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Title: A book of bridges
Illustrator: Frank Brangwyn
Author: Walter Shaw Sparrow
Release date: July 16, 2024 [eBook #74057]
Language: English
Original publication: London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1915
Credits: Carol Brown, Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOK OF BRIDGES ***
Transcriber’s Note:
In Memory of
Chris Curnow
(1937-2023)
the Project Manager at Distributed Proofreaders
who selected this book,
and more than 2200 others,
to be preserved as free digital transcriptions
by Project Gutenberg.
* * * * *
A BOOK OF BRIDGES
[Illustration:
PONT ST. BÉNÉZET OVER THE RHÔNE AT AVIGNON,
BUILT BETWEEN THE YEARS 1177 AND 1185]
A BOOK OF BRIDGES
BY FRANK BRANGWYN, A.R.A.
AND WALTER SHAW SPARROW
LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXV
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
[Illustration: HISTORIC VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, ON THE MARNE]
PREFATORY NOTE
Literary projects may be put in two classes. Some are like steamers
that go in a regulated course direct to their destinations, while
others tack here and there like sailing ships, governed by a zigzag
progress.
The subject of bridges belongs to this latter class. For
five-and-twenty years I have tried to order it into a methodised hobby.
As well try to teach a hive of honey-bees never to visit certain
flowers in a garden, and never to fly beyond certain pathways and
hedges. Yet a writer cannot help rebelling when his chosen theme
declines to play in the game of authorship, and deviates from many
careful plans which are made for its benefit. Every chapter in this
book has been rewritten eight or ten times, yet my sailing ship has not
become an Atlantic liner.
My wish for a long time was to show the evolution of bridges in
about seven hundred photographic illustrations, with eight lines of
text under each print; and in preparation for this work I collected
materials, and received invaluable help from other pontists,
particularly from Mr. Frank Brangwyn, Mr. H. T. Crofton, Mr. C. S.
Sargisson, Mr. Edgar Wigram, the Rev. O. M. Jackson, and the Church
Missionary Society. Pontist after pontist sent me notes, photographs,
sketches; and then Frank Brangwyn suggested that we should work in
collaboration. Here was luck indeed! His pictures and drawings would
be the book of art; and the rambling subject, if it passed over mere
technique into the human drama, ought to interest the general reader
who does generally read. For bridges have represented types of society,
every change in their development having been brought about by changes
in social needs.
One thing more than any other is attractive to a pontist: it is the
varied strife that bridges and roads have circulated, not only in
military campaigns, but in the thronged struggle for existence--the
one incessant war in the affairs of men. A routine of idle sentiment
prattles about an illusion named Peace, yet strife everywhere remains
the historian of life, every effort to do and to live claiming a
battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed. Even sleep, the nearest
kinswoman of peace, is united to the law of battle by dreams that
torture. A pontist, then, when studying the strife that roads and
bridges have distributed, must clear from his mind the fanciful ideas
that pacifism has invented; he is an adventurer in history, not an
idler in a world of visions. To-day, above all, he is called upon to
see the truth, because Europe, driven by the rival motive-powers of
hostile ideals, has passed from industrial strikes and contests into
other phases of necessary warfare. Once more differing civilizations
will have their worth tested to the full on stricken fields; and once
more roads and bridges will dominate the military tactics and strategy.
This great War broke out when my last chapter was nearly finished,
and its early events illustrate and confirm the main arguments which
I have tried to make as clear as possible, so that no person may
think of bridges apart from their historic service to mankind. During
many centuries, for example, all strategical bridges were fortified;
then a gradual decline began, and it culminated in the defenceless
modern bridge that sappers blow up in a few minutes. Bridge-builders
everywhere have much good sense to regain from the science of national
defence, a very difficult science to-day, for many of its methods are
being rendered obsolete by airships and aeroplanes. So a book on
historic bridges could not be published at a time more opportune than
the present moment.
* * * * *
Several collectors have lent pictures, and their kind aid is
acknowledged in the table of illustrations.
W. S. S.
_November 11th, 1914._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
PAGE
ON THE STUDY OF BRIDGES AND ROADS 1
Section I. GENERAL VIEWS, from p. 3 to p. 13. Section
II. STRIFE AND HISTORIC BRIDGES, from p. 14 to p. 52.
Section III. CUSTOM AND CONVENTION, from p. 53 to p.
84. Section IV. CONTROVERSIES, from p. 85 to p. 106.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
MAN AS THE MIMIC OF NATURE 107
Section I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS, from p. 109 to
p. 112. Section II. AMONG THE HERALDS OF MAN, from p.
113 to p. 124. Section III. THE SLAB-BRIDGE WITH STONE
PIERS, from p. 125 to p. 128. Section IV. TREE-BRIDGES
WITH STONE PIERS, from p. 129 to p. 132. Section V.
TREE-BRIDGES WITH TIMBER PILES, from p. 133 to p.
135. Section VI. SOME TYPICAL TIMBER BRIDGES, from
p. 136 to p. 143. Section VII. PRIMITIVE SUSPENSION
BRIDGES, from p. 144 to p. 149. Section VIII. NATURAL
ARCHES--THEIR SIGNIFICANCE AND THEIR INFLUENCE, from
p. 150 to p. 164.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
A FEW WORDS ON THE ROMAN GENIUS 165
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
OLD BRIDGES, EUROPEAN, PERSIAN AND CHINESE 205
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
ON THE EVOLUTION OF UNFORTIFIED BRIDGES 329
APPENDIX I
CHINESE GABLED BRIDGES 365
APPENDIX II
STEEP ROMAN BRIDGES 367
INDEX AND GLOSSARY 369
LIST OF COLOUR PLATES
_Frontispiece._ PONT ST. BÉNÉZET OVER THE RHÔNE AT
AVIGNON. Built between the years 1177 and 1185.
_National Gallery of Australia._
TO FACE PAGE
RAILWAY BRIDGE AT ALBI IN FRANCE 8
PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS IN FRANCE: THE FORTIFIED GATES
AND TOWERS. Thirteenth Century. See also the second
picture of this Bastille Bridge 16
THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO. Mainly the work of Archbishop
Tenorio, A.D. 1380; fortified by Andres Manrique, A.D.
1484. _Collection of Miss E. C. Rossignol_ 32
WAR-BRIDGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AT PARTHENAY IN FRANCE 36
CANNON STREET RAILWAY BRIDGE, LONDON. _Collection of the
Fine Art Society_ 48
OLD LONDON BRIDGE. Begun by Peter Colechurch in 1176, and
finished by a Frenchman, called Isembert, in the year
1209 52
OLD BRIDGE OVER THE CLAIN NEAR POITIERS 56
AT ALBI ON THE TARN IN FRANCE. Showing on our right the
Old Houses, and beyond the Bridge, on our left, the
great Old Church, famous for its fortifications 72
TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON. _Collection of John Lane, Esq._ 80
FAMOUS BRIDGE AT ESPALION IN FRANCE. Said to date from
the Eighth Century 88
PONT DU TARN AT ALBI IN FRANCE. Said to date from about
the years 1035-40 92
PONT DE VERNAY AT AIRVAULT, DEUX-SÈVRES. Famous bridge
with ribbed arches, French Romanesque Period, Twelfth
Century 96
OLD BRIDGE OVER THE AUDE AT CARCASSONNE IN FRANCE.
Twelfth Century 104
GOTHIC BRIDGE AT VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOT, FRANCE 120
PONTE DELLA PAGLIA AT VENICE. Renaissance. _Collection of
R. Workman, Esq._ 152
ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT SEGOVIA IN SPAIN 184
HUGE DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT CÓRDOVA IN SPAIN. Originally
Roman, but remodelled by the Moors in the Ninth
Century. Recently so much repaired that it looks
almost new 188
OLD BRIDGE WITH HOUSES AT KREUZNACH ON THE NAHE, PRUSSIA 208
THE RIALTO IN VENICE. Designed in 1588 by Antonio da
Ponte. _Collection of the Fine Art Society_ 212
NEW LONDON BRIDGE. Designed by George Rennie, and carried
out by his brother, Sir John Rennie. Opened to the
public in 1831. _Collection of Charles Holme, Esq._ 220
THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE AT VENICE, OVER THE CANAL OF ST.
GIOBBE. Brick and stone. Renaissance. _Collection of
J. Heaton, Esq._ 224
GOTHIC BRIDGE AT BARNARD CASTLE, YORKSHIRE 232
GOTHIC BRIDGE WITH SHRINES AT ELCHE IN SPAIN 236
OLD BRIDGE AT ESPALY, NEAR LE PUY, IN FRANCE 240
PONT DES CONSULS OVER THE TARN AT MONTAUBAN IN FRANCE.
Fourteenth Century 256
PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS-SUR-LOT. Thirteenth Century. See
also the other picture of this Bastille Bridge 264
THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO. Showing the Moorish Gateway at
the Town end of the Bridge. See also the other picture 284
SPANISH WAR-BRIDGE--THE BRIDGE OF ST. MARTIN AT TOLEDO.
Its history seems to date from 1212, but in the
fourteenth century it was rebuilt by Archbishop
Tenorio 288
PONTE NOMENTANO OVER THE ANIO; A MEDIÆVAL WAR-BRIDGE IN
THE CAMPAGNA 296
LAROQUE ON THE RIVER LOT, NEAR CAHORS. A sort of inland
Gibraltar; a part of the village is built on bridges
thrown across chasms in the rocks 300
PONT NEUF AT PARIS. Built in 1604, but much altered since
the Renaissance 320
THE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON. _Albertina Collection, Vienna._
See also the other drawing 328
PONT HENRI IV OVER THE VIENNE AT CHÂTELLERAULT IN FRANCE.
Built by Charles Androuet du Cerceau, 1564-1609 332
PONT DE TOURS, FRANCE. Famous Bridge of the Eighteenth
Century 344
ON THE TARN AT MILLAU IN SOUTHERN FRANCE. Representing
the broken end of an old bridge with a mill built on
it; behind is an arch of the new bridge 352
LIST OF BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
HISTORIC VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, ON THE MARNE v
BRIDGE OF BOATS AT COLOGNE 1
BROKEN WAR-BRIDGE OF THE XIII CENTURY, AT NARNI IN ITALY 14
WAR-BRIDGE OF THE XIV CENTURY AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE 18
RUINS OF THE GREAT ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE NERA AT NARNI,
ITALY 24
PUENTE DE SAN JUAN DE LAS ABADESAS AT GERONA IN SPAIN 29
THE OLD WAR-BRIDGE OF STIRLING 45
PONT SIDI RACHED AT CONSTANTINE IN ALGERIA: 1908-1912 53
IN THE VALLEY OF WYCOLLAR, LANCASHIRE: THE WEAVERS’
BRIDGE 63
PONT DU DIABLE, ST. GOTTHARD PASS 67
OLD TOWN BRIDGE IN PERUGIA, ITALY 85
AT ZUTPHEN IN HOLLAND 107
IN KASHMÍR: PRIMITIVE BRIDGE WITH TRIANGULAR ARCHES 161
BRIDGE AT WALTHAM ABBEY ATTRIBUTED TO HAROLD 163
SMYRNA: ROMAN BRIDGE AND AQUEDUCT 165
THE PONT DU GARD FROM ABOVE THE FIRST TIER 172
RUINS OF A ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE LOIRE AT
BRIVES-CHARENSAC 180
THE BRIDGE AT ZARAGOZA, PARTLY ROMAN 187
PONTE ROTTO AT ROME, ANCIENTLY THE PONS PALATINUS OR
SENATORIUS 192
PONTE MAGGIORE OVER A RAVINE OF THE TRONTO AT
ASCOLI-PICENO IN ITALY: BUILT IN THE MIDDLE AGES, BUT
ROMAN IN STYLE 200
THE PUL-I-KAISAR AT SHUSHTER IN PERSIA 203
DURHAM 205
THE PUL-I-KHAJU OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN IN PERSIA 213
STAIRCASE BRIDGE IN CHINA 248
BRIDGE OVER THE MAIN AT WÜRZBURG IN BAVARIA (1474-1607)
259
BRIDGE OF ALI VERDI KHAN OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN 269
PRIMITIVE TIMBER BRIDGE IN BHUTAN, INDIA 273
DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT SOSPEL 276
BROKEN WAR-BRIDGE AT NARNI IN ITALY 277
WAR-BRIDGE OVER THE GAV-DE-PAU AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE 279
WAR-BRIDGE AT MONMOUTH 281
THE RABOT AT GHENT: A FORTIFIED LOCK 289
TODENTANZBRUCKE AT LUCERNE IN SWITZERLAND 292
PONT SAINT-ESPRIT 293
CANAL BRIDGE IN VENICE 329
RAIN 363
A BOOK OF BRIDGES
[Illustration: BRIDGE OF BOATS AT COLOGNE]
CHAPTER THE FIRST
ON THE STUDY OF BRIDGES AND ROADS
I
GENERAL VIEWS
A pontist, or devotee of bridges, ought to be envied and pitied; his
work is marvellously attractive, but he cannot hope to learn even a
twentieth part of the discoverable history which has circulated along
highways. Indeed, the history goes back to a time that preceded the
descent of man; a primal time when every bridge was made by Nature,
and when footpaths and tracks were the runs and spoor of wild animals,
many of which were huge enough to plough their way through deep jungles
and to trample wide paths through the undergrowth of virgin forests.
There were eight or nine sorts of natural bridge (p. 113), and they
were all useful to the many quadrupeds that travelled far in their
search for prey and forage. To meditate on this fact is to visualise
many probable happenings; vivid pictures live before the mind’s eye,
and in one I see how a full-grown Iguanodon, after gorging all day
in a ravaged weald, was overcome by the sleep of glutted hunger as
he tried to cross a big fallen tree that bridged a chasm near by his
lair under a rock-shelter; and a flock of little bright birds came and
settled on the seventy feet of body and tail, just to pick up vermin.
Why not? Life everywhere has fed on lives; something has died, and
suffered a resurrection of vitality, whenever appeased hunger has
renewed the health of an organism; and this picture of an edacious
Iguanodon and his bird friends attracts me for two reasons: it reminds
me that bridges throughout their history have circulated strife, and it
represents the perpetual law of battle that rules creatively over all
living creatures, like foul manure over gardens and harvest fields.
A pontist, then, must try to see clearly, under a form of visual
conception, what part his subject played in the earliest war of organic
life, when natural bridges aided the first animals not only to hunt
over great territories, but to migrate from their first homes into
lands very far away. In the second chapter we shall try to feel the
inspiring pressure of events which must have acted during the descent
of man on a brain remarkable for its imitative faculties. Perhaps we
can get into imaginative touch with our earliest ancestors; perhaps we
can find in ourselves a vestige of their aboriginal nature; and then
we shall know, by a sympathy which we shall not question, how each
natural bridge helped them in their wanderings, and became a model to
be copied, and adapted, and improved.
Such is the beginning of our enviable studies, but their end is
never reached. Not even the long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum,
in Addison, where antediluvian seconds endure about as long as our
trivial minutes, would be enough for a complete study of bridges and
roads, viewed as inestimable servants to the commonweal of mankind. A
complete study would follow their evolution through eight world-wide
subjects: architecture, civil engineering, antiquarian research,
the development of trade and commerce from primitive barter, social
wayfaring, war and its red tragedies, the longevity of barbaric
customs, usages, traditions, and the ups and downs of fortune in
the slow fever called progress, whose clinical thermometer has been
tribal and national enterprise, and whose gradual effects on the
temperature of bodies civil have produced many withering crises fatal
to civilizations.
These eight subjects are vastly intricate as well as world-wide.
In scope they are infinite, if we compare their magnitude with the
brief seasons of our perishable days. Let us then ask ourselves a
question: How much may we expect to learn about bridges and roads, the
distributive agents of all human aims and ambitions? Suppose we live
to be threescore years and ten, and suppose we work gladly for eight
hours a day from the age of fifteen to that of seventy; encouraged by
perfect health, and so delighted with our work that we rescue Sunday
from a sabbatarian inertia, and lose no time at all by being drudges
to the holiday mania. For a pontist never need be idle; not only has
he a thousand problems to reconsider, but in all his walks and rides
he is a wayfarer with his hobby. When he feels cocksure he can visit a
detestable railway bridge and drink the wormwood of pessimism; and when
for a whole week he has tried in vain to follow a devious fact through
all its golf-ball antics from bunker to bunker, let him go to a
classic bridge such as the Puente Trajan over the Tagus at Alcántara;
or let him be as a delighted pupil to Turner’s Walton Bridges or to
Brangwyn’s magnificent vision of the Pont St. Bénezét at Avignon.
From time to time, also, after paying his rates and taxes, a pontist
should recall to memory the rare great “finds” which his long research
has unburied. To enjoy a “find” properly is to feel sure that one has
made a gallant entry into El Dorado. Never shall I forget the elation
that came to me when at the same moment I came upon two wondrous
facts: first, that Nature had created lofty arched bridges, like the
Rock Bridge in Virginia and the Pont d’Arc over the Ardèche[1] in
France; next, that the earliest archways in handicraft were copied from
Nature’s models, and copied with a plodding mimicry, for they were
built not with converging archstones, but with courses of stone laid
horizontally, just as Nature in stratified rocks had put one flat layer
upon another (p. 155). To discover facts of this kind is a joy that
keeps the heart youthful. Study is not a friend to the Income Tax, but
it puts trouble out of mind, a true Nepenthe. Even aged scientists at
the Pasteur Institute grow young and merry when they isolate a virulent
microbe which for a long time has baffled their curiosity. Yes,
research ought to be very popular; in its companionship any person of
sense may learn gladly as an “old boy” from his fifteenth year to the
seventieth, working daily for eight thorough hours.
How many hours in all would be given to study and thought? In
fifty-five years there are twenty thousand and seventy-five days; these
we multiply by eight and behold! we have been sedulously youthful for
160,600 hours. Here is a record of industry; it may be unexampled until
centenarians become as frequent as M. Metchnikoff wants them to be; and
yet, after all, is it a great record? Great it may be in its relation
to human weakness, but it means only a trivial apprenticeship to any
vocation that lures the mind with illimitable open fields. Our happy
toil is nothing more than a gleaner, but it should keep us from being
prigs--little students overfed on a little knowledge and too foolish to
feel ignorant. What Sir Clifford Allbutt has told the public about the
immaturity of modern science is true also of the study of bridges and
roads; here, too, knowledge is often hollow while ignorance has a solid
weight, even among men who are not content with current formulas. “In
every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are
brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset
with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon
to an end. In every chapter arises problem after problem to beckon us
on to farther investigation; yet this way and that we are so baffled
by darkness and ignorance that to choose one of these problems for
attack, one which is likely to repay his labour, is often beyond the
scope of a junior candidate.”[2]
Not that a young man should be very humble in his choice of a problem,
for it is with students as with empire makers, who would do very little
if a bold indiscretion were unfruitful. Let us have faith in the
sunburnt cockiness of extreme youth. When it hunts the far horizon as
if mirages of self-deception were the butterflies of ambition, easy to
catch and easy to preserve, it is guided by the genius of research; and
certainly it has done far more for the world than will ever be done by
a reasoning caution that looks too far ahead.
[Illustration: RAILWAY BRIDGE AT ALBI IN FRANCE]
About five-and-twenty years ago, when I began in my leisure time to be
a pontist, a good old slippered antiquary gave me some hints on what he
called “a discreet fervour in the study of bridges.” I was to choose an
English county, perhaps Derbyshire, and for eight or nine years I was
to live all day long with the bridges, getting them photographed from
many points of view, and recovering bits of their stories from dusty
old records and forgotten muniment chests. Then a clay-cold book in
two volumes was to be written, with a frigid zeal for the accuracy of
minute data, and with enough glacial footnotes on every page to strike
terror into that general reader who does generally read. No thought at
all was to be given to the public, whose vulgar mind had neglected
the many antiquaries who had told the historic truth unflinchingly,
with a desperate effort to be impartial, unemotional, and yet effective
also, like icebergs. I told my adviser that his ideals were those of
a studious millionaire. He could afford to write without heart and
to be pleased with a bad circulation; could afford also to forget
that old English bridges, though at times as charmingly rustic as the
Robin Hood Ballads, were not great masterpieces of art, like a good
many old bridges on the Continent. If I invited readers to dine with
me on Brazil nuts, unaided by nutcrackers, how in the world could I
expect to receive company? But argument was useless. The antiquary
had two homes--himself and the past, and in both he lived as a rapt
dreamer. I see him still, a lean and dusty figure, unkempt, unwashed,
for he “hated immersion” like Dr. Johnson. His favourite aim--and he
never realised it--was to put a spade tenderly against a human skull
buried in Pliocene deposits. “I would sooner do that,” he declared one
evening, “than be married to all the prettiest women in England--girls,
not widows, of course.” Courage was not his forte--except in one
pugnacious habit which he shared with most antiquaries: not only did
he love facts with a zeal that was always ready to defend them, but he
regarded every fact as a big truth.
The old man would say to me, for instance, “Hunt in the Middle Ages
for common but shining truths about roads and bridges. Ah yes! There’s
the fact that many bridges were property owners; their landed estates
were sometimes inconsiderable, to be sure, like the noble parks of
Lilliput; but each estate, whether large or small, was a great truth
in the history of bridges. And I like to remember the good folk who in
their wills bequeathed money to their favourite bridges, like Count
Neville, who in 1440 left twenty pounds to ‘Ulshawe Bridge,’ near
Middleham. Now and then the testator was a skinflint, like John Danby,
who in 1444 left in his will a beggarly six and eightpence to ‘Warleby
Bridge.’ Yes, and he was rash enough to die unrepentant. Another man, a
notable merchant in his day, Roger Thornton, of Newcastle, was clever
enough to save himself from oblivion, a merchant’s destiny, by leaving
a hundred marks to the Tyne Bridge in his native town--a bridge, by the
way, that needed much renovation. But Thornton in his charity struck
a hard bargain: the hundred marks would not be paid unless the ‘mair
and ye comyns’ released the testator from certain actions at law!
Thornton died in 1429; and to show you that the beautiful truth which
I am illustrating was not then historically juvenile, I will mention
an earlier fact from the life of a Newcastle citizen, John Cooke by
name, who in 1379 bequeathed twenty marks to the fortified bridge at
Warkworth.”
The old man gossiped quaintly about his “truths,” but when he wrote
about them he was legal in profuse entanglements. Then it seemed to
him that truth could not be protected by too many fortifications. Had
he looked upon facts as facts, mere things which had happened and
which had no future, his antiquarian knowledge would have been less
arid. But he belonged to a school of pedants--the same school which
either kills antiquarian magazines or enables them to live obscurely
on unpaid contributions. That a man’s lifework should be futile to the
public, a mere cemetery where facts lie buried like fossils in a rock,
is pitiful; yet antiquaries are very proud of their barren labour.
Scarcely one of them understands that a fact, however entertaining,
has no value to thought unless it is a useful item in a mass of
corroborative evidence; and even then it can be nothing more than a
fact, a thing to illustrate the perpetual action of an absolute truth,
or the increasing worth of a given hypothesis, or the general belief in
a given theory. Two or three facts that confirm each other justify a
guess, a random “shot,” or a vague suspicion; an important collection
of such facts, if it continues to grow, gives validity to a hypothesis;
and when from many sources as various as they are many new facts are
added year after year to the collection, until at last the cumulative
evidence holds the field with the best judges, then we know that the
hypothesis has been developed into a theory, the highest form of mobile
knowledge in the realms of Thought. But a theory is not absolute truth,
of course; it is a harbour where Knowledge rests while Thought is on
the high seas, a Columbus, searching for new worlds.
From a guess to a theory; this, then, is the architecture of
constructive growth that research and revision build with facts; and
if we as pontists wish to think clearly and humanely, we must use facts
as a means to a worthy end, as architects employ their materials. One
by one facts are to us what a few slates and tiles are to a builder,
but Thought collects them, and then with care and inspiration she
builds with them as she builds with stones and bricks and timber. In
her work, moreover, there is nothing little when she does little things
admirably; but when her devotees go away from her and parade guesswork
as theory and fact as truth, we should ask them whether brick-kilns are
houses and stone quarries cathedrals. To-day, unhappily, most people
exalt facts into truths, and very often the great word “theory” is
a journalistic term for any supposition that is loose or wayward or
foolish. Thus, “Mrs. Jones has a mere theory that her husband is hard
at work when he remains in town after office hours.”
From the life of bridges we may draw a great many conjectures,
suppositions, speculations, suggestions, fancies, ideas; and here and
there we find some attractive hypotheses, notably those that concern
the introduction of pointed arches into French bridges, and of ribbed
arches into English bridges. Are there any truths, any useful and
necessary things that repeat and confirm themselves age after age?
