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Title: The River of London
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Illustrator: John Muirhead
Release Date: February 3, 2022 [eBook #67308]
Language: English
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIVER OF LONDON ***
THE RIVER OF LONDON
BY HILAIRE BELLOC
_AUTHOR OF ‘THE PATH TO ROME’_
T. N. FOULIS
LONDON & EDINBURGH
[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S FROM BLACKFRIARS]
_Published
December 1912_
_Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
THE LIST OF CHAPTERS
I. INTRODUCTION _page_ 3
II. THE APPROACH UP RIVER 17
III. LONDON, THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES 39
IV. LONDON, THE PORT OF THE THAMES 75
V. LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE 117
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_reproduced from Oil Paintings by_
JOHN MUIRHEAD, R.B.A., R.S.W.
ST. PAUL’S FROM BLACKFRIARS _Frontispiece_
ERITH _page_ 24
RICHMOND BRIDGE 32
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT FROM VAUXHALL 40
LIMEHOUSE 48
GREENWICH 56
GREENHITHE 64
STRAND ON THE GREEN 72
THE THAMES FROM GREENWICH PARK 80
GRAVESEND 88
KINGSTON BRIDGE 96
SUNBURY 104
TWICKENHAM FERRY 112
HAMPTON 120
TEDDINGTON 128
PANGBOURNE 136
INTRODUCTION
Through the flats that bound the North Sea and shelve into it
imperceptibly, merging at last with the shallow flood, and re-emerging
in distant sandbanks and less conspicuous shoals, run facing each other
two waterways far inland, which are funnels and entries, as it were,
scoured by the tide.
Each has at the end of the tideway a narrow, placid, inland stream,
from whence the broader, noisier sea part also takes its name. Each
has been and will always be famous in the arms and in the commerce of
Europe. Each forms a sort of long great street of ships crowded in a
traffic to and fro. For each has its great port. The one Antwerp, the
other London. The Scheldt is the name of the first, which leads to
Antwerp, and makes the opportunity for that great market of the world.
But the second is the River of London, much older in its destinies, and
probably more destined to endure in its functions of commerce.
I know not how to convey that picture in the mind, which the eyes
do not see, and yet by which a man is haunted if he has read enough
of books and seen the maps, when he comes up through the Narrows of
Dover Straits from the wide, empty seas three days behind and knows
that there lies before his owner a choice between the eastern and the
western gate. That choice is in the case of every ship determined long
before. She has the dull duty to do of turning to the right or to the
left, and her orders bind her to the river of the Netherlands or of
England as it may be. But if you will consider many centuries and the
changing adventures of business you will still--as you pass northward
between the two shores of Flanders and of Britain, and as you see their
recession upon either side of the northern way which opens before
you--understand that doubt upon the future and the rivalry of the two
rivers which is soon to be so deeply impressed upon the politics of our
time.
I could think of the Scheldt and of the Thames as two antagonists
facing each other before conflict across a marked arena, which is that
of the shallow, tumbling, and yellow water of the North Sea; or as two
forces pitted one against the other, streams each of which would force
the other back if it could find the strength; or as two Courts in a
perpetual jealousy one of the other, intriguing and making and losing
point after point in a game of polity.
When the statisticians have done their talk--and very brainless it
is--of resources and of metals, two opposing _lives_ are left standing
behind either of the great towns, and either of the great sea rivers.
The one is the experiment of the modern Germanies; the other is the
founded tradition of England; and the more closely a man considers each
of these the greater contrast does he discover between the causes of
either’s energy of come and go.
A third great tidal river is also concerned with these seas, also helps
to determine their commerce, also supports its great inland town. That
river is the Seine, and I shall, in the pages which follow, use the
Seine also for the example it affords in the analogies and contrasts
and parallels which I propose to draw. But it is the Scheldt and the
Thames which still remain the greater opponents. The united political
life of Gaul, which was inherited and transformed by the French
Monarchy, forbade the growth of a great commerce to the north. Paris
became not only the political centre of France but its main market as
well, and to-day the water carriage of Paris--that is, the traffic of
its port--is greater than that of any maritime town in the country.
Only if Normandy had developed as an independent state would Rouen have
become what Antwerp and London have become. Rouen would then have been,
without doubt, the point of transhipment between the inland and the
maritime waterways, and the distance of the town from coal would hardly
have affected it more than does the distance of London. Its situation
as a political junction would have determined its greatness. As it is
the Lower Seine may be set beside the Scheldt and the Thames for an
illustration in their topography and in the origins of their human
settlements, but it does not afford a true commercial parallel to-day,
and Rouen is no third rival to the two great ports which are before our
eyes and in this generation struggling for primacy.
It is the custom of sailors to speak of that water by which they
approach a great town under the name of the town. Men coming up from
Yarmouth Roads inland do not speak of the Yare, but of Norwich River.
For, to the sailor the river is but a continuation of, or an access
to, his port, and the Lower Thames is thus universally known from the
sea as London River. The term is an accidental one, but it contains
the true history of the connection between the stream and the town.
The Thames made London. London is a function of the Thames, and it is
in such a connection that I propose to regard it in this essay: London
as the great crossing place of the Thames, and as the custodian and
fruit of what early may have been the chief ferry, but has for nearly
two thousand years been the chief bridge; London as the market of which
the Thames is the approach and the port; London as a habitation of
which the great street is the Thames, a street for centuries the main
highway of its people, lost for a time and now recovering its ancient
use; London as the civil and religious head of revenues which were
drawn from the Thames Valley; and London as the determinant, through
its position upon the Thames, of English military history.
[Illustration: ERITH]
This intimate connection between the city and the river we all
instinctively feel, and the two are connected together as no other
waterway with its capital can be connected throughout Europe. For
the Thames is all that every other river is to every other capital,
wherever some great stream is connected with a chief city. But whereas
in every other case it is but one or another of the functions of such
a stream that history can remark, in the case of London it can remark
them all. Little sea-borne traffic reaches Paris by the Seine; the
Tiber could never be a street for Rome; Vienna neglects the Danube;
Antwerp protects no great crossing, nor has ever been the nucleus of a
State; Rouen--the nearest parallel--was not the strategical pivot of
Normandy, nor ever formed, as London forms, a chief fraction in the
economic power of its province. The two rivers which are sacred to
Lyons never fed that town; the Rhone watered but did not lead to Arles.
The towns of Lombardy depend upon the fertility of the Po Valley, but
the stream is nothing to their commerce or to their political eminence,
and Milan, and Venice, and Turin are independent of it. Saragossa was
the mistress of Arragon, but the Ebro did not make Saragossa, and as
for Madrid, the trickle which runs below Madrid is best described in
the story of the Spanish patriot who was dying of thirst after battle,
but upon being offered a cup of water, said, “Give it to the poor
Manzanares.” Lisbon and Cadiz are maritime, not fluvial, and look where
you will throughout the civilisation of Europe you will not find, save
in the case of London, this complete interdependence between a great
town and its river.
In tracing or establishing this intimate bond between London and the
Thames one must guard against an error which the modern reader rightly
suspects and is justly ready to criticise or to deny when it appears in
any piece of historical writing. That error is the error of materialism.
A generation ago it was universal, and there was no phenomenon in the
story of England or of Europe from the emplacement of a city to the
growth of the Church which was not traced to inanimate causes superior
to, and independent of, any action of the Will. This philosophy
narrowed, distorted, and dried up every department of knowledge, and
while the area of learning increased with a rapidity hitherto unknown,
the spirit inhabiting that conquest was starved. It was as though
the time could not contain at once the energy to discover and the
energy to know, and as though the covering of so vast a field in so
short a period was achieved inevitably at a cost of profundity. That
a bias towards the mechanical and the necessary should be present in
the physical sciences--in chemistry for instance--is to be expected,
that it should have invaded biology was less excusable, but that it
should have been permitted to affect (as it did) the business native to
man--his building, his institutions, his very dreams--was an excessive
blunder, and the spirit of all the younger men to-day is running if
anything too strongly in reaction against that ebb-tide of the soul.
They reject the dogmas of their fathers which would bend everything
man has done to material circumstance, which would talk of man as
the slave rather than the master of his instruments, and which, in
an argument absurdly circular, “interpreted history in the terms of
Economics”:--and they are right.
Even in the sphere of topography, where the physical limitations
of human action are the main subject of the writer, they expect a
full admission of the soul of man and even--which is very wise--some
recognition of that mysterious genius which inhabits every place and is
perhaps its vital part.
They are right. No one can see the marriage between London and its
river without wondering in what degree things other than ponderable
and measurable things may enter into the habitation of man. There is
nothing man does, of course, which has not in it the soul. But it may
be also true that there is nothing done to man wherein some soul is not
also. Now the homes of man and the air and the water and the wind and
the earth, against which in part and with which in part those homes
arise, are so woven in with his fate--which is a spiritual fate--that
we must properly lend to these insensate things some controlling
motive; and we may rightly say, though only by the use of metaphor,
that all these things have a spirit within them. I cannot get away
from it that the Thames may be alive, and London most certainly is.
But all these things, though one may put them in the form of
statements, are really questions; and questions to which no sort of
answer has yet been discovered.
II
THE APPROACH UP RIVER
There is perhaps no journey in the world in which the past and what now
is and the links between them stand out more clearly stratified than a
journey up the Thames upon the tide from the Sea-reach to the Pool.
I will describe it; for it is upon a physical experience of this kind
(I mean the seeing of history through the eye to the north and to the
south of the narrowing river and the feel of the stream under one) that
any historical essay upon the River of London must be built.
I have heard it said that the experience is a common one, seeing that
so many thousand men of the articulate, travelled, and experienced
class (who can relate their experience to some purpose) have entered
London by river. Any one (I am told) who comes in from the East or from
Holland to the docks will know what I mean. But I do not think this
is so. I do not think that the thing seen rapidly from the decks of a
liner, perhaps cut short at Tilbury, perhaps missed because the voyage
is at night, is quite what I intend to emphasise. Nor am I certain that
the proportion of those fifty miles is accurately seized when they are
experienced from the height of some great steamer whence the strength
and nature of the stream, its ebb and flow, its local life, are missed.
It is so with all other great ports. The myriads that come in nowadays
to England by the Mersey have no opportunity for judging the estuary,
the meaning of the opposing shores, nor that character of south
Lancashire which lies before their eyes in the mist and is so singular
a factor in the makeup of England.
I think that to know the River of London the journey must be made from
the sea upwards, in something not larger than a barge, in a motor boat,
or in a fishing vessel, or little half-rater, and taken upon one tide
with an easterly wind, as all the men of the past took it, making the
great port upstream under the weather they had chosen. In this way,
with little freeboard between one’s feet and the changing level of
the broad water, and with not too rapid a passage of the stations upon
either bank, and with some true measure wherewith to gauge in detail
what one sees, one can understand the river. It was in a progress such
as this that the painters came to understand the Lower Thames, and
nothing has nourished a more national art than this valley, though its
interpreters have been rare.
You see five successive stages clearly marked in such a voyage.
You see, in the first place, that everything up to the very gates of
London must have been, at the beginning of our history, as desolate
as any province in Europe. The rare places at which high and firm
land comes down to the modern stream are, as it were, isolated, and
live a life upon the defensive. Nowhere (as we shall see when we come
to examine London as a crossing place) does some good habitable site
stretch down to either opposing bank. There is no natural gateway
upon the Lower Thames; no twin villages defending a gap; nor the
projection from the north as from the south of tongues of high land or
even good arable land, the proximity of which, one to the other upon
either shore, would give humanity to the river. All the miles of it are
desolate marshes, either to the one side or to the other, most commonly
upon both, and the few spots where an exceptional formation has given
firm building ground and fertile fields as well close to the river
have something about them exceptional and, as it were, beleaguered.
It is a gross and an unhistorical exaggeration to say (as many of our
academic people are saying) that all that valley was a flooded lagoon
until historic times. It was not that. But it was a long succession of
very wide, watery marshes, with knolls of slightly higher land standing
up therein. Consider, for instance, the view to the northward, from
the height just above and east of Dartford. There you have two good
miles of what was marsh and still is largely marsh to the main stream,
and beyond, upon the farther shore, another three or four miles of
the same flats, with odd, exceptional rises at Rainham, at Aveney, or
upon the edge of the flat of Upminster. It is the same from the Abbey
Wood, east of Woolwich. Plumstead Marshes and Barking Level made one
morass, four miles wide at least, or nearer five, drowned twice a day
into a great level sheet of water, until some civilisation came to
dyke up the tidal stream and confine it to the central bed, which it
had scoured in its windings through such a desolation. Now of all that
primitive effect of waste, abandoned places very much remains in such a
journey as I have suggested. It is true that a wall of earth everywhere
controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not
see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water
to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks
of mud for miles upon either side of his going. But he still sees in
so many places as to make them the chief note of the lower reaches, at
least, great Flats without a soul upon them, unbroken by tree or house
or hedge, and plainly saved by artifice alone from flooding. This run
up the Lower Thames is, save for the exceptional approach of high land
in one place or another (as at Gravesend or Erith) like a sail through
the Fenland, and this character of desertion, silence, and morass, the
oldest foundation of all, is still quite plainly the background of what
one sees and remembers when one comes up the River of London to London
from the sea.
