Framing the maritime Frisians

MARITIME IDENTITY and cross-sea connectivity are amongst the most interesting aspects of the Early-medieval Frisians, yet also some of the most difficult to pinpoint. Historical Frisians are undoubtedly considered maritime people, both by their contemporaries and by present-day scholars, and are distinctively portrayed as connected to the North Sea once known as Mare Frisicum. This is often illustrated by the image Pliny the Elder paints of a people living on elevated platforms in an area that is neither fully land nor sea as ‘resembling sailors in ships when the water covers the surrounding land, but shipwrecked people when the tide has retired’ in Roman times (Naturalis Historia, XVI, 1), or the poetic depiction of a Frisian seafarer’s wife in the Old English Maxims I as an example of the Frisian maritime identity and cross-sea links in Early-medieval context (Bremmer 1981, 74–5; Shippey 1972, 154; Whitbread 1946). Although evocative and important references, without their textual, historical, societal and physical context, these remain illustrations, which in themselves do not prove that early Frisian society was distinctively maritime. To classify Early-medieval Frisian society as one shaped by maritime connectivity, and Frisians as a people with a particular maritime identity, we need to question the more structural impact of the maritime on people and their perception.

This article aims to shed some light on the elusive evidence we have for maritime connectivity and to rethink how it shaped society and mindset amongst Early-medieval Frisians. It does so by discussing how we can meaningfully understand maritime connectivity in the historical archaeoethnological frame of this volume on the one hand. On the other, it questions the available evidence, the absence of evidence, and whether we need to look further beyond the descriptive and the tangible. Although focussing on the Early Medieval Period, largely spanning from post-Roman times into the eleventh century, that is not used strictly to demarcate time limits for this article. Rather, through looking at traces of structural maritime connections in a wider frame of time and space, and comparing them with other cultures, this article presents some lines of thought about our understanding of how much the Early-medieval Frisians were structured by the sea.