Yes. There are some technical truths that belong for all time to the
mechanics of bridge building; the world can employ them for ever, and
always with the same good results, if engineers and architects work
competently. There is also a great social truth in the life of bridges
and roads; namely, that types of society are as old as their systems
of circulation, just as women and men are as old as their arteries. So
the condition of a body social can be judged accurately if we examine
with care its landways and waterways. In Spain, for example, where the
genius of modernity is inactive, and where fine bridges represent many
dead social states, Roman, Moorish, Mediæval, and Renaissance, the past
reigns over the highways, sometimes as an inspiration, as in the great
and vast bridge at Ronda, but usually as a mournful historian. Even
in those parts of Spain where trade endeavours to be modern, workmen
have time enough to be honest craftsmen; their metal bridges are not
uncouth, and their stone bridges are charmed with hints taken from
classic models. They do not “progress,” for they keep far off from that
spirit of trade which regards the lies of advertising as proofs of a
pushful honour. From a modern standpoint, then, Spain does not live
except as a dim reflexion of her long ago.
A pontist has few theories to consider, only two, indeed, and these are
sisters. Let me introduce you to them.
[Illustration: A BROKEN WAR-BRIDGE OF THE XIII CENTURY, AT NARNI IN
ITALY; REPAIRED WITH WOOD]
II
STRIFE AND HISTORIC BRIDGES
The first theory sets thought astir on the necessity of having landways
and waterways which in all respects are fitted to distribute the many
functional activities of military and civil life. It is not enough
that a complex type of society should have many intricate systems of
circulation for its multiform traffic. The weakest points in each
system ought to be regarded as danger zones in the strategy of
national defence, so it is a duty to protect them from attack, and the
protection should be as complete as the military arts can make it,
age after age. Now the most vulnerable points in a system of landways
are the long bridges by which roads and railways are conducted across
wide chasms, and deep valleys, and perilous waterways. Yet in England,
and in other countries also, neither roads nor railways are defended;
indeed, modern bridges are not only unfortified, but as sensitive to
bombs as elephants are to large bullets. Why has the world forgotten
that a powerful nation whose bridges were cut would be like a giant
whose arteries were severed? As the suffragettes burnt down Yarmouth
pier, so a conspiracy of civil disorder, acting in accordance with
a well-formed plan, could in a night, with a few sappers, cripple a
vast railway, by blowing up the main strategic bridges. I am giving
a chapter to this urgent subject, most engineers having evaded with
equal zest the charm of beauty and the security of our food supplies.
At a time when the nations overarm themselves for war, tradesmen and
engineers have erected ugly bridges for an imagined peace; but now
that the art of flying threatens civilization from overhead and from
all around, like a new Satan, the public attitude to highways cannot
remain lethargic. Willingly or unwillingly, we must recall and renew
those principles of defensive war with the help of which bridges
were safeguarded by the Romans and also in the Middle Ages. Frank
Brangwyn has painted many aged fortified bridges, making a most varied
selection; and in each of these historic pictures he illustrates the
attitude of old times to the theory of pontine defence.
The apathy of the public has been unintelligent, but not
unintelligible, because bridges and roads are so ordinary, so very
trite, that we who use them every day do not think of their supreme
influence on the nation’s health and safety. They belong to that realm
of custom where truths fall asleep in truisms and facts in platitudes.
To understand a thing that seems obvious, or “inevitable,” is among the
problems that genius alone can solve in a complete way. Dr. Johnson
believed that men and women could marry ugliness without being in
the least intrepid, because custom would soon teach them not to know
the difference between good looks and bad. As custom dulls our minds
even in family life, where affection is most watchful, we cannot be
surprised that common roads and bridges are too evident to be seen
intelligently.
Very few persons love a bridge until it is gone, or until it has been
put out of action by Napoleon’s “whiff of gunpowder.” Then a victorious
army may be brought to a standstill, like Wellington’s, in Spain, when
the retreating French blew up an arch of the colossal Roman bridge
at Alcántara, so that for some long days the unfordable Tagus might
protect their rearguard. It was no easy task to repair the bridge with
a netting of ropes that carried planks; and when the British army
crossed the gap on this makeshift footway, Wellington knew that the
Devil was not the only archfiend in human affairs.
[Illustration: PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS IN FRANCE: THE FORTIFIED GATES
AND TOWERS. SEE ALSO THE SECOND PICTURE]
Yes, believe me, it is worth while to think of the highways and byways.
Try to imagine, for instance, what it has cost in suffering and in
death to make fit for use all the traffic arteries and veins that
nourish and sustain life in the bodies civil of the world. How long
would it take to explore the myriads of rambling footpaths? Could this
work be done in two hundred years by a thousand Stanleys? How many
lives have been lost in making roads through forests and fens and over
mountains? in the construction of railways? in the building of bridges?
in the slow cutting of canals? The Suez Canal was a long campaign of
stricken fields in the war of trade enterprise;[3] and the Panama Canal
has reaped lives as quickly as minor battles reap them. If we could
see in a form of visual conception all the sacrifice of life that
civilizations have offered to progress on the historic landways and
waterways, how terrified we should be! Even the hospitals and sick-beds
of humanity have not had a more scaring pathos than that which has
accompanied the more peaceable enterprises of mankind.
[Illustration: A WAR-BRIDGE OF THE XIV CENTURY AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE]
This reflexion brings us to the second theory that has a home in the
life of bridges and roads. Other homes it has also, a vast number of
them, for this theory belongs to the law of battle, the universal law
of strife. In so far as the lower organisms are concerned, this law
seems to be as permanent as the sun; we have no reason to suppose
that its rule will ever be relaxed among birds, beasts, fishes,
insects, or among other forms of life, such as competitive trees in a
wood; but mankind is an eternal mystery, and none can say into what
civilization of symphonic harmony the human race may be evolved by
gradual improvements in the crowded struggle for existence. A hundred
thousand years hence the competitions of human life may be like
harmonious rivalries between notes in music, or like the wondrous
orchestration that unites into a symphony of benign health all the
communities of cells in a sound body. “All for Each, Each for All” is
the social rule that Nature administers in her cellular civilizations;
and she punishes with disease and death the bodies that rebel against
her rule by developing harmful egotisms. Yet mankind has stereotyped a
very different social rule, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself”; and
what right have we to believe that this egotism, so long inherited,
and continuously active, can change its nature gradually, till at last
it will be as philharmonic as the cellular commonwealths forming a
strong human body? At present this appears to be very improbable, but
impossible we dare not call it, since every type of society is free
to improve its own lot. So the law of strife in human affairs appeals
to us not as a truth destined to last till doomsday, like the strife
of carnivorous hunger, but as a theory which human life has not yet
contradicted, but which in course of time may be tempered into a social
art--a competitive harmony favourable to everybody. Yet even then, no
doubt, inequalities of mind will be active in accordance with Nature’s
law of infinite variation.
Meanwhile, however, we have to accept history as mankind has made
it. Strife has reigned everywhere; even the test of efficiency has
been--not the survival of the finest natures, but--the survival of the
least unfitted for a long battle against bad environments. Very often
the delicate have the best characters and the most alert brains; and
in times past the delicate died from hardships by myriads. Consider
also the innumerable wars; slaughter and success have tried to go
hand-in-hand together as boon companions. Every road through history
is a changing procession of armies; every ancient bridge has a long
story of battles. Indeed, bridges and roads have circulated all the
many phases of strife that men have employed in civil rivalries,
in mercantile competitions, in generative migrations, in roadside
adventures with footpads and cut-throats, in fateful invasions, and in
those missionary conquests which have given to religions their rival
empires.
No one knows how many invasions were broken up by the forests and
fens of England before the Romans came with their colonising methods,
and linked their scattered camps together by means of paved highways,
great roads destined to be used for many centuries, and by many raids
and armies. The earliest prehistoric tribes came along a bridge of
land by which England was united to France; they found in their course
some of the nature-made bridges (p. 114), and the spoor and tracks of
formidable animals, such as the mastodon and the mammoth. Much later
invasions, also prehistoric, must have come over the sea in boats,
for the bridge of land had the history of most bridges, the water
swallowed it up; but every boat may be regarded as a floating bridge
which is moved from place to place, so that a pontist when he studies
the sea-borne invasions keeps in touch with his favourite subject. On
their arrival in England the later prehistoric colonists found that
most of the nature-made bridges had been copied, and that a great many
footpaths and tracks rambled from settlements to watering-places and
through the forests where huntsmen risked their lives in a sport of
habit.
The men of the Bronze Period were supplanted in Europe by a race more
powerful, whose clenched fists needed larger sword-handles; it was a
race of manly and swaggering nomads, strong and fierce; and yet, as
Darwin believed, their success in the war of life may have been aided
still more by their superiority in the arts. Can we fix a date for
the introduction of bronze into the British Isles? Here is a matter
of opinion; but, according to Sir John Evans, the most likely date
is separated from the Christian era by about 1400 years, perhaps 200
years less. Iron belongs to a much later time. Probably, in the fourth
century B.C., it was known as a metal in South Britain; and about
a century later it began to supersede bronze in the manufacture of
cutting implements.[4]
Then, as now, England waited for great discoveries to be imported.
Many British tribes were hermits of convention, willing drudges to a
routine of fixed habits and customs. For example, the highest form
of prehistoric bridge-building, the lake-village, came to England
not earlier than the Bronze Age, and we shall see (p. 137) that a
lake-village, with its late Celtic handicrafts, existed at Glastonbury
when in its neighbourhood the Romans were at work. But I do not wish
to imply that no British tribe had any alertness. As Cæsar found out
to his cost, there were Britons with an enterprising conservatism,
whose war-chariots were managed with a skilful bravery. This wheeled
traffic postulates a good road here and there, with bridges over some
deep rivers; and to this supposition two facts must be added: the
war-chariots were small, and their wheels were primitive, so in a wet
climate they would have been useless on unmended tracks. Let us infer,
then, that the Roman conquest of England was aided by some British
landways which were genuine roads, valued for their service and kept in
repair. Is not this implied also by the circulation of Druidism from
its venerated heart in Anglesey? There is no evidence better than that
of a just inference from known events, for events cannot lie, whereas
the eye-witness _can_, and very often he _does_.
Again, to think of the aggression which has travelled along roads
and over bridges, is to think also of the five phases through which
civilization has evolved many times. During the first phase a new
home is won by invasion; and during the second phase the new home
is extended by invasions, and efforts are made to co-ordinate the
separated parts by improving their intercommunications. Then civil
and economic competitions not only multiply, but become too active in
the body social; wealth breeds wealth, and poverty, poverty. So the
classes grow discordant, and put too much strain on each other, just
as diseased lungs poison the strongest heart, or as virile hearts
rupture weak arteries. Here is the fourth phase; it means a gradual
disintegration brought about partly by the economic war, partly by a
relaxing faith in stern duties and in patriotism. Amusement becomes a
passion, even a mania, and discontent seethes under the fool-fury of
the merry-making. Then comes the gradual break-up or downfall, which
may be hastened by invasions from a younger and more militant country.
Each phase may be a long development, sometimes delayed by events, and
sometimes hurried; and the final phase may be postponed for a long time
when the strife of poverty is relieved by constant emigration. Human
gunpowder does not explode if it is shipped to a happier country where
a day’s work brings comfort enough for three days. But the main point
is this: that civilizations have travelled always in the same direction
and ended always in a break-up, just as great rivers have flowed always
toward their destiny in the sea, though all have changed their beds
many times and widened their valleys.
When we meditate on the part played by bridges and roads in the rise
and fall of ambitious nations, we should choose a fit environment, such
as a Roman bridge crippled by three forms of war: floods, winds, and
human strife. France has three or four Roman bridges of this kind, but
let us take an Italian example. Brangwyn has chosen the Ponte Rotto, at
Rome, and the great ruins of the bridge at Narni. It was Augustus Cæsar
who erected Narni Bridge, in order to join two hills together across
the valley of the Nera, on the Flaminian Way, in the Sabine country.
There were four arches of white marble, and the finest one had a span
of 142 feet. The others varied much in breadth.[5] The Romans plumbed
the river and chose the best natural foundations for their piers;
stability was more to them than a sequence of uniform arches. At the
present time only one arch remains; but under its great vault, as you
stand on the left bank, you will feel alone with the pity and terror
that history brings to those who see past events as clearly as painters
behold their concepts.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE GREAT ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE NERA AT NARNI,
ITALY]
Under this arch at Narni many types of society have passed, with
their customs, religions, fears, hopes, ambitions, predatory trades
and pillaging armies; have passed one after the other, and vanished.
_Tempus edax_ devoured them; and now they are studied in relics of
their arts and crafts, their mute historians. What permanent social
good did they do? Ought we to be as forgetful of them as they were of
their buried generations? Do they merit any praise at all? They were
proud, of course, and looked upon change as abiding progress, yet the
more they altered the more their egotism was the same thing, either
intensified and developed, or slackened and degraded; for the ruling
motive powers of their life were but variations of the aboriginal war
between the enfeebled and the strengthened. The social rule tried to
prove that “Each for All, yet Each for Himself,” was the only sane
doctrine for men to be guided by in their civil competitions. Everybody
had to do much for the commonweal, but yet he was taught to believe
that astuteness, even more than upright ability, would enable him to
gain control over a number of slaves, or serfs, or servants, whose lot
would be what he thought fit to make it. This habitual struggle for
Dominion over others was a friend to the fortunate classes only: it
bred microbes in the body social and produced fever and disruption.
Is it surprising that civilizations withered away? Their autopsies
have a horrible sameness; but from their mute historians--their books,
pictures, sculpture, potteries, bridges, roads, and other relics
of a lasting communism--we learn to have faith in useful work done
thoroughly. In all that endures there is some altruism. Who would care
a fig for ancient Greece if all her mute historians had perished with
her incompetent social order?
The Middle Ages exist for us, not in records of their freebooting
social aims, but in the work done by a few men of genius and their
pupils and assistants. More than one mediæval century is represented by
a few churches, a few castles, a few bridges, a few books, a damaged
house here and there, and some weapons, tools, and furniture. All else
in the story of its life is tragic and sinister, a wild pilgrimage
whose shrines are battlefields and whose ranks are visited periodically
by the plague.
Again, what are we as pontists to say about the fallen master of many
Christian periods, the Roman genius, whose architecture and road-making
were copied? The Roman baths were not copied, of course, for a clean
body was not regarded as sacred in a Christian way; but the Roman
bridges, roads, aqueducts, were favourite models for imitation. Many
a ruler, from Charlemagne to the Moorish zealots in Spain, not only
valued their service, but restored them carefully. Mediæval architects
invented very little in bridge-building; their first work tried to
recover the lost Roman art; and then, little by little, they added
some ideas to their acquired knowledge. Here and there they equalled
the Romans, as in the great bridges at Montauban and Cahors, which
Brangwyn has painted with a vigorous enjoyment; but in most of their
efforts the design was either too rustic or too lubberly, so ponderous
was the technical inspiration. Far too often their ideal of strength
was a mere man-at-arms, brave but underbred. Rivers were obstructed by
immense piers, for instance, by which spates were turned into dangerous
inundations; and footways along bridges were so narrow that safety
recesses for pedestrians had to be built out from the parapets into
the piers. Even in exceptions to this rule of ungainliness, as in much
Spanish workmanship, architects were overapt to make the use of bridges
a tiring penance that wayfarers could not avoid. Thus the bridge over
the Sella at Cángas de Onis has a lofty footway shaped like a gable;
to-day it is little used, for the climbing exercise that it offers
to everybody is put out of vogue by a modern bridge, its neighbour
and rival. In brief, many gabled bridges in Spain[6] were made narrow
enough to be useless to wheeled traffic and friendly to pack mules;
friendly in a mediæval manner, for a seasoning of peril was added to
their inconvenience. Most of them are without parapets; and when their
rivers flood into roaring spates, and across their giddy pathways a
gale sweeps eagerly, an Alpinist can enjoy a mad crossing, after dark,
between dinner and bedtime.
Frank Brangwyn has drawn for us, with as much fidelity as vigour, one
of the finest gable bridges, the Puente de San Juan de las Abadesas at
Gerona. This bridge has a great historic interest. The Moors left in
Spain a peculiar grace of style which native architects often united
to their own qualities--a haughty distinction and a lofty ambition.
Consider the immense nave in Gerona Cathedral, a glorious pointed arch
not less than seventy-three feet from side to side, almost double the
width of Westminster nave. It belongs to the fifteenth century, yet in
the magic of its youthful hope it proves that its architect, Guillermo
Boffiy, was a child of the thirteenth. And the great central arch of
the Gerona bridge has in it some of the soaring courage that transcends
all expectation in the cathedral nave[7].
Yet this gabled bridge, though very spacious and attractive, has less
charm than its rival at Orense, in Gallicia, a noble monument 1319 feet
long, built in 1230 by Bishop Lorenzo, and repaired in 1449 by Bishop
Pedro de Silva. The six arches differ in size, yet their combination
is symmetrical; four are gracefully pointed, and the finest one rises
above the Miño to a height of a hundred and thirty-five feet, and its
brave span, a hundred and fifty-six feet from pier to pier, is the
widest of any in Spain.[8]
[Illustration: PUENTE DE SAN JUAN DE LAS ABADESAS AT GERONA, SPAIN]
It is commonly supposed that gable bridges were invented by the genius
of Gothic architecture. Yet Marco Polo found them in China,[9] and
the Roman bridge of two arches at Alcantarilla is hog-backed. Usually
the Romans liked a flat road over a river, though it was easier and
less expensive to build a steep bridge from low embankments. But the
bridge at Alcantarilla, about twenty miles below Seville, is quite
steep enough to be the forerunner of all the gable bridges erected in
Spain.[10]
There is little in stone bridge building that the Romans did not
discover. To this day their aqueducts and bridges are models of
thoroughness, and apologise nobly for a civilization that rambled
through wonderful achievements into a gradual suicide. While arenas for
barbaric sports were being built at a great expense, and while most
of the Roman roads circulated war, did many persons guess that their
imperial genius in handicraft would outlive their statesmanship by
hundreds of years? Who knows why Rome very often squandered her energy
on the least fruitful phases of strife, neglecting those benign phases
out of which intellectual vigour ought to have come, age after age,
in a continuous zeal for research, and revision, and improvement? She
neglected science, for instance, and her bad example was followed by
the mediæval Church. Not a mind had any inkling of the fact that the
brightest hopes for mankind would emerge from science, like medicinal
plants from dry seeds. Innumerable millions died from ignorance
because Pasteur and Lister were not evolved until the races of man
were perhaps a million years old. In the creeping progress of humanity
the dead have been mocked by every good discovery; there has been
nothing so cruel as a healing success, for it has ever been too late by
thousands of years.
To visualise this truth in the strife of man is a great trial to any
mind; but yet it is the one thing that a pontist cannot evade without
being disloyal to his honour as a student, since he knows that strife
has ruled over the tremendous drama which has had for its theatres the
highways and byways, and for its actors the races of man, continuously
at odds with one another. If this truth had to be deleted from the
drama, then I, for one, would not be a student of roads and bridges.
As well read the Greek tragedians after deleting all the passions that
make for contests and crises.
So let us try to get nearer and nearer to strife, the most active
genius in the life of our subject. Why has it set tribe against
tribe, nation against nation, class against class, tradesman against
tradesman, intellect against intellect? Must we clear from our
minds all the shibboleths of modern idealism? and feel pity for the
supergood when they chatter to us about their isles of dreams, their
unsubstantial fairy places, where “cosmic conscience” reigns with “the
universal brotherhood of man,” and where “everlasting peace” promises
never to be effete and sterile? When a Wellington of Finance erects a
Peace Palace, at The Hague or elsewhere, are we to be glad that the
pomp of irony did not leave the world when Gibbon died? Should we gain
anything at all if we were bold enough to condemn the whole past life
of the human race? Ought we to pass with Carlyle from democratic hopes
into hero worship, and thence into a hot-brained conviction that faith
in mankind is impossible? Are we to suppose that man has transformed
into instincts the worst habits he has acquired, so that his ultimate
destiny upon earth will be determined by his attitude to these
instincts? Will he obey them or will he try to conquer them?
[Illustration: A GREAT SPANISH BRIDGE, THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO.
MAINLY THE WORK OF ARCHBISHOP TENORIO, A.D. 1380; FORTIFIED BY ANDRES
MANRIQUE, A.D. 1484. ON THIS SITE A ROMAN BRIDGE WAS DESTROYED IN A.D.
871]
Again, is there a glint of hope in the hysterical words that came
to Charles Dickens when he wrote as follows, after a visit to
Chillon?--“Good God, the greatest mystery in all the earth, to me, is
how or why the world was tolerated by its Creator through the good old
times, and wasn’t dashed to fragments.” You see, Dickens understood
the terror of strife, but he made no effort to be calm with Darwin,
who knew that the evolution of man could not have happened if nascent
humanity had been unfit to endure the sufferings of its daily contests
both against Nature’s violence and against a terrible fauna. Thus a
pitiless character was thrust upon primitive man by the environment in
which unlimited strife worked his development; and what the ages have
evolved only a long future can amend in another evolution. What Dickens
called unpardonable cruelty was to the distant past what strikes are to
our own time, a weapon, a phase of war, approved by public opinion;
and let us remember also that the cruelties which a hard life has
bred, and turned into customs, have not shown an egotism fiercer than
that primal necessity which has compelled life among the species to
feed on lives. Dickens himself, while writing his condemnation of the
past, was nourished by the death of many living things; was in himself
a mysterious alembic that transmuted food, slain life, into benign
health and action. Had he been logical in his feelings toward strife
he would have had mercy on those forms of life that feed mankind; in
other words, he would have died of hunger rather than be cruel; but,
naturally, the manifestations of strife hateful to him were those that
happened to be far off from his needs and sympathies. Yet he ought to
have seen in the national efforts of his time that strife, though easy
to rebel against, is woefully difficult to improve, since even kindness
of heart when shown in promiscuous charities may unseat from their
thrones in the public mind many good racial qualities, doing as much
harm as ever was done by mediæval brutality.
“Let me think” should be everybody’s motto; nothing less than arduous
thinking can save us from the cant and the sentimentalism which at
the present time enfeebles England.[11] Let me give you an example.
Yesterday I was talking to a friend about the mediæval battle-bridge.
Putting before him Frank Brangwyn’s excellent sketch in water-colour
of Parthenay Bridge, I said: “This fortified gateway belongs to the
thirteenth century, and through its machicolations red-hot stones and
boiling oil were poured down many times upon the head and shoulders of
an attack. The gateway was built between 1202 and 1226, not without
help from English money, for the Josselin-Larchêveques of Parthenay
were allies of the Anjou Plantagenets, who gave us English kings; but a
few years later our English troops were driven from Parthenay by Louis
IX, called St. Louis. Can’t you imagine the assault? Would you care to
rush that gateway in a thirteenth-century manner?”
My friend, a Quaker, was scandalised. “Rush the gateway?” he cried.
“Red-hot stones and boiling oil! What imbecile savagery! Thank
goodness, we are not savages now; life has improved wonderfully. To-day
most men of sense fear war, and those who don’t fear it scorn it for
moral reasons.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you really believe that the history
of this old war-bridge is more strifeful than the industrialism of
to-day? Is it an act of peace when a trust ‘corners’ some article
of food, or when a limited liability concern kills all competition
from little neighbours, whose wives and families can’t get rid of
hunger because business has failed? Those who attacked the bridge at
Parthenay were armour-clad, while those who suffer in trade wars from
the greed of co-operative egotisms have usually no self-defence, as
their capital is small. Don’t you see, then, that from machicolated
towers to millionaire tradesmen is but an evolution in social strife?
Chivalry did try to put some generous feeling into mediæval warfare;
and how much feeling of chivalry do you expect to find in the battles
of industry? Are the strategic victories of finance more humane than
were the politics of the Black Prince? Do they harm the defeated less,
or more? And can you explain, old chap, why it is that Quakers, Jews,
Hindus, though they fight for money with an astuteness that never
flinches, prattle about peace after office hours? Their ideal of peace
includes all warfare except that which employs battleships and big
battalions. Myself, I would sooner lead an attack against the Porte
St. Jacques on Parthenay Bridge than be opposed in trade by a wealthy
firm of shrewd Quakers, whose great skill in the combats of trade would
soon ruin me. I shouldn’t have a chance of doing credit to myself in a
dangerous adventure.”
[Illustration: A WAR-BRIDGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AT PARTHENAY IN FRANCE]
There is nothing more odious than the modern cant about peace. But
a pontist soon learns that strife of every sort is a phase of war.
Indeed, whether roads and bridges aid a pilgrimage of the sick, or
an army of Crusaders, or a primitive migration, or the ramblings of
charity, or the enterprise of monasteries; whether they help a mediæval
pope at Avignon to thwart the land-hunger of a French king, or enable
modern life to turn industrialism into a world-wide Armageddon whose
scouts are lying advertisements; whatever they do or have done their
history brings us in touch with the same human motive, a desire to win
victories. James Martineau went so far as to picture the strife as
absolutely barbaric. He said: “The battle for existence rages through
all time and in every field; and its rule is to give no quarter--to
despatch the maimed, to overtake the halt, to trip up the blind, and
drive the fugitive host over the precipice into the sea.” Tennyson
also went too far when he wrote about strife; too far, because he did
no more than skim along the surface of a primordial truth, by which
man’s history has been made a part of Nature’s. From Tennyson we gain
no help at all; he tells us merely “that hope of answer or redress”
must come from “behind the veil.” In his opinion Nature cares for
nothing, so careless is she of the single life, and so ready to let a
thousand types go. Yet her realms teem with miracles of contentious
life, and I cannot think of any great extinct species that I should
care very much to meet in a country walk. I do not wish to hob-nob
with the Iguanodon, for instance. When John Stuart Mill complains that
“nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing
to one another are Nature’s everyday performances,” he forgets the
far-reaching harm that men can do within the tolerance of “Old Father
Antic, the Law”; and, besides this, he forgets to explain how a world
of organisms ruled by hunger and thirst and passion, and dependent
on innumerably various climates, could be other than Providence has
decreed.