So much, then, for the first layer.
The second should by right be Roman: but nothing Roman remains; no,
nor anything of the Dark Ages. Unless we believe what is probable
enough, but not proved in any way, that the great containing walls of
earth (notably that round the Isle of Dogs) were Roman work, we can
distinguish nothing in such a journey to mark the first thousand years
of Christendom. Far out beyond the Sea-reach, Reculvers was a Roman
station in the estuary, but the ways have eaten it away. No great
monastic nucleus of the Dark Ages could be founded in that inhospitable
land. There was no palace of the kings standing near the central stream
until the neighbourhood of London was approached. There was not even a
fortress. Indeed it is odd to think how empty all that approach from
the sea to the greatest of the western Roman towns was and remained. It
was not until the Middle Ages began to flower that the Lower Thames put
forth any human signs--at least of such a sort as have come down to us.
The remains of them are very few, but they are distinctive.
Of all that life of the Middle Ages which the English countrysides
preserve in so many visible relics--and especially in a host of parish
churches surpassing all of the kind in Europe--the Lower Thames has
but one clear instance remaining to the eye; and that is the little
isolated church of St. Clement’s. Rainham is too far from the water,
the legends and associations surrounding the well of St. Chad are
also too distant to count in the picture. The endowed foundations of
religion either stood remote from the river-bank or have disappeared.
London, but for the Great Fire, would have supplied in this the
emptiness of the lower river.
But for that capital accident in the history of the city, which renders
London so different in outward aspect from all other great European
towns, the Middle Ages would still break upon one in a sheaf of spires
showing over the flats from Woolwich Reach, at least, and perhaps
from farther down the stream. But that accident--the Great Fire of
the seventeenth century--has left London stripped of the Gothic and,
alone of the great capitals of Europe, no impress of our four hundred
years of Gothic remains with the traveller as he comes upstream.
When we consider the two parallels to London upon the Continent--the
parallels I have chosen as ports upon the two great tidal rivers of the
north-west--Antwerp and Rouen, the loss will be apparent.
For miles and miles over the flats of the Scheldt the sailor making for
Antwerp sees the high steeple upon his horizon fixed against the sky,
and, late as was its building, this watch-tower of Antwerp is of the
true Middle Ages; Europe was still Europe and one when its last stone
was laid.
Still more does the sailor making for Rouen have the Middle Ages before
him as he rounds the Ferry Reach and comes up northward into the
sweep of the river before the town. In spite of the extraordinary and
meaningless gate which the new travelling bridge makes for the city,
its cathedral still dominates the whole view; surrounding it, the high
pitch of St. Vincent, the belfry of St. Maclou, the rebuilt towers of
St. Ouen, give their character to all the smoky basin of houses between
the Seine and the hills.
A far more splendid sight was the Gothic group of London as one came
upon it up river before the Great Fire. A score of spires stood
in varying height and perspective before the master spire of the
cathedral. Old St. Paul’s upon its hill carried the loftiest cross in
Christendom--far higher in the air than Strasburg; and old St. Paul’s
had been built, as had nearly every great monument of the Middle Ages,
with a special eye to the landscape whence it should be seen and which,
in a sense, it should control. The huge and somewhat ill-proportioned
pyramid of St. Dunstan’s by the very excess of its bulk made a landmark
which is the first thing to strike us when we look at a sketch of
the river made at any time before 1665. We are fortunate, moreover,
in our retention of such memorials. No other northern town, I think,
possesses a complete panorama of its appearance in the first half of
the sixteenth century such as London possesses in the great work of
Wyngaerde in the Bodleian. And though the seventeenth century, with
its triumph of engraving, produced a great number of such documents
throughout Europe, Visscher’s drawing is unique in its importance,
while we have at the end of the series Hollar’s careful delineation of
the square mile of ruins after the Great Fire.
This is perhaps the most remarkable piece of pictorial evidence open
to English history, and any one who will look at that long string of
churches burnt out to shells, and of private houses reduced to a few
feet of black and crumbling wall, will see what a revolution in the
outward aspect of the river and of its port, and what a breach in the
outward continuity of London the Great Fire means. The Conservative
temper into which the English fell (with regard to their externals,
at least), after the sixteenth century, would have preserved the
architectural past of London (and that to our own day) much more
perfectly than the past of any great city of the Continent has been
preserved. It seems due to the national spirit that a view more ancient
even than that of Rouen should greet the traveller coming in by Thames;
but the accident of the Great Fire has forbidden it.
On the contrary, the note of the approach to London nowadays from
the Lower Thames is a note peculiarly and strongly modern. It is as
though the abnormal expansion of our perilous Industrialism in the last
hundred and fifty years had not only conquered but obliterated the
eighteen centuries from which it suddenly arose. Here and there an odd
survival left remaining of deliberate purpose serves but to emphasise
the capture of the Lower Thames by that crazy mechanical giant so
recently born and already so blind and old. You have the noble front
of Greenwich, you have the charming little “mail” opposite, you have,
most distinctive, perhaps, of all the survivals upon the river, the
Fort of Tilbury. Save for these a huge and hardly national commerce,
plainly suffering the domination of a few, has eaten up the scene
of Thames-side and marks it more and more as one comes in through
the outlying miles until one is relieved by older, dingier, and more
gracious things near the heart of the whole business in the Pool.
It seems unjust to pass, with no more than a mention, that lovely
little isolated relic at Tilbury. Here was for centuries the natural
gate, the military defence of the port. When the range of ordnance
was not much more than hailing distance, no defences could be thought
of upon the broadening water of the Hope, still less in the funnel of
the Sea-reach. But Tilbury, standing over against Gravesend, defended
the first point at which the river had narrowed sufficiently to be
commanded by batteries from the shore.
In the earliest map of this point (which is preserved in the Admiralty)
one may trace the way in which the river was closed. There ran out from
the northern bank, pointing somewhat downstream, a sort of barrier.
We have no indication of its structure. A few piles would have been
sufficient to prevent a passage and to canalise traffic into the open
space that was left in the midst of the stream; for this space was not
left free, as we might have supposed, just under the guns of the fort,
but at a range which seems upon the drawing to be about 250 yards.
Whether a corresponding permanent work existed upon the Gravesend shore
I am ignorant, but it was obviously easy to emplace guns there when
they might be needed. Meanwhile Tilbury, with its continual preparation
for arms and as continual innocence of them, with its one chief
historic memory of the Armada, remains the most perfect relic of the
past upon all the stretch of the river. The swamped land round about
has defended it and isolated it, and that great regard for the old
things of the nation which is a virtue to be proud of has saved it from
decay.
For the rest, as I say, and with the exception of those rare survivals
of which Tilbury is the most striking, modern industrialism, down to
its last manifestations, has captured the Lower Thames and stands in a
bleak contrast against the windy emptiness of the flats. Nowhere is one
more oddly struck by this than opposite the great tanks which have been
put up for the storage of petrol--the last of our necessities. From
Tilbury upwards, wherever there is available space or good ground, it
is the haste, the necessity, and the carelessness of modern exchange
directed for the immediate profit of men who perpetually change their
methods of acquirement (and even their homes) that marks the river. It
is a new sort of desolation, the obverse (and not a pleasant one) of
that more natural desolation which Nature made by stretching out her
marshes and lagoons upon either side of the tideway.
And I say “exchange,” not production. Thames-side used to do many
things, but in particular to tan leather and to build ships. The
tanneries have nearly gone; the shipyards are in process of death.
In the last journey which I made up the tide some months ago to see
London once more from the river I passed what may be the last of the
men-of-war built upon Thames-side. It lay completing upon the northern
shore. It was the ship round which had turned the discussion whether
or no the Thames could still successfully build against the north, and
if the official answer is to be that it cannot, then this decision will
mark the end of the oldest trade of the river and that most native to
its life. But we live in a time when most things are dying.
For all this lamentable cloak of purposeless industrialism, chaotic and
already murmuring with the sounds of its own dissolution, the gradual
envelopment of a man who comes up river, his reception by the hugeness
of modern London is a thing which no one who has experienced it can
forget.
Indeed, the utter ruin of order and of plan, which is but the outward
manifestation of the ruin of religion, has destroyed the sense of
approach everywhere around that great helpless, apathetic nation which
we call London, save where it could not be wholly destroyed, and that
is along the water which was its most ancient highway.
[Illustration: RICHMOND BRIDGE]
Come in from what direction you will, save by the Thames, and the
approach to London is a waste of eyesight. No one has imagined for two
hundred years such a thing as a gate or a limit. There is no kind of
salutation offered or of barrier presented or of definition laid down.
Draggle-tail financial experiments of no interest or purpose to those
responsible for them, save abstract wealth, stand isolated in fields
as often as not given up to weeds and rubbish, and new roads half made
end everywhere in dust-heaps or in mud. Then for one mile after another
you pass the thousands of little houses all shamelessly similar, for in
none does a man intend to make his being, to possess his soul, or to
live and die there. There is not even a city wall remaining from the
past, nor so much as a broad outer street, delimiting what may still be
noble and permanent from these hopeless suburbs. Little scraps of what
were once happy and united villages still stand like islands in this
flood of mean brick. For the most part they are to be distinguished no
longer save by the narrowness and crookedness of their streets, and
when at last one comes to the inner part, where there is something of
history and of meaning and of an inherited culture, one comes upon it
without introduction and without grace. Of all cities that ever were,
modern London least deserves a wall, gates, and a senate.
But the entry by the river cannot be wholly destroyed. The river is too
strong. And therefore a man does here receive a physical impression
almost worthy of the magnitude of the things he seeks. He does get some
idea of London and some introduction to it. The houses and the places
of change, and the great stores and the abrupt street-ends with their
water steps, cluster in groups with narrower and narrower gaps between
them, until at last they come up all together in rank and enclose
one avenue of flood, banked everywhere by brick and crowded with the
interlacing of vessels. It is a thing which, if a man could draw it
properly, would make the best record of our time for the curiosity of
those who are to come after us. Accustomed as we are to an eternal
noise drowning thought and human life wherever the haphazard and
violent activity of our time is at work, there is an odd broken silence
in this waterway of sails and chains and alarms, guarded and hemmed in
by the leagues of houses. The mainspring of the moving road is silent,
the power of that one thing in the view which is not made by man, the
rushing upward of the water; between all these new and artificial
things the strength of the Thames survives with no more sound in its
going than when it went through other silences before men found it.
III
LONDON THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES
It is a commonplace which must be repeated whenever the connection of
the Thames with London is referred to, that the capital matter in that
connection is London’s position as _the lowest crossing point upon the
Thames_. That affirmation, standing alone, is of no use to history
unless one also explains why it was so important to find a crossing
place as low as possible down the river, and the many causes which
combine to make that lowest crossing place the neighbourhood of London
Bridge. These last especially require a full explanation because, of
the many converging reasons for selecting that site, the chief were,
until quite recently, imperfectly studied.
Why was it of such great importance for man, from the beginnings of a
settled occupation in this island, to discover a convenient crossing
place as low down as possible upon the course of the Thames? And why,
when once this crossing place had been established, would it become the
principal meeting-place in the country?
The answer to these questions is to be found, not only in the shape of
the island, but in the position of its best soil and in its relation to
the Continent.
[Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT FROM VAUXHALL]
It is obvious that the main connection between Great Britain and the
Continent must be by the Straits of Dover. It is not only the shortness
of the trajectory from the mainland to the island which makes the
Straits of Dover the necessary and permanent entry into this country,
it is a number of other things as well: as, that communication is
very easy from the opposing shore inland; that that opposing shore
was provided for ages with a harbour peculiarly suitable to early
traffic--the Portus Itius (now the silted-up plain between the hills
behind Boulogne); the conformation of the high land upon either side
at Grinez and at Dover Cliffs which, in the centuries when the thing
was important, gave an uninterrupted sight of land during the crossing;
and the choice of entry which the various inlets (now filled up) afford
from the Portus Lemanis behind Folkstone, the old inlet at Dover,
and the old Mouth of the Stour to what was once the sheltered channel
between Thanet and the mainland behind the island of Richborough.
