oseberg and Gokstad burials in Norway did the same two centuries later, with the Oseberg ship holding two women and a wagon. Whatever the theology behind it, the vessel as the vehicle of the dead was shared across the water.

The water itself received offerings. From the Bronze Age onward, weapons, cauldrons, ornaments and whole ships were deposited in bogs, inlets and river mouths around the sea, at Nydam and Hjortspring in Denmark among many others, often deliberately broken first. Richard Bradley's analysis of such finds argues that they are structured deposition, a religious act of giving away wealth to water, and not the accidents or emergency hoards that earlier antiquarians assumed.

Tacitus, writing about the coastal peoples, describes the goddess Nerthus carried in a covered wagon among the tribes and then washed in a hidden lake, after which those who had washed her were drowned. Njord in the later Norse sources, a god of the sea, wind and wealth from voyaging, carries a name derived from the same word. David Wilson's survey of Anglo-Saxon paganism finds the same watery emphasis on the English side, in place names and in offerings at springs and rivers that the church legislated against for centuries.

Christianity crossed this sea in both directions and more than once. Irish monasticism reached the Scottish islands at Iona in the sixth century and northern England at Lindisfarne in the seventh; from Northumbria the traffic reversed, and Willibrord sailed to Frisia in 690 and Boniface into Frisia and Saxony, where he was killed in 754. The manuscripts produced along this coast, the Lindisfarne Gospels among them, are the art of a single cultural province rather than of separate countries.

In 793 the direction changed again. The raid on Lindisfarne, recorded with horror in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, opened three centuries in which the same searoads carried Scandinavian fleets, settlement and eventually the conversion of Scandinavia itself, so that by the eleventh century the whole rim was Christian.

Michael Pye's history argues that the North Sea world, not the Mediterranean, made much of what is characteristic about northern Europe, from its law and money to its habits of literacy. The Reformation moved on the same water: Tyndale's English New Testament was printed in the Low Countries and smuggled across in bales of cloth, and the English separatists who sailed from Delfshaven in 1620 had already been living in Leiden for a decade. The fishing communities kept their own religion of the sea, with fishermen's missions and blessings of the fleet that continue in ports on both shores.