To talk as Mill did is to imply that Nature sins against us, and
against herself, when she allows any species to grow completely unfit
for the gift of life. Yet her aim is to protect life from the suicidal
fertility of lives, so that the whole economy of Nature demands death
in the highest interests of the future. When we die we do an act of
charity to our children and grandchildren; for if each of us lived to
be active at ninety, the world would need a much smaller population
of young people. It is our frail tenure of life that renders a high
birthrate necessary; and progress gains more from the enterprise of
vigorous youth than from the too cautious knowledge of old age. So I
do not understand the pother raised by Mill and others over the benign
discipline of death that Nature wields as a servant of the Eternal.
Believe me, a pontist can never solve even one problem in the law of
battle if he lets himself be scared into a revolt against natural
forces; scared by the incessant tragedy that each day’s little trip
along the highways of history brings in a challenging manner before
his mind’s eye. He must try to protect himself with humour and irony
and scorn, as Thackeray tried to save himself from a feminine heart.
The main point is that he should learn to live outside himself; then
self-pity will not be his troublesome guide through the labyrinths of
strife.
Cardinal Newman asks us to believe that human life has been
terrible--“a vision to dizzy and appal”--because mankind has been
punished by God for some aboriginal sin too abominable for mercy and
forgiveness. This doctrine is completely dark and horrible. If it
were illumined on one side only, like the moon, it would invite the
companionship of thought, but it gives no light whatever. Indeed, it
implies that no civilization has been free to improve its own lot and
to get progressive reason from the large brain of man. To blame God
for our own follies--to say that our social acts are wild and foolish
because we are being punished by Heaven for a sin of ignorance
committed by man in the babyhood of the human race--what is this but a
charge of illimitable cruelty against the Creator? Besides, we learn
from the much nobler doctrine of evolution that human nature, despite
all her wilful fondness for wrong actions, has crept up and up from
a very low beginning, in an ascent continually wonderful, though
infinitely slow and tragical. The accumulated progress excites in me
as much awe as I should feel in the presence of a resurrection from
the dead. Indeed, what is evolution but a vast drama of resurrections,
by means of which base forms of life have become gradually better?
Can anyone suppose that Milton, had he been a contemporary of Darwin,
would have turned from the endless hopes that evolution ought to
inspire, just to dally with fallen angels and with an errant couple in
the Garden of Disobedience? And can we suppose that Newman would have
written his famous page on the doctrine of original sin, had he not
turned his back on modern thought and knowledge?
Amid the doubts and difficulties that trouble this meditation on
strife, just a few things are bright and clear-eyed, like illumined
windows which on dark nights cause jaded tramps to feel less their
lone wayfaring; and these things I have watched for years in the life
of bridges, where their activity never ceases. It is clear enough, for
instance, that custom and convention have acted as narcotics on the
mind, sending reason to sleep. This explains why human strife has never
turned to the best use the great opportunities that each generation
has inherited. To custom and convention, mankind has owed the social
rule which has sown the seed of death in every civilization; the rule
of illogic and discord, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself.” Let us
see this rule in operation on the highways, taking care to note how
it has inflamed egotism and deadened both the sense of honour and the
spirit of citizenship.
The just and beautiful principle that every man lives by his mother
the State, and that he must do good for the benefit of the commonweal,
was enforced upon mediæval landowners by the _trinoda necessitas_, or
triple obligation, which among other duties made the upkeep of roads
and bridges a general charge on all owners of the English soil. Not
even the religious houses were exempted, though the State favoured
them in other ways. But the second principle of the social rule--“Each
for Himself”--interfered constantly with the first principle, bringing
trouble after trouble into the administration of the highways, as into
all other useful and necessary things. Landowners transferred their
duties to their tenants, and very often the tenants made negligence a
habit, until at last the Law and the Church became equally active for
the people’s benefit. Again and again bishops offered “forty days’
indulgence to all who would draw from the treasure that God had given
them valuable and charitable aid towards the building and repair” of
a poor bridge ruined by neglect, or of some quagmire which had been a
decent road.[12] It happened in the year 1318 that the Law pottered
into action because a timber bridge at Old Shoreham, in Sussex, had
been scandalously ill-used by those who were responsible for its
upkeep. Half of it had fallen into the river. Year after year an
evident crime against the State had gone on publicly, yet no one had
taken steps to make the dangerous condition of the bridge a subject
for legal enquiry and punishment. The village grumbled, of course,
but grumblers have never had any initiative of their own; unless a
man of action has come to be their conscience and their leader, they
have done nothing. Their energy has evaporated in talk, like steam
from a boiling pan. It was not until the bridge had fallen that the
village hummed intelligently like a hive of bees, and set itself to
work. What could be done then? Who was the landowner? No less a person
than the Archbishop of Canterbury. Are we then to believe that in 1318
a Primate of England scamped his public duty? Was his attitude to a
timber bridge inferior to that of the high priests of ancient Rome,
who called themselves _pontifices_ because they built and repaired the
Pons Sublicius, a bridge of stakes at the foot of Mount Aventine?[13]
The sheriff and his officers had a different question to consider; they
would wish to know whether the Archbishop had been an astute man of
the world, whether he had made his tenants responsible to the _trinoda
necessitas_. If not, then he and the Law were in a fix, and peasants
over their ale would guffaw with malice. But enquiries proved that his
Grace was a canny landlord; the tenants alone ought to have mended the
bridge; and so the Law was free to act with a vigour that common folk
knew too well.
Its agent was the bailiff, good Simon Porter, and Porter set out at
once to collect money from the tenants. If any tenant either declined
to pay his share or was unable to pay it, then the bailiff put his
hand on some marketable property, perhaps a few sheep, or a cow, or “a
gaggle of geese.” The necessary thing was to take enough; never an easy
thing to do in the country, as no one cared to pay a fair price for
escheated live stock. The peasant has ever been at heart a pawnbroker.
But Simon Porter had no reason to look upon his troublesome work as a
high office of trust important enough to keep his name alive for six
hundred years. It was when he met Hamo de Morston, a truculent fellow,
that Simon entered into history. Hamo de Morston was a logical egoist,
he fought for his own hand only, trying to use the State at a trivial
cost to himself; but now this amusement, after prospering for years,
brought him suddenly face to face with legal pains and penalties--a
thing most irritating to a bad temper. So Hamo refused to pay; and his
fury was terrific when Porter confiscated a horse. Even then he was
not defeated, for he set lawyer against lawyer, and one day a petition
was sent by him to King Edward II. The rascal was a good fighter, but
his appeal to the supreme authority failed; the bailiff’s action was
approved, and Hamo had costs to pay.
As for the bridge, it was repaired, and repaired very well. Twenty
years ago it was in use, a shaggy and venerable structure, not yet
crippled by old age. Then certain highwaymen, popularly known as road
officials, visited Old Shoreham, and there they tried to prove that a
bridge admired by landscape painters was unfit for a commercial time.
The poor bridge! At this moment it has no charm at all; not only is
it dull, it is neat in a shabby way--a discord in good surroundings,
like bankruptcy at a wedding breakfast. So we pass from Hamo de Morston
to our own roadway officials, and find ourselves in the presence
of a public bridge injured by public servants. To Hamo we can give
a little sympathy, he fought for his creed of self and paid costs,
whereas highway boards have never been fined for spoiling old bridges.
Perhaps they do not hate venerable architecture, but they belong to a
system of public service that is ill-equipped for its work, receiving
neither criticism from the newspaper press nor supervision from county
committees of independent architects.
That the State has been wronged by these public servants is known
to all artists and antiquarians; also the fact is advertised by the
great many hideous railway bridges that demean towns and blemish the
country. In this matter, as in others, the State must defend her
own just rights, so as to get by compulsion what a free egotism has
declined to give--efficiency and good taste. It is possible that
England has not suffered a great deal more than the Continent; for
even in France, despite the excellent administration of the _Ponts
et Chaussées_, crimes against noble bridges have been committed, as
when the second ancient bridge at Cahors was lost in a storm of local
party politics. But England happens to be poor in great old bridges,
whereas the Continent is rich; we cannot afford to lose even the
modest little ballads of arched stone which have resisted floods for
many generations, while working as necessary drudges in the making of
England. Trivial they are when compared with the bridges of Isfahan or
with many of those in France and Spain, but yet they are hallowed by
time, and they mimic the gentle rusticity of English landscapes. It is
a crime to spoil them, because modern bridges for heavy traffic can be
built at a lesser cost near by the little mute historians.
To the Scotch, on the other hand, many a fine old brig is a Burns of
the highways; and this sentiment for history and for sylvan poetry
has kept from the cruel hands of industrialism some very attractive
single-arched bridges, and some long bridges also, notably the
rhythmical Brig of Stirling, which Brangwyn has chosen as an example
of quiet good taste in mediæval civic architecture. The Brig of
Stirling is a Scotch citizen of the dour old school, but warmed with
an undercurrent of that kindly emotion which even the canniest Scot is
glad to show off when he is away from business. I am inclined to think
that not even a militant suffragette would have folly enough to attack
the Scotch brigs; she would be fascinated by their names, and this
would keep her out of mischief. Such a name as the Brig o’ Doon is
music combined with a racial vigour. No weak people would have invented
it, and no dull people could have retained such a poetic name.
[Illustration: THE OLD WAR-BRIDGE OF STIRLING]
The Irish also are fond of bridges, like the true unspoiled Welsh. As
late as a century ago Irish peasants were pious in their attitude to
any bridge that crossed a dangerous river; they saluted it reverently
because of its friendliness to poor wayfarers, and because good
thoughts come from simple hearts. As for the Welsh, thanks partly to
their Celtic blood and partly to the waywardness of their rivers, they
have been known as pontists for a very long time. In the romantic
hills their bridges seem to belong to Nature herself, so lovingly have
they been united to the spirit of ancestral landscapes; whereas the
industrial parts of Wales make the bridges of trade into vile objects,
as if beauty has no right to a home where money is earned out of coal
mines, and ironworks, and the debilitating factory system. Far too
often the industrial bridge everywhere is like an ill-used highway
uniting the purgatory of a seared district to some hell or other
invented by poets or by priests. There are many such bridges in the
Staffordshire Black Country, and in the scarred Potteries, where an
ebon meanness lives with jerry-builders, and where puny drab children
take from the present generation the youth that endures. What would a
Dante think in the stricken fields of industrialism? And why is it that
only a person here and there, after compelling himself to leave the
atmosphere of custom, sees our industrial war clearly, and views it in
its relation to the body social?
The truth is that our creed of self has become instinctive; we cannot
without an effort live for an hour outside our personal interests; and
thus the beautiful principle “Each for All” has to be kept alive by a
host of active laws that encircle us with compulsion. Where there is
no compulsion we are governed by our preferences. If we like bridges,
for instance, we try to protect them from ill-usage; but if they are
indifferent to us we care not a straw when engineers add half a dozen
uncouth viaducts to the many other misdeeds which they have thrust upon
the State. Instead of regarding all bad public work as a sin against
the commonweal, we let ourselves be ruled by the creed of self even in
our best efforts to serve the State properly.
Is our egotism better or worse than that of the Middle Ages? This seems
to be a matter of opinion. Thorold Rogers believed that mediævalism in
a good many respects was kinder than our industrialism; and the late
Russel Wallace regarded “our social environment as a whole, in relation
to our possibilities and our claims,” as “the worst that the world has
ever seen.” On the other hand, a great scientist from his laboratory
has told us that “the sun rises on a better world every morning.”
Gracious! If the sun could speak to us about his complete knowledge
of mankind, if he did not obey the law of silence that rules over the
greatest motive-powers and creative agents, our conjectures would be
less wayward, for sunrays would whisper into our ears the story of the
most evil civilization in the whole strife of mankind. In this matter
the sun would be authoritative; but how can we poor mortals expect to
see the whole past truly when we are half blind to the significance
of our own social life? Besides, it is enough for us to see how one
civilization has differed from another, and how in many respects all
human life has been like the sky, always the same elementally, but
never quite the same in colour and form, and in the effects of strife.
A pontist, as he journeys through present-day England, sees very
clearly the difference between our commercial time and the past; for
industrialism is plainly out of joint with that which is normal in
organic growth, and its workmen are conscious of the unstable energy
bred and frittered away by hurry and speed-worship. Consider those
dread “hives of industry” where trade bridges are makeshifts, and
where the jerry-built villa or cottage is repeated thousands of times,
and always in mean streets. Do they not bear witness to the feeling
of insecurity from which our age suffers? I shall be told that many
things are very well made, as in the case of battleships, motor-cars,
engines, steamships, guns, rifles, artillery, surgical instruments,
expensive clothes, implements for games, and gigantic metal bridges;
but in this good craftsmanship, tradesmen are thorough because they
dare not be slipshod; they fear to turn out work that would endanger
human life, and business would fail if they angered the specialists of
luxury and of sport. Where they are free from restraint, as in work for
ordinary households, tradesmen manufacture trash and prosper. In fact,
the quicksands of cheapness are to most people in England what cheese
in a trap is to mice, or what seasonable bait is to fish. So widespread
is the feeling of insecurity that the poorer classes do not think it
worth while to buy enduring goods and chattels. Instead of practising a
thrift that would hand on furniture to their grandchildren, they say,
“Never mind; perhaps these things may last our time.” And this dull
pessimism in the creed of self is the most wretched phase of strife
that a pontist has to connect with the circulation of trade enterprise.
[Illustration: CANNON STREET RAILWAY BRIDGE, LONDON]
Even the prehistoric tribes wanted to be remembered by their
posterity, so they built enduring barrows or set up cromlechs to their
ancestor-worship, this being their spiritual bond between past and
present and future. In the Middle Ages also, though disease and filth
and bloodshed made life as uncertain as a game of chance, the social
egotism that built and purchased for itself had faith in the future,
and claimed and got full value for its money. In fact, from nearly all
specimens of mediæval handicraft we may learn why the peoples of Europe
survived terrible crises and bred men of genius to represent them for
ever. In each race, and particularly in ours, there was a wonderful
endurance, certainly based on the creed of self, but admirable all the
same, like the tough elasticity of yew timber. The ruling egotism was
honest in nearly all its private work, but when it was expected to
be equally thorough as a public servant, then a habit of dishonesty
appeared in handicrafts, sometimes to be followed by new laws or by
threatening proclamations. Again and again the conscription of the
archery laws was imperilled by bowyers and fletchers and merchants,
who formed “rings” and flooded the markets with nefarious work to
be sold at high prices. Certain bridges, also, and notably the one
at Berwick-on-Tweed, fell so often that the supervision of town
authorities must have been exceedingly lax. On this point, M. Jusserand
says:--“London Bridge itself, so rich, so useful, so admired, had
frequent need of reparation, and this was never done until danger was
imminent, or even till catastrophe had happened. Henry III granted
the farm of the bridge revenues to his ‘beloved wife,’ who neglected
to maintain the bridge, appropriating to herself without scruple the
rents of the building; none the less did the king renew his patent
at the expiration of the term, that the queen might benefit ‘from a
richer favour.’ The outcome of these favours was not long to wait;
soon it was found that the bridge was in ruins, and to restore it the
ordinary resources were not enough; it was necessary to send collectors
throughout the country to gather offerings from those willing to give.
Edward I begged his people to hasten (January, 1281), the bridge would
give way if they did not send prompt assistance; and he ordered the
archbishops, bishops, all the clergy, to let his collectors address the
people with ‘pious exhortations’ that the subsidies should be given
without delay. But the money thus urgently needed arrived too late; the
catastrophe had already happened, a ‘sudden ruin’ befell the bridge,
and to repair this misfortune the king established a special tax upon
the passengers, merchandise and boats (February 4, 1282), which tax was
enacted again and a new tariff put into force on May 7, 1306....”
What were the citizens doing while Henry III and his dear wife ruined
the bridge by confiscating her revenues? Did they believe that
everybody’s affair was nobody’s business, and that they would be asked
to mend the bridge if they drew attention to her condition? As to
Edward I, he kept his hand away from his own pocket, and personated
charity that for ever begs. “Each for Himself” was a policy that
suited Edward; and his orders to the clergy proved that he knew it to
be a policy which his loyal subjects followed as a habit. Hence the
“pious exhortations,” with indulgences also, we may rest assured. The
whole story is pitifully ironic. London had no other bridge over the
Thames, yet the people looked on while a king and his wife played the
part of bridge wreckers. Some protest there must have been, for London
Bridge--a great street of timber houses--was more populous than many a
village; and the tenants, like other Englishmen of those days, had no
wish to be plunged into cold water. According to Stow’s “Annals,” five
arches fell, so many houses also were lost, perhaps with their inmates.
M. Jusserand believes that during the Middle Ages our English highways
fared no better than London Bridge. His verdict runs thus: “Though
there were roads, though property was burdened with obligatory services
for their upkeep, though laws every now and again recalled their
obligations to the possessors of the soil, though from time to time
the private interest of lords and of monks, in addition to the public
interest, suggested and directed repairs, yet the fate of a traveller
in a fall of snow or in a thaw was very precarious. The Church might
well have pity on the wayfarer; and him she specified, together with
the sick and the captive, among those unfortunates whom she recommended
to the daily prayers of pious souls.”
There is a great deal of evidence to justify this verdict, but
evidence in history depends on its choice; and in Thorold Rogers there
are other facts that leave England with some efficient mediæval roads,
along which horsemen could travel rapidly. Perhaps Rogers may have set
too much store by his data; but when we study all the evidence, when
we balance it carefully, and visualise all its pictures of well-tested
negligence and crime, one thing is beyond all doubt: that the social
rule, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself,” was a national catastrophe.
Its first principle had a very precarious life, though incessant
compulsion tried to drive it home to the people’s fear of revengeful
laws; whereas the second principle--“Each for Himself”--was so popular
as a creed that even the divine mysteries beyond death were assailed by
egoists, who thought they could buy a place in heaven by giving lands
and goods to the Church, no matter what harm they had done in a brief
life upon earth. Study Erasmus in his wayfaring letters, and you will
breathe the atmosphere of the Middle Ages.
[Illustration: OLD LONDON BRIDGE, BEGUN BY PETER COLECHURCH IN 1176,
AND FINISHED BY A FRENCHMAN, CALLED ISEMBERT, IN THE YEAR 1209]
[Illustration: PONT SIDI RACHED AT CONSTANTINE, ALGERIA. BUILT IN
1908-1912
The span of the great arch is 70 metres. The work illustrates the
longevity of custom and convention, being inspired partly by Roman
aqueducts and partly by the two famous bridges over the Tech at Céret,
in France, one of which dates from the year 1321. The span of its great
arch is 45m. 45cm.]
III
CUSTOM AND CONVENTION
Yet a pontist must be exceedingly careful when his tramps through any
period bring him in touch with ethical problems. He should try to live
on the highways of history, not in order to pass judgments on vice and
on crime, but because he wants to see clearly, under the form of visual
conception, why social concord and equity have never fared well, even
the best forms of civilization being only half-educated barbarisms that
allow their strife to be drilled by a vast number of active laws. These
phases of compulsion go on increasing, yet they fail to resolve into
harmony those rapacious egotisms that compete against each other in
the body social like microbes in living tissues. As soon as a pontist
understands his wayfaring through history, as soon as he feels at
home in the general atmosphere of the human drama, he is glad to be a
realist; then nothing that societies do or have done seems unexampled
and inexplicable. To him, for example, the infanticide practised age
after age by savage tribesmen is not more terrible than the death
of babies in the slums of civilized towns, or than the degradation
brought before his mind by the alert philanthropy that saves little
English children from cruelties. To him, again, the slaughter on a
great battlefield is not more woeful than the annual sacrifice of lives
in street accidents, and railway smashes, and mine disasters, and sea
tragedies; as well as in games and sports, in nursing the sick, and in
all trades and professions. He is not scared by the fact that the sum
of human life is war, but he is scared by the primordial customs and
conventions that make the incessant war infinitely less humane than it
could be and ought to be. So a pontist in his attitude to history is
a sociologist, and not an abstract moralist. Each body social and its
systems of circulation are to him what patients are to medical students
in a hospital; he has to learn to be attentive to all disease and
to make his diagnoses thoughtfully. Even then frequent mistakes will
occur. One thing he must regard as his clinical thermometer: it is the
truth that civilizations in their intercourse with right and wrong have
been governed by habits and customs and conventions, which have caused
most men to be other men; so that most human actions, whether studied
in old history or in the current routine of living, are mere quotations
from other human actions, instead of being like original ideas in a
well-ordered composition. In other words, the ordinary human brain has
tried to be automatic, as if to be in harmony with the rest of the
vital organs.
Now the architecture of bridges, like that of huts and houses and
cottages, never fails to keep before our minds the awful slowness of
each reluctant advance from custom to custom, and from convention to
convention. I have no words to describe the terror that comes to me
when I find in daily use a type or species of bridge so aboriginal in
its poor workmanship that a forerunner not only similar to it, but as
rudely effective, may well have been employed by the earliest Flint
Men, whose delight in imitation was stimulated by all the bridges which
Nature had created. Even more, at this moment in England, and even in
busy Lancashire, where to-day’s machinery abounds, there are primitive
bridges which are not even primitively structural; bridges which
need in their making not more thought than is given to a difficult
sneeze when we are troubled by a cold (p. 60). When I look at them and
think of the myriads of generations which in different parts of the
world have used bridges akin to these, I am so awed with fear that
I feel like a baby Gulliver in a new Brobdingnag where everlasting
conventions are impersonated by brainless giants whose bodies are
too vast for my eyes to focus. Often, too, I say to myself: “In the
presence of this dreadful conservatism, this inept mimicry that endures
unruffled by a thought for many thousands of years, you are as futile
as a single microbe would be on a field of battle. Or imagine that
the microbe is in Westminster Abbey, and that it has a blurred sense
that makes it dimly conscious of all the many historic things there
gathered together; then you have a figure of yourself in your relation
to the mingled good and bad in history. For the Abbey shows in its
architecture that convention, though a bane to ordinary minds, is the
grammar of progress to the rare men of genius who from time to time
shake the world free from its bondage to fixed customs and routines,
and compel it to move on to other routines and customs, where it will
dawdle until other geniuses come out of the dark and find in new
mother-ideas a compulsive force that works a new liberation.”
[Illustration: OLD BRIDGE OVER THE CLAIN, NEAR POITIERS]
This, indeed, is the only encouragement that I am able to perceive when
I watch in history the periodical strife between inveterate conventions
and the mother-ideas of genius. In the case of bridges, for example,
the first mother-ideas were those that enabled a primitive craftsman
here and there to copy with success the least difficult of Nature’s
models. What this man achieved was repeated by his tools, the ordinary
men of his tribe; then other tribes got wind of the discovery and began
to make similar bridges, until at last several conventions were formed,
and they became widespread and stereotyped. When a convention was very
simple and also effective for a given purpose, no one wished to see
it developed, so it entered that domain of infertile mimicry where
stone tools and weapons remained unpolished for years to be reckoned
by scores of thousands. If experience had shown that chipped flint
in a rough state would neither cut wood nor break human skulls, then
at an early date polishing would have been found out by a savage of
genius who yearned to prove that his invention could be made useful;
but rough-hewn stones were rudely efficient, so mankind settled itself
in a routine and plodded on and on automatically. And thus it was also
in the case of many primitive bridges which became so firmly fixed in
conventions that now they seem to be contemporary with nearly all the
ages of human strife. Not in any other way can we explain their present
use by many Europeans, as well as by the natives of Asia, and Africa,
and America (p. 145). On the other hand, when a primeval bridge did not
serve its purpose efficiently, when it was useless in tribal wars and
dangerous in rainy seasons, then a mother-idea paid it a visit from
time to time, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Whence the idea came we do not know. It entered a mind that was ready
to receive it, coming unbidden from a place unknown like an abiding
quest from a spirit world. The mind that welcomed the idea was neither
masculine nor feminine, it was both, a thing androgynous, for genius
has ever been a single creative agent with a double sex. The tools with
which genius has worked--the selected traditions and conventions, the
acquired knowledge, the original observation, and the handicrafts of
social life--have ever been plain enough, of course; but to see and
admire tools is not to understand the advent of those imperishable
ideas which not only transform history, but turn all ordinary men into
their mimics and mechanics. For instance, whenever we light a candle
or a fire we obey the genius of a Palæolithic savage, who, with sparks
beaten from flint into some inflammable grass or moss or fluff from
cocoons, brought into the world the earliest missionaries, artificial
light and heat. Similarly, whenever we walk across a timber bridge,
whether old or new, we are servants to the earliest savage who with
a stone axe cut down a tree, causing it to fall from bank to bank
of a river or chasm. Delete from history even two mother-ideas--the
invention of wheels, for example, and the evolution of arched bridges
from Nature’s models--and how many civilizations would you cancel?