So powerful has been the topographical effect of the Straits that
no revolution in travel has dispossessed them of their original
importance. The great expansion in our means of communication has only
emphasised the bond which is established by the Straits between this
island and the Continent of Europe, and so throughout the whole of the
old world. When, a few years hence, a man sets out to travel by land
to India or to China, he will cross from Dover and will take his train
at Calais. Were communication inland as uninterrupted throughout this
island as it is throughout the opposing portion of the Continent, a
system of roads would naturally have established itself, radiating
from some depôt common to the various ports of Kent, just as a system
of roads grew up upon the Continent, radiating from Calais and from
Boulogne, and forming a network inland with such central points as
Bavai, Amiens, Cassel, etc., to form pivots for the whole.
But communication within the island of Britain was not thus
uninterrupted in all directions. One great obstacle lay across it
from east to west, and that obstacle was the Thames. How complete an
interruption the Thames formed, especially in its lower course, I will
describe in a moment; it must suffice to notice here that for one who
would reach all the fertile land of East Anglia and of what is now
Hertfordshire, for one who would reach from the landing-place in Kent
the wheat lands of what is now Essex, and the centres of population
in what is now Norfolk (both of them originally capital sites of
population before the growth of modern industry), the profound wedge
driven into the land by the estuary of the Thames and its continuation
in the tidal river formed an almost insurmountable obstacle. There was
no straight line from say Canterbury to the Midlands and to the central
east of the island with its great mass of arable soil. More than this:
if one looks at a map of England on which moorland and waste country is
distinguished from the arable soil, it will be apparent that north of
the Wash the latter takes the form of a long and somewhat narrow strip
corresponding at first to the lower valley of the Trent and farther
north again to the Vale of York. A direct line to this arable northern
strip from any principal Kentish centre (and Canterbury was such) would
take one across the Thames estuary and was therefore impossible. The
farther up river a practicable crossing was found the longer the detour
it involved. The only considerable population in Britain that was early
accessible to a road-system proceeding directly from Kent was the
population of what later came to be called Wessex, that is, the central
southern districts of which Winchester was the capital. As a matter
of fact we find a road of immemorial antiquity proceeding directly
east and west from Canterbury to Winchester along the ridge of the
Chalk, but a similar road northward was blocked by the obstacle of the
Thames. We shall see in a moment that the discovery of a good crossing
place fairly low down in the course of the river not only saved a long
detour by the upper valley for travel proceeding from the Straits of
Dover to the eastern Midlands, and ultimately to the plain of York,
but also afforded a fairly direct line in another direction which was
essential to travel, namely, the direction of the north-west and the
main ports which establish communication with Ireland.
We may take it, then, as established, that there existed from the
earliest times a necessity, or a necessary tendency, to found and keep
up a permanent crossing place at the lowest practicable point in the
Thames valley.
Once that crossing was founded and continuously maintained it was
equally necessary that it should grow into the chief meeting place of
the island; that is, the chief market and therefore the chief town.
Indeed the various advantages such a crossing would have form so rare
a combination that we should be perfectly justified, even if we had not
the evidence we have, in making certain of the existence of a great and
important London early in history.
All the causes which we have seen to feed the commercial growth of the
site from the sea were reinforced by the inland communications which
met at this crossing place. The bridge (as I have shown elsewhere) made
a terminal not only to sea-borne traffic, but to all the inland traffic
from down the upper valley. It became the place of transhipment. It
was further the terminal, and the necessary terminal, of the three
great roads from north-west, from the north, and from the east, which
combined at this point to seek the Straits of Dover to the south; and
once this nexus was woven, once the market and place of meeting was
fixed, it must further become the goal of other roads against which
the Thames did not originally provide an obstacle. Thus it was that
a road would necessarily be established from this crossing place
to the west and to the south-west. Though the main traffic from the
fertile Lower Severn valley would more naturally make for the Straits
by way of the Chalk ridges, yet, when once London with its market
supplies and depôts was established, a main road would necessarily aim
at the Straits _through_ London rather than south of the Thames. And
though the secondary entries into the island from the Continent by
Southampton Water, and by the ports to the west of it, would naturally
send out arteries of communication northward and westward, yet their
communication north-eastward through London would soon acquire the
chief place. That London would have become what it did through no more
than these domestic causes may well be denied. The main factor in
its growth was throughout the centuries what it remains to-day--the
commerce of the tidal Thames. But standing at the head of that commerce
London also gathered to itself, as the main crossing point of the
Thames, the communications of the whole island.
The peculiar and determining effect this had upon the military history
of England I have mentioned in another study,[1] and shall expand
in this. Parallel effects could be found in every other department
of activity, not only in commerce but in the political machinery of
England, of English feudalism, and of the English monarchy, and later
of English aristocratic government. London once so formed upon its
river was the centre or support of each in turn supreme in the island.
Having established this, let us consider why the crossing place came
just here upon the line of the river, and to solve that problem we
must recollect what it is that acts as a barrier to communication,
especially in early times. This barrier is certainly not to be found
in hills of such a gentle sort as diversify south England. The breadth
of a stream, up to half a mile or so, and apart from broken water,
though of considerable importance in the problem, is again not the
chief difficulty, for man has always been able to cross water if
his approach to it was unimpeded. The true obstacle was marsh--bad
going. It is still the chief impediment to modern engineering, and the
difficulty which men found during earlier centuries in negotiating any
considerable breadth of marsh translates itself to-day into the expense
which a similar undertaking now involves. Belts of marsh impeding or
actually forbidding travel across them have been formed upon one, the
other, or both banks in so unbroken a chain down the Lower Thames
valley as to make that valley the obstacle it was and is to transverse
travel. The first factor in the formation of such marsh is the tide.
If you have a considerable difference between high and low water, and
if that difference is further complicated by great variations between
the neap and the spring tides, the difficulty of the barrier of marsh
affected by such a tide will be correspondingly increased.
[Illustration: LIMEHOUSE]
This consideration is often missed, and it will therefore be worth
while to explain it. A fairly regular height of tide covering daily
the same expanse lends itself to the establishment of a regular
crossing place, and though that crossing place may not be in continuous
use from the difficulty of using it at low tide, it can be regularly
counted upon to serve twice in the twenty-four hours. But if there is
any very considerable difference in the state of the tides throughout
each fortnight, then the opportunities for using the crossing are very
much reduced, unless, indeed, one has a steep shore to deal with. Under
such conditions one might find a spot where crossing was easy enough at
the springs, and yet impossible at the neaps; and instead of a ferry
regularly in use twice in the twenty-four hours, you would have one
which could only be depended upon a few times in a month.
Now the Thames is a river in which this difference is considerable,
and it has greatly strengthened the power of the waterway to act as an
obstacle to travel from north to south.
This, then, is the first of the factors which have combined to make
the Lower Thames the obstacle it was and is to travel. If we compare
the Thames in this respect with the other great rivers which we have
seen to be its parallels upon the Continent, we shall be struck by the
greater effect of the tide in its waters.
The second factor in the establishment of such an obstacle is the type
of soil over which the water works. It is evident that a tidal river
and estuary in which sand and gravel or even chalk form the riparian
soils will less produce marsh than clays will. A river which washes
the silt of clays up and down with its tides will be defended by
worse belts of bad land than one which runs through the other types
of rock. Now in this respect also the Thames has a bad pre-eminence
over its rivals. Chalk only comes near the stream once or twice, and
for a very short distance, in its lower course, and though gravel and
sand, as we shall see, approach the banks in more than one place (and
ultimately determine the site of London), this kind of soil is nowhere
that which the mass of the stream churns up or carries down in its
course. The Thames deals for many miles of its upper tidal waters with
clays, bringing them down towards the mouth, and has settled them for
centuries upon either side of its channel in the shape of deep alluvial
marshes.
But there is more than this.
The third factor in the problem depends upon the contours of the land
upon either side of the river. A river with steep banks, fairly narrow,
bounded by hills, even though it be a highly varying tidal stream, and
even though it scour through a great part of its tidal course a soil of
clays, cannot form wide belts of marsh upon either bank.
It so happens that the Lower Thames--until the site of London is
reached--nowhere enjoys even a short stretch of steep-on shore upon
both banks at once. The few spots where higher land comes down to
the water’s edge upon the southern or right bank are faced in every
case by great level stretches opposite which, until modern works were
undertaken, were regularly flooded with every return of the tide and
were impassable; while the lower and smaller patches of land on the
north bank (as at Purfleet or Grays) have marsh opposite them also to
the south.
In this respect the Scheldt appears under primitive conditions even
worse off than the Thames; but the Seine continually enjoys steep
banks after the first twenty miles or so up from its estuary, and in
at least half a dozen places from Caudebec (which roughly corresponds
to Gravesend) and Rouen, the first bridge (which we have seen to
correspond to London), there are opportunities for crossing the tidal
Seine, even under primitive conditions, with no considerable obstacle
of marsh upon either bank.
Now if we combine all this and consider the total effect of all three
factors in the Lower Thames valley we shall understand why no great
road ever attempted to cross it, and why no line of travel runs
transverse to it to-day. A mere examination of the contours would be
almost sufficient, presenting, as they do, great flats in most places,
stretching for miles from the main stream of the river. But beyond this
you have the great variation of the tide and the type of _surface_ soil
with which the stream deals.
Civilisation has so considerably changed the aspect of all our streams,
it has so embanked them and drained their neighbourhood, that in order
to appreciate the original conditions which made it impossible to find
a crossing place below London one must consult the new sheets of the
Ordnance Geological Survey. They give us the drift or top-soil--which
alone of course concerns travel. In this new survey the area covered
by alluvium and the line where that alluvium impinges upon the older
and harder soils to the north and the south are very clearly marked.
That area with its boundary line gives one the original area and
the original boundary line of the Thames’ marshes, and it is very
instructive.
The problem is one of approach from the south. From the north there is
no firm soil at all within the neighbourhood of the riverbed from the
sea upwards until one reaches the slight eminence of the City, unless
one counts the isolated patches at Purfleet and Grays, the approach to
which from the north was not only originally difficult but connected
with no reasonable line of travel. One has but to look at the map to
see that Purfleet could have been approached from the north by no
considerable road. It might have formed some sort of terminal for an
eastern road but only that at the expense of a long detour such as is
made by the main road to-day through Ockendon or by the railway, for
immediately behind lies a belt of what was originally marsh. Moreover,
even if primitive travel had drifted by this somewhat circuitous route
to the hard patch at Purfleet, it would have found no crossing there;
immediately opposite lay the very wide belt of marshy land which flanks
either side of the Darent. That river comes in almost exactly opposite
the small belt of natural hard on which Purfleet stands.
Primitive travel, then (and for that matter modern travel too, unless
it is at a great expense of engineering), could not approach the
northern bank of the Thames between the sea reaches and the City of
London save, and that with difficulty, by the very small exceptional
patches of Purfleet and Grays, and at Purfleet would have discovered no
opportunities for a crossing: the bank opposite being a particularly
wide and impossible stretch of marsh at this point.
Now as to Grays: That very pleasant place does give some approach both
in soil and contour to the water from the north. It is just on the edge
of the chalk, just above the old limit of high water, and its original
nucleus, though not actually on the stream, would require but a short
causeway to reach it.
But Grays is in the same bad topographical case as Purfleet, only
rather worse. It is still less of a terminal for any road from the
north. It connects with the east only through Stanford and the Horndon
roads. To the north of it lay, completely cutting it off from any
communication, the belt of marsh of which Mordyke is now the drainage
line, and of which Orsett Fenn is the principal survival.
We have, then, on the north, only Purfleet and Grays; and both must
be rejected. On the south, however, there is a series of isolated
natural wharves which approach the main tidal stream, and not only
stand fairly steep-on to its rise and fall, but are further of a soil
upon their surface which permitted travel and an easy approach to the
river in early times. These are, counting from the sea-reaches upward:
Gravesend, where the chalk comes right down to the Thames; Greenhithe,
where a tongue of the chalk juts out and touches the water; Erith, the
point where the gravels, which some mighty stream laid down when the
rivers of Northern Europe were discharging ten, twenty, or a hundred
times the flood they have to-day, first approach the existing stream.
At Woolwich sand and gravel closely approach the river and line it for
so considerable a distance as to afford the platform for a fairly large
town. Next up-river the same formation of gravels gives at Greenwich
a hard along the stream, and immediately above another spit of the
same actually touches the river at the point where used to stand the
isolated village of Deptford.
