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similar fashions. It was a world to some extent separated from others by natural barriers, although, even in the case of the brutal climatic frontier, there was a way in and out for those who knew the rules. To the south, east and west, access was more open, but there were still difficulties, and these difficulties could be greatly heightened by peoples interested in keeping intruders out.
    The coastal areas of the North German Plain, for example, were detached from the big rivers that ran through them, and riddled with small streams flowing directly into the sea from sodden infertile plateaux – the Mecklenburg lakes, the Masurian lakes and the bogs of Hither Pomerania. Here are the Danes trying to get through the ‘wide, obstructive and filthy marsh’ north of Demmin in 1171, as described by Saxo Grammaticus:
    Its surface was covered by a thin layer of turf, and, while it could support grass, it was so soft underfoot that it swallowed up those who trod there. Sinking deep into the slime, they went down into the muddy depths of a foul moraS… Toease their progress, and avoid becoming exhausted, the cavalry then took off their armour, and began leading them from the front. And when the horses got bogged down too deeply, they hauled them out, and when the men sank as they led them along, they kept themselves upright by holding on to their manes; and they crossed the little streams, which meandered about the marsh in great numbers, on wattles of woven reeds… and, while the horses were pulling themselves out of the hollows into which they sank, now and then they crushed under their hooves one of the men who were leading them. The king himself, who had thrown off everything except the shirt next to his body, and was carried on the shoulders of two knights, hardly managed to escape from the soft mud. Seldom has Danish valour sweated more! 6
     
    South of these marshes, and south of the barren highlands of Outer Pomerania, stretches a belt of sandy forest and heathland, also interspersed with lakes and bogs, leached, acid and intractable. It runs from the North Sea to the Vistula, and baffled the cultivator until modern times. The missionary Otto of Bamberg crossed it on his way to the coast in 1124 and 1127. On the first occasion, going from Poznan to Pyrzyce, his disciple Herbord claimed that.
    the route is as hard to describe as it was to follow. For no mortal man had been able to get through this forest, until in recent years… the duke [of Poland] had blazed a trail for himself and his army with lopped and marked trees. We kept to these marks, but it took us all of six days to get through the wood and rest on the banks of the river which is the Pomeranian frontier, and it was very hard going, on account of various snakes and huge wild beasts, and troublesome cranes that were nesting in the branches of the trees and tormented us with their croaking and flapping, and patches of bog which hindered our waggons and carts. 7
     
    That was about ninety miles in six days; and in 1127 Otto took five days covering the thirty-five miles between Havelburg and Lake Müritz. It was not surprising that most travellers kept to the riverbanks, or went by boat.
    That was Slav country, and its western limit was marked very firmly, at least between the ninth century and the 1140s, by the Limes Saxonicus , a no-man’s-land of dense forest and hedges which covered the sixty miles between Kiel Fjord and Lauenburg on the Elbe. Weak sections could be manned from the nearest villages to keep out raiders, and,while merchants and armies could get through, it was never a safe journey as long as this remained a political barrier.
    Also to the west, if you came by land, there was an ancient trackway running from Saxony northwards up the length of Jutland to the Limfjord; this was the ocbsenweg or Hœrvej , and it was used every now and then by invaders from the south who sought to conquer the Northern world. However, since the eighth century there