Omit from the annals of our “modern democracy” not more than three
mother-ideas: the discovery of steam as a motive-power, the discovery
of microbes, and the use of metal in bridge building. In a twinkling we
go back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when hospitals were
cesspools,[14] when surgery and medicine were wild empirics, when
travellers in stage-coaches longed for the general Turnpike Act (a boon
delayed till 1773), and when England was unspoiled by jerry-builders
and a factory system. A pontist, then, if he understands his subject,
looks upon genius as the solar system of human societies, hence he
cannot be a willing servant to any mob-rule or mob-worship.
On the contrary, he would gladly see in every town a fine church
dedicated to the men and women of genius who with great mother-ideas
have tried to better the strife of human adventure. For two reasons
I used the phrase “have tried to better.” In the first place, the
constituents of new knowledge, when mingled with the old customs and
conventions, lose much of their good invariably; and, next, the amalgam
thus formed may become explosive. At this moment we see in our new art,
the art of flying, how precarious is the charity that mother-ideas
bring into the battlefields of competition. What aeroplanes can do
in war is already the only consideration that the mother-idea of
mechanical flight receives from the most alert minds; and very soon
military engineers will be called upon to invent bomb-proof covers for
every strategic bridge which cannot be displaced by a tunnel. So we
compel airmanship to torment us with visions of wrecked cities, when
she ought to delight us with bird’s-eye views of happier countries.
In brief, the more we study mother-ideas the more clearly we perceive
that they in themselves are phases of strife, for they have power to
do harm as well as good. Providence for ever tries to quicken the inept
human mind, since no blessing is granted to us without its attendant
bane. Electricity has dangers of its own, so has fire; Pasteurism has
dangers of its own, so has food; radium is curative and very perilous,
like the sea or the sun; and all other good things ask us to pick our
way with care between danger and utility.
The most tragic element of all in human indiscretion is the mindless
routine which has deadened the brain of ordinary men. There is in
Lancashire, for example, a charming valley where six or seven old
bridges make a few minutes’ walk a very long pilgrimage through the
history of primitive conventions. Wycollar the valley is called,
and antiquaries and pontists ought to go there at once, but not
in motor-cars that devour topography as well as miles. One bridge
is exceedingly low in the scale of thought and skill; indeed, no
prehistoric tool or weapon stands below it. Even the Adam of Evolution,
if he ever lived in rock-strewn places, had common sense enough
probably to choose a flat stone and to lay it across a deep rivulet, so
as to save his children from danger. Such is the most primeval of the
Wycollar bridges: three schoolboys could make a smaller one between two
April showers. For the stone is not a huge slab ten feet long by four
wide, such as we find not far from Fernworthy Bridge, Dartmoor; nor is
it like the single slab over the Walla Brook on Dartmoor. It is a long
lintel-stone, and in eight or nine strides a little girl would cross
it easily.[15] If the stone were new, and also alone in the valley, no
one would think more of it than of a plank used as a temporary bridge;
but the stone is very old, and lintel-bridges are ancient customs in
the valley of Wycollar. If Nature once in a century allowed bridges to
tell their tales, I should expect two of the Wycollar historians to
trace their lineage through a great many ancestors until at last they
came to a time when the first nomads hacked their way with flint axes
through the undergrowth of Lancashire forests, and cursed in primitive
words or sounds at the virile brambles whose thorns were sharper than
pointed flints.
The second bridge of lintel-stones at Wycollar is a simple adaptation
from one of Nature’s bridges, the bridge of stepping-stones
littered over the beds of rivers by earthquakes and floods. When
the stepping-stones are long you turn them on end and use them as
piers; when they are short and squat you pile them up into piers;
then lintel-stones are put from pier to pier, and from pier to each
bankside. Here is the A B C of primitive bridge-making with slabs,
boulders, and fragments of rock. It needs very much less mother-wit
than that which enabled primitive men to survive innumerable hardships,
and to breed and rear those true artists who in Palæolithic times,
about 50,000 years ago,[16] turned a good many European caves into
the first public art galleries, famous for their rock-paintings and
for their sculpture and engravings. Thus the Altamira Cavern, near
Santander, in Northern Spain, and the La Madeleine cave in the Dordogne
(about eighty miles east of Bordeaux), are among the prehistoric
museums, or art galleries, which have given us work very far in advance
of the Wycollar lintel-bridges; so far, indeed, that trees and shrubs
in the valley ought to blush with shame by keeping autumn tints in
their leaves all the year round. This hint from Dame Nature might
awaken some little self-reproach in the Lancashire weavers and peasants
whose heavy clogs clatter day after day over the lintel-stones, wearing
them into troughs where rainwater collects pretty pictures from the sky.
[Illustration: IN THE VALLEY OF WYCOLLAR, LANCASHIRE: THE WEAVERS’
BRIDGE]
Not long ago a busy official mind in the neighbourhood was troubled
by one of the bridges at Wycollar, named the Weavers’ Bridge, a
dull-witted primitivity made with three lintel-stones and two rough
piers in the water. Though the busy official mind was troubled it did
not suggest that the bridge should be put under glass and kept with
as much care as the perfect skeleton of a mastodon would receive; nor
did it wish to build a successor in the cheapest style of industrial
metal-work. No; what the official mind advertised as a fortunate
inspiration was a foolish little act of commonplace vandalism. It set a
mason to chisel out of existence the trough worn in the lintel-stones
by generations of clog-wearers! I have two photographs, now historic,
in which the trough can be seen distinctly; but the poor weavers have
no such consolation. Their ancestors’ work has to be done all over
again, and they know that their great-grandchildren will find in the
lintel-stones not a trough but a vague hollow scarcely deep enough to
hold a few raindrops. Mr. Sargisson wrote to tell me this pathetic
story of a crisis in antiquarianism. But it is fair to add that the
busy official mind was content with one foolish act; it spared the rude
pillar on the left bank, though this rough stone looks like a small
menhir and completes the primeval bridge.
And now let us look at the survival of convention under a form that is
even more distressing. Is it true that in many times and lands human
beings have been sacrificed not to bridges, but to the spirits of
floods and storms which have been feared as destroyers of bridges? One
good reference to this question will be found in Francis M. Crawford’s
“Ave Roma Immortalis.” The most venerated bridge in ancient Rome was
the Pons Sublicius, whose history dated from the time of Ancus Marcius,
who reigned twenty-four years--B.C. 640-616. In much later times, long
after the good fight that made Horatius Cocles famous for ever, strange
ceremonies and superstitions lingered around the Pons Sublicius. On
the Ides of May, which were celebrated on the fifteenth of the month,
Pontiffs and Vestals came in solemn state to the bridge, accompanied
by men who carried thirty effigies representing human bodies. The
effigies were made of bulrushes, and one by one they were thrown into
the Tiber, while the Vestals sang hymns or the priests chanted prayers.
What did this rite signify? A tradition popular in Rome taught children
to believe that the effigies took the place of human beings, once
sacrificed to the river in May. This tradition is attacked by Ovid,
“but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove
that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for
one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed
until the year of the City 657, when, Cnæus Cornelius Lentulus and
Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no
man should be sacrificed thereafter.”
It is possible, if not, indeed, probable, that the effigies were made
at first in order to placate the common people who were indignant over
the loss of a festival. We can imagine what would be said to-day if
Cup-finals were stopped by Act of Parliament; and the Romans, in their
fool-fury over “sport” at second-hand, were always glad to appease
their curiosity with shows of bloodshed. Further, in the folk-lore of
later times bridges and rivers are connected with the primitive rite
of killing women and men as a sacrifice to evil spirits. This dread
tradition is related now in the Asiatic provinces of Turkey, as I learn
from Sir Mark Sykes, whose “Dar-Ul-Islam” is a book for pontists to
read. It was at Zakho that Sir Mark heard the following legend:--
“Many years ago workmen under their master were set to build
the bridge; three times the bridge fell, and the workmen
said, ‘The bridge needs a life.’ And the master saw a
beautiful girl, accompanied by a bitch and her puppies, and
he said, ‘We will give the first [life] that comes by.’ But
the dog and her little ones hung back, so the girl was built
alive into the bridge, and only her hand with a gold
bracelet upon it was left outside.
“At the foot of this bridge I found the local Agha, Yussuf
Pasha, superintending the collection of the sheep-tax, in
which as a large landowner he has an interest.”
Try to visualise in all their details these pictures, passing from
to-day’s tax-gatherer, a Pasha Lloyd George, into the drama of a very
terrible superstition. The workmen can be fitted with fairly good
primitive characters, for they do not suggest the sacrifice of a life
until the bridge has fallen thrice. As to their master, he is a fiend,
since he acts upon their suggestion at once, unmoved by the girl’s
beauty and the frisking springtime that accompanies her. A little dead
hand--and a gleaming bracelet--and the masons chanting at their work,
as bridge-builders chant now in Persia: so the drama ends, or so it
would end if we could not unite it with a similar legend known almost
everywhere in Europe.
Why in the Turkish story the workmen say, “The _bridge_ needs a life,”
I do not know. Their superstition goes away from the river and its evil
spirits, and from those other demons, which in olden times made winds
so variable. Are we then to suppose that men have defiled the charity
of bridges with bad spirits other than those that live in wilted
conventions and in modern engineers? I prefer to believe that a bridge
that fell three times would muddle the superstition of any workman.
In fact, there are many bridges which superstition--not modesty in
men--has given to the Devil, and as a rule they have been connected
with the same legend, or bogie tale. Mr. Baring-Gould takes a great
interest in the bridges ascribed to the Devil, and writes about them as
follows in his “Book of South Wales”:--
[Illustration: PONT DU DIABLE, ST. GOTTHARD PASS]
“The Devil’s Bridge is twelve miles from Aberystwyth; it is
over the Afon Mynach just before its junction with the
Rheidol[17].... The original bridge was constructed by the
monks of Strata Florida, at what time is unknown, but legend
says it was built by the Devil.
Old Megan Llandunach, of Pont-y-Mynach,
Had lost her only cow;
Across the ravine the cow was seen,
But to get it she could not tell how.
“In this dilemma the Evil One appeared to her cowled as a
monk, and with a rosary at his belt, and offered to cast a
bridge across the chasm if she would promise him the first
living being that should pass over it when complete. To this
she gladly consented. The bridge was thrown across the
ravine, and the Evil One stood bowing and beckoning to the
old woman to come over and try it. But she was too clever to
do that. She had noticed his left leg as he was engaged on
the construction, and saw that the knee was behind in place
of in front, and for a foot he had a hoof.
In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled,
She called her little black cur;
The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew,
Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’
“Precisely the same story is told of S. Cadoc’s Causeway in
Brittany; of the bridge over the Maine at Frankfort, and of
many and many another.
“How comes it that we have an almost identical tale in so
many parts of Europe? The reason is that in all such
structures a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil
who haunted the place. When a storm came down on the sea,
Jonah had to be flung overboard to allay it. When, in the
old English ballad, a ship remained stationary, though all
sails were spread, and she could make no headway, the crew
‘cast the black bullets,’ and the lot falls to the captain’s
wife, and she is thereupon thrown overboard. Vortigern
sought to lay the foundations of his castle in the blood of
an orphan boy. A dam broke in Holland in the seventeenth
century; the peasants could hardly be restrained from
burying a living child under it, when reconstructed, to
ensure its stability.[18]
“When the [Cistercian] monks of Strata Florida threw the
daring arch over the chasm, they so far yielded to the
popular superstition as to bury a dog beneath the base of
the arch, or to fling one over the parapet.”
There! We have followed a superstition--a vile convention in ignorance
and cowardice--from the Pons Sublicius in Ancient Rome to the
Pont-y-Mynach in South Wales; and the best we can say of it is that in
Pagan Rome it went from human victims to effigies of men and women,
while in Christian times it passed from human victims to dogs.[19] Mr.
Baring-Gould has told us that in bridges, and “in all such structures,
a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place.”
Yet it was not _in_ a structure--a finished building--that Vortigern
wished to offer his sacrifice; he “sought _to lay the foundations_ of
his castle in the blood of an orphan boy,” so his aim was to placate
the Spirits of Evil before his castle was built. As to his conception
of the spiritual agencies to be appeased, it would mingle his own
passions with the fears bred by his primitive fanaticism. For, as
Darwin says, “savages would naturally attribute to spirits the same
passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and
the same affections which they themselves felt.”
Now in the case of bridges we have to identify primitive men with
the terror inspired by storms and floods; a terror difficult for us
to understand in our sheltered lives. Have you read Matthew Paris,
who lived in the reign of Henry III? If not, go to him and study the
tempests that he described, and see how villages were desolated by
winds and inundations. Amid these disasters the ignorant would cling to
ancient superstitions; fear would be pagan out of doors whatever faith
might say in church; and I have no doubt at all that the many so-called
Devil’s Bridges were as supernatural to the mediæval peasant as were
witches. The Dutch of the Middle Ages were more advanced in domestic
civilization than our own ancestors; and yet at heart they were cruel
pagans, even as late as the seventeenth century, as Mr. Baring-Gould
has shown. How very humble human nature ought to be!
Let us pass on, then, to a convention that does not reek like
a stricken field. One of the best historians in architecture,
Viollet-le-Duc, found in the hills of Savoy a primeval bridge whose
structure had been changed very little, if at all, since the days when
its ancestors were described by Cæsar and used by the Gauls. It is a
timber bridge, known in France as _un empilage_, a thing piled together
rudely, and not constructed with art. Indeed, it needs no carpentry,
so it is far behind the social genius of prehistoric lake-dwellers.
To make a simple Gaulish bridge, as to-day in Savoy, we must choose
a deep-lying river with rugged banks; then with water-worn boulders
we make on each bank a rough foundation about fifteen feet square, or
more. Upon this we raise a criss-cross of tree trunks, taking care that
the horizontal trees jut out farther and farther across the water,
narrowing the gap to be bridged by four or five pines. Each criss-cross
must be “stiffened” or filled in with pebbles and bits of rock; and
across the unfinished road of pines thick boards are nailed firmly.
Viollet-le-Duc says:--
“Cette construction primitive ... rappelle singulièrement
ces ouvrages Gaulois dont parle César, et qui se composaient
de troncs d’arbres posés à l’angle droit par rangées, entre
lesquelles on bloquait des quartiers de roches. Ce procédé,
qui nest qu’un empilage, doit remonter à la plus haute
antiquité; nous le signalons ici pour faire connaître
comment certaines traditions se perpétuent à travers les
siècles, malgré les perfectionnements apportés par la
civilisation, et combien elles doivent toujours fixer
l’attention de l’archéologue.”
Does anyone suppose that Savoy would have been loyal to a prehistoric
bridge if all primitiveness had vanished from her social life?
Not that Savoy is the only place where criss-cross bridges are still in
vogue. Much finer specimens are to be found in Kashmír, thrown across
the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Greek historians. At Srínagar, the
capital city, founded in the sixth century A.D., there is a quite
wonderful example, for it has many spans, and corbelled out from the
footway is a quaint little street of frail shops, rickety cabins with
gabled roofs, and so unequal in size that they are charmed with an
amusing inequality. I have several photographs of this bridge, and in
them I see always with a renewed pleasure its ancestry, its descent
from the prehistoric lake-villages, those heralds of Venice and of Old
London Bridge (p. 216). All the piers are made with deodar logs piled
up in the criss-cross manner; those that stretch across the river are
cut in varying lengths, and each succeeding row is longer than the one
beneath it, so the logs in a brace of piers project towards each other
farther and farther over the water, till at last they form an arched
shape; not an arch perfect in outline, of course, since the head of
it is flattened by the long bearing beams of the roadway. Still, the
arched shape is very noticeable.
A pontist should study these rude arches with care, and connect them
with similar arches in the Gaulish bridges of Savoy, and also with
the historic fact that the first arches built with _voussoirs_ (i.e.
arch-stones) were evolved from vaults roughly constructed with parallel
courses of stone and layers of timber (p. 155). It is probable that
the parallel layers of timber or rows of logs came before the parallel
courses of stone, as the evolution of architecture passed from wood
to stone. Forests much more than rocks and quarries have been an
inspiration to primitive builders, as if the handling of wood has
quickened in human nature an arboreal instinct dating from the family
trees in the descent of man.
[Illustration: AT ALBI ON THE TARN, IN FRANCE, SHOWING ON OUR RIGHT THE
OLD HOUSES, AND ON OUR LEFT, BEYOND THE BRIDGE, THE GREAT OLD CHURCH,
FAMOUS FOR ITS FORTIFICATIONS]
However, another criss-cross bridge in Kashmír ought to be studied
in photographs; it is carried on six piers over the Jhelum at
Baramula--quite close to the Himalayas; the piers rise from boat-shaped
platforms that meet the oncoming water as boats do, with their blunt
stems looking brave as rearguards. The parapet is a simple latticework,
and the abutments are masonry. Here we have a type of bridge perhaps
quite similar to the one from which the Gauls got their rude methods,
long after the craft of the lake-dwellers had left its sheltered
moorings and adventured across wide rivers.
Is there any concrete evidence to suggest that the bridge with
criss-cross piers has gone through many phases of change, of growth
or of decadence? Yes. At Archangel, in North Russia, the criss-cross
piers are more primitive; instead of being arched they are upright and
stiff; but as the bridge is nearly a quarter of a mile long, and as it
is taken down every spring (before the ice breaks up noisily, and the
Dwina thunders into a raging torrent), crude workmanship in a hurried
routine is excusable. The main point is that a bridge akin to the
Gaulish type and to the variation in Kashmir exists in North Russia.
And another variation is met with at Bhutan, in India. Brangwyn has
drawn it, and we shall study it later in a page on gateway-towers
(p. 272). In the highlands of Eastern Kurdistan, the borderland of
Asiatic Turkey and Persia, travellers find a bridge akin to the Bhutan
variety. An excellent book on these highlands has been published,[20]
and its authors, very generously, have written for me some valuable
notes on the bridges. Before I quote them in full, let me ask you
to remember that in Eastern Kurdistan timber is uncommon; hence the
criss-cross bridge has been evolved into another sort of primitive
structure--a third cousin, several times removed. A Kurdistan bridge is
built as follows: “A site is selected, if one can be found, where two
immovable and flat-topped masses of rock face one another across the
stream to be bridged: an abutment of unhewn stones is built on these,
solid, until a height has been reached sufficient to be safe from any
flood.
“Then a bracket of four or more rows of poplar trunks is constructed
on each abutment; short stout trunks form the bottom row, and those of
each succeeding one are naturally longer than the preceding. Unless
the bridge is unusually wide in the footway four poplars are enough to
form a row, and the butts of the trees, which are kept shore-wards, are
weighted down with big stones as counter-weights to hold them in place.
“The top of each row of trunks projects perhaps five feet beyond the
preceding one, so that when a bracket of four rows is completed, it may
project perhaps twenty feet over the stream.
“When the corresponding bracket has been completed, two long poplar
trunks are slung by withies from bracket end to bracket end, a footway
of withy hurdles, resting on faggots, is laid down over all, and the
bridge is complete. The length of this centre span is of course limited
by the height of the poplars available. I should think fifty feet the
extreme possible.
“If the width of the river makes it necessary, one or more piers of
stone,--I have seen as many as three,--are erected in midstream,
preferably on rock foundations. Each of these carries a bracket on each
side, but this double bracket is usually made of ‘whole trunks’ and
these naturally need no counter-weighting.
“As a rule the footway is about four feet wide, and the whole structure
is very elastic, so that, as it is guiltless of handrails, it requires
a steady head in the passenger. Further, the central span often
acquires a pronounced ‘sag,’ and not seldom an equally pronounced
tilt to one side or other. Ancient rule says that the passenger ought
not to look down in crossing such a place, lest the sight of water
whirling below should unnerve him. In Kurdistan, however, look down
he must, and make the best of the hurdles that form the footway; they
abound in holes and other traps for the unwary, and a stumble may mean
disaster. These bridges, then, though admirably planned (for they are
true cantilevers), are not built in the most convenient manner. It is
characteristically Oriental, this union of real fineness of design
with great casualness in construction and in upkeep. The piers are
invariably of stone, never of wood. Good timber is almost unknown in
Kurdistan. The poplar grows well, but it is at best only a good pole.
Stone, on the other hand, is embarrassingly abundant.
“Dry-stone arches are thrown over smaller streams, but their builders,
though acquainted with the principle of the vault, do not venture on a
span of more than thirty feet!”[21]
How do you like the antiquity of conventions? Does it not make you
feel that the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of
desire that its civil institutions should be improved? Note, too,
that convention among men is inferior to the instinct of animals,
for animals invariably repeat themselves with a passionate interest,
whereas we in our formulas grow more and more unfeeling and automatic.
Even rabbits when they dig their burrows seem to be guided by
inspiration, as if routine work with them is an appetite, like love and
hunger; so very different are they from the conservative peasants of
Savoy, whose dull routine has delivered down through the centuries a
primeval bridge which an hour’s thought could have improved.
One day, let us hope, most men will realise that it is woefully
commonplace to be as other men; then conventions will go out of vogue.
Courts and clubs will invent new and good etiquettes every year; no
game will be stereotyped; and laws will command that such and such
things be altered and improved by given dates. For example, if an Act
of Parliament decreed that during the next ten years all the railway
bridges in England must be made less uncomely and less at odds with the
needs of military defence, I have no doubt that compulsion, the scout
of civil progress, would discover among engineers more than enough
invention.
Railway bridges have been built in obedience to a brace of conventional
arguments. It has been argued, first, that because traffic and trade
are the main considerations, therefore art is not a matter to be
considered; next, that because boards of directors have to please their
shareholders, therefore a most strenuous economy must be advertised in
a very evident manner, even although its results blot fine landscapes
with the shame of uninspired craftsmanship.
Thirty-four years have passed since the late E. M. Barry, R.A., in a
thoughtful book, asked the public to understand that modern engineering
was not architecture at all, but mere building; and he chose as an
example of horrible work the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits.
“Here we have the adoption of the trabeated principle of large iron
beams laid upon supports of masonry, which rise from the valley
beneath, and tower up above the beams to a height far exceeding that
which is necessary for their support. I well remember the animated
discussions in scientific circles as to the form and design of these
beams, which were ultimately decided upon as rectangular tubes. In the
many discussions of the merits and defects of circular, elliptical
and square sections, I do not recollect that a word was said about
architectural effect [or about military convenience and strategy]. Had
anyone ventured to suggest that this, too, was an important matter,
and that an unsightly structure would be an eyesore for all time, he
would have been promptly told that the forms to be employed were an
affair of science alone, and that utility pure and simple would dictate
their arrangement. In the result a lovely valley was defaced....”
The same convention in mean tradecraft is shown in the tale about
Tennyson and the jerry-builder. “Why do you cut down these trees?” the
poet asked reprovingly. “Trees are beautiful things.” “Ah!” answered
the jerry-builder, “trees are luxuries; what we need is utility.” And
what this utility has done for us may be seen in a thousand railway
bridges as bad as those that disgrace even the Harrow Road, near by
Paddington Station.
It is not my argument that every railway bridge in England is underbred
and crapulous; here and there an engineer has made an effort to be
architectural, but the usual level of taste is exceedingly vulgar, and
not in railway bridges only. Even the Tower Bridge, London, a vast feat
in engineering, is so conventional with a meretricious mediævalism that
it needs the screening dust and mist that veil the Thames. This is
among the modern bridges that Brangwyn has drawn and painted, raising
them into art as a record of current history. Nothing moves him more
than the huge mechanisms that seize upon to-day’s life and turn it
into their obedient slave. Men dwindle ever more and more in scale as
machines become fatal in their enormous bulk, like Super-Dreadnoughts
and the “Titanic”; not to forget such vulnerable monsters as the
bridges of New York, which airships sent forth by Mr. H. G. Wells have
already attacked with prophetic success. Is man really doomed to be the
tool of machines? Is this to be his final convention?
In one great picture by Brangwyn the High Level Bridge at Newcastle
represents our time. Historically the High Level Bridge has much
interest; it displaced the Britannia Bridge as an object of scientific
veneration, and from the first it has ranked high in the conventional
ugliness that the British public has accepted from engineers. When
the Britannia Bridge was proved to be a bad railway line (trains were
the decisive critics), and when men of science after weighing their
after-thoughts began to find fault with the distribution of metal in
the section of its tubes, then engineers said, “And now--now we must
have a good railway bridge, completely scientific in all respects.”
It was to be built with two roadways, the one for common traffic
passing under a railway, so that business folk might be comforted
by the noise overhead, which would be as music to any believer in a
pushful industrialism. Six arches of metal would be united to five
piers and the abutments; their spans would have precisely the same
width, i.e. 138 ft. 10 in., for minds long used to office hours and
ledgers would enjoy a dead uniformity. Indeed, everybody was pleased
with these plans; and in 1849, when Queen Victoria opened the High
Level Bridge, artists alone were unexcited with joy. All the rest of
the English world imagined that science, at the cost of only £243,000,
had achieved a metal masterpiece. New London Bridge had cost six times
as much (i.e. £1,458,311), and her materials were stones, not metals,
so once more the north of England had scored heavily over the south.
