Michael Pye > Quotes

“Erik the Red left Norway for frontier Iceland ‘on account of some killings’ and after a while he had to leave Iceland on account of some more killings; he needed a fresh start after his first fresh start.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“they were a closed society, not ready even for a biological intruder”
― Michael Pye, The Pieces from Berlin

“but we know enough from the early years to see that the machinery of the law was mostly used against workers who wanted more money than employers wanted to pay. This is not surprising; if someone’s offence was refusing work there was nothing to discuss. They were judged on the spot and punished until they agreed to do what was wanted. There was no need to go to the kind of court that keeps records.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“Power wants us numbered and not named, carded and not just remembering our name, address, telephone number, purpose, social security number, PIN, and so forth. Power has good reasons. As long as we have papers, we cohere;”
― Michael Pye, Taking Lives

“Forgetting history or even getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added: ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger.’32”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“Silver worked: small, thick silver coins that were often minted locally. The Frisians minted them with the old god Wotan on one side, with spiked hair, a drooping moustache and eyes that stare out like goggles; and on the other side a serpentine kind of monster with clawed feet and a high tail. The Anglo-Saxons in England imitated the Frisians, and put a creature like a porcupine on their silver, or sometimes a king.41 These silver deniers were scarce in all the wide Frankish territory until the Franks grabbed Frisia and its mints in the 730s.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“Take away the idea of dark times and ruin and you begin to hear other voices. Women were not always silent, or without the power to make choices – we may just have been listening in the wrong places;”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“The Roman world was very aware of barbarians at its limits, but it did not depend on being opposed to be sure of itself; Christians insisted on a sense that they were being opposed and displaced, even as Christianity moved into more and more territories, changed people’s minds, changed the organization of their lives in alliance with kings and lords.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“The Bourse, that elegant palace for playing with money, insurance, shares, was invaded by soldiers dressed in velvet and satin stolen from merchant wardrobes who set out tables to play their own games with dice.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“silver coins had gone from being a convenient way to carry a valuable metal to a symbol in their own right. Coins were value you could carry about, which other people recognized the same way you did. They didn’t need to be sheltered and fed like cattle, or ploughed and reaped like fields, and best of all they didn’t die; their value persisted. They could be buried in times of trouble and dug up to spend later.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“In England it took two hundred years after the Romans left before coins were used as money again. There were no mints at all east of the Rhine until Regensburg, and that mint produced very little.37”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“price and value depended, in the medieval mind, on the immediate moral decisions of many individuals: their will to be just and fair, the decision not to chase always and only after money.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“They also found extra payments for threshing, gifts of wheat, food and drink at mid-day, a bonus for working in the rain: all put down to general expenses but going to the workers.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“The poorer women lived from wages, the richer women sank their money into houses they often shared with other beguines. That did not stop them being very successful in the new commercial world around them; the beguinage of Sint-Truiden was attacked and plundered in 1340 by townspeople furious at how well the women were doing, especially since they were free of some taxes.9 Some of them were traders, not just artisans.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“Irish scribes had a way of gossiping and complaining in the margins: ‘I am very cold’ or ‘That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it’ or ‘Oh that a glass of good old wine were at my side.’ Their notes may have been for people working alongside them, because sometimes a team of four or more would work together on a single manuscript;19 but some were entirely personal, as when a scribe writes out the scene of Judas Iscariot betraying Christ with a kiss and adds in the margin: ‘Wretch!”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“this one beach holds the story of a world always changing, always on the move.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“and the bakers went south to Rome because Romans, it turned out, loved German bread.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“The base coins of Northumbrian times became pennies rich in silver, coins which manage to muddle together the Viking sword, the hammer of the god Thor and some inspirational Christian messages.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“It was the Frisians who reinvented useful money, and taught their ideas to the Franks under Charlemagne.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“the house had been set up by two countesses ‘by divine inspiration, as it is piously believed’, to preserve the respectability of women who couldn’t marry, couldn’t afford the ‘dowry’ needed to enter a convent and who were about ‘to go begging or shamefully support themselves’. The beguinage allowed them to ‘support and clothe themselves by suitable work, without shaming themselves or their friends’.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“Bring the words and the objects together, though, and the new story is much more convincingly human. Life no longer stops dead when Rome falls and the empire collapses and the tradition of classical Latin writing comes to an end, not even when the Saxons and Vandals and Goths and Huns make their various pushes to the west. Human beings didn’t lose their ability to connect, trade, fight wars and generally move about to change their lives just because there are so few surviving documents; indeed, they didn’t lose their ability to write and read those documents. Life goes on; we just need different tools to find and describe it.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“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.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

“I urge you, William, my handsome, lovable son, amid the worldly preoccupations of your life, not to be slow in acquiring many books.”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

“Ireland went on buying English Christian slaves until well after the Normans took England, not least because William the Conqueror was in no hurry to change things; ‘he enjoyed a share of the profits from this trade,’ William of Malmesbury reports.33”
― Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are