[Illustration: GREENWICH]
Now any one of these natural hards along the south bank of the Thames
between London and the sea would have afforded an excellent platform
for the crossing of the river. It is true that the Thames is somewhat
wider in its lower reaches than at the pool, but the difference was
not so considerable as to balk those who first instituted the ferry
and later the bridge of London. If one could cross the half-mile of
water which lay before one at extreme high tides under the earliest
conditions at Southwark, or bridge (as was done so long ago) the four
hundred yards of the mainstream, there would have been no difficulty in
dealing with the quarter of a mile at Deptford or at Greenhithe, nor
even with the rather broader stream opposite Woolwich.
Save perhaps by a bridge of boats, a permanent crossing could not have
been attempted at Erith or at Greenhithe, though the narrowing of the
stream at Gravesend might well have allowed a more stable structure to
be established. At any rate, a crossing even so broad as that opposite
Erith has nowhere in Europe interfered with the passage of commerce,
or of arms where both sides of a great stream lent themselves to such
a passage. But it is here that each one of the points I have mentioned
is at fault. Opposite Gravesend as opposite Greenhithe, opposite Erith
as opposite Woolwich, Greenwich, and Deptford, there lies upon the
northern bank a belt of marsh which forbids traffic. Tilbury Fort,
opposite Gravesend, stands upon a tiny circle of harder land, but
all around it are the Chadwell and the Tilbury marshes. Greenhithe
has right against it the projecting expanse of West Thurrock Marsh,
Erith the whole breadth of Wellington and Rainham marshes; and, as one
approaches London, and the river narrows, matters seem only to get
worse. Woolwich faces the expanse of originally flooded soil between
the Lea and the Roding, with the most of which even the economic forces
making for the expansion of London have been able to do nothing, and
of which so unpleasant a relic of its original condition is left in
Plaistow Marshes to-day; while opposite Greenwich and Deptford lay that
perfectly impossible morass, which, though turned into water meadows by
a river wall many centuries ago, is still perhaps the worst building
ground within the London area. We call it the Isle of Dogs.
The reader must not imagine this lack of any two opposing hards upon
London River below the City to be due to some coincidence. It has a
fairly obvious geographical cause. Those points where the gravels and
the chalk were touched by the scouring of the stream were naturally the
outer cusp of its curves. The river having first determined a bend to
the south or to the north, would eat away more and more on the outer
edge of those bends (which the stream always follows both in flood and
in ebb), and scour away the bank until it struck harder soils and was
there checked. Deptford and Greenwich lie on the outer edge of the
first great southern bend; Woolwich on that of the second; Erith on
that of the third; Greenhithe the fourth; Gravesend the fifth; while
both Grays and Purfleet represent similar checks to the bends towards
the north.
Now it is evident that the same process which makes a river extend
its curves outward more and more by the scouring the stream along the
exterior edge leaves on the inside of the curve an increasing tongue
or wedge of alluvial deposit. What we have, therefore, on the Lower
Thames, the continual opposition of marsh to the rare hards, is only
what we should expect from the geological history of the river, and the
crossing place which was at last found is much more of a coincidence
and accident than the absence of a crossing place below.
That crossing place was, of course, finally discovered opposite the
steep gravel bank upon which the oldest part of the City of London is
built.
The land has been so often turned and returned in at least twenty
centuries of building that it is not easy to-day to reconstruct the
original conditions of that crossing; and, unless we look at all the
evidence, slight as it is, it is easy to fall into errors upon it.
Thus several writers upon this subject have often spoken as though the
gravel-topped knoll upon which the original London stood was the sole
factor in establishing the crossing, and I have myself fallen into the
error of believing that the approach from the south could only be made
over a long artificial causeway.
A further consideration of the evidence, and especially of that
concerning surface soils to the south of the crossing, has convinced me
(subject to yet further evidence which may appear) that the opportunity
for a crossing near the site of London Bridge was almost as tempting
from the south side as it was from the north. It is true that no
considerable rise of land is to be discovered on the Southwark side
until we have gone some distance from the river, and the contour lines
do not, therefore, suggest an easy crossing at this spot. But much more
important than the lie of the land was the nature of the surface over
which travel must proceed. The rocks across which a road is driven are
not of the first importance in primitive times, though they become
important, of course, when the road is expected to bear very great
loads, or when it is so thoroughly metalled that the presence of good
stone in its neighbourhood has to be considered. What is important to
a primitive track is the immediate soil under foot, and if that be
fairly hard and dry it can be quite shallow and yet sufficient for the
purposes of travel.
Thus, one can point out to many a path across the clay of the weald
which picks its way from one shallow patch of sand, gravel, or stone
to another, over country the main base of which is clay, and there is
a similar example (with which I have dealt in another volume)[2] in
the upper valley of the river Wey. There, once the primitive track has
left the chalk and come to the marshy alluvials of the lower levels, it
picks its way in this fashion from one long strip of gravel to another;
and though these strips of gravel are shallow--mere casual drifts in
many cases--they are sufficient for the purposes of the road. Now in
the case of the crossing of the Thames at London, the new Geological
Ordnance Survey, as it gives the drift as well as the rocks, shows us
that a spit of sandy gravel projected into the alluvial mud of the
Thames valley just opposite the “bluff” upon which the oldest part of
London stands, and indeed projected so far towards the stream that
the last traces of it are not lost until beyond Guy’s Hospital--that
is, until within little more than a furlong of the present high-water
mark. The causeway which might therefore be necessary to approach the
stream from the south in all states of the tide need only have been
such a hardening of the track over the mud as is necessary between the
high- and low-water mark of any tidal river where a ferry is to be
established, and we must believe that the river at high water washed
the gravel spit.
Upon the farther or northern bank traces of artificial embankment
(indicating the original limit of alluvial mud upon that side) have
been found upon the line of Thames Street, and the Roman wall ran just
to the north of it. The total width, then, which had to be negotiated
at this point was one at the very most of seven hundred yards, and
perhaps much less than that, and it was one which at high water was
flanked to the south, as to the north, by a hard surface across which
the river could be approached.
[Illustration: GREENHITHE]
No such conditions were to be discovered between this point and the
sea, and, far inland as this point was, it was therefore the lowest
practicable crossing of the Thames. Thus it was that the Thames
established London.
It has also been maintained that this crossing formed not only the
first practicable way to one coming up from the sea and seeking the
_lowest_ passage of the Thames, but also that no practicable passage
could be found for some considerable way _up_ the river either; in
other words, that the opportunity for going over the Thames near the
site of London Bridge was an isolated and all the more valuable one
from the absence of similar opportunities _above_ as well as _below_ it.
We must be very careful before we accept such an argument. It is as
certain as inference can make it that an original crossing, perhaps
older than that of London, passed the Thames in the neighbourhood of
Lambeth Bridge. The road which the Romans made or straightened from the
south-east, that is, the first great main road from the Straits of
Dover to the north, the Watling Street, points directly to this spot,
and the presence of good going on the south bank at least strengthens
the conjecture, coupled as it is with the antiquity of Westminster
as an inhabited site, and the long-established ferry which plied for
centuries from the neighbourhood of Lambeth Palace to the opposing
“Horseferry” Road.
The formation of the surface-soil in this neighbourhood is well worthy
of study.
Immediately in the bounds of Lambeth Church and Palace the superficial
hard gravels (which have been approaching the river for two miles and
leaving a belt of marsh to their right or north) touch the stream.
Not quite opposite, but nearly so--quite nearly enough for the
establishment of a ferry--the large isolated patch of gravel which
lay between the two mouths of the old brooks and which supported the
nucleus of Westminster affords a good landing-place. It is true that
there is (or was) a patch of bad ground immediately to the north of
this gravel, but very soon the rising ground which is now marked by
Constitution Hill and Grosvenor Gardens gave good going and led the
track up, nearly coincident with Park Lane, to “Tyburn,” whence the
Watling Street makes straight for the north and west along the line of
the modern Edgware Road.
For a mile or two farther up, until the gravel in Chelsea was reached,
opposite the steep land of Battersea crossing may have been difficult,
but between Battersea and Chelsea it was certainly as easy in early
times, or easier than at London Bridge, and after that, of course, as
one goes westward the passage of the river becomes easier and easier
until on the present western limits of London, at Brentford, you have
what is almost certainly an original ford across the river, at low tide
at least, and one which some authorities have regarded as the crossing
place of Julius Cæsar.
It is not, therefore, because the crossing at London is unique--it
is, on the contrary, but the last of a long series of crossings--it is
because it is the _lowest_ crossing of the Thames that it came to be of
such capital importance in the history of this island. Upon it converge
the great military road from Chichester and the Great Port, the still
more important road from the Kentish ports, and in particular from the
Straits of Dover, the road from Shoreham going directly northward, of
which such slight but such conclusive evidence has been discovered.
These from the south--while from the north the great eastern road
from Colchester and the corn-lands of Essex, the northern road with
its branches to the ports and to the corn-lands of East Anglia, the
north-western road from the garrison at Chester with its branch to the
arable lands of Lancashire, past the fortress of Manchester, and even
the western road from Bath and from the mines of the Mendip and from
the garrison of Caerleon, all converge.
Once this scheme of ways had been established (and they were certainly
all complete before the end of the fourth century), once London had
thus become the hub of a wheel of such spokes and the centre of such
a web, the Thames which had made it, making also its commerce from
the sea and its value as a point of transhipment between inland and
sea-borne traffic, assured its eminence over all the other towns of the
island.
I will not here repeat the arguments which I have dealt with in other
studies, and which are advanced in defence of various hypothetical
dates for the first building of the bridge. Its establishment across
the river marked, of course, the completion of the process whereby
London was produced. For once the bridge was there it was a necessary
terminal to sea-borne traffic, and a convenient one to inland traffic;
it was the military communication between north and south, and the
commercial one as well. I will close by distinguishing between the very
few pieces of actual evidence and the presumption built upon them.
We have a line of Roman remains pointing to a place upon the northern
bank, somewhat to the east of London Bridge and almost coincident with
the opening of the subway. Opposite it we have the old landing place
near “Stoney Lane” which is supposed to indicate a southern causeway
meeting this identical causeway from the north. Between the two there
may have been in early Roman times a ferry. On the other hand, we have
the Stane Street pointing directly at the southern terminal of old
London Bridge (a trifle to the east of the modern bridge) and we have
the undoubted presence of that bridge through the Dark Ages, which did
not, as a rule, possess any considerable monument which they had not
inherited from Rome. We have, further, the fact that the earliest line
traceable for the Roman town puts London Bridge nearly at its centre;
and again the fact that on the line of the bridge certain Roman relics
have been unearthed or fished up.
In the absence of more positive evidence we may take it as sufficient
for history that in the natural course of things a ferry probably
preceded the bridge, yet the bridge existed, if not when the Romans
came, at any rate shortly after their occupation.[3]
Thus it was, then, that the River of London seems to have made London.
The Thames was so situated in the island that a crossing place of
a permanent sort had to be established as far down the stream as
possible. This place was found where the stream was still broad,
tidal, and a port. Once bridged the same spot would mark the terminal
of sea-borne traffic and the place of exchange between foreign and
domestic produce, while the roads radiating north and south from such a
crossing would further establish its pre-eminence.
But that pre-eminence was, from some very early period, _commercial_.
The first mention of London in recorded history, the phrase of
Tacitus, speaks of the town particularly as a _market_. As a market
London has grown, and as a market it is still chiefly eminent. But
London is a market only because it is a port, and it is the port of the
Thames. In that aspect I will next consider the connection between the
town and its river.
[Illustration: STRAND ON THE GREEN]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Warfare in England_, Williams & Norgate.
[2] _The Old Road_, Constable & Co.
[3] The arguments with regard to the age of the bridge and the earliest
position of the crossing will be found set out in their most recent
form and most fully by Mr. R. A. Smith, F.S.A., in the first volume of
_London_ in the Victoria County Histories.
IV
LONDON
THE PORT OF THE THAMES
That a town would group up on the lowest crossing of the Thames, once
that crossing with its bridge or ferry was definitely established,
is obvious enough. That this town would be important and large if
there were a sufficient development of population and culture in the
island is equally obvious. Both consequences would naturally follow
from the topography of Britain. But that this town should become of
such high importance in the European scheme and of such overwhelming
importance in the national scheme; further, that this town should soon
grow to be the second town in size of Western Europe, and at last
by far the first, is not so immediate a conclusion from the known
topographical conditions which brought it into being. That moral and
material growth of London is due, of course, to the supremacy which
London enjoyed and enjoys as a place of _commerce_. It is London as a
market, and as a market the port of which was the Thames, which we must
next consider, and we must ask ourselves upon what so considerable
and historical a phenomenon has been based. The matter is usually
dismissed by an affirmation lacking analysis and still more lacking
proof. Our text-books are too often satisfied with telling us that “the
exceptionally favourable position of London as a commercial centre” was
at the root of the town’s greatness. The affirmation is perfectly true,
but it does not provide its own explanation nor satisfy our curiosity
as to _why_ this position should have meant so much.