“Besides,” remarked the engineers, “we have put into the superstructure
321 tons of wrought-iron, and into the arched ribs 4,728 tons of
cast-iron. Economy.... Scientific economy.... And we have now in use a
perfect example of the true bowstring arch in which no cross-bracing is
needed.” All this, when discussed at dinners, enriched the flavour of
champagne; and opinion became so “heady” that even the “Encyclopædia
Britannica” in its eighth edition received the High Level Bridge as an
inspired work, and gave to its engineering as much space as the thrifty
Romans would have given to all their Spanish bridges and aqueducts.
At last, and all of a sudden, a reaction came; enthusiasm not only
caught a chill, it passed in a hurry from its tropical summer into a
bad winter of discontent. Scientists went so far as to declare that the
High Level Bridge was a youthful indiscretion, advertised publicly in a
material which might endure for centuries; and this change of opinion
had a great effect on the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” whose ninth
edition gave only eighteen lines to its former favourite. Even the
bowstring arch was praised no longer, “being essentially more expensive
and heavier than a true girder.”
[Illustration: THE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON]
Such are the comedies invented by our new playwright, the genius of
civil engineers. Still, the High Level Bridge at Newcastle looks well
on a misty day; by moonlight it is more impressive than a Whistler
nocturne; and in Brangwyn’s art it represents our industrial age with a
vigour that is manly and impressive.
For the rest, from the pictures in this book you will be able to choose
for yourself many a convention in the craft of bridge-building. Study,
for example, the arches and their shapes, noting those which have a
character of their own. These mark a new departure, and are famous.
Thus the bridge at Avignon is admired by technicians because its
architect, the great Saint Bénézet, gave to the arches what Professor
Fleeming Jenkin has described as “an elliptical outline with the radius
of curvature smaller at the crown than at the haunch, a form which
accords more truly with the linear equilibrated arch than the modern
flat ellipse with the largest radius at the crown.” Good Bénézet!
Seven hundred and thirty years have gone by since he turned from the
Roman tradition of semicircular arches, and designed an excellent arch
of his own, a beautiful thing, with a look of triumph in its quiet
dignity. Many writers think that L’arc de Saint Bénézet is original
also in construction, its vault being composed of four separate bands
put side by side in stones of about equal bulk. Sometimes this method
of building is condemned as weak, though four of Bénézet’s arches
have outlived seven centuries of war; and what engineer would feel
disgraced if he were baffled by the terrific floods to which the Rhône
is subject?
Moreover, Bénézet was not an originator in this matter; he borrowed
from the Romans. In his time there was a bridge that carried the Via
Domitiana over the Vidourle at Pont Ambroise; the vaults of its five
arches were built in precisely the same manner, in four parallel arcs
or bands that touched each other; and the bridge was notable for other
reasons, and thus attractive to all bridge-builders. In the first
place, a Bull of Pope Adrian IV, dated 1156, now treasured at Nîmes
in the Church of Nôtre Dame, has proved that in the twelfth century
a chapel was built either on or from the middle of the bridge; it
was dedicated to St. Mary, and it belonged to the chapter of Nîmes
Cathedral. A Roman bridge sanctified by a Christian chapel recalls to
one’s mind the devotion of the Flavian family that placed the monogram
of Christ among the ensigns of ancient Rome. Unless the chapel stood
out on corbels from the side of the bridge, it must have been a tiny
place of prayer, for the bridge was only three metres wide, while
the Via Domitiana had an average width of six metres. Further, the
roadway across the bridge was peculiar; it followed in gentle curves
the contour of the arches, instead of being either flat (as in most
Roman bridges) or with a slight incline at the abutment ends (as in
the bridge of Augustus at Rimini).[22] We cannot suppose that this
bridge, so noteworthy in several ways, was unknown to Bénézet, head of
the Pontist Friars. Anyhow, the immense Pont du Gard, near Nîmes, a
Roman masterpiece, must have been known to him; and the arches of its
second tier have in the belly of each vault three parallel bands of
equal-sized stones. If this method of construction be unsound, how are
we to explain the heroic stability of the Pont du Gard, the finest of
all the Roman aqueducts?
Myself, I do not believe that Bénézet was inexpert as a borrower. We
shall meet him again (p. 236), but let us note here that his work
is rhythmical and charming; so it does not belong to the underbred
heaviness that bridge-builders often copied from the art of mediæval
fortification. This art was an unthrifty engineer; it employed far
and away too much blind masonry. Castle walls were ten feet thick,
and brave soldiers at home feared the light of day, merely to show
respect for arrows and machine-worked catapults. They were not
discreet; they made caution too timid and too uncomfortable. Did
gallant married knights forget to sleep in their suits of mail? Was a
honeymoon in armour a trifle more tiresome than were twelfth-century
castles with their arrow slits for windows? For many a year home life
was an ill-smelling twilight, particularly to persons of rank; and
from this we may infer that the custom of war during the Middle Ages
went hand-in-hand with a superstitious dread of death. Bénézet needed
courage as well as genius when he slighted in a graceful manner the
ponderous conventions of safety that ruled in his day over castles
(1177-1185). It was his arch that saved the vigour of his design from
being dull and clumsy.
Some other arches in French bridges have provoked paper wars. This is
true of those in the bridges at Albi and Espalion, chosen by Brangwyn
partly because of their controversial interest, and partly because
they illustrate a mood of handicraft which may be called the uncouth
picturesque.
[Illustration: AN OLD TOWN BRIDGE IN PERUGIA, ITALY, TO ILLUSTRATE A
POINTED ARCH WHICH HAS IN ITS CURVE A SORT OF LINGERING SENTIMENT FOR
THE ROUND ARCH OF THE ROMANS]
IV
CONTROVERSIES
Students are tested and judged by their attitude to controversies.
Common sense should keep them from partisanship; and when they feel
tempted to look on as mere spectators, they should remember that crowds
at boxing matches are very apt to form wrong opinions. It is better
by far to laugh at both sides by caricaturing the weak points of a
discussion. In a few days a student will learn which side is the more
difficult to caricature, and this knowledge will help him to sift all
rubbish from a controversy and to form a judgment of his own on facts
and on inferences. As Sir Thomas Browne said, a man should be something
that all men are not, and individual in somewhat beside his person and
his name.
The bridges at Albi and Espalion have caused some men to break old
friendships over a simple question, namely: “When were pointed arches
used for the first time in French bridges? At what date were they
brought from the East?” As the pointed arch was copied by Europeans,
not invented by them, the precise date of the mimicry ought not to
excite a pontist; it is a thing for antiquaries to be flurried about.
If the question ran in another form: “Was the pointed arch in French
bridges an independent discovery?” then a battle and some exploded
reputations would be worth while. But no such hypothesis has been
put forward by either side in a warm dispute. One party declares
that as early as the time of Charlemagne, towards the end of the
eighth century, or the beginning of the ninth (768-814), a French
builder seems to have played the part of the sedulous ape to Eastern
architecture, cribbing the pointed arch, and using it without much
skill in the bridge of Espalion, whose construction (as documents
prove incontestably) was ordered by Charlemagne himself. In this bald
statement there is no challenge, no provocation; it is nothing more
than a conjecture supported by a documented fact.
If Charlemagne had been a weak ruler, like Louis the Indolent, it would
be fair to suppose that his commands were neglected more often than
obeyed; then we could not accept his character as a fact of greater
value in a controversy than a command of his mentioned in authentic
documents. Let us say that the Black Prince or his father ordered a
bridge to be built at a given place; we have documents to prove this,
and at the place named in the documents a very old bridge is extant.
Should we not read these documents by the light of the reputation won
by the Black Prince or by his father? Myself, I should say at once,
“His orders were obeyed.” And so, too, in the case of Charlemagne. I
accept his character as a guarantee that he was obeyed at Espalion;
and in this I am supported by Charlemagne’s general attitude to roads
and bridges. It was he who made many an effort to keep the highways in
repair, trying to rescue them from the great disorder into which their
administration had been thrown by the decline and fall of the Romans.
He created the right to exact tolls, and sanctioned on the roads the
use of statute labour and of fatigue duty done by soldiers. During
his reign of forty-six years he restored much Roman work and set in
movement a system that did not overtax the poor finances of his Empire;
but after his death the Empire was divided and continual wars put an
end to civil advancement.
As Charlemagne needed a bridge at Espalion we may believe that a bridge
was built there between the years 768 and 814. Does the bridge still
exist, or was it rebuilt in the twelfth century, or later? There is no
evidence on these points; hence the controversy. Those who think it
possible, if not probable, that the bridge as it is now, apart from
periodical repairs, belongs to Charlemagne’s reign, draw arguments
from the uncouth workmanship; and even their opponents admit that
the bridge is “une œuvre barbare n’offrant absolument aucun intérêt:
a barbaric work without any interest at all”[23] (as architecture).
Why, then, should any Frenchman wish to assign this barbaric bridge
to a much later century than the eighth? Ah! Here we touch once again
the influence of conventions. A belief current among antiquaries has
connected the pointed arch with the first Crusade, and so with the
last decade of the eleventh century (1095) and the first years of
the twelfth. Godfrey of Bouillon, on July 15, 1099, was made King of
Jerusalem, and before this date many Crusaders had returned home. M.
Degrand says: “At this time, about the year 1100, Crusaders returned
to France after their stay in the East, notably at Antioch, where
monuments of Persian origin must have been numerous; and without
doubt they brought home with them sufficient knowledge to introduce
the pointed vault into the national architecture. Thus it is easy to
understand why the twelfth century has been chosen as the date for the
earliest work done in France with the pointed style. We conjecture,
then, that the bridges at Espalion and Albi, in their present state,
have not the antiquity which supposition has given to them; and that
they must have been rebuilt (_ils ont dû être reconstruits_) after the
periods from which their first construction dates.”
[Illustration: FAMOUS BRIDGE AT ESPALION IN FRANCE SAID TO DATE FROM
THE EIGHTH CENTURY]
This argument has a tongue and no legs. Even Nature in the Pont
d’Arc at Ardèche had given a pointed arch to France;[24] and how can
we dare to suppose that no traveller from the East in the time of
Charlemagne could have brought with him to Espalion any knowledge of
pointed arches? Was this knowledge guarded so carefully that nothing
less than a Crusade could bring it to France? Intelligent soldiers
would certainly note the details of Eastern architecture, and when
they returned home their talk and their tales would be listened to
with eagerness by French craftsmen. More than this we have no right to
believe. It is mere hollow claptrap to argue that no French architect
or builder could have received earlier news of the pointed arches. But
claptrap--is it not the drum of controversy? It makes a great noise,
and gives men heart to fight for poor beliefs.
So irrational has this controversy become that even M. Degrand, a
most thoughtful pontist as a rule, includes the bridge at Albi in his
defective argument, though it cannot be older than the year 1035,
because at this date its construction was arranged at a great public
meeting held by the Seigneur of Albi and the clergy. Not even then was
it possible for a Frenchman to know that pointed arches were common in
the East! M. Degrand accepts the date 1035, and thinks it probable
that the building was “begun” then or a few years later; “but,” he
adds, “we have no proof that the bridge existed before 1178, in which
year, according to a contemporary document, a body of troops used it
to cross the Tarn.” If M. Degrand were able to prove that Albi Bridge
was new in the year 1178, then we should forget his conventional belief
in the first Crusade; a fact would be very welcome after his parade
of idle suppositions. Further, the meeting of 1035 must guide us
until we know that its decision was _not_ carried into action. It is
a policy of evasion to argue as follows: “In the Middle Ages building
projects were often delayed, as in the case of the noble brick bridge
at Montauban;[25] so we cannot attach any importance to the meeting of
1035 at Albi. Though the desire to have a bridge was approved then by
the Seigneur, by the clergy and by the people, yet a hundred and one
things may have intervened between the project and its realisation.
In 1178 a bridge at Albi was strong enough to be used without risk by
troops, but why connect it with the meeting of 1035? To do so would be
rash indeed, since our aim is to add a pointed arch to the cross worn
by the Crusaders.”
So we turn to the evidence of workmanship; and here again we can shoot
at M. Degrand with his own bullets. To show that Albi Bridge is a
clumsy structure without art is to prove it unworthy of the year 1178,
when the Pontist Friars were active in France, and when at Avignon
the genius of Saint Bénézet was planning a wonderful achievement. The
more just fault we can find with Albi Bridge as a piece of building,
the more fit we make it for the year 1035. Yet M. Degrand, passing
from wayward controversy into art-criticism, gives himself away in an
excess of fault-finding. He forgets that the bridge, a bad model as
architecture, is uncommonly picturesque, and he writes as follows:
“There are seven pointed arches, and their spans vary--without order or
regulation--from 9 m. 75 c. to 16 m.; the piers in bulk are variable
also, some of them being 6 m. 50 c. thick, that is to say, two-thirds
of the adjacent voids; they are badly aligned and the spandrils belong
almost all to different planes. The breakwaters jut out too far, and
meet the current with angles of even less than forty-five degrees;
while the buttresses behind, on the down-stream side, are rectangular
and almost without projection. Last of all, there is no ornament to
dress the nude spandrils and to set them apart from the parapets.
_C’est là, en fait, une œuvre barbare...._”
Let us conjecture, then, that this barbaric bridge at Albi, with its
seven pointed arches, may belong, not to the time of Saint Bénézet, but
to the year 1035, or thereabouts. Nearly a century ago, in 1822, it
was considerably enlarged, but the arches were not rebuilt. The bridge
must have been restored many times, but there is no proof that it was
reconstructed in the thirteenth century or in the twelfth. Besides,
sportsmen in a controversy should be fair. Yet a good many books of
reference say: “The Pont du Tarn at Albi, whose first construction goes
back to the year 1035 or 1040, is thirteenth-century work”--a calumny
on a very beautiful period in the evolution of Gothic architecture. We
should have far too much admiration for the Valentré Bridge at Cahors
to give the Pont du Tarn to the thirteenth century; and several other
bridges in France do ample justice to the successors of Saint Bénézet.
For example, there is the Pont St. Esprit, a masterpiece of the Pontist
Friars, and a work so vast in length that Brangwyn is never tired of
recalling his first impressions of its magnitude.[26] If, again, we
wish to study work that comes to us from the twelfth century, then we
turn to the famous bridges at Béziers and Carcassonne.
[Illustration: PONT DU TARN AT ALBI IN FRANCE. SAID TO DATE FROM ABOUT
THE YEARS 1035-40]
As to the bridge at Espalion, it has four unequal arches, and three of
them are pointed, more or less. Their form is experimental, and seems
to mark a first experiment in pointed Gothic. One arch, indeed, when
looked at from underneath, might be an ill-planned Roman arch, so poor
is its “ogival” or pointed shape; but yet the bridge, as the Brangwyn
sketch bears witness, shows how an effort was made to free craftsmen
from the convention of semicircular vaults. If we connect it with the
age of Charlemagne we may argue thus: “Perhaps the masons were among
those who at times restored a neglected Roman bridge; and perhaps the
bridgemaster had gained some knowledge of Eastern arches, either at
first-hand or from travellers or from drawings. East and West were
united then as they were in much earlier times, so that information
from each must have been conveyed to the other.” On the other hand, if
we guess that the first bridge at Espalion was rebuilt in the twelfth
century or in the thirteenth, then we must say also that the town of
Espalion was too lazy even to seek advice from the Pontist Friars.
Larousse has set forth the position very well: “The most ancient of
the extant bridges, constructed in mediæval France, appears to be the
one at Espalion (A.D. 780); its date is contested because we find it
associated with the pointed arch; but this arch already had been used
for two centuries in the East.”[27]
So we may conclude, in a conjecture perhaps strong enough to be called
a hypothesis, that the pointed style in architecture may have been
brought to France on three occasions: in the reign of Charlemagne, then
in the first half of the eleventh century, and then after the first
Crusade. There is no need to set much store by the second presumed
inspiration, since the idea for Albi Bridge may have been taken from
the Pont du Tarn at Espalion.
England as well as France has a controversy over arches; and I mention
the fact because of Brangwyn’s masterly pen-drawing of the Monnow
Bridge at Monmouth--a fortified work of the Middle Ages. In this bridge
the arches are ribbed, like those in the bridges at Kirkby Lonsdale,
and Warkworth, and Rotherham, at Baslow and Bakewell, in Eamont Bridge
at Penrith, at Ross in Herefordshire (Elizabethan), and elsewhere. When
was the ribbed arch first used in bridges?
The use of ribbed vaulting in English churches dates from the twelfth
century; it came to England from France. Yet Scotland, the historic
friend of France, used it very rarely in bridges; perhaps only once,
in the famous Old Bridge of Dee near Aberdeen, which dates from
the beginning of the sixteenth century. Mr. G. M. Fraser, a Scotch
pontist, tells me that he has looked in vain throughout Scotland for
another example. Old Stirling Bridge, and the Brig o’ Doon, and the
Auld Brig o’ Ayr, and Devorgilla’s Bridge at Dumfries, all finely
historic and various, have plain arches. On the other hand, ribbed
arches are fairly common in North English bridges. One of the best
examples architecturally is the graceful single arch that Sir Walter
Scott loved in Twizel Bridge, that enabled Lord Surrey to outflank the
Scotch before the battle of Flodden Field.[28] Why the frugal Scotch
were unattracted by a new and thrifty way of building I cannot explain,
unless by supposing that they loved convention even more than a hard
economy. Viollet-le-Duc estimates that in _arcs-doubleaux_, or ribbed
arches, builders use a third less of tooled and clavated masonry; hence
a great saving not of cost only, but of dead weight also.
And there were other economies. An _arc-doubleau_ is the simplest form
of ribbed vaulting: at given intervals in the building of a vault a
concentric arch is supposited, or the vault itself at intervals is
made much thicker than at others. In Poitou, where ribbed bridges were
studied by Viollet-le-Duc, the intervals between the ribs are filled
in with flagging under the roadway; and with this material--or with
ashlar--the spandrils above the ribs are packed. When flagstones are
used, and rain-water filters down from the roadway, no harm is done;
the wet trickles away through the joints of the flagstones, without
causing the haunches of an arch to throw out saltpetre: a mishap that
occurs often when arches are unribbed. I am writing here with the mind
of Viollet-le-Duc, who makes two other valuable statements: first, that
ribbed bridges are notable in Poitou; next, that they seem to belong to
the beginning of the thirteenth century, or perhaps even to the end of
the twelfth.
Now it was in 1214 that King John invaded Poitou without success;
fifteen years later Henry III misconducted an expedition to the same
province; and again in 1242 he landed in Poitou to be thrashed at
Taillebourg. His aim, like that of John, was to win back the Empire
of Henry II. May we then suppose that ribbed bridges came to us from
Poitou? Certainly the mind of England during the first half of the
thirteenth century was drawn towards the seaward provinces of France.
Still, it was the Cistercians of the twelfth century who introduced
ribbed vaulting into English churches,[29] and why not into bridges
as a development therefrom? At a time when bridges were united to the
Church in many ways, new methods in sacred architecture would be passed
on to bridge-building. Not only were bridges protected by the Church
(p. 40), many were built by the lay clergy and by the monastic orders;
and when a bridge had neither a chapel nor a little place for prayer,
it was sanctified by a shrine, or--and this was usual--by a cross or
crucifix raised up from the parapet above the middle arch. It marked
the centre of the bridge, and I dare say peasants believed that it
prevented evil spirits from passing above running water. Altogether,
it is very probable that the first ribbed bridges were built in the
twelfth century, though I have no quite conclusive evidence to offer
from extant examples.
[Illustration: LE PONT DE VERNAY, AIRVAULT, DEUX-SÈVRES. A FAMOUS
BRIDGE WITH RIBBED ARCHES, FRENCH ROMANESQUE PERIOD, XII CENTURY]
The six pointed arches in New Bridge on Thames, near Kingston, are
very well ribbed, but they are Early English, not Norman; they belong
to the early part of the thirteenth century. At Fountains Abbey,
Yorkshire, are two small bridges, one Norman, the other Early English;
both were built by Cistercian monks, yet neither has ribbed arches,
so that I supply you with a fact that runs counter to my hypothesis.
At Durham there are two bridges reputed to be of Norman origin, and
one of them has two ribbed arches with a span of ninety feet. It is
the Framwellgate Bridge at the north end of the city. According to the
eleventh edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” Framwellgate Bridge
was “built in the thirteenth century and rebuilt in the fifteenth,”
but no authorities are given, and counter evidence may be accepted as
more probable. For example, William Hutchinson[30] says without
hesitation, giving references, that Framwellgate Bridge was built by
Bishop Flambard who died in 1128, after holding the See of Durham for
29 years 3 months and 7 days. Flambard “fortified the castle with a
moat, and strengthened the banks of the river, over which he built an
arched bridge of stone, at the foot of the castle, now called
Framwellgate Bridge.” In the fifteenth century the bridge was restored
by the famous Bishop Fox, who began his reign at Durham in 1494, and
died in 1502. There is no evidence to show that the restoration was a
rebuilding, and the character of the arches does not belong to the
time of Bishop Fox. Even Parker, in his “Glossary of Architecture,”
1850, is not surprised that the Framwellgate Bridge should be given to
the Norman period, for he mentions this attribution and describes the
ribbed arches as perfect. The parapet is scorned as “modern.” For many
years--I know not how long--a large gateway-tower stood at one end of
this bridge, but in 1760 it was taken down.
One of the most famous Norman bridges in Old England was the one
that crossed the Lea at Stratford-at-Bow. It was founded and endowed
by Queen Mathilda, wife of Henry I. In 1831, eight years before its
demolition, a print was issued of Bow Bridge, and ribs can be seen
under two of the three arches. The central arch is represented in a
direct front view, so the vaulting cannot be studied; but Lewis, who in
1831 published his “Topographical Dictionary of England,” found ribs
in the three arches. So a very important question arises here: Was Bow
Bridge ever rebuilt? M. J. J. Jusserand shall answer this question; he
has read all the evidence, he makes no reference to ribbed arches, he
is unbiassed, and his pictures are lively:--
“Whether Queen Mathilda (twelfth century) got wetted or not,
as is supposed, on passing the ford of the river at
Stratford-atte-Bow--that same village where afterwards the
French was spoken which amused Chaucer--it is certain that
she thought she did a meritorious work in constructing two
bridges there. Several times repaired, Bow Bridge was still
standing in 1839. The Queen endowed her foundation, granting
land and a water-mill to the Abbess of Barking with a
perpetual charge thereon for the maintenance of the bridge
and the neighbouring roadway. When the Queen died, an abbey
for men was founded at the same Stratford close to the
bridges, and the Abbess hastened to transfer to the new
monastery the property in the mill and the charge of the
reparations. The Abbot did them at first, then he wearied of
it, and ended by delegating the looking after them to one
Godfrey Pratt. He had built this man a house on the causeway
beside the bridge, and made him a yearly grant. For a long
time Pratt carried out the contract, ‘getting assistance,’
says an inquiry of Edward I (1272-1307), ‘from some
passers-by, but without often having recourse to their aid.’
Also he received the charity of travellers, and his affairs
prospered. They prospered so well that the Abbot thought he
might withdraw the pension; Pratt indemnified himself in the
best way he could. He set up iron bars across the bridge and
made all pay who passed over,[31] except the rich, for he
made prudent exception ‘for the nobility; he feared them and
let them pass without molesting them.’ The dispute
terminated only in the time of Edward II, when the Abbot
recognised his fault, took back the charge of the bridge,
and put down the iron bars, the toll, and Godfrey Pratt
himself.
“This bridge, over which no doubt Chaucer himself passed,
was of stone, the arches were narrow and the piers thick;
strong angular buttresses supported them and broke the force
of the current; these formed at the upper part a triangle or
siding which served as a refuge for foot-passengers, for the
roadway was so narrow that a carriage sufficed to fill the
way. When it was pulled down in 1839, it was found that the
method of construction had been very simple. To ground the
piers in the bed of the river the masons had simply thrown
down stones and mortar till the level of the water had been
reached. It was remarked also that the ill-will of Pratt or
the Abbot or of their successors must have rendered the
bridge almost as dangerous at certain moments as the
primitive ford had been. The wheels of vehicles had hollowed
such deep ruts in the stone and the horses’ shoes had so
worn the pavement that an arch had been at one time pierced
through.”[32]
This perforated arch proves pretty conclusively that Bow Bridge was
never rebuilt; but I look upon doubt as an excellent thing in one’s
attitude to matters of this kind, partly because fresh evidence may be
discovered, and partly because facts are woefully elusive even when
they are tackled by judges, and barristers, and juries.
There is one more controversy to be considered: it centres around the
famous bridges on Dartmoor, and I will try to put all the main points
both clearly and fairly. In this dispute architects contend against
antiquaries, and their arguments hold the field. Let me sum them up:--
The “clapper” bridges over Dartmoor rivers are not difficult to study;
their construction resembles that of cromlechs and Stonehenges. Their
piers were evolved from menhirs, and their table slabs from the mass of
rock forming the horizontal member of a cromlech. Nor is it difficult
to suggest the evolution through which the clapper bridges have passed,
for on Dartmoor itself the evolution is plainly suggested by the rude
bridge at Okery and by the single slab at Walla Brook. Any primitive
farmer of the Bronze Age had sense enough not merely to put a ledge
of granite across the Walla Brook, but to span wider rivers by using
menhirs to support large blocks of granite. Timber would not be used,
since trees were very scarce on Dartmoor, while granite was so abundant
that it must have been very troublesome to farmers.
