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culture of
     Europeans, is turned by the magic of grant-giving into a kind of infrastructure for
     particular central institutions whose main characteristic is that they seem to take
     no notice at all of the easy flow of ideas that already exists between individuals
     who disagree with them.
    That is why we need to try to tell this
     story straight. It is a way of thinking again about who we really are.
    We have to get away from the raucous
     seaside, the holiday place that Cecil Warburton knew; the North Sea is much more
     than the water between a thousand beaches. It seems minor, it seems grey, but it has
     a furious and brilliant history. We can start with the stones on the beach at
     Domburg and ask: who brought them there and why, and what did they think they were
     doing?



1.
The invention of money
    The Roman army on manoeuvres: first century CE , on the North Sea coast, roughly where Belgium now stops and the
     Netherlands starts. Plinius Secundus was one of the commanders, and when he came to
     write his famous natural histories, he remembered what he had seen.
    There were wide salt marshes and he saw no
     trees at all. He could not make up his mind if he was on the land or on the sea. There
     were houses built on hillocks and he thought they looked like ships in the water, or
     maybe more like shipwrecks; he reckoned the houses must be built that way to escape the
     worst daily surges of the tides. He sounds almost nervous in this strange marsh
     landscape, being an inland Roman and used to having the ground stay firm under his
     boots; now he was looking out at a landscape of shifting clay, all cut up with creeks
     and gullies where the tides pushed salt water in and out. He might as well have left the
     empire altogether because this coast was cut off from the mainland by lagoons and
     brackish peat, as good a frontier as the forests that kept whole peoples apart, better
     than any river. To reach the marshes, and the water people who lived there, you had to
     know the marshes. You also had to be welcome, because you would be seen.
    Pliny considered the water people and he
     decided they were not worth the bother of conquering. Fish, he wrote, was all they
     had. 1
    Seven centuries later opinions had not much
     changed. Radbodo, Bishop of Utrecht, was most uncharitable about the Frisians, the
     people of these marshes: he wrote that they lived in water like fish and they rarely
     went anywhere except by boat. They were also crude,barbarous and remote: sodden provincials. 2 And yet between the
     writing of those two accounts the Frisians reinvented all the links and ties across the
     North Sea, as far as Jutland at the northern tip of Denmark and even beyond. They
     founded a new kind of town on the coast that thrived as the old Roman towns were in
     decline. They made themselves a capital on the left bank of the Rhine at Dorestad, just
     where the river divides to run down to its delta, which became the turntable of all
     Northern trade. And they ruled the North Sea, dominating all the trade that went by
     water, so for a time its name was changed: the Frisian Sea.
    They did something else which helped to
     shape our world: they reinvented money. They took coins with them on their trading
     voyages, money for buying and selling and doing business. Other territories had run out
     of cash, or lived off gifts and barter, or stopped using money for anything except tax
     and politics, but the Frisians carried the idea of using money wherever they went. It
     was not at all a trivial idea. With it came ideas of the value of things and how to
     calculate that abstract value on paper – the value that objects in the real world share,
     a pot with a pile of grain with a fish with a plank with a place in a boat going up the
     Rhine, even when it seems obvious they have nothing else in common at all. The idea of
     value had to work wherever the Frisians came ashore. Trading meant taking that value and
     working with it,