I think, indeed, that most observant people in reading this or similar
phrases must, if they had any knowledge of the map, have been struck
with the apparent disadvantages under which a site such as that of
London suffers. It has not behind it a vast hinterland from which it
should be able to gather raw material for export, nor is it a natural
outlet for the various products of several different regions as is, for
instance, the region surrounding the mouths of the Rhine. It is not
central to the European scheme as Lyons was for so many centuries, and
Paris for so many centuries more. It lies a long way up its stream from
the sea. No system of converging waterways unites in its neighbourhood.
There seems at first sight, therefore, no reason why London should have
obtained more than a local importance.
When we consider its advantages as a general meeting-place for varied
foreign commercial interests, a first view will profit us little.
London is on no general European highway but lies ex-centric to Europe
far upon the north and west of the general area which European culture
covers; nor does its more central position since the discovery of the
New World avail the argument, for the greatness of London was planted
and its future continuance assured long before Europeans had known and
developed the Western Continent. London, again, does not seem to invite
commerce by lying upon the frontier common to two civilisations; it
does not lie upon any economic boundary line as do the cities of the
Levant and notably the cities of Palestine. It is, if we consider the
economics of commerce during at any rate the first 1500 years of our
era, almost at the edge of the world.
To explain the supremacy of London as a market more than one thesis is
put forward for general acceptance which must, I think, be condemned.
Thus we have the thesis that London occupies the position it does
_because it is almost in the centre of the land hemisphere_. As a
matter of fact the actual centre of that hemisphere is not far from
the neighbourhood of Falmouth, and is at any rate within the limits
of Britain. If we trace upon a globe a great circle or “equator” so
as to include the greatest mass of land surface possible, we find
our southern ports, and London amongst them, to lie near the Pole
of such an Equator, and this argument has been of some weight with
those who have not paused to consider what that “land hemisphere”
means. If the climate of the world were everywhere equal and most
of its soil equally productive, then the fact that the great estuary
of the Thames lay almost central to the greatest mass of land would
have its importance--though the mouths both of the Seine and of the
Scheldt, of the Rhine, and for that matter of the Elbe, would not be
so far distant as to explain the peculiar supremacy of London. But
in the first place the most part of that mass of land did not enter
into the commercial scheme until quite modern times, and secondly,
the variations of its climate and of its productivity destroy the
theory. Not far to the north of our port (relatively to so great a
thing as the planet) lies that vast circle of uninhabited or hardly
habitable frozen land which is not only almost useless for the purposes
of exchange, but which also bars any passage of commerce across it.
Not so very far to the south, again, runs the belt of desert east and
west across Africa and Asia, the worst part of which, the widest, is
also the nearest to us and is called the Sahara. It is of little use
to have a central position between, say, Japan upon the one side and
Cape Town upon the other, if the Greek Circle which connects us with
Japan passes, as it does, through the Polar Ice. There are certain
central positions which explain the supremacy of some particular site,
but these positions are nearly always central to limited areas over
which travel is uninterrupted. The great market of Nijni Novgorod in
Russia is an example of this sort. Chicago in the United States of
America is another. But London is no parallel to such cases as these,
so far as the world or even Europe is concerned. It is fairly central
(as we shall see) to what was once the chief wealth of England: it is
ex-centric to all else.
[Illustration: THE THAMES FROM GREENWICH PARK]
Still less will the many arguments based upon fairly modern conditions
solve the problem which confronts us. Thus the great export trade of
modern England is mainly based upon coal. But the estuary of the Thames
is not a natural place of export for coal. The political relations
which necessarily bind this country to-day to other countries of the
same speech throughout the New World have a vast effect in continuing
and expanding our oversea exchanges, but all the ports natural to such
ties lie upon our south or west. London does not face the New World. It
looks away from it.
The truth is that the singular position of the Lower Thames as
a terminal for international commerce, and of its port as an
international market, must be sought in a medley of causes, the chief
of which fall into two clear categories. We have first the causes which
made London what it was before the transformation of commerce through
the discoveries of the Renaissance and the later gigantic expansion
which reposes upon modern facilities of communication. Once London is
thus established as the second great city of the West, we have the
later causes which permit it to continue in the enjoyment of that
position, and to nourish it until the city whose port was the Thames
became not the second but by far the first of all the great markets in
wealth, population, and shipping.
I will take these two sets of causes separately.
As to the first, what made the greatness of the Thames as a port for
London, and of London, therefore, as a market before the modern era of
geographical discovery?
A natural market exists only where two natural conditions are present:
ease of approach from without, and what may be called _draining power_
from within.
I mean by ease of approach from without a natural facility for the
arrival of goods from areas of production foreign to those of the
market. And I mean by “draining power from within” some topographical
or other condition which makes domestic produce run naturally towards
the one centre of this market.
To these two natural conditions must be added two further political
ones: first, one must have such a society connected with that market as
gives it security, and, secondly, such a society as is organised by
its activity and adventure for production or for exchange, or for both.
Now all these four conditions London enjoyed from a very early time. I
have pointed out elsewhere, and shall point out again in these pages,
the nature of the political security which London has enjoyed for so
many centuries. It did not lie in any particularly peaceful character
peculiar to the country as a whole, for while London was growing to
greatness England was a continual theatre of domestic war. It lay in
the great size which the city had attained, coupled with the breadth of
its stream, and in its numerical proportion to the general population
of which it was the capital. The fact that London was never besieged
or sacked depended upon these characters, and they in turn, therefore,
guaranteed that local security which is the first political necessity
of a great and continuous market.
As to the commercial and productive character of the inhabitants of
Britain, it escapes any material analysis. We must postulate it as
a constant fact running through the known and recorded centuries of
our history, and we may ascribe it according as we more love ease or
veracity to whatever cause we feel most flattering or most true. No
proof is possible. We can only say in this respect that certain areas
of Europe have shown these characters for greater or less periods of
time, and that others equally well endowed have not shown them, but
have shown other characters perhaps as valuable.
The main fact in this connection is that whether the productive areas
of Great Britain were exporting raw material (as during the most
active centuries of the Middle Ages, when wool was our chief export),
or whether (as later became the case) manufactured articles and coal
were the stand-by of our oversea trade; whether we consider the period
before or after the development of our carrying trade; whether we are
concerned with an industrial or an agricultural England; whether we
are observing late centuries in which the English showed a passionate
interest in novelty and foreign adventure, or far more numerous early
centuries in which they were indifferent to distant voyages--throughout
the whole story with all its changes the productive area of the island
has always maintained a high standard of wealth in comparison with its
neighbours and its aptitude for exchange has always been equally high.
It is a point often neglected that the Norman Conquest, though of
course it introduced a new and much more developed culture than Saxon
England had possessed, did not find an impoverished land which the
newcomers might “develop.” It found an exceedingly wealthy country
according to the standards of the time; and the extent and variety of
that wealth stands out very clearly in the narrative of contemporaries.
Four centuries later, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, foreign
observers make precisely the same comment. It is the packed wealth of
South England filling its comparatively small area which the foreign
envoy notes. We have a striking piece of evidence surviving before our
eyes in the number, decoration and amplitude of our churches to which I
have already alluded.
To continue the proof after the Tudors would be superfluous. There
was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found in the
seventeenth century, the close of which we have unhappily seen in our
own generation, when the wealth of England was so superior to that
of any other rival that the material circumstances of life among the
wealthier classes of the country seemed to belong to a different world
from that of neighbouring nations, and when the economic supremacy of
England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost
contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend.
London, then, for all these centuries has enjoyed the two political
conditions necessary to the establishment of a chief market, security
and a productive area in the hands of a race by its genius inclined to
exchange.
There remain the two natural conditions: ease of approach from without
and “draining power” from within.
Now when we turn to these natural conditions we find that in the matter
of ease of approach the Thames was unrivalled. London was, of course,
far from the sea--a point with which I will deal in a moment--but
there was no haven north of the Mediterranean which called so readily
for commerce upon a large scale. Given the political conditions for
a market--security and active powers of production and exchange--the
Thames was as good a highway to that market as any that could be found.
No vessels until quite modern times had to consider their draught or
fear the entry of the river (at least, through channels which the
pilots commanded), and once within the inland water a swinging tide was
at the service of the ships. There were, within that inland stretch, no
obstacles, no high intervening hills to becalm, no narrows or islands.
In this ease of access, again, must be reckoned the position of the
Thames relatively to opposing ports. The wide funnel opened at a few
hours’ sail from all that line of ports which begins with the mouth
of the Seine and ends with the northernmost mouths of the Rhine. What
we now call the coasts of Normandy, Picardy, Flanders, Belgium, and
Holland lay, even at their extremes, within one double tide of the
Thames.
It is true that they also lay equally convenient to any one of the
lesser havens upon the Sussex, the Kent, the Essex, or the Norfolk
coasts, but the ample space afforded by the river, the opportunity for
a crowd of shipping, coupled with opportunities for inland trading,
were to be found nowhere else in the south and east of the island as
they were to be found up London River.
[Illustration: GRAVESEND]
In this connection the use of the tide should be noted. By a
peculiarity which has not been without its effect upon the history of
the river the flood carries a man past the Kentish coast long past
high water and indeed until a moment very close to that in which
_another_ tide, that from the North Sea, carries its sweep of water up
the river. Thus, though the tide reach high water shortly after noon
in Dover Harbour, a man outside will carry the stream with him all up
past the Kentish coast until close upon five o’clock. He has but to get
round Longnose and he finds this other tide serving him--a tide that
has been making from three o’clock or thereabouts, coming in from the
North Sea, and that will carry him right up river as long as the wind
or daylight permits him to follow it; a tide that does not reach its
height at Gravesend until eight that evening, or in the Pool of London
until nine. In other words, the River of London afforded to the vessel
coming in from the south a double tide which, clever picked up, gave a
continuous voyage from the Channel right down into the sheltered water
inland.
At this point it is interesting to consider why the principal harbours
of the Middle Ages, in the north and west of Europe, at least, and upon
tidal seas, so constantly developed not upon the coast itself, but at
some distance up a stream or creek and inland.
Consider the examples: Havre comes late in the development of the
Seine--the original port is Harfleur; Bristol stands up a tortuous
and narrow channel well inland, and not upon the estuary of the
Severn at all; Liverpool had its first nucleus four miles from the
open sea; Preston quite twelve; Chester more than twenty, of which
the last five or six were a narrow river above the estuary; Nantes is
another striking example--something like one day’s sail from the sea;
Antwerp, Rotterdam--Bruges itself lying those few miles inland upon
its canal--follow the general rule; and so does Norwich, and so does
Colchester, and so does Boston, and so does Glasgow; Bordeaux tells the
same story, and so does the Royal Harbour of Montreuil. And in general,
while a great number of smaller ports rose upon the very coast of the
Atlantic, the North Sea, or the Channel, there seemed to be, until
modern times at least, a tendency for the main depôts of sea-borne
commerce to lie thus inland. Why was it?
We can only guess, but I would suggest that three factors combined to
establish such a state of things: First, the little boats used for
inland transport and the vehicles dependent upon roads and therefore
upon bridges would seek a place of trans-shipment at some point upon
the river where it had not yet become too broad or too rough, and so
long as this place was accessible from the sea, the higher up river it
was the better for them.
Next must be counted the security of a perfectly land-locked harbour
for the smaller craft, which formed so much the largest part of
maritime transport. A perfectly land-locked natural harbour upon the
coast was a very rare thing. Let the stretch of water be only of the
size of Southampton Water at its mouth, or of the Solent, and they
would be wrecked in a high wind, but rivers everywhere afforded a
secure protection when once one had entered their narrow channel.
Thirdly, we must consider the advantage which such sites presented
against the attacks of pirates, and the better opportunities for
defence which a considerable inland town possessed, with its resources
in the surrounding fields and population over the smaller seaports.
In considering the first of these points we must remember that there
was always a tendency for the central depôt or main commercial town
to arise somewhat inland and to be served by subsidiary ports, if
there were no direct access to it by water--and even if there were.
Canterbury is an example of this, so is Winchester, so is Amiens, and
so is Arras, and so is Caen, and so is Rennes, and a host of others.