Now the pastoral life of the Bronze Age was very active in the Dartmoor
settlements; all antiquaries make much ado over this fact, yet they
fail to see that the circulation of this farm life, the movement
here and there of flocks and herds, required bridges, for the rivers
then were not less wayward than they are now. Without bridges the
farms would have stagnated. And another thing also needed the help
of bridges: many domestic fires burnt a great deal of peat and wood,
and wood had to be imported from neighbouring districts, probably in
exchange for live stock. So, to visualise the farm life is to make it
dependent on a ceaseless movement to and fro over very freakish rivers,
which after rains and thaws were exceedingly turbulent and perilous.
Deep gorges have been worn in the rocks through which the rivers flow;
this alone is enough to prove that such wild rivers could not be
forded by the tiny sheep and the small cattle of the Bronze Age. Even
in mediæval times, as Thorold Rogers has proved, sheep were about as
big as Mary’s little lamb; they were bred because their wool was the
wealth--the Golden Fleece--that made England prosperous; and yet their
cultivation failed to add to their national value by increasing their
size. Sheep of the Bronze Age were probably smaller still; and how were
they to cross the Dartmoor rivers unless bridges were built? Could
sheep in those days swim like ducks, or did they float as naturally as
logs? And since bridges must have been made here and there in order to
keep the farming life from ruin, are we to suppose that the abundant
granite blocks would not be used for piers and table stones? Are we to
forget the instinctive delight in rude stonework shown everywhere by
the dusky, short-statured race which for convenience we call Iberian?
The research of antiquaries may be good or bad. What has it done for
the life of these clapper bridges? Has it proved that the present
ones are probably younger than the Middle Ages, but that they had
many predecessors going back to pre-Roman times? On the other hand,
have antiquaries proved that in the Middle Ages a primitive phase of
building was revived in Dartmoor, partly because it was good enough
for the traffic, partly because it was inexpensive? The absence of
lime on Dartmoor would influence the mediæval settlers and govern
their building work. But in this discussion it matters not whether the
present bridges be old or young; in either case they represent primeval
methods. Between the Bronze Period and the Middle Ages all the earliest
slab bridges may have disappeared; if so, then settlers on Dartmoor
brought with them knowledge enough of cromlechs to recall the Iberian
stonecraft, just as in modern times architects have revived phases of
Gothic and phases of Classic. Every possibility is entertaining, but
why is it that antiquaries in their remarks on the clapper bridges try
to be elusive as well as dogmatic? For example, Mr. William Crossing
is of opinion that the larger clapper bridges have had their age
overestimated probably because their rough and massive appearance makes
them very striking. Why “probably”? He adds that they are mostly in the
line of pack-horse tracks, and were probably built by farm settlers.
“Probably” again! Yet he gives no evidence. Even Mr. Baring-Gould
is equally dogmatic in devious assertions that have no value to any
architect. Like Mr. Crossing, he attributes the “clappers” to the
period of pack-horses, and sees nothing in them to indicate a great
antiquity. What next? Is primitive stonework insufficiently antique
whatever its age may be? And who is to estimate the age of rude granite
blocks?
I have summed up with fairness the views of architects, and they ought
to hold the field in the judgment of all pontists. The antiquarian talk
about pack-horse tracks has no cogency, for the prehistoric tracks
over Dartmoor are the first pathways along which the controversy must
ramble. A pontist, then, when visiting Dartmoor, has to do four things.
1. To visualise the farm life of the Bronze Age;
2. To reconnect it with the rivers and with the necessary
trade in wood for household fires and for tool
handles;
3. Then he will realise that bridges were essential, and
that they would be made with the granite blocks
which Nature had provided.
4. Then, too, he will see that the larger clapper bridges
are merely flat cromlechs built over water, and
that it matters not when the present ones were put
up, since their main interest is their descent from
those rude monuments of stone in which the Iberian
people commemorated their cult of ancestors, their
reverence for the sacred dead.
Near Postbridge, over the East Dart, there is a very bold clapper with
three heavy table slabs, each of which is about 15 ft. long and 6
ft. wide. Two piers rise out of the water; each is a pile of granite
menhirs that lie flat in the river with their ends looking up-stream
and downstream. The abutments also are layers of granite, and in one
abutment the stones are long enough to support on land a very large
cromlech. Samuel Smiles believed that this bridge had “withstood the
fury of the Dart for full twenty centuries,” but there was no need
to challenge antiquaries by making a rash statement. For the rest,
we must bracket these Dartmoor structures with two other kinds of
slab-bridges--those in the valley of Wycollar (p. 60), and those in
Spain, at Fuentes de Oñoro. My friend Mr. Edgar Wigram writes to me as
follows about the Spanish variety:--
[Illustration: THE OLD BRIDGE OVER THE AUDE AT CARCASSONNE IN FRANCE]
“I include this very rough sketch because it does give some
idea of one of the ‘Clapper’ slab-bridges at Fuentes de
Oñoro. The bigger stone would be about 8 ft. long. As to the
more important slab-bridge over the Dos Casas rivulet, it
stands in a glen where large slabs lie handy. I can speak of
it from recollection only, but think it has four spans,
about 3 ft. 6 ins. high, or perhaps 4 ft.; the lintel-stones
perhaps 7 ft. or 8 ft. long, centre to centre of piers, and
the piers of single stones planted in the river bed, with
the longer axes up- and down-stream. A causeway led up to
the bridge at each end. Even at the time the solidity of the
structure aroused in me a suspicion that it _might_ be very
old. On the other hand, it may be a recent work of
convenience, not of necessity, for the stream in summer is
often dry, and in winter it would not be unfordable (except
for children) till it had submerged the bridge.”
Still, a primitive piece of work, whether done yesterday or 500,000
years ago, comes from a dark mind and a hand without skill; and the
younger it is the more tragic is the meaning of it in sociology.
Europeans of the twentieth century A.D. ought to be as far removed
from rough slab-bridges as they are from ancestor-worship. Education
and personal pride should make them ashamed to use anything that does
not represent in its own way the very best that to-day’s genius can
achieve. For a survival of primitive conventions in a civilized country
is a proof that in certain districts the people have feeble minds
incapable of prolonged attention, and therefore glad to find in mimicry
a refuge from the pain of thinking. To me, then, primitive bridges are
always sinister things; even when they belong to savages they degrade
mankind by showing how mother-wit in men often ceases to be fertile.
Between a low degree of intelligence and a fondness for unchanging
custom there is at least some relation, for “persons who are slightly
imbecile tend to act in everything by routine or habit; and they are
rendered much happier if this is encouraged.”[33]
In the next chapter we shall try to follow from the earliest times the
slow history of those gifts of the spirit whose growth very often has
been arrested; and we shall see once more that weak minds have employed
imitation as their scout and custom and convention as their fortified
places.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Pont d’Arc at Ardèche, over the river Ardèche, has
a total height of sixty-six metres. From water-level
to the crown of the arch is a flight of thirty-four
metres; and in a span of fifty-nine metres this great
natural bridge puts a huge vault over the river. As
to the shape of the arch, it is pointed in a rather
waved outline, and quite possibly it suggested the
pointed arch to French bridge-builders long before the
introduction of “ogivale” arches from the East (p. 88).
[2] “Notes on the Composition of Scientific Papers,” T.
Clifford Allbutt, London, 1904, p. 3.
[3] The earliest canal in history is the one that Necho II
began in 610 B.C., to connect the Arabian Gulf with
the Mediterranean Sea; and Herodotus relates that the
work went on for a year and was then abandoned, after
costing the lives of 120,000 men. Necho was uninspired
by the spirit of industrialism which would have
finished the work, while praising the beauty of peace.
[4] “Archaeology and False Antiquities,” by Robert Munro,
M.A., M.D., LL.D., F.R.S.E., F.S.A.SCOT., page 12.
[5] Some authors give various measurements. Legrand says
that the biggest arch had a span of thirty-four
metres, and that its greatest height, when intact, was
thirty-two metres. I cannot do better than refer you
to Choisy’s “Art de bâtir chez les Romains,” Paris,
1874. Several ancient writers--Claudian, Procopius,
and Martial--guide Sir William Smith in his remarks on
Narni Bridge, but he makes a mistake when he speaks of
“three” arches.
[6] See “Northern Spain,” by Edgar Wigram, an excellent
book. The gable-shaped bridges are mostly of mediæval
date. Some fine examples: at Martorell (partly Roman),
at Puente la Reina, and across the Gallego river
between Jaca and Huesca. To-day these are seldom used
because of their steep pitch and of their narrowness.
The great one at Orense, over the Miño, is still in
daily use.
[7] Gable bridges are uncommon in Great Britain, but a
fine example crosses the river Taff not far from
Cardiff. It is called the Pont-y-Prydd. Between its
abutments the great arch measures 140 feet, and
the footway is so very steep that laths of wood
used to be fastened across it to keep horses from
falling. Before industrialism murdered a beautiful
countryside the Pont-y-Prydd was a rainbow of stone
that shone all the year round. We owe this bridge to
a self-educated country mason, William Edwards by
name, who in 1750 brought his work to completion,
after suffering defeat in two previous efforts. My
photograph of the Pont-y-Prydd is disgraced by a very
hideous commercial bridge that progress has put quite
close to the Welsh masterpiece, but, happily, there
are many old engravings and pictures that do full
justice to William Edwards. Richard Wilson painted the
Pont-y-Prydd--an excellent recommendation to a fine
piece of handicraft.
[8] Mr. Wigram, in his finely illustrated book on Northern
Spain, reminds us that the Puente Mayor at Orense
played a various part in the Peninsula War. It was
the pivot of the French operations when Soult led
his troops from Coruña to renew the subjugation of
Portugal. At first all went well, but “within two
months his army was reeling back from Oporto, without
hospital, baggage, or artillery, in a worse plight
even than Moore’s. He had wrestled his first fall with
the great antagonist who was destined to beat him from
the Douro to Toulouse.”
[9] See Appendix I.
[10] See Appendix II for a description of this Roman bridge.
[11] This was written several months before the outbreak of
the Great War, which England had invited by allowing
her peace-fanatics to bill and coo in her foreign
politics. Instead of reading the arrogant books on
blood-lust that nourished the well-advertised aims
of Germany, England played the fool with epicene
triflers of all sorts and conditions, and turned
her back on Lord Roberts, her truthful statesman.
She babbled about peace until she received from the
Prussian junkerdom proposals so abominable that they
brought her to the fighting point of honour; and
then she cried out for a million new soldiers. Yet
British statesmen, even then, paid many compliments
to their bad old habit of ingenuous pacifism. No
political dove wanted the world to believe that there
had been anything of the eagle in his attitude to
German war-culture. As if this truism could be a
consolation to heroic little Belgium, the Jeanne d’Arc
of nations, whose safety England had guaranteed, and
whose experiences in the hell of Teutonic savagery
had left her scorched, mutilated, yet unconquered.
Can anyone explain why the word “peace” has been
hypnotic to Anglo-Celtic minds? Every phase of human
enterprise must be a phase of war, because it claims
a battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed.
Poverty alone is such a terrible phase of permanent
war that pacifists ought to devote all their energy
to its gradual betterment. Even the accidents of
civilization--street and railway accidents, colliery
explosions, sea tragedies, and so forth--equal in a
century the casualties on stricken fields. If only
our sentimentalists would try to think! Then they
would learn that the occasional strife between armies
never destroys in a century as many lives as the
multiform continuous strife called peace. And we may
be certain that all the human war of the future will
not belong to “peace” alone. The birth of many a new
era will be aided by the fierce midwifery of military
and naval warfare. To-day is the 26th of September,
1914, and England in two months has nearly outgrown
the routine claptrap of her effete idealism. To-day
she is eager to bear any amount of self-sacrifice;
two months ago her peace-mania was a crime against
the Empire and against her treaty obligations to
Belgium. She had no faith in National Service till
Germany had passed from arrogant warnings to barbaric
aggressions. Agadir was not enough to put common sense
into her dreamful solicitude about international
“peace.” “Peace” in her home affairs she never tried
to get; she wanted peace to conquer the nations, not
to cure industrial conflicts and the Irish Question.
What a comic tragedy! And let us remember that our
peace-fanatics, though silent to-day, are not dead.
Their influence will become active again after the
overthrow of Germany. New mischief will flow from
their sentimentalism. To lose the flower of British
youth, while keeping our peace-fanatics: here indeed
is a sinister fact.
[12] See “English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages.” J. J.
Jusserand. The chapter on roads and bridges.
[13] There has been much controversy over the position of
the Pons Sublicius. (See p. 140.)
[14] See the most valuable book on Domestic Medicine by
Lister’s little-known forerunner, Dr. William Buchan,
of Edinburgh. The eighteenth edition was published in
1803, and its pictures of social life are most helpful
to a pontist.
[15] I have two photographs of it, both taken by my friend
Mr. C. S. Sargisson, a Lancashire pontist. At one
end the lintel rests on a rocky bank and is broken
across by long use; at the other end it rests on a
slab projecting from the bank, just below a stile of
unmortared flags set in a picturesque wall of loose
stones. The footway is much worn; and in frosty
weather even a temperance reformer might slide from it
with his reputation.
[16] I am quoting this approximate date from Sir Ray
Lankester.
[17] “The Mynach cataract consists of four leaps, making a
total descent of 210 feet. The bridge has been thrown
across a chasm 114 feet above the first fall and 324
feet above the bottom of the cataract.”
[18] What does this phrasing mean? I wonder. Is the living
child to be reconstructed? in order that its body when
buried under the new dam may be strong enough as a
foundation?
[19] To-day, in some parts of China, a living pig is thrown
into a river when a bridge is endangered by a flood.
(See p. 248.)
[20] “The Cradle of Mankind.” By the Rev. W. A. Wigram,
D.D., and Edgar T. A. Wigram. London, 1914.
[21] Notes by the Rev. W. A. Wigram, D.D.
[22] To-day only a ruin can be studied at Pont Ambroise:
two isolated arches and the lower part of an
abutment; but recent French writers draw attention
to the technical structure of the arches. In the
under surface of each vault four arcs or bands are
placed side by side. See Vol. III, Part II, p. 294,
“Géographie générale du Département de l’Hérault.”
Published by La Société Languedocienne, Montpellier,
1905.
[23] See a very helpful book, “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” by E.
Degrand, Inspecteur Général des Ponts et Chaussées,
and Jean Résal, Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées--Two
vols., illustrated; Béranger, Paris; price 40 francs.
[24] See note on p. 6.
[25] See the brilliant sketch by Frank Brangwyn, and the
story of the bridge on p. 254.
[26] See the picture on p. 293.
[27] Much more: we shall see (pp. 156, 160) that a pointed
vault was built in ancient Egypt. The Babylonians also
built pointed arches and vaults.
[28] Twizel Bridge, over the Till, has a very beautiful
arch which is slightly pointed; it has a span of 90
ft. 7 ins., and a distance of 46 ft. separates the
parapet from water-level. Tradit ion says that a lady
of the Selby family built this bridge, one of the most
famous in England.
[29] Read the delightful monograph on Kirkstall Abbey by
Sir W. H. St. John Hope and Mr. Bilson of Hull.
[30] “The History and Antiquities of Durham.” Newcastle,
MDCCLXXXV.
[31] It is said that he charged eightpence for the passage
of a dead Jew! A large sum in those days. A Jewish
cemetery was just beyond the bridge.--W.S.S.
[32] “English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages,” pp. 45
and 47. See also “Archæologia,” Vols. XXVII, p. 77;
XXIX, p. 380. Also the histories of Essex.
[33] See Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” Part I, chapter III.
[Illustration: AT ZUTPHEN IN HOLLAND]
CHAPTER THE SECOND
MAN AS THE MIMIC OF NATURE
I
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
We have taken a glance at the bridges made by Nature (pp. 3-4), and now
we have to consider their influence on the genesis and development of
handicraft. This difficult study has been neglected by men of science;
not even Darwin said a word about natural bridges, though they were
models to be copied by the sedulous ape in primitive men; and so we
must try to be as thorough as possible, within the limits set by a
brief chapter.
Where and how is a beginning to be made? The useful and necessary
thing is to visualise the fact that varied hints on bridge-building
accompanied the descent of man, so the influence of their utility
was active through all the linked growth in that organic chain by
which the earliest men and their nearest allies were united. Sooner
or later the mere use of natural bridges would generate in some minds
a desire to copy them; and although we are quite ignorant as to when
this desire came for the first time out of the darkness, yet we may
suppose, without any great extravagance, that it belonged to the same
period of handicraft as the earliest manufactured tools and weapons,
which were a development from stone clubs and spears fashioned into
shape by earthquakes and volcanoes, the first armourers of the Stone
Age. As soon as a tribe, guided by a savage of genius, began to copy
three or four object-lessons in Nature’s perennial school for mimics,
the imitation of several others would be suggested by the same trend of
thought, sooner or later. It is reasonable to believe that hand-made
weapons preceded hand-made bridges, as hunting and fighting were the
strongest motive-powers behind human needs and actions. To slay was
the herald of to build, so the first bridges of handicraft ought to
be placed in a likely inference among the later doings of Palæolithic
hunters and warriors.
A horrible slowness marked each advance from a bad copy of a natural
bridge to a slightly better one. In fact, only a few brilliant creative
minds--not more than two or three thousand--separate our own social
order from the strife of Palæolithic savages. Into the coarse dough
of humanity an infrequent genius has put some enchanted yeast. And we
must needs believe that the dead routine of imitation, to which human
nature has ever been enslaved, held primeval man even more relentlessly
than it holds ourselves. One misfortune more than any other delayed
a creeping progress: it was the fact that mankind had no cause to
fear the most intelligent creatures among the lesser organisms. If
snakes and beasts of prey had been as clever as were bees and ants and
beavers, men could have saved themselves from extermination by one
means only--by a rapid advance from frequent good ideas into great
achievements. Day after day the large human brain would have been
called upon to produce large protective thoughts, and, had it failed
to produce them day after day, the human race would have been food for
enterprising rivals. We have no guess why Providence withheld from
mankind this high discipline, this fateful choice between death and
a swift intelligence; but we do know that the most dangerous of the
lesser organisms have been the least quick-witted, and that men in
their intercourse with natural things have shown a lethargic mimicry.
Their cave-dwellings were stolen from cave-lions and cave-bears; their
pit-dwellings were copied from the holes and tunnels burrowed by many
animals; and in their lake-dwellings they collected hints from five
sources: natural bridges, the platforms built by anthropomorphous
apes,[34] the habits of waterfowl, the beavers dam and “lodge,” and
the nests of birds. In the round hut, which was made with branches
and wattle-and-daub, stick nests were united to the plasterwork of
rock-martins. Yes, a good workman in the construction of mud walls
does no more than rock-martins have done in all the ages of their
nest-building. When these birds make their nests they use wet loam
stiffened with bits of straw, and each layer is allowed to harden
before another is put on in a thickness of about half an inch for a
day’s work.[35]
Even more remarkable is the fact that men may have borrowed from
several birds the idea which enabled them to pass from round huts
into oblong cabins. In Australia, for instance, there are three
birds--genera of the same family--that build arched bowers with long
sides; and Darwin tells us to regard them as “co-descendants of
some ancient species which first acquired the strange instinct of
constructing bowers for performing their love-antics.” One species of
Australian bower-birds, the fawn-breasted variety, erects a platform
of sticks as a foundation for its gabled hall of courtship, that
measures nearly four feet in length and eighteen inches in height.
This structure is charmingly decorated, and if we could magnify it
to the size of Westminster Hall we should be amazed by its beautiful
architecture. Unmagnified, it is a model to all primitive men, for it
shows far more invention than a wigwam or than a charcoal-burner’s hut.
As soon as a student begins to understand what mankind has copied in
Nature’s wonderful school for mimics, he cannot fail to take delight
in natural bridges and their influence on handicraft. At first he is
humbled painfully by the small amount of creative wit that a million
years or so have gleaned from the big human brain; but soon the novelty
of feeling humble is more attractive to him than the vile habit of
flattering human nature.[36]
II
AMONG THE HERALDS OF MAN
It was during the Upper Miocene age that two or three big apes migrated
into Europe, probably from Africa, and passed from explorers into
colonists. One of them was the Dryopithecus, a creature almost as
tall as a man, and closely allied to Hylobates. He illustrated that
organic art of caricature in which young Dame Nature excelled, many of
her experimental efforts having Gargantuan humour in their shapes and
proportions.
When food was scarce the Dryopithecus became a nomad, a sort of
four-handed Odysseus who was very well able to fight his own battles,
whether he wielded a heavy stick, or hugged his foe, or from the
shelter of a tree dropped missiles that cracked heads and made
backbones exceedingly painful. Hugging seems to have been his _forte_,
after clawing and fierce blows had prepared the way for a close
embrace; and by his expert ferocity in defence and in attack he earned
for himself the right to be a forerunner of several entertaining
creatures, notably the gorilla and the chimpanzee and primitive man. He
was inquisitive enough to use every natural bridge put in his path by
good fortune.
At first I see him on four sorts of natural bridge, and no fault can
be found with his activity. He crawls along fallen trees over some
torrents and chasms; across a flooded river here and there he leaps in
a shambling, lopsided fashion, when stepping-stones and boulders rise
above water-level; he roams into hilly districts where many a ledge of
rock spans a dangerous gap; but he enjoys himself most of all when a
suspension bridge of branches enables him to amble from tree to tree
across a deep-lying river pent up between high cliffs.
In these four bridges, each of them generic, Nature has arrived at
utility in her usual manner, by alternating growth and violence. The
fallen tree, for instance, from which all timber bridges have been
evolved by handicraft in a sequence of gradual improvements, belongs
to the utility of Nature’s violent moods; and this applies also to
the bridge of stepping-stones. Earthquakes and floods distributed
boulders over the beds of rivers, and from these boulders handicraft
has developed piers and abutments. On the other hand, a bridge of long
boughs--and I have used many a one myself--is a symbol not merely of
growth but of abundance, and also of endurance. But it is not to be
looked upon as the only suspension bridge along which our arboreal
ancestry capered, and from which primitive mankind took, and take,
hints in bridge-building. Let us remember also the pendent bridge
of lianes, and of other tough creeping plants, which in many warm
countries grew, and grow, from tree to tree, forming strong cables. On
such a high-swung bridge I can see the Dryopithecus, suspended by his
hands, and learning tricks as a gymnast, while his mate squats between
the fork of a branch and collects fleas from her baby.
When photographs of natural bridges lie around me on a table, there
is another vision that comes before my mind in a succession of vivid
pictures. I behold a shaggy little animal, partly an ape, partly a man,
who stands upright on a fallen tree; below his feet a river in flood
foams among rocks; and over there, beyond the peaked hills, a blood-red
sunset makes a wondrous tragedy of colour. Somehow the little animal
is awed by the flaming sky, and stares at it fascinated, his protruded
mouth wide open, and his teeth gleaming. His arms are thin, sinewy,
capable, hairy, and very long; they hang at full length, and their
prehensile fingers grasp two sticks, one long and pointed, another
short and knobbed. His breastbone looks weak as his shoulders droop
forward, and horizontal lines of wrinkled skin run from each armpit
across the narrow chest. His legs are short and somewhat arched; and
their feet grip wood as a habit. The eyes, overhung by a ledge of
bone, shimmer with a peculiar suspicion, an instinctive cunning, very
vigilant and fierce, that protects even tired sleep with the alertness
of a sentinel. The body is daubed with yellow ochre and iron ore, as if
to rival the coloured life seen everywhere in Nature; but through this
decoration much uneven hair is noticeable, and a coarse beard surrounds
the face with a ruff rather similar to that which now gives pride to
the _Cebus capucinus_. The head is becoming human, a real Pandora box,
whence many banes and a few blessings will escape continually, and
spread far and wide over the earth. At present this creature is a wild
beast in the terrible nursery stage between apehood and savage manhood.
Already he has lost the athletic ease and grace of his tree-top
cousins. Not only is he out of joint with them, but his own lot is very
perilous, a never-ending war against hardships and dangers. Beasts of
prey know how weak he is; most animals outrun him; birds in their swift
flight escape from his weapons, and he feels rage and jealousy when
monkeys at play leap long distances from bough to bough. Out of his
nature comes a pitiless hatred for all living creatures. Do you not see
this earthling, this Adam of Evolution, part ape and part man, standing
alone on a windfall bridge, with a river in flood below his feet, and
the sun a radiant crescent, blood-red, dipping below that far horizon
of peaked hills?
And yet this biped has been moved by the sunset, and also by an idea
of his own, whose history can be read in deep lines of ploughed earth
that run from the bridge to a wood over there, a hundred yards away. At
this distance from the river a tall tree was blown down, and a tribe of
ape-like men, guided by their leader, dragged it to the bank-side and
put it across the waterway, taking long days over the wonderful task.
Nature at last has discovered a mind that can think in imitation. Her
tree-bridge has a rival.
