North Sea
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The lowlands facing the North Sea near the mouth of the Rhine were the home of an industrious people, hardy because of their continual struggle with nature for self-preservation. Their knowledge of the sea and their courage in braving it early made them traders and manufacturers. Their ships brought raw wool and carried away the fine woolen cloth famous throughout Europe. Of the several provinces included in the Lowlands, or Netherlands, Flanders up to the seventeenth century was the most important, with many great manufacturing centers, such as Ghent, Louvain, and Ypres, and with Bruges not only the chief market of the Lowlands but one of the great trade centers of Europe. For an arm of the North Sea, now silted up, reached inland to Bruges as late as the fifteenth century. Some of its trade went overland by the Rhine and the Brenner Pass; some went by sea around western Europe through Gibraltar." --Gardner's Art Through the Ages (1926) by Helen Gardner |
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The North Sea is a marginal, epeiric sea of the Atlantic Ocean on the European continental shelf. It is more than 600 miles long and 350 miles wide, with an area of around 222,000 square miles. A large part of the European drainage basin empties into the North Sea including water from the Baltic Sea. The North Sea connects with the rest of the Atlantic through the Dover Strait and the English Channel in the south and through the Norwegian Sea in the north.