In balancing the various advantages offered by various sites for the
establishment of a market, a preponderating advantage must always be
a position lying in the midst of several centres of production, and,
since man is a land animal, these sites would normally lie inland. When
they were served by a river so much the better; when they were served
by a great and secure river, they could not fail to grow as London has
grown.
As part of this ease of access must be reckoned, the peculiar character
of the Thames, much more open to the wind than the Seine, not blocked
by any island, affording once within the estuary a constant depth amply
sufficient for all vessels until quite recent times.
But all this would not have given London its place had not a city
established at the lowest crossing of the Thames exercised in a
peculiar degree that “draining power” of which I have spoken.
We have seen how the system of British roads necessarily converged
upon London, and if we consider one or two other features in English
topography, we shall see why London provides a common depôt for nearly
the whole of English exports in a fashion which no other city could
show for any other equally large area of production.
Before the north of England was industrialised, three things were
mainly required to establish what I have called the “draining” power
of any market in the island. First, that it should be fairly central
to all the south and Midlands; secondly, that it should afford a
convenient centre of demand for various foreign products; thirdly,
that it should be as close as possible to such continental markets as
principally received our export.
Given those three conditions combined in any one place, and so far as
the great mass of Britain was concerned, a point would be established
to which would flow the main part of the produce which the Continent
desired to purchase by exchange.
Observe how all these three conditions coincide in the case of London
and of that Lower Thames which was its port.
When I say with regard to the first condition that the point we are
seeking must be “central” to the south and east of the Island and to
the Midlands, I am using a word which needs expansion. I mean that we
must have a point to which the communications of commerce already lead,
and one not too ex-centric to the area tapped.
Now at the first glance at the map London does give an impression of
ex-centricity, of lying upon one side: and that towards the east and
the south.
But when we begin to consider certain qualifying conditions, we shall
find that London is fairly central, even geometrically, to the area in
question, and that, when we are considering the economic “weight” of
the various parts of this area, London may by a metaphor be said to be
near the “centre of gravity” of such an area.
Cut off, in the first place, the Dumnonian Peninsula--that is, Devon
and Cornwall,--the Welsh Highlands, and the Pennines. Consider (that
is) South England, East Anglia, and the Midlands. You have an area
roughly square, and about two hundred miles every way.
In drawing such a square, take for your extreme points Chester on
the north-west, a point midway between Portland and Exmouth on the
south-west; upon the north-east a point a little north of Cromer, and
upon the south-east a point in the Straits of Dover, a trifle west of
the line between Dungeness and Boulogne. Such a square includes a good
deal that is outside our area, much of the estuary of the Severn, a
strip of the Channel, a wedge of the North Sea and of the Wash, and
a wedge of Pennine land to the north; but it also excludes a certain
amount properly within our area as some of the richest parts of Kent
and of Norfolk and Suffolk. We may therefore take this square for a
fair average, and we shall see that even upon the test of distance
London is not so ex-centric as might be imagined. Draw the two
diagonals of this square, and you will find that London lies upon one
of them at a distance of less than forty miles from the centre.
[Illustration: KINGSTON BRIDGE]
When we consider something more than distance and think of London as
the “centre of gravity” of the Midlands, the east and the south, we
find it still more central for the centuries immediately preceding our
own. Their staple export was wool. The pasturage of the chalk ranges
runs right round London in the Chilterns and their extension into East
Anglia, in the north and south Downs and the Uplands of Wiltshire,
Hampshire, and Dorset. London is the obvious centre of all that
triangle of chalk. It is again nearly equi-distant from the principal
markets of Norfolk, of the Upper Trent valley, of Dorset, and of the
Cotswolds. If we treat as exceptions the Lancashire and Yorkshire
Plains (each with their local ports), the Vale Royal and the Lower
Severn (each with its local port at Chester and at Bristol), London is
very near the commercial centre of gravity of what remains. We must not
forget that the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain are but a few
miles more distant from London Bridge than is the extremity of Kent.
From the town of Pewsey to London Bridge as the crow flies is almost
exactly eighty-eight miles. From the South Foreland the distance is
not ten miles less. It needs but a slightly longer radius to include
all the Warwickshire Midlands and very nearly all the county of
Norfolk: all, of course, of Suffolk, of Essex, of Kent, Sussex, Surrey,
and Hampshire.
London is geographically and commercially central at any rate to the
older England--which was all that was needed for its establishment.
It was even more central when regarded as a nexus of communications.
How all the main roads centred there we have already seen. The roads
alone would have given London a pre-eminence as a market above all
other towns in Britain even if the Thames had dried up after their
establishment. But the position was meanwhile further strengthened by
the conditions of water carriage; and it is here that the meaning of
the Thames as a whole appears, and the way in which the upper as well
as the lower river has built up the greatness of London.
I have no space to show why and how water carriage was of supreme
importance both in primitive times (that is, before the Roman
civilisation came) and during the Dark Ages through which, in spite of
decline, it survived. It should be sufficient to point out that in the
decline of a civilisation, or in its absence, water carriage--suited
to heavy burdens, requiring no repair of ways, and providing a mode of
traction ready-made--is, wherever it is available, the chief economic
factor of commerce.
Now when we recognise that the bulk of English wealth lay for centuries
south and east of a line drawn from Exmouth to the Wash, and when we
appreciate what the Thames valley is in that triangle, we shall see
how necessarily the main market of the Thames was also the main market
of England. The natural water communications of the south consist in
a number of small streams, only one of which, the Salisbury Avon, may
have been navigable for more than a dozen miles or so inland. East
Anglia was better served, and particularly the northern area, which
was drained by the three rivers converging upon Breydon Water. The
northern part of that area was also fairly well served by the three
parallel rivers of the Ouse, the Nen, and the Welland, but their
service as a means of communication was handicapped by the nature of
their entry into the sea through the Fens, and after that through the
perils, sandbanks, and shallows of the Wash; while the good service of
rivers along all the East Anglian coast had this drawback: that, as we
there have nothing but a series of short systems, there was no water
connection between one group of short valleys and another, not even
one thought-out road. A dozen streams will carry produce from the sea
to Worstead, to Norwich, to Beccles, to what was once the considerable
port of Orford, to Ipswich, to Colchester, etc. But each avenue is a
separate avenue. There is no “trunk” connecting the system.
With the Thames it is otherwise. Glance down the valley and see how
one point after another, each the natural market of a whole district
of its own, drains the produce from the north and the south of the
river, to discharge it upon the main stream. From Lechlade (up to which
point ran the “measure and the bushel of London”)[4] through Oxford,
Abingdon, Wallingford, Reading, Marlow, the Middle Hythe (which we now
call Maidenhead), and Windsor, you have a whole string of such centres,
each gathering its own section’s produce from its scheme of roads,
or of subsidiary streams, and turning the mass down seaward upon the
“trunk” afforded by the Thames.
The Thames, therefore, with London as its port of transhipment between
the inland communications and the sea, tapped the very heart of all
that was wealthiest in England for fifteen hundred years, and all that
commerce by river as by road drained upon London because London was
“central” to exchange in the rich south and east of the island.
But, as we have seen, two further characters were attached to
“draining” power. We must not only seek a point central for
communications, we must also seek a point where there was a ready
demand for import and a ready access to the best foreign markets.
Let us consider these two characters in their order:
A ready demand for import must exist either in a port itself or
behind it, if that port is to develop into a great town and to
acquire political importance. You have many instances, especially in
contemporary commerce, of ports which do little more than export, and
of other ports in which there is no demand for import, but which merely
serve to pass the import inland. In the first case the international
exchange is effected through imports at some other point. The clearing
between export and import is a paper clearing, and the ships at the
export point arrive in ballast--a drawback. In the second place, though
a town may grow to some importance as a mere place of transhipment,
it will never acquire the importance of a capital nor even of a great
city--it will never have a great _political_ place unless, round
the handling of its imports destined for the interior, there grows
up a considerable local power of demand for values. In other words,
something of the imports transmitted through the town must “stick on
the way.” Modern Liverpool is a good example of this. The primary
economic function of modern Liverpool is still the transhipment of
cotton to Lancashire just beyond its boundaries, but in the pursuit
of this function Liverpool has claimed its tribute for now three
generations, and so vast an accumulation of other activities connected
with the port has grown up that even the digging of the Manchester Ship
Canal, the effect of which was so much feared in Liverpool, seems
to have been, if anything, a benefit to that town. What proportion
the power of demand exercised for imported goods in Liverpool itself
may bear to the total of values entering the port cannot be exactly
calculated, but it is safe to say that the toll levied is not much less
than one-fifth.
Now when to this power of demand created by the “sticking” at the point
of transhipment or port of import, of goods coming from abroad, there
is added the power of demand caused by the residence of government, of
a court and of wealthy men apart from those who are wealthy through
commerce, you get, of course, a very highly increased power of demand
which makes of the port of import a specially great economic centre. A
ship coming to such a port in order to take on board there the export
in which it deals, can enter loaded with imports which are sure of a
ready market.
[Illustration: SUNBURY]
It so happens that London during all the centuries of its growth, and
especially during those four hundred years of the Middle Ages which
chiefly established its great position, was in exactly this position.
Not only was it, as modern Liverpool is, a point of transhipment
round which a vast quantity of subsidiary activities had grown, it
was also close to the more or less permanent residence of the court,
to what became the permanent seat of legislature, and to what was
very early the permanent seat of the central courts of justice. The
process continued uninterruptedly. After the loot of the church land
of the endowments of the poor under the Tudors, the great palaces of
the new aristocracy lined the Strand, and from the early seventeenth
century--when this process was completed--onwards, the power of demand
exercised by London alone and its local call for imports, has never
ceased to grow, until to-day the position of London as an importing
centre is due almost entirely to this character, next to its value
as a clearing house: It is now only in a much less degree a point of
transhipment.
The type of goods for which this local power of demand existed had also
a very great effect in helping the growth of London through the traffic
of the Thames.
Perhaps the principal import of the Middle Ages in value was that of
wine. It was a luxurious import for which there was a local demand,
especially where you had the residence of the wealthier people, and,
what was exceedingly important, it was _an import large in bulk_.
It meant that ships would come either in great numbers or in heavy
tonnage, and this in itself suggested London as a place of export for
their return, made a speculative voyage to London worth taking, and
developed the warehousing space and the wharf space of the port. Later
came coal, later still the tropical products, and last of all the
great passenger traffic. But in every stage of the development London
has exercised a local power of demand for that kind of import which
demanded bulk in storage.
As to the second point, the easy access to the foreign port whither
export was to be made, London was again especially favoured, in its
point of growth. To-day it is no longer so, as we shall see in a
moment. London is going forward with the momentum of its past. But
until quite modern times London looked more favourably at the points
to which England exported than did the other island ports, its rivals.
It lay in the full focus of that long curve of the Norman, the Picard,
the Flemish and Dutch coasts, which were the principal markets of the
Middle Ages. Right opposite were the Flemish cities that bought English
wool--the staple export--right opposite, also, the mouths of the Rhine
for communication with the interior Germanies and, though a little more
distant than the northern ports, agreeable to all that Baltic and North
Sea trade which grew up with the close of the Middle Ages. The league
of mercantile towns called Hanseatic had its depôt in London from the
middle of the thirteenth century. The northern ports of England that
lie a little nearer had no hinterland to feed their commerce, and
London was, moreover, the best clearing-house and centre of general
exchange for them in all the north and west. In this character it
surpassed even Bruges.
When all these conditions changed--when the discovery of the New World,
and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country
industries and one hundred other factors had taken away from the site
of London its old topographical supremacy, the port was so firmly
established that it provided its own sources of vitality.
It is always so in the economic affairs of a town or of a nation.
Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the middle period
of their growth; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish
themselves. The River of London to-day is the capital example of this
truth out of all Europe. A basin far too small for modern commerce,
lying much too distantly up a river too narrow for modern commercial
needs, dangerous of entry for ships of modern draft, and needing
perpetual and enormous labour to keep it properly open, none the less
preserves its place at the head of the ports of the world. As a depôt
for commerce its wharves and docks extend to Tilbury, and that system
of clearing which grew up naturally on the low gravel height above
London Bridge, when the pool held all the shipping of the place and was
a large and secure harbour, is still established on that same hill in
the shape of the banks and the exchanges of the City of London, which
cancel the exchanges, not of the pool below, but of I know not what
fraction of the shipping of the whole world.
There is one last point to be considered in connection with London
river as a port. It has been well made by Mr. Lyde in one of his short
but remarkable geographical studies. The estuary of the Thames exactly
faces that great and permanent frontier line between two parts of our
European culture, upon either side of which lie contrasting speeches,
traditions, and even religions.