At this moment the picture changes. A female creature appears,
accompanied by several children. She is uglier than the male, because
she suffers much more; her family grows too fast, and for a long time
its members are unfit to defend themselves. Never for an hour can she
put aside her motherhood. Other animals are occasional parents, because
their young are soon able to do their own business; while she, our Eve
of Evolution, for ever anxious about her helpless little ones, is an
incessant mother through the few brief years of her fertility. Perils
encompass her and them, and in a short time she is worn into old age.
But she loses her youth creatively; there is not a privation nor a
pain that her constant motherhood fails to make into a spiritualising
of the heart, into a _Vita Nuova_, into the starting-point for a fresh
development. So she is humanised by suffering and love-humanised in
spirit, that is to say--long ages before her body has matured into
womanhood. It is she who endows children with quickened minds and with
social inclinations; and it is she who encounters with a yielding
but tenacious courage the wild beast that male passions breed and
perpetuate. Also--and this is very important--she is by temperament
a practical worker, whereas the male is not; he thinks all the time
of adventure, and his moods are incalculable. Even his paternity is
coarse-handed, and subject to furious greeds and lusts. His brain is
active enough to be awed by the strife of Nature and weak enough to
be crippled by a little reason. His character threatens to check his
evolution. Where the climate is hot, and food grows abundantly, he
makes no progress; bad times alone compel him to work, and to pass very
slowly, with a dogged reluctance, from handicraft to handicraft. His
higher education begins when he chips a stone into a pointed weapon
and feels the rhythmical enjoyment that accompanies invention and
manipulation. In fact, handicraft is the earliest public school, the
first university; it helps motherhood to transform the brute male into
a being somewhat better,[37] a primeval savage. Yet naturalists have
confirmed themselves in three bad habits: they say too little about
handicraft, they admire man far too much, and they patronise woman.
When they do not bury Woman in the term Man, they glance at her with
a condescending half-pity, as bibliophiles glance at second or third
editions; and so it is worth while to do some justice to our primitive
foremother, the Eve of Evolution.
With her incalculable partner, the irrational male, she and her
family wander from district to district. At times they settle
under a rock-shelter or in a cave, and make footpaths from it to
watering-places and hunting-grounds. Here and there a river is crossed
by stepping-stones, and more than one ravine is spanned by branches and
by a fallen tree. What is their attitude to these things? The windfall
tree-bridge, like every other gift from Nature, is a bane to them as
well as a boon, for it is a road open to dangerous animals; as such
it is a thing to be guarded, and many a fight in its defence occurs,
creating traditions of bravery which are long remembered.
Further, as time goes on, and the progenitors of man become more human,
the pressure of competitive life draws ever more and more attention to
the incompleteness of natural bridges. For example, stepping-stones may
be useless when they are needed most of all, in wet seasons and after
storms; and the tree-bridge is so narrow that warriors cross it only
one by one, so their slow attack gives a terrible advantage to a brave
defence. These hindrances, so obvious and so unpleasant, make appeal
to the inventive faculty that a few men possess. Not much is required.
From four or five seedling ideas a great many improvements will grow;
and now is the moment for us to choose a vague tentative date for the
beginning of this gradual development.
Most people are bored by prehistoric archæology, because its earlier
periods are as undated as is the oblivion of coma. So a date in obscure
history, however tentative it may be, is very helpful; the mind rests
on it, somehow, anyhow, and feels that the lost legions of the dead
years left some oases in the Saharas of ancient time. And this point is
not the only one that concerns the general reader who _does_ generally
read. In recent years the antiquity of handicraft has been extended
very much by a “find” of eagle-beaked flint implements, with other
tools, below the Pliocene deposits on the East Anglian Coast. The
eagle-beaked flints are undoubtedly of human manufacture, and they
carry back the ancient stone period of man to the Tertiary times. Sir
Ray Lankester writes on this important subject, and his knowledge helps
us a great deal, though we have to recover it from entangled sentences.
For example[38]:--
“Evidence has been for twenty years or more in our
possession (in the form of stone implements) of the
existence of man in Europe in the warm period which preceded
the Pleistocene, with its glacial clays and drifts and its
gravels deposited on the sides of existing river valleys,
sometimes 800 feet above the level of the bed to which the
stream has now worn down its excavation, many miles wide.
The discovery within the last four years of beautifully
worked flint implements of the shape of an eagle’s beak
(called ‘rostro-carinate’) and of other serviceable forms
below the marine Pliocene shelly sands--known as the ‘Red
Crag’ in Suffolk--separates the migrations and mixtures of
human tribes and groups, of which we have any knowledge, by
a huge chasm of geologic time from the date of the earliest
European population. The best geologists have come to the
conclusion that half a million years (and it may well be
twice as many) separate us from the days before the Crag Sea
laid down its shelly deposits on the East Anglian Coast. Yet
there were skilful men--not mere ape-like creatures using
sticks and roughly-broken stones, but men capable of making
and admiring symmetrical, well-finished flint tools, and of
using them to clean skins and to plane wood--living a human,
creative, dominating life here in Western Europe in those
immensely remote days. Probably enough, as great a period as
separates those skilful men from us separated them from the
earliest unskilful ‘commencing’ men of the tropical zone.”
[Illustration: GOTHIC BRIDGE AT VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOT, FRANCE]
Yes, probably enough, but yet we must not suppose that handicraft in
Western Europe has ever had a standard of uniform merit. As our own
work is very often inferior both to that of the Romans and to that of
the Middle Ages, so the eagle-beaked tools may denote nothing more
than a local industry which a man of genius had originated. No other
implements have been dug up from Pliocene deposits in other European
localities, hence students of art and architecture cannot accept the
generalisation advocated by Sir Ray Lankester. As well suppose that
the whole of Western Europe produced in the same age many painters
equal to the Van Eycks, or many bridge-builders of a piece with Caius
Julius Lacer, or the good Saint Bénézet. It is enough to believe that
at a date to be known vaguely as 500,000 B.C., a craftsman of genius
lived and laboured in a district of Western Europe, now called the
East Anglian Coast. How far his influence extended, or how long it
lasted, we have no inkling yet; but it may have been the influence,
not of a rare genius, but of a school tradition which migrating tribes
had spread through many parts of Europe. Anyhow, the eagle-beaks are
historic facts and their manipulative skill gives us the right to make
reasonable inferences.
For example, we may infer that if the craftsman who made an
eagle-beaked tool showed intelligence in some other useful ways, he
did no more than common justice to his humanity. Suppose he cut down
a tree with his flint axe, choosing one that grew aslant over a chasm
or across a river; or suppose he piled stepping-stones together in the
middle of a waterway, and then used this pier as a support for two
tree-trunks whose far ends rested on the banksides. Neither of these
ideas has more mother-wit than that which has enabled ants to bore
tunnels under running water, and to make active bridges by clinging to
each other in a suspension chain of their wee brave bodies. Not many
human minds in any period of history have been as diligently rational
as ants; but let us risk the conjecture that the first advance in
bridge-making began among the rostro-carinate workmen probably more
than half a million years ago.
To cut down a tree, in order to get a bridge at a chosen place, was a
good idea in primitive enterprise, but it was not enough; it gave but
little additional help in tribal wars, since it repeated the narrow
footway, the main drawback of windfall tree-bridges. Two or three
trees laid side by side were necessary, and at least two piles of
stepping-stones to carry enough trees over a fairly wide river. Such
were the first improvements that war and social life demanded from
the wit of primitive mankind, and often they were demanded in vain
for many long ages. Even at the present time there are tribesmen who
feel well pleased with themselves when they make single and double
tree-bridges. I am told, for instance, by Mr. T. Beddoes, a traveller
and trader in Equatorial Africa, that often in his wanderings he has
made and used a tree-bridge to cross a narrow creek, following a native
method for the sake of its ready convenience. “The natives,” he writes,
“cut down the tallest trees on a bank of the waterway that they intend
to bridge, then they make a handrail with bush-rope fastened to short
upright sticks which are placed about three feet apart. Bush-rope
is made from creepers or from long cane vines. Sometimes an attempt
is made to flatten the upper surface of the tree; but this work is
uncommon, as African natives are lazy; they detest manual labour.
There are trees that grow to an enormous height; one of them measured
a hundred feet odd, so fairly wide creeks and streams can be bridged.
But canoes are the favourite means of crossing rivers; they carry light
loads well enough, and they need less labour than bridge-building.”
This peep into the aboriginal mind reveals a dire stagnation. But
although no other thing in Nature is less uncommon than human
initiative, yet the men of the eagle-beaked tools may have made
tree-bridges, and also such stone bridges as the lintel-slabs at
Wycollar (p. 60). For this work required nothing more than imitation,
while the eagle-beaks added some invention to a deft handicraft. Many
an earthquake had made a slab-bridge, and other models were formed by
the lava from volcanoes which hardened into a thick crust over many
gaps in the land.
From these bridges--a tree cut down with a flint axe, and a single
boulder or slab laid from bank to bank of a stream--came three lines
of descent in very slow, yet fertile handicraft; and to the history of
each a long book could be given. Let me name them one by one:--
1. The Slab-bridge with stone piers.
2. The Tree-bridge with stone piers.
3. The Tree-bridge with timber piles.
III
THE SLAB-BRIDGE WITH STONE PIERS
In this we follow an evolution from unhewn fragments of rock upheld
by stepping-stones to Cyclopean slabs of hewn granite and marble
supported by well-made stone piers. The halting development of this
bold stonecraft was loved and fostered by that original people which
for convenience we call Iberian, and which at some unknown period
migrated from Asia, “and swept round Europe, whilst a second branch
colonised the Nile basin and Northern Africa, and a third streamed
east and occupied China and Japan. The master idea in the religion of
this people was the cult of ancestors, and the rude stone monuments,
menhirs, cromlechs, and kistvaens they have left everywhere, where they
have been, all refer to commemoration of the sacred dead. The obelisk
in Egypt is the highly refined menhir, and the elaborate, ornamented
tombs of the Nile valley are an expression of the same veneration for
the dead, and belief in the after life connected with the tomb, that
are revealed in the construction of the dolmen and kistvaen.”[39]
What could have been simpler than the building methods of the Iberians?
We see them at Stonehenge, which dates from about the year 1680 B.C.,
according to the astronomical calculations of Sir Norman Lockyer and
the late Mr. F. C. Penrose.[40] Here we have the primitive circle of
large stones, and the rugged trilithon (two rude uprights, or menhirs,
connected by a long table slab or lintel). There is a feeling for
massive construction, but it is barbaric. The clapper bridges over
Dartmoor rivers belong to this elementary craftsmanship. Each is a
cromlech repeated in several spans over water, no matter when it was
built (p. 100). Among the ancient Egyptians there were kindred bridges;
and the Chinese have managed to preserve in a formidable handicraft an
Iberian fondness for the trilithon. Mr. O. M. Jackson tells me that
many slab-bridges in Sichuan have lintels about twenty feet in length;
they are decorated by sculptors with a dragon’s head and tail at the
junction of two lintels and a stone pier. Every dragon’s head looks
upstream, and the tail curls out on the downstream side; so the slabs
appear to rest for security on the back of a guardian dragon.
There is a Chinese bridge of lintel-slabs, concerning which very
different descriptions have been written, but even the most moderate
account makes it more than four and a half times longer than the Pont
Saint-Esprit (p. 293). Gauthey writes about it as follows:--
“At Loyang, in the Province of Fo-Kien, on an arm of the
sea, there is a bridge with three hundred spans; its
construction went on for eighteen years and employed
twenty-five thousand workmen. Technically it belongs to the
same class as the bridges of ancient Babylon, which are said
to have been made with long and flat stones laid from pier
to pier. If Loyang Bridge be 8800 metres in length, as some
writers affirm, then its piers will be 4 metres 87 in
thickness, and its spans in width will measure 24.36 metres.
The footway is 22.74 metres. The long slabs are 5 metres
thick and 3 metres wide. As for the piers, they are 23
metres in height, and bear marble lions carved from blocks 7
metres long.”
Gauthey gives a drawing of this bridge, and his measurements are taken
from the Atlas of Martimmart. They have an air of great exaggeration.
As Gauthey remarks, “It is difficult to believe that the tabular
stones are as large as they are presumed to be: their bulk is more
than threefold greater than that of the obelisk at Rome in the Place
de Saint-Pierre. Besides, M. Pingeron speaks of them as being fourteen
metres long by a metre and a half in thickness and in width, so he
diminishes by a full half the length of Loyang Bridge. Even with this
reduction it is a wonderful achievement, more than four and a half
times longer than the Pont du Saint-Esprit.”[41]
The dimensions given by M. Pingeron may be accurate; they represent a
hugely magnified clapper bridge decorated with sculpture and carried
on tall piers for a distance of 4400 metres, in a series of three
hundred spans. The marble lions, I suppose, ornament the parapets above
the piers, like those on the bridge of Pulisangan (p. 310). Marco Polo
visited the province of Fo-Kien, where Loyang Bridge is said to be,
and stayed at the city of Kue-lin-fu, known to-day as Kien-ning-fu.
Here he was greatly struck by “three very handsome bridges, upwards of
a hundred paces in length, and eight paces in width.”[42] Not a vivid
description, yet enough to prove that notable bridges in Fo-Kien have
had a long history.
IV
TREE-BRIDGES WITH STONE PIERS
The most famous bridge in this kind is the one built by Trajan over the
Danube, just below the rapids of the Iron Gate. Trajan required it for
his wars against Dacia, which in A.D. 106 he brought to a successful
end, the Dacian leader Decebalus being slain and his people subdued.
The bridge had played its part, yet Hadrian, the next Emperor, who
began his reign ten years afterwards, looked upon it as a dangerous
highway, open to incursions from Dacian revolts, and for this reason he
destroyed some piers and the footway. Perhaps Hadrian was jealous of
Trajan’s work, for two fortified gates and a handful of Roman troops
could have defended the bridge against barbarians.
There has been much controversy over this great structure. Its
architect was Apollodorus of Damascus, who designed also the Trajan
column placed in the centre of the Forum Trajanum. A bas-relief on this
column represents the bridge, but in a manner at odds with the written
description given by Dion Cassius, who held important offices under
Commodus, Caracalla, and Alexander Severus, A.D. 180-229. Dion Cassius
wrote a history of Rome, in eighty books, and a small portion of this
work has come down to us entire. His evidence then is worth having,
and it states that the bridge had twenty piers of hewn stone, 150 feet
high and 60 feet wide, with openings between them of 170 feet, spanned
by arches. Doubt has been thrown on the accuracy of this description,
because the bridge on the Trajan column is unsuited to a span of 170
feet; “nevertheless thirteen piers are still visible out of the twenty,
according to Murray’s ‘Handbook.’ The writer has not been able to find
any accurate measurement of the width between these piers, but as the
‘Handbook’ speaks of the length of the bridge as perhaps 3900 feet,
and as the Conte Marsigli, writing from personal observation, in a
letter to Montfaucon, gives the total length as probably 3010 feet,
there can be no doubt that the spans were very considerable and that
the representation of the design in the bas-belief is almost wholly
conventional. The one point as to which it gives clear information, not
supplied elsewhere, is that the superstructure was of wood.”[43]
In other words, this colossal work was a descendant of the earliest
tree-bridges, in so far as the footway was concerned. Whether arched
timbering was carried from pier to pier to uphold the roadway, as
in the bas-relief, is a question of no great moment; the horizontal
bearing beams would need support, no doubt, since they had to span
openings far wider than the longest trees; and it is useless for us
to guess in what way this support was carried to them from the lofty
piers, which were built with enormous blocks of stone. The main point
is that one phase of bridge-building, whose first models were fallen
trees lying astride rivers and chasms, seems to have culminated in
the masterpiece of Apollodorus of Damascus. Much inferior work of the
same kind, very varied and entertaining, has been common everywhere;
some of it belongs to Kurdistan, for example (p. 73); and in the Lledr
Valley there is a good Welsh specimen called the Pont-y-Pant, whose
wooden footway is primitively rustic, and whose piers are fragments of
rock gathered from the river-bed and piled together. I have found at
Thirlmere a quaint thing which is partly a dam and partly a bridge. The
dam, an undulating wall of unmortared stones, has at equal intervals
a few angular openings over which wooden hand-bridges are thrown.
It would be easy in a shallow river to make a fish-pool by heaping
boulders into a dam of this rude sort, and the completed work would
rank no higher than the beavers contests against running water. So I
tell myself that many a tribe in the great period of prehistoric art,
about 50,000 years B.C., ought to have built for itself a bridge as
elementary as the Pont-y-Pant and a perforated dam as uncouth as the
one at Thirlmere.
From this untutored handicraft we look back again at the great art of
Apollodorus, whose vast bridge over the Danube was near the ancient
town of Nicopolis. What a long travail in the gestation and birth
of infrequent ideas! Even half a million years ago a man of the
eagle-beaked tools may have put a boulder under a tree-bridge because
the tree was thin and swayed too much on a windy day; half a million
years ago, and yet we do not feel ashamed of the Pont-y-Pant!
V
TREE-BRIDGES WITH TIMBER PILES
Let me restate the first periods in their history:--
1. A windfall tree lying astride a gap in the land.
2. A windfall tree dragged from a wood and put astride a gap in the
land, perhaps by a tribe of semi-human creatures directed by a superior
mind.
3. A savage of genius, perhaps as early as the Tertiary period, cut
down a tree in order that it might span a dangerous creek or an abyss
in the mountains. Intelligently, with the aid of a flint axe, he
copied the work done by many a gale of wind; and in this act of simple
mimicry he discovered the first principles of secure bridge-making. The
footway was strong, and branches from the tree-trunk gave support to
clutching hands. Any bough that blocked up the footway was topped off.
Even to-day we find in country woods a good many rustic bridges hewn
from tree-trunks, and guarded at the sides by hand rails of dressed
branches. Their footways are no wider than the planed surface of a
well-grown tree.
4. Another savage of genius, thousands of years later, maybe, took a
hint from a troublesome inconvenience which from the first had been
present in tree-bridges. The footway being too narrow, he put two or
three trees side by side, so that two or three warriors might cross it
abreast, instead of weakening their attack by an advance in single file.
But this improvement suggested other changes of much greater value
both to war and to social life. However carefully the trees were laid
side by side, their rounded surfaces left a valley between them; and
gaps were formed by curved trunks and by gnarled excrescences. So
the widened footway had drawbacks of its own. Often, on a rainy day,
naked feet would slip, for the trees were polished by long use; and
many a slip would either break or strain an ankle. Yet the wit of
mankind would bear these troubles with a grumbling patience; thousands
of years may have passed by unprofitably; but sooner or later a man
of genius would perceive that every defect in a bridge suggested an
improvement. The valley between the tree-trunks could be filled in with
soil and pebbles and turf; a round foothold polished by long use and
slippery after rain, could be flattened and roughened; and where the
trees diverged from each other, making traps for the unwary, invention
could be busy for a long time. Why put the trees close together? If
they were separated by half a stride, then covered transversely with
brushwood and turf, a much better bridge would be made without much
effort. Again, suppose the long beams were thin saplings that shook too
much underfoot, particularly when a tribe of shouting warriors ran
across them in a hot attack. To steady such a bridge with props would
be a great convenience, and timber props would serve as conveniently
as boulders and piled stones. A criss-cross of logs made an excellent
pier,[44] for example, and forked boughs, which entered into several
phases of primitive handicraft, made good piles.[45] We know not when
these quite simple improvements gave some dignity to manual work, but
their inception needed only a little mother-wit. Some Quarternary men
ripened a great deal more in their arts, as painters and sculptors and
engravers.
In this monograph several descendants from the aboriginal tree-bridge
are studied briefly, and I refer you to the Index. Some varied English
specimens are given in Francis Stone’s “Norfolk Bridges”; and from Don
Antonio de Ulloa (1716-1795) we can learn how wooden bridges have long
been made in the mountainous parts of South America. They “consist
of only four long beams laid close together over a precipice,” and
they “form a path about a yard and a half in breadth, being just wide
enough for a man to pass over on horseback.” Here the beams have a
flat surface, and lie together like boards on a floor. It is primitive
handicraft of a low sort, for the beams would carry a much wider
footway.
VI
SOME TYPICAL TIMBER BRIDGES
As there is no room here for a pedigree of timber bridges, let us
choose a few examples which are particularly famous in history. It will
be enough if we take three: (1) a prehistoric lake-village, (2) the
Pons Sublicius of the Romans, and (3) the wonderful work done in the
eighteenth century by two Swiss carpenters, the brothers Grubenmann.
Lake and marsh villages were the highest form of prehistoric
bridge-building; their thronged platforms, dotted with round huts, not
only put a defence of water between home life and prowling foes, but
heralded all the housed bridges that the world has seen during its
periods of written history. Whether we study Old London Bridge, or
the criss-cross bridges with frail shops in Kashmír (p. 71), or the
booth-bridges of China (p. 210 _note_), or the roofed timber bridges of
Switzerland (p. 291), we are concerned with a pedigree that starts out
from the first Neolithic lake-dwellings. But the later stone period,
known as Neolithic, is not very old. Between it and ourselves there is
a span of about nine thousand years, or a few thousand years more.[46]
But British lake-dwellings are attributed to a time still later, the
Bronze Age, whose date in the British Isles may be fixed tentatively at
from 1200 to 1400 B.C.[47] Further, as pit-dwellings lasted to the days
of Tacitus among some Germanic tribes,[48] so a British lake-village
here and there defied progress till the coming of the Romans. There
was one at Glastonbury, and its “Late Celtic” routine of life has been
studied carefully from its remains.
Standing on an artificial island formed by a series of timber bridges,
it occupied nearly three and a half acres, and its round huts, about
sixty in number, were intermingled with a few square cabins that marked
the most recent enterprise. Low walls were erected with upright posts
driven into the artificial island at a distance of about a foot from
each other; then this framework was wattled and plastered with clay. A
few rough slabs of lias stone made a doorstep, a piece of timber lay
across the threshold, a wood fire crackled on a central hearth, and
every household wanted to feel entirely safe, for a tall and tight
palisade enclosed the little colony. In this primitive defence a great
many poles were set up side by side; they ranged in height from five to
ten feet. Wolves and war were feared very much, evidently; and yet the
villagers were devoted to that self-decoration with which men and women
for many a long period had tried to rival the patterned colours given
by Nature to birds, and beasts, and insects, and fish, and snakes,
and flowers, and stones. They loved rings, cut from amber and jet and
glass; wore bracelets, some of bronze, others of Kimmeridge shale;
glass beads had their vogue, and clothes were fastened together with
bronze safety-pins, or with split-ring brooches of bronze. Perhaps the
women were truly feminine, and wore a monstrous headgear, outraging
their good looks in fashionable efforts to renew their beauty.
Drawing closer to this village perched up on primitive bridges, we
find in it some weavers and spinners, a few wood-carvers who were true
artists, some carpenters who had lathes, and some clever smiths who
made iron knives, awls, spades, bill-hooks, gouges; and a few ambitious
potters decorated their work and gave it a careful finish. Harvests
were grown somewhere, as women used querns to grind the corn. Good
little people! They wanted to be pacific and artistic; fighting did
not set their genius; and so they vanished. How could they hope to
protect the gift of life when British war-chariots and Roman soldiers
began to fight in the neighbourhood, obeying the dread mysterious law
of fruitful carnage? They slunk away from the fierce midwifery of war,
fearing the long self-sacrifices of a painful renaissance.
Their gentle enterprise lasted from about the second or third century
B.C. to the Roman occupation. Among the remains of their village
several skulls have been found, mild-looking skulls of a long shape,
like those which have been taken from the long barrows. It was an
Iberic tribe that trifled with peace and art, showing an epicene
fervour akin to that of our cooing sentimentalists. Perhaps the Romans
allowed the village to fade out of being, or perhaps they cleared it
away as a futility, for neither Roman coins nor Roman wares have been
found on the site, though remnants of Roman villas and potteries have
been unburied in the vicinity.[49]
It is certain that most of the Roman bridges were built with timber.
Thousands of trees were cut down when a paved road was constructed, so
that cheap material for bridge-building was always at hand when the
road was carried over ravines and rivers.[50] Besides, if a great many
stone bridges had been built by the Romans, in Britain and elsewhere,
many remains of the piers would have been found in all big rivers. We
know, too, that the Romans were tolerant in their attitude to native
bridgemen, since the criss-cross piers of the Gauls outlived the Roman
Empire by many centuries.
We know not, neither can we learn, how the Romans themselves made
timber bridges. Even their Pons Sublicius, a sacred monument, hallowed
by historical traditions and by its connection with religious
ceremonies, was described imperfectly. To this day experts quarrel
over its technique and over its position on the Tiber. Colonel Emy has
tried to reconstruct it, but his attempt differs from that of Canina,
and we cannot choose between them. The utmost we can say is this--that
the Pons Sublicius was a tree-bridge resting on piles, and dating from
the times of Ancus Marcius, who reigned from B.C. 640-616. If the chief
priests did not build it, they certainly kept it in repair, always
using wood with a pious regard for a venerated past; and with their
help it existed as late as the reign of Constantine (A.D. 306-337),
when it was mentioned in the “Notitia,” and when a bridge was named
after it at Constantinople. But the Pons Sublicius became obsolete as
a highway for traffic, and then a good understudy bridge of stone--the
Pons Lapideus--was built close at hand, and was known sometimes as Pons
Sublicius, a title of honour. Sir William Smith believed that these
bridges were outside the city, beyond the Porta Trigemina, and that the
wooden one was built by Ancus Marcius in order to connect the town side
of the Tiber with a new fortress erected on the Janiculus.
