The Crusaders and the British Empire in the North Sea

The primacy of the North Sea as a transit location is just vastly diminished by the virtue of it not being a big sea. And that's also really interesting because what then potentially happens, which we haven't talked about: What if let's say you have in England, the Western Roman structures, you adopt the North Sea raiding technologies and then you get a British empire that's not seafaring but goes east. That's pretty wild if you think about it.