That frontier roughly divides such areas of Western Europe as have
continuously preserved the traditions of the Roman Empire from outer
regions to the east and to the north, which only received the Christian
religion and the Roman civilisation after the breakdown of central
authority exercised from the Imperial city.
The estuary of the Thames opens like a funnel just opposite the point
where this frontier between what some would call the “Teutonic” and
“Latin” areas, reaches the sea.
It may not be at first sight apparent why a position of this kind is
of capital commercial importance. The reason is rather moral than
material, though it has its material element in the cheapness and
expedition of carriage by sea.
Areas which differ in the type of their culture tend to become
polarised one towards the other for the purposes of exchange. Each
will tend to produce something that the other lacks. Now the exchange
between two such areas will, of course, proceed actively enough across
innumerable points lying upon the frontier between them, but it will
not penetrate very far inland, if there is in competition with the
inland routes a water route. Thus Arras will exchange easily enough
with, say, Aix-la-Chapelle, Metz with Trèves or Frankfort, but what
of Rouen and the Baltic, Bordeaux and the Frisian Lowlands, Brittany
and Vendée and the German Plain? It is evident that if no friction
existed a direct sea-borne commerce along the north-western coasts of
Europe would effect these exchanges; but there does exist a friction,
especially in early times, consisting in the ignorance and, as it were,
the credulity, separating places so far distant in mileage and, what
is more important, in culture. If, then, a half-way house is found
sufficiently familiar to either party, that half-way house will tend
to become in this new aspect out of so many, a centre of exchange--and
this is precisely what happened to London. The North Sea and the
Baltic were familiar with London--but then so was the Channel and the
Bay of Biscay. London river attracted in this fashion a sheaf of trade
routes, drawn from the north and east, another from the south and
west. And so true is this that to the present day, and in one curious
slight but emphatic modern instance, you can see the process at work.
Travellers intent upon no purpose of commerce but merely upon an
excursion will leave London river for Boulogne and Calais, sometimes
for Dieppe and Havre; other travellers will leave the same facility
of egress for the Scheldt and the Rhine and the Dutch ports and the
Elbe. But, unless I am mistaken, the more obvious track of a passenger
steamer route between the French ports and the Belgian, Dutch, and
German ones does not exist save in the case of the great liners which
touch at Cherbourg. A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by
sea or from some lower French port to, say, Amsterdam, would very
probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames
and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present
position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one:
but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at
the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this
‘facing’ of London River towards the great political frontier line of
Europe, was of capital importance. Scandinavia, the Baltic, Frisia, and
the Dutch ports had all known their way to London for centuries when
the Norman Conquest, and still more the succeeding Angevin monarchy,
brought round into London River a new wealth of trade from the Seine,
the Loire, and the Garonne.
[Illustration: TWICKENHAM FERRY]
In all that has preceded we have been considering London as the
creation of the river in its civil aspect alone; it remains to consider
the town and the stream in their effect upon the military history of
the country, and to that I shall now turn.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] The reader may see quoted in full in Sir Laurence Gomme’s _The
Governance of London_ (p. 346) the precedents upon which Coke founded
his opinion in 1597, including the verdict of 29 Ed. I., concerning in
particular the portage of salt upon the Thames.
“Quod nullus mensuarius sit de London usque Lachenlade nisi dicti
mensuarii et bushelli de Ripa Reginae.”
V
LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE
The last historical aspect in which we must consider the River of
London is the military aspect; and this aspect has three clearly marked
divisions. We have first to consider the Lower Thames as an avenue of
invasion; next as an obstacle to invasion of the northern part of the
island, or to the passage of the troops from the north to the south.
Thirdly, we must estimate what effect upon the military history of
the country London itself has had, commanding as it does the lowest
crossing of the Thames, always forming a vast base of supply, and for
centuries by its stores and munitions forming an ally or an enemy of
capital importance to whichever party it supported so long as warfare
was waged in England.
The first two of these considerations are very sharply defined not
only in their nature, but also in the historical periods over which
each one predominated. The Thames as an avenue of ingress or invasion
belongs to the earlier part of English history. The importance of the
lower river in this category ends very nearly with the close of the
Dark Ages. Its second character, that of an obstacle to the invader
who would go northward or to troops marching from the north southward,
in the main is discoverable of course throughout history, but chiefly
belongs to the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. I will take
these three points, therefore, in their order and deal first with the
invasions of England which the Lower Thames has served. These invasions
from the first recorded case of the almost to the last may be grouped
together under one description. They were the raids of the pirates.
It is true that these raids became, as the Dark Ages developed and
the true Middle Ages approached, better and better organised, more
definitely political and dynastic in plan, until at last they took on
the character of regular warfare. But from the beginning to the end
of the process we have little or no use of the Thames on the part
of regular forces proceeding from the ancient civilisation of the
Continent, from Gaul, or from the mouths of the Rhine. The whole story
is a story of invasion from the outer and barbarian limits of Europe,
that is, from the North Sea and the confines of the Baltic.
The early pirate raids upon this island, which were first called Saxon,
hundreds of years later Dane, but which had through the whole of the
Dark Ages much of one character of purposeless devastation, used the
Thames for one of their chief entries. The earlier and less powerful
raids seem to have made nothing of London. It was too much for them.
But the later and worse tempest of the eighth and ninth and tenth
centuries had London for their main object when they forced the river,
and since it is a piece of history very little explored, it is worth a
moment’s digression here.
What were the conditions under which the pirates conducted their raids
upon the waterway?
First let us establish a little list of what was certainly known with
regard to these attempts.
Of the first Saxon raids in connection with the Thames we know nothing.
Even the distorted legends set down hundreds of years afterwards only
preserve a recollection of a landing in Kent, in Thames, and the
fighting that follows them is upon land and south of the river. Of
what raids were made upon the Essex shore, or whether any were made,
or whether (which is improbable) any attempt were made by these sparse
destroyers against the walls and bridge of London, all the part, small
or null or whatever it was, which the Thames played in the first pirate
raids of the fifth and sixth centuries escapes us.
[Illustration: HAMPTON]
This is not the place in which to insist upon the unreliable character
of that vast mass of popular history erected upon sheer guess-work and
describing the early raids of the Saxon pirates as effecting in some
way a reconstruction of England. The wilder sort of fiction dealing
with that remote and almost unknown period talks of these first pirate
raids as “the coming of the English.” We must, of course, neglect
rhetoric of that kind. But it is worth while admitting a moment’s
digression to impress on the reader upon what an absence of any thing
approaching evidence all this academic guess-work has been raised.
The one definite fact and the only one connected with the pirate
raids which descended upon the eastern and southern river mouths and
beaches of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is the fact that
these raids cut off southern and eastern Britain from the rest of
civilisation. Of contemporary evidence there is nothing for more than
150 years, save one very vague denunciatory or apocalyptical document
more in the nature of a sermon than a record, which testifies to the
violent impression produced upon the civilised inhabitants of the
island by these raids, and a couple of fragmentary sentences written
perhaps by contemporaries, certainly not by eye-witnesses, and
probably at a great distance from the scene of the trouble.
We do not know when the raids of the pirates began, nor whether they
were already severe before Britain was cut off.
We do not know whether Southern and Eastern Britain was already
occupied by kinsmen of the pirates serving as Auxiliary Troops within
the Empire or no.
We do not know whether the maritime belts of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and
Sussex spoke a Teutonic language before the pirate raids or no.
We do not know whether a Christian Church was sufficiently established
in those belts for the raids to have had an opportunity of “destroying”
such a Church.
We do not know in what numbers the pirates came nor with what object
nor what the towns (which were the nucleus of that society) suffered or
did not suffer from the invasions.
We have, as almost the sole instrument of historical analysis for a
full 150 years, nothing but inference and the consideration of what is
physically possible and physically impossible in the various theories
that have been put forward.
Thus it is physically impossible that any very considerable number of
men can have come over seas at any one moment in the small and shallow
boats of the time, but for all the rest we have nothing but legend
and our varying estimate of how the society attacked would probably
have behaved and what the internal reactions within it under the
strain of such an anxiety would probably have been. We can be fairly
certain that an attack of this sort could not deal with a defended
Roman town, though here and there a garrison on the coast may have
been overwhelmed. We can be morally certain from all that we know of
that society that men coming for loot would not kill slaves. On the
other hand, we do not know how far the anarchy may have been increased
by the presence of numerous escaped slaves in the welter. We have a
right to exclude the fantastic--such as the astonishing idea that a
great Roman town like London could be wiped out _and then resettled
by a totally new population_, and we have a right to exclude as very
nearly worthless odd stories cropping up hundreds of years later in
the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. On the other hand, we are bound to pay
more respect to such a remark as that of the Venerable Bede when he
testifies to the migration of a whole body of pirate population from
the capital of Schleswig to that of Britain.
If we could discover what happened between the first generation of the
fifth century and the first generation of the seventh, the discovery
would be the most important and interesting that could be made in
connection with our history. For in Britain as in every other province
of Europe the process by which civilisation entered into the Dark Ages
is the explanation of all that followed. But the discovery has not yet
been granted to us, and in all human probability never will be.
We know that the avenue of approach from the Continent to Britain, that
is, the coasts of the south and east, were so far ruined or occupied
or degraded, the communication with the rest of the island was cut
off; we know that when civilisation came back with St. Augustine it
had to work through the medium of little courts scattered up and down
these shores, and we can presume that writing and record and government
thus filtering through the south and east to the rest of the island
gradually spread the speech and certain of the customs of that south
and east eastward throughout the succeeding centuries.
Of more than that we are ignorant.
The Lower Thames, therefore, and the part that it played in that first
capital piece of fighting lies, unfortunately, outside the field of
positive history. We do not begin to get any true record of the Thames
as an avenue of invasion until the second raids begin, three centuries
after the first: those second raids which are collectively known in
this country under the title of “Danish.”
At the end of the eighth century the pirate raids from the north struck
England again. A few boats’ crews would land, especially in the north,
and raid a monastery or loot the outer barns of a steading, only to be
beaten off.
But a lifetime later, in the middle of the ninth century, the raids
increased in pressure. As early as 832 you get them in the mouth of
the Thames. It is a small matter. They land in Sheppey and raid that
sparsely inhabited, isolated island, but their raid was successful and
it taught them the way back. The next year they meet Egbert down in the
south-west in some considerable conflict, killing two of his leaders
and holding the battlefield. Two years later again they were in the
Irish Sea and were caught and beaten in an island raid in the west.
In 837 they were beaten off Southampton, to which they had come with
thirty-three ships--and perhaps at the most five thousand fighting men.
But again that same year a raid of theirs in Dorsetshire succeeded, and
the next year between Kent and Sussex they struck again, and before
winter in the hollow land of the Fens and in the Broads and in Kent.
It is with the year 839 that you get the first hint at an attack upon
London. It is not certain that that attack was Danish, but it is
almost certain that the mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to
a great simultaneous series of raids upon the French and the English
coasts which struck Picardy and Rochester in Kent as well as London.
Something we shall never know is what was pushing them. They had some
more adventurous man with his companions to rouse them in the Baltic
and off the Norwegian inlets, or there was passing over that unknown
pagan society of the north one of those spirits which pass over human
societies and lead them out to peril. They would risk the Bay of
Biscay, but their ships were caught by the Christians in the Asturias.
They even dared for the first time to winter without going home, and to
pass the time between one fighting season and the next upon an island
in the mouth of the Noir Moutier. They pushed as far as Seville and
the Moors ate them up. They ran up the Elbe to Hamburg in a force far
larger than anything that has been seen in the west. They ran up the
Seine to Rouen and further. They pushed through a gate of Paris and
were turned out.
[Illustration: TEDDINGTON]
They first charged at and then carried Bordeaux, and all this while
they raided Ireland. It was in the year 851 that there came at last
a great fleet of these purposeless destroyers to the Thames mouth,
three hundred and fifty ships so came, and Canterbury and London were
stormed. But their host, which so considerable a fleet must have
brought for the first time in numbers really threatening, was beaten as
it marched down the Stane Street to the raiding of the south. They were
met at Ockley[5] by the host of the English King Ethelwulf and were cut
to pieces. He had probably come up by that old way from Winchester
which leads through Alton into the Dorking Gap, and so had come up with
the raiders. Four years later these pirates, who had already learnt to
winter upon Christian land in Gaul, wintered in Sheppey. That they went
up the river next year we have no record, but ten years later, in 865,
they had been wintering in England, this time in Thanet. The Kentish
men paid them ransom, but the pagan kept no faith. He took the ransom
and harried the land. Thenceforward it is perpetual raiding up and down
England north of Thames. In ’71 they are in Reading, but not, it would
seem, by river, and Alfred beat them on Ashdown, but they were in no
way driven off. They held London all that winter, and year after year
they still marched up and down England.
The pirates, keeping more or less together in one horde, marched and
ravaged without strategical purpose and with no power of conquest,
organisation, or government, ruining as they went, and you have in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such phrases as: “Here the host travelled
over the mouth of Humber to York.” “Here the host went to Mercia and
to Nottingham.” “Here the host went again to York.” “Here the army
rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up their winter quarters
in Thetford.” “Here the host went into Northumbria, and took up their
winter quarters at Torksey.” “Here the host went to Repton”--and so
forth, to Cambridge, to Wareham, to Exeter--a perpetual raid until in
878 Alfred came out from behind Selwood and his hiding in the crisis
of his kingdom, and beat them for good on the bare chalk Down above
Eddington. Thenceforward the pressure is against the pirates.
More than twenty years later they raided from Boulogne into Kent, and
it was in that same raid in 893 that again the Thames was violated.
Haesten, whom we call Hasting, came up so far as Milton, that is the
first good landing-place upon the southern shore of the inland Thames
just opposite Tilbury.[6] He was working with another force to the
south in the Rother, but nothing came of this double attack. There was
no sailing up river. The station at Milton was broken up and Hasting
went down river, crossed to the northern shore, and established himself
at Benfleet. The men of London, with a reinforcement of the national
army, took his fort and broke all that part of the Danish force, and
his ships were either destroyed or brought up river to London, or some
up the Medway to Rochester, but Hasting himself who had been raiding
was not captured. He came back with that part of his force which had
been with him, summoned sundry parties of the raiding Danes from other
parts of England, made a new base not far from the old one, and started
upon a new raid right across England to the Western Sea. When he had
returned he brought such ships as remained to him up river into the
Lea, built yet another fort upon that stream twenty miles from London.
Once more that base was destroyed. The river Lea was blocked below
their settling place, such ships as they had, destroyed or taken to
London again. And meanwhile the astonishing Danish host survived,
raiding out again across England in a final effort. But their sea
power was gone. They wintered at Bridgenorth in the west. Their few
remaining ships, six in number, attempted the Isle of Wight and Devon.
Alfred beat them off, also catching three aground, but of the remaining
three two were left upon the Sussex coast and their crews hanged in
Winchester. The last one left, full of wounded men, made East Anglia.
In 901 Alfred died, but though he had prevented the raiding of the
Danes from destroying Christian England, the plundering went on year
after year, but for many years the Thames was free. Seventeen years
later they fell upon Severn mouth and were beaten off, and the story
goes on with a gradual reconquest of the posts which the pagans had
established in the Midlands. It was not until 980 that they touched
again at Thames mouth in Thanet, harrying it, and two years later they
seem to have come up river and attacked London once more, but there is
a bare mention of it, and nothing further. But with that end of the
century you come to a very different set of wars--a political attempt
of the northern raiders, now organised in regular fashion, and almost
a kingdom by themselves, upon the verge of accepting Christianity and
of entering into the European Commonwealth. These new fights were
fought not for plunder but for conquest. They ended in success, and the
critical moment of the campaign was decided in the Thames.
All the fighting of the thirty odd years which established the Danish
dynasty in England and led up to the great reign of Canute, has for its
pivot or centre the estuary of the Thames and in successive attacks
upon the defence of, or in the alliance of London.
Ethelred the Unready, when he forms his first plans against Olaf,
gathers his fleet in the Pool of London--though he does nothing with
that fleet (992). When, two years later (994), Olaf makes his alliance
with Sweyn, it is again up the estuary of the Thames that he sails to
make his great attack upon the City--but London beat him off. Though
London is attacked again from the _land_ in 1009 and with very great
vigour in 1013, Edmund Ironside, a boy who all but saved his house,
fought alternately north and south of the estuary against the armies
landed from the invading fleet.
That campaign (the campaign of 1016) is as excellent an example of the
part the Lower Thames played in the warfare of this island before the
Norman Conquest as one could choose. In the month of May Canute makes
his attempt to reduce the capital. He cut a canal through the alluvium
of Suffolk to get his ships round the Bridge head, so that he held
London from the River side both above bridge and below, and he dug his
trench all round the north, east, and west over against the walls. But
he did not reduce the town. Edmund Ironside coming up from the west,
re-entered it. The invader retired to an entrenched camp at Greenwich.
When later the whole invading fleet had dropped down the Thames and
sailed out of the estuary, you get a strategical playing north and
south of that obstacle which is most illuminating. Canute attacks the
Suffolk shore. Edmund marches thither, having the estuary to the south
of him. Canute then sails across the mouth of the Thames and attacks
Kent shore. Edmund counter-marches, _is compelled to take the long
route crossing the Thames at London_, and finds the Danish advance at
Otford to the south of the estuary. He defeats it. Canute thereupon
once more crosses the mouth of the Thames and attacks the Essex shore,
and once more Edmund goes back by the long land route, crosses at
London, gets to the north of the estuary, and fights and loses (by
treachery) his great action on the Crouch at Ashington, near Rochford.
You could not have within a shorter space of time a clearer view both
of what the Lower Thames meant as an avenue of approach to invasion
during the Dark Ages that were coming to a close, and what it was to
mean as an obstacle to a passage of armies during the centuries of
the Middle Ages which were about to open. The Lower Thames played
no great part between this date, 1016, and the invasion of William
the Conqueror. A fleet seems to have stood on it perpetually for the
defence of the kingdom under Canute, but did not serve as an avenue of
invasion, nor was that fleet brought to action.
[Illustration: PANGBOURNE]
The Lower Thames last appears before the Conquest as an element in
warfare when Godwin and his sons enter the mouth of the River in
1052, the fifty ships of the King not daring to offer battle. London
favoured this particular advance, allowed Godwin to pass under the
Bridge without obstacle (which shows how the masts were stepped), and
with that successful but hardly challenged expedition ends the first
chapter of the Lower Thames in English warfare: the chapter of its use
in the Dark Ages as an avenue of invasion into the heart of the country
and against London and, already by the early eleventh century, its
strategical value as an obstacle to the movement of troops from north
to south.
The Lower Thames in the warfare of the Middle Ages, and indeed up to
that of the seventeenth century and the Civil Wars--that is, throughout
a space of six hundred years (from 1066 to 1644), appears in English
warfare only in the character of the main obstacle of crossing South
England.
It is impossible to develop a negative aspect of this kind at any
great length, nor is it even possible to affirm it as an universal
negative. I can indeed call to mind no case of the transport of troops
in any considerable numbers from the north to the south of the Lower
Thames, or vice versa, during the period in question. But even if some
considerable exception be discovered, it does not affect the general
thesis that the great groups of civil war which marked the history
of England in the Middle Ages and during the seventeenth century were
powerfully affected in their strategy by the interruption to eastern
communications to north and south, which was caused by the Lower Thames
and its estuary.
Thus the whole plan of the Wars of the Roses, infinitely confused
though it is in detail, involves a striking up from or down to London
with perpetual action west of London, but there is never any attempt
to turn a southern or a northern position by the crossing of the Lower
Thames in force--at least that I can call to mind. You have the same
thing earlier in the Barons’ Wars. When Henry III. wishes to make a
base for himself in South England and begins by advancing on Rochester,
Simon makes no attempt to cut across anywhere below London. On the
contrary, he marches south from that lowest crossing, making sure of
intercepting the King on his march round parallel with the coast. In
the succeeding campaign the line of the Severn determines everything,
and here again the Upper Thames is crossed and recrossed as well, the
Lower Thames not at all; and when we come to the great Civil Wars of
the seventeenth century or, as our forefathers called them, “the Great
Rebellion,” you have perhaps the clearest instance since the campaign
of Edmund Ironside of how the estuary of the Lower Thames determined
by its obstacle the strategy of the east of England. Speaking in very
general terms and from the point of view of strategy alone as distinct
from the great moral and social forces at work, the Parliament won
because it continuously held not only London but a great triangle of
the Eastern English land; Kent in the main, and all East Anglia, and
after the second year of the war Lincolnshire as well.
Now imagine in the place of the estuary of the Thames continuous land
communication and you will see what a difference that change would have
made. Charles at the very beginning of the campaign, though he could
not have besieged a town as large as London, could very probably have
marched past it and chastised East Anglia, broken up its recruiting
centres, etc., confident that there was open to him an alternative
retreat to the west upon either side of London. Nay, he could, had he
been successful in this early part of the war, in an East Anglian raid
have continued that success in the south-east. He might, I imagine,
have isolated London, though he could not have besieged it. As it
was, the two halves of his enemy’s country divided for _his_ purposes
by the Lower Thames were for _their_ purposes united by common radii
converging at London and by the control of all the Lower River as a
continuous avenue of transport and supply.
What was still heartily Royalist in Sussex (and I believe I may
count here many of the castles) was, through the action of that same
obstacle, a hopelessly isolated patch which Parliament had later little
difficulty in reducing. But suppress the Lower Thames and it would have
given Charles a solid base for advance.
We must not exaggerate the point, for the strategy of the time was very
confused, and sometimes at first almost purposeless; but none the less
in any campaign, however muddled, the main natural strategy imposed by
topography invariably appears, and for what it is worth I cite it in
this case of the Lower Thames and of the Civil Wars.
The third point, of course, in this connection of the Lower Thames with
the Civil Wars waged in this island is the position of London: and that
position is twofold. London has one great strategical character as the
lowest crossing place of the Thames; it has another great strategical
character as the chief natural base in the island.
The first of these two characters is obvious, and as obviously recurs
throughout the whole history of battle between the Norman Conquest and
the Parliamentary Wars. Whoever has possession of London has possession
of the secure crossing place nearest the sea which gives immediate
interior communication between one section of the east of the island
and the other, and as a rule to have possession of London is to have
command sooner or later of the whole of the south and east upon that
account.
But the second character, London as a base, is of even more importance.
You had here a town so great that after the Dark Ages it need never
stand a siege. It is further a town the supplies of which under
primitive conditions lay almost always uncut. Unless a man had so
considerable a fleet that he could cut off supplies by River, so well
organised a transport that he could keep both banks of that broad
stream perpetually in touch, and finally so very large a command that
he could hold the whole circuit of the walls securely and the Bridge
end on the Southwark side as well, London could not be, strictly
speaking, besieged, and, from the Danish Wars onwards, London never was.
Not only was this great centre of supply nourished by the Thames immune
from such isolation, but it could also furnish stores of provision,
remounts, and all that was necessary for a medieval army in quantities
more than sufficient for the restoration or recruitment of such a
force; hence we find London perpetually turning the scale during six
centuries of fighting, and it is almost true to say that he who has
London ultimately wins the war. It was the size of London, and in
particular its value as a recruiting centre, which checked Charles I.
after Edgehill. London made the fortune of Simon de Montfort; London
appears to have remounted the Barons in the most critical moment of
the campaign of Magna Charta; and London was the necessary pivot upon
which William the Conqueror was compelled to hinge all his work of
pacification after Hastings. Indeed, the position of London could not
be better illustrated than in this early example, where the Norman
found it impossible or inadvisable to attempt a direct attack upon
it, was compelled to isolate it temporarily by sweeping a line of
devastation around it, and made it his first care to recognise its
customs and pre-eminence in the kingdom.
With the conclusion of this brief survey of the part which the Lower
Thames and London as the creation of the Lower Thames has played in the
history of warfare I must close this Essay.
I would close it, as I began it, by the qualification that all those
material causes which are the delight of one who traces out the effects
of historical geography are but half the story. Of the spirit of place
and of the human motive without which such mere topography would be
meaningless, I have said little or nothing in this consideration of the
River of London building up London through two thousand years; but that
is because this business of the soul in any historical matter must be
separately treated, and that in a spirit always alien, and sometimes
antagonistic, to the chain of material cause and effect.
Nevertheless, it is the soul of London and of London River which has
driven forward the story of both of them together, much more than any
material limits within which that soul was compelled to act. And that
is why to-day overlying the vestiges--often now completely hidden--of
the original material framework, London and the River rather control
that framework and what were once the necessary condition of port and
market and crossing place than are controlled by them.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] The reader should be warned that this famous action has been
ascribed by modern pedantry to all manner of other places and sites.
For my part I will trust our ancestors, the tradition of the place, and
the obvious strategies of the Roman Road.
[6] Or Milton Creek out of the Swale. So Professor Oman will have it
in his book upon _England Before the Conquest_. But he gives no proof.
Milton on the Thames itself would have seemed a much safer and more
accessible base.
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