We pass on now to the brothers Grubenmann, whose best work was
destroyed during the war of 1799. Ulric and Jean Grubenmann were
village carpenters, born at Teufen, in the canton of Appenzell. Ulric
seems to have been the abler of the two; certainly he was a man of
true genius who spanned great distances by his unrivalled use of
corbelled and trussed timber bearings. It was in 1755 that he began his
suspension bridge at Schaffhausen, and in 1758 this work was complete.
There were two spans in a distance of 364 feet, and they formed an
elbow that pointed upstream. The abutment near Schaffhausen was 171
feet from the angle, and from the angle to the opposite shore was 193
feet. Ulric had decided that the bridge should cross the Rhine in one
magnificent flight from abutment to abutment, but the town authorities
interposed and told him to find use for a stone pier belonging to a
bridge which a flood had ruined in 1754. Being a Swiss by birth and
by training, Ulric Grubenmann followed an ancient tradition in Swiss
carpentry, covering his bridge with a solid roof; and so perfect was
the bridge, so admirably scarfed, trussed, strutted, braced, bolted
up, and suspended, that only two faults could be found with it: the
roof was too heavy, and the parts were too dependent on each other. An
injury to one portion of the structure might have been disastrous to
the whole bridge--a vital consideration in a warfaring time.
Grubenmann’s methods were simple. “The braces proceeding from each
abutment,” said Telford, “are continued to the beam which passes
along the top of the uprights, and the lowest of these general braces
are actually united under that beam, thereby forming a continued arch
between the abutments, the chord line of which is three hundred and
sixty-four feet, and the versed sine about thirty feet. These braces
are kept in a straight direction by the uprights, which are placed
seventeen feet and five inches apart. If this bridge had been formed in
a straight line between the abutments I can see no reason why this form
of construction should not have supported a roadway of about eighteen
feet in breadth, as well as a slight roof; because, in that case, all
the weight arising from the braces which proceed from the middle pier
would have been saved, and the roof might have been made much simpler
and lighter.”
While Ulric Grubenmann was working at Schaffhausen, his brother Jean
built a similar bridge at Reichenau, two hundred and forty feet in a
single span; and some years later the two brothers constructed their
Wittingen Bridge over the Limmat, near Baden, giving to it a span
of three hundred and ninety feet. They were famous now, and their
influence travelled from Europe to America, where it found in Bludget
an able interpreter, Bludget’s bridge over the Portsmouth River being
similar in technique to the bridge at Schaffhausen. Since that time
the evolution of timber bridges has remained in the United States of
America, where it has ranged from the criss-cross of logs for bearing
piles to the most intricate combinations of lattices and trusses. Very
often there is far too much intricacy, and no thought at all is given
to military considerations (p. 352). “Many wooden American bridges
are trusses which almost defy analysis, the designs being, however,
obviously suggested by an attempt to combine at least two of the three
main types of bridges. No advantage whatever is gained by a combination
of this kind; on the contrary, great disadvantage is almost sure to
follow its adoption, namely, that it will be impossible that each part
of the structure should, under all circumstances, carry that portion
of the load which the designer entrusted to it. For suppose a bridge
constructed partly as a girder and partly as a suspension bridge, the
girder being very stiff and deep, the chain perfectly flexible with
considerable dip. Let the chain and girder be each fit to carry half
the passing load. It is perfectly conceivable that the deflections of
the two should be so different that the girder would, under the actual
load, break before the chain was sensibly strained, or the difference
in the relative dip of the chain and depth of the girder might be such
as to cause the former to give way first.”[51]
VII
PRIMITIVE SUSPENSION BRIDGES
We have seen (p. 114) that the first suspension bridges were of two
sorts: (_a_) long branches which had grown across rivulets and chasms;
(_b_) thick and tough creeping plants by which many forest trees
were festooned to one another. It is a vast evolution from these
natural things to the art of Ulric Grubenmann, the forerunner of metal
suspension bridges.[52] Unfortunately it is also an evolution which we
cannot follow through many consecutive phases, artists and historians
having failed to record its growth. We cannot suppose that the
ancients neglected suspension bridges; from the spider alone they must
have learnt that pendent ropes made a good bridge; but we know not what
they achieved in this airy handicraft. Many people of to-day show in
primitive hammock-bridges that their ancestors were influenced by the
work of spiders. In countries so far apart as China and Central Africa
and Northern India, for example, there are hammock-bridges of cane and
osier, netted elaborately at the sides and swung by bamboo cables, as
in China, or by ropes made from the silky fibres of the Nilgiri nettle,
as in the Bermulda Hills. Whatever sort of primitive rope is employed,
its first model was the gnarled and twisted stem of a vine-like
creeping plant.
Perhaps the most ancient suspension bridge in China is the one known
as _Liu Soh_ or _Lew saw_, literally a slip rope. A bamboo cable is
fixed from side to side of a ravine, not in a level line, but a little
aslant, so as to form a mild sort of switchback. A traveller carries
a wooden saddle with a deep groove in it; the groove fits the bamboo
cable, and straps fasten the saddle and give confidence to the jockey,
who travels at a rapid speed when he is fat. On his return journey he
is pulled up the bridge by ropes. In the mountains of Sichuan there are
hundreds of these single cable-bridges.[53] What are they but lianes
and vine stems _plus_ a little human primitiveness?
Don Antonio de Ulloa, the Spanish Admiral, describes a Peruvian bridge
closely allied to the Chinese Liu Soh, and called the tarabita. Ulloa
noticed it on several rivers, but particularly on the rapid Alchipichi.
The tarabita is only a single rope made of bujuco, or ox-hide thongs
twisted into a cable from six to eight inches in thickness. It is
extended from one side of the river to the other, and anchored firmly.
On one bankside it is controlled by a wheel, or winch, that makes it
either taut or slack. A leather cradle is hung from the tarabita by
two clasps that have rounded heads; two ropes are stretched across the
river and bound to the travelling clasps; a wayfarer sits in the cradle
and is pulled across by the guide-ropes. Even mules are slung from two
tarabitas, according to Antonio de Ulloa, whose book on South America
was published in 1748, at Madrid. An English translation appeared in
1758, and ran into five editions. Let me give a quotation from the
fourth, issued in 1806. It concerns a venerable suspension bridge akin
to the bamboo variety made in the mountains of Sichuan in China:--
“Over the river Desaguadero is still remaining the bridge of
rushes invented by Capac Yupanqui, the fifth Ynca, for
transporting his army to the other side, in order to conquer
the provinces of Collasuyo. The Desaguadero is here between
eighty and a hundred yards in breadth, flowing with a very
impetuous current under a smooth, and, as it were, a
sleeping surface. The Ynca, to overcome this difficulty,
ordered four very large cables to be made of a kind of grass
which covers the lofty heaths and mountains of that country,
and called Ichu by the Indians; and these cables were the
foundation of the whole structure. Two of them being laid
across the water, fascines of dry juncia and totora, species
of rushes, were fastened together, and laid across them. On
these the two other cables were laid, and covered with the
other fascines securely fixed, but smaller than the first,
and arranged in such a manner as to form a level surface;
and by this means he procured a safe passage for his army.
This bridge, which is about five yards in breadth, and one
and a half above the surface of the water, is carefully
repaired or rebuilt every six months, by the neighbouring
provinces, in pursuance of a law made by the Ynca (Capac
Yupanqui), and often since confirmed by the kings of
Spain.”[54]
In the first volume of his book, chap. VII., Antonio de Ulloa visits
the Andes, and finds there some tree-bridges, some stone bridges, and
some complex bujuco bridges. The stone variety he does not describe,
but he writes interestingly about the bujucos. When six cables have
been made by twisting together strips of ox-hide they are suspended
across a river, not in a single row, but in two tiers, the lower one
with four cables, the upper with two. Over the lower tier branches and
canes are laid transversely; and when this floor is braced to the upper
cables, there is a sort of cage within which travellers can walk in
safety while the bridge swings.
“On some rivers of Peru,” says Ulloa, “there are bujuco bridges so
large that droves of loaded mules pass over them; particularly over the
river Apurimac, which is the thoroughfare of all the commerce carried
on between Lima, Cusco, La Plata, and other parts to the southward.”
Humboldt passed over one of these pendulous bridges, and Miers crossed
another which was strong enough to bear the traffic of pack-mules,
though it was two hundred and twenty-five feet in span.
And now we must pass on to a half-suspension bridge which is very
common among the N’Komis, a tribe that inhabits the Fernan Vaz
district in Equatorial Central Africa. It is a bridge built with
Y-shaped sticks. Two parallel rows of these pronged branches are
driven into the bed of a stream, and into the banksides; then long
runners are put between the forks to bear a footway of sticks laid
across them transversely.
Mr. Thomas Beddoes, an African trader, and traveller, draws my
attention to this bridge of forked branches; and tells me also that in
the Agowe district, but far inland from the banks of this river, he
came upon a primitive suspension bridge partly made with very thick
vines--vines as thick as a man’s leg--which were joined together into
a couple of natural ropes long enough to be suspended from trees over
a creek about two hundred feet wide. Perhaps a yard separated them,
and they were parallel to each other. When anchored to the trees at
a height of four or five feet above the bank, they form the upper
part or parapet of the bridge. As for the footway, its bearers were
saplings--young trees from ten to twelve feet long and three or four
inches in diameter; they were lashed together into a continuous runner,
and two such runners were laid from the banksides over the creek, to
carry a hurdle pathway of canes or sticks. Then the upper part of the
bridge was braced to the saplings with thin vines, which were tied
to their supports at intervals of about a foot, and which served the
purpose of suspension rods, for they counteracted the strain on the
saplings when a native crossed the narrow footway.
It would be easy to write much more about primitive swing bridges,
but enough has been said to stimulate thought and discussion. Not one
of them has a brighter intelligence than that which we find in many
prehistoric handicrafts.
VIII
NATURAL ARCHES--THEIR SIGNIFICANCE AND THEIR
INFLUENCE
Long before the germ of humanity in some anthropomorphous apes became
slowly fertile in a mysterious gestation, Nature had weathered many
rocks into hollowed and vaulted shapes. Some were yawning sea-caves,
whose arched mouths gulped in the tidal waves, and whose caverned
bodies gurgled or boomed with the noise of deepening water.[55] Others
were vaults gradually fretted into being by subterranean torrents,
such as we find to-day at Saint-Pons, in the Cevennes, where the river
Jaur is nourished by an abundant spring which in a second, through the
mouth of a low-arched cavern, pours a thousand litres of fresh, sweet
water. Others, again, were genuine arched bridges, such as we find
to-day in the Pont d’Arc, over the river Ardèche (p. 6). In England
we have several such bridges, notably the Durdle Door on the coast
at Lulworth, whose arched span must owe at least a part of its shape
to the troubled action of sea-waves. “La Roche Percée” at Biarritz--a
crinkled, lava-like formation--is inferior to our Durdle Door; and “La
Roche Trouée,” near Saint-Gilles Croix-de-Vie, though remarkable as a
square-headed aperture, has a lower place still in the pontine work
done by Nature.[56]
Perhaps the most wonderful rock-bridges are those at Icononzo, in New
Grenada, over the torrent of Summa-Paz. There are two, and one of them
soars up and up to a crown that spans the water at an altitude of
ninety-seven metres. How could men of genius fail to be architects when
Nature set before their eyes great vaults, not only varied in shape,
but at times of a stupendous height? In different ways she produced
surbased arches, pointed arches, semicircular arches, all more or less
ragged in their outlines, but each a model for progressive mimicry and
adaptation.
Here is not the place to dally with the causes of their formation,
such as uneven weathering and the scour of running water subject to
high tides or to terrific floods. As rivers in the course of many ages
deepen and widen their channels, they reach now and then a strata of
fissured rock, and their eating action is very rapid when they are
able to undercut the softer rocks by fretting their way along apertures
or crevices. Many an earthquake has made such inlets for river water,
and earthquakes may have shattered some rocks into vaulted shapes.
Whether glaciers have played a part in the hollowing of rocks into
arched caves and bridges I do not know; but rock-basins are attributed
to the erosive power of glaciers, so why not some rock-bridges also? It
is a question over which geologists ought to quarrel as they did over
rock-basins.[57]
[Illustration: PONTE DELLA PAGLIA AT VENICE, _RENAISSANCE_]
But the main point is that the archways made by Nature not only
suggested the arched bridge of handicraft, but heralded all the lovely
styles of building which have used vaults, domes, turrets, towers,
spires, steeples, and arched openings--gateways, porches, and windows.
There is a rival art, as we know, an art which has glorified the long
lintel-stone carried by pillars; but it has never won from the genius
of great men the highest technical inspiration. To it we owe much work
of a noble dignity, but in the powerful aspiration of this work there
is but little upward flight; it is not near at once to the point of
heaven and the point of home. In fact, its masterpieces weigh down
heavily on the earth instead of rising towards the light. Not till we
come to genuine _archi_tecture--to the art that employs arches and
vaults and domes--do we find united in the same edifice a majestic
weight and a buoyant fervour. This union of qualities may be found in
a supreme Roman bridge, such as the Puente Trajan at Alcántara, but it
reigns most beautifully in a Gothic cathedral, whose bulk, earth-bound
and vast, has in it what Goethe defined as a petrified music, lofty
and spiritual. Rome built for man and the ages, while Gothic art has
a symphonic ardour expressed in a creed of hope that transcends all
terrene things.
The work done by Nature in various archways, some pointed and many
round-headed, is a surprise to many persons. Yet Nature’s custom is
to build in curves and circles, as in the trunks of trees, and the
shapes of flowers, and the forms of birds’ nests. She hates angles, and
particularly right angles; these she makes in her moods of violence,
when she flashes into zigzag lightning, or splinters trees and rocks
with an earthquake. We ourselves are accustomed from early youth to
squared shapes in handicraft, yet our actions often speak to us of
mankind’s primitive fondness for circular huts and round pit-dwellings.
We find it difficult to walk forward in a straight line, the steps
we take having a tendency to curve; and untaught boxers never hit
straight from the shoulder, their arms swing in segments of a circle.
Art students, again, begin by drawing “too round,” so they have to be
shown how “to square their touch.” Are you tempted to believe that the
spinning of our globe has transmitted to all living things the routine
of its movement?
In any case, let us keep well in mind the different symbolism
implied by curves, angles, straight lines, and circles. Squares and
oblongs denote repose and weight, while circles and curved lines are
identified with everything in the universe that denotes life, mystery,
intelligence, fertility, light and heat, movement and speed, and space
illimitable. Human progress itself is a circular ascent along the
finest spiral lines, for civilization as a whole never comes back to
the same conditions, but creeps above them to some trivial extent. The
greatest circular or rounded shapes are the sun, the full moon, our
own little world, the human skull, and the human heart; eggs, flowers,
nests, the shapes of bones, and the wheel, without which dilatory
progress would have been far and away too pedestrian. The first wheel
was a rolling stone; afterwards men noticed that a log touched by
accident on a hill rolled down for some distance; and at last a person
of genius cut solid sections from a tree-trunk and made the earliest
wheel of handicraft.
Just one more point ought to be noticed with sympathetic care: that
arches in art are more suggestive than circles; they have the mystery
of a beautiful part taken from a whole--a whole that looks methodical.
We feel this mystery whenever we watch how the moon grows from a
silver crescent into a radiant circle. A thing complete dulls an
attention that looks on, whereas growth or the suggestion of growth has
the stimulus of hope and faith. To culminate is to begin a decline.
Even the circle of the sun would be tiresome but for the grey days
that renew a truism into a gracious truth. This explains why arches in
art make an appeal to the imagination that circles never equal. For
example, wheel-windows in Gothic architecture never have the magic of
pointed windows. Our eyes travel around them and cannot escape in a
flight upwards. Nature, then, when she produced arches, brought into
the world a very noble inspiration, and therefore very remote from the
dull and slow mimicry of mankind.
In fact, the earliest known vaults of handicraft have but a trivial
age in the vast antiquity of human life. Let us take a rapid glance
at them, so as to note their rudimentary construction. They are built
not with stones directed towards the intrados, but with stones in
horizontal courses that jut out one beyond another, just as Nature’s
archways in stratified rocks have a succession of layers. At Abydos,
one of the most ancient cities of Upper Egypt, there is a vault of
this primitive sort in the temple of Rameses the Second, who reigned
for sixty-seven years, from about 1292 to about 1225 B.C.[58] Another
is found at Thebes in the temple of Ammon-Rē, but the most ancient
specimen of all is at Gizeh, in the great pyramid of Menkaura. Now
Menkaura belonged to the Fourth Dynasty, so that his date is more
than 3000 years B.C. His sepulchral chamber is ceiled with a pointed
arch--not a true arch, of course, the stones being merely cantilevers
opposite to each other, with their undersides cut to the pointed shape.
To understand the structural method, close your hands together at their
full length, then open them gradually into the form of a pointed arch:
the united finger-tips represent the apex of the vault, and the curving
fingers represent the long archstones. Here is a departure from the
horizontal layers of stone, but with these also pointed arches have
been built.
For instance, Italy has a very good example at Arpino, in Campania.
“Arpino occupies the lower part of the site of the ancient Volscian
town of Arpinum, which was finally taken from the Samnites by the
Romans in 305 B.C..... The ancient polygonal walls, which are still
finely preserved, are among the best in Italy. They are built of blocks
of pudding-stone, originally well jointed, but now much weathered.
They stand free in places to a height of eleven feet, and are about
seven feet wide at the top. A single line of wall, with mediæval round
towers at intervals, runs on the north side from the present town to
Civita Vecchia, on the site of the ancient citadel. Here is the Porta
dell’ Arco, a gate of the old wall, with an aperture fifteen feet
high, formed by the gradual inclination of the two sides towards each
other.”[59]
This ancient gate has a pointed arch; it belongs to the so-called
“Cyclopean style.” Sir William Smith gives an illustration of the Porta
dell’ Arco, and refers to “the very singular construction,” in which
successive courses of stone “project over each other till they meet,
so as to form a kind of pointed arch.” Yet the construction is in no
respect very singular, being the simplest way in which rude arches can
be copied from Nature’s models. With toy bricks of wood a child can
build a Porta dell’ Arco.[60] On the other hand, art and science go
together in the building of an arch with voussoirs and keystones. A
long evolution separates this workmanship from the gateways at Arpino
and Tiryns and Mycenae, though we cannot follow it through its gradual
improvements. It is an evolution with many breaks, many related forms
having perished; but experts note a difference between the Porta dell’
Arco at Arpino and similar vaults both at Mycenae and at Tiryns, where
the craftsmanship dates from the Heroic Age in Greece.
The main entrance at Mycenae is called the Lion Gate, from the famed
triangular arch and relief above its huge lintel-stone. The arch
belongs to the method of laying stones in horizontal courses that jut
out towards each other across an opening; and the decorative sculpture
represents two lions that stand face to face; they are separated by
a pillar and their front legs rest on a low altar-like structure
that supports the pillar. The same device occurs in cut gems and in
goldsmith’s work of the Mycenaean age; and the lions recall to memory
those with which some Chinese bridges have been ennobled (pp. 127, 311).
Even more remarkable are the beehive tombs at Mycenae; there are eight
in all, and some others are found in the neighbourhood. Pausanias
regarded them as the places where Atreus and his sons hid their
treasures, but now they are looked upon as the tombs of princely
families. The most important of them, just outside the Lion Gate, is
called the Treasury of Atreus. It has two rooms, a square one cut
in the rock, and a round one with a pointed dome. This chamber is
fifty feet in height and in diameter; we go to it along a horizontal
passage twenty feet wide and a hundred and fifteen feet long, with
side walls of squared stone sloping up to a height of forty-five feet.
“The doorway was flanked with columns of alabaster, with rich spiral
ornament, now in the British Museum; and the rest of the façade was
very richly decorated, as may be seen from Chipiez’s fine restoration.
The inside of the vault was ornamented with attached bronze ornaments,
but not, as is sometimes stated, entirely lined with bronze. It is
generally supposed that these tombs, as well as those excavated in the
rock, belong to a later date than the shaft tombs on the Acropolis.”[61]
In the Treasury of Atreus there are two points that interest architects
more than any others. The first is the contrast between admirable
decoration and hugely primitive stonework; and the other is the fact
that the annulary courses forming the domed and circular chamber have
this particular character, that the lateral joints of the stones
hardly tend at all towards the centre. Moreover, again and again
the stones are separated by a space, and this interval is filled up
with small rubble which seems to have been pressed together with the
greatest care. These irregular courses, whose inside diameter grows
less and less as the circular wall grows higher and higher, forms at
last a sort of pointed dome over the great tomb. M. Degrand says very
well: “A vault of these proportions must count as a memorable work.
Its construction here and there makes use of colossal stones, and it
subsists almost intact after more than thirty centuries of existence.
At a pinch its architect and workmen could have erected some masonry
bridges in accord with the same technical method.”
In wide arches of this sort the resistance of good mortars would have
been called upon to play the leading part; but in arches of narrow span
the stones could have been used dry, and such arches may well have
displaced many a primitive footway of logs that rested on stone piers.
The Egyptians built some real arches, not with long stones carefully
shaped into segments of a circle, such as we find in some Chinese
bridges (pp. 313-14), but with hewn blocks whose joints converged
toward a common centre. In Ethiopia, for example, in one of the
pyramids of Meroe, there is a semicircular arch composed of voussoirs;
and two pyramids at Gebel Barkel have arched porticoes with voussoirs
that tend to one point. Their shapes differ, one arch being pointed and
the other round-headed.[62] The pyramids of Gebel Barkel are puny in
style, and belong to a very late date in old Egyptian history.
As we have seen, a triangular arch may be studied above the Lion Gate
at Mycenae. Triangular arches are uncommon, but Brangwyn has chosen a
good example of a much later date from Kashmír. The builders found it
easier to set up a triangular scaffold than a rounded one.
[Illustration: IN KASHMÍR: A PRIMITIVE BRIDGE WITH TRIANGULAR ARCHES]
As for the semicircular arch, early examples of it have been discovered
in Asia Minor, among the ruins of Phrygian cities; in Acarnania, the
most westerly province of ancient Greece; and also in that part of
Central Italy where the Etruscans, by their powerful civilization,
heralded Rome. It was in Etruria that Rome cradled her infancy, for
she borrowed from the Etruscans many of her building methods and
many of her civil institutions, both religious and political. Among
the gleanings that she harvested we find the round-headed arch, which
became a symbol of Roman conquest and colonisation. Perhaps it was
employed at Rome for the first time in those great sewers, extant
still, which were attributed to the statesmanship of Lucumo Tarquinius,
the legendary man of wealth who with his wife and retinue migrated in a
splendid manner from Etruria and became a Roman citizen. If the sewers
were built about 600 years B.C., then the history of round-headed
vaults, as Rome collected from many nations the toll of enlightened
obedience, extended over more than a thousand years.
In the next chapter we shall try to understand the Roman genius,
but here we must recall to mind two preliminary points: one is the
aboriginal arch of tree-trunks that Cæsar found in Gaulish bridges
(pp. 70, 72), the other is the fact that the Romans left in Britain
a version of their round-headed arch that is simpler and more rustic
than any other. It was copied frequently by mediæval bridge-builders,
and to-day many of the copies are known locally as Roman. Brangwyn
represents one of these imitations in Harold’s Bridge at Waltham Abbey.
Perhaps this bridge may date from Harold’s time, but it is a feeble
thing in comparison with the Roman example near Colne, Clitheroe, whose
simple and effective structure is bolder in aspect than the New Port at
Lincoln, a genuine Roman gateway. There is but one arch in the Roman
bridge near Colne, and its voussoirs have no masonry above them, the
footway being protected by large cobbles which are easy to displace
when they become outworn. Perhaps the width of this bridge may have
been great enough for Roman wheels and British chariots, but I doubt if
a coster with his cart would make the crossing.
Along the ancient tracks of Lancashire there are many single-arch
bridges with a Roman aspect, but without an authentic air of stalwart
dignity. The one near Colne looks genuinely Roman, while the others
speak to me of a Roman tradition enfeebled in much later times by
a rather timid craftsmanship. Mr. C. S. Sargisson has examined
these bridges carefully, and from him I have received some excellent
photographs.
[Illustration: BRIDGE AT WALTHAM ABBEY ATTRIBUTED TO HAROLD]
A bridge belonging to the same school is to be found at Monzie, near
Crieff, in Perthshire; there are several in North Wales, the best
example being Pandy Old Bridge at Bettws-y-Coed; and a good English
specimen, quite as entertaining as Harold’s Bridge at Waltham, should
be noted at Hayfield. Nothing can be simpler than this use of a
single rough ring of voussoirs; and it justifies the inference that
Roman pontists were niggardly in Britain, since they stereotyped a
narrow bridge without parapets, and erected no tremendous aqueduct
and no bridge of enduring fame, such as we find elsewhere in Europe.
If Rome had foreseen the future history of Britain, and had given way
to jealousy, she could not have