Seven hundred years later, the bishop of nearby Utrecht was similarly dismissive.

They were sea people for a reason, because in that region, at that time, it was quicker to travel on water than land. They were sea people, he announced, and all they had in their lives was fish, so they were not worth conquering. Pliny the Younger had mentioned that there were people on the edge of the world who lived cut off from the mainland by marshes. It starts with the Frisians, with a change of climate and the fall of Rome. And that is important to Pye’s thesis for he claims that it was those people who lived beyond the imperial reach who created the circumstances and the tools for what we consider modernity. The title, however, should more exactly refer to “the edge of the Roman world” for this is where the North Sea sits, in many places well beyond the imperial frontier. But no book I have read, nor any that I spotted in Pye’s 50 pages of references, has looked at the available evidence in the way it is presented here. But it has become increasingly fashionable to wonder whether there wasn’t something going on in all that time, and Michael Pye is certainly not the first to shine a light into the gloom. Michael Pye thinks we owe a greater debt elsewhere and has written a book to support this idea.Ī conventional view of history has the dark ages beginning with the decline of Rome in the 400s and the lights not coming back on until the Renaissance a millennium later.

His colleagues of the Enlightenment were happy to concur and ever since then we have tended to draw a line through history that makes us the heirs of ancient Rome and beyond it, Greece. He then enthused about painting, sculpture, ruins and, ultimately, the entire classical achievement. The German polymath Goethe would have approved of that because on his first journey to Italy, in autumn 1786, he had barely crossed the Alps before he started enthusing about the food. I n a recent survey of our favourite dishes, pizza, lasagne and spaghetti all made it into the top 10.

The Edge of the World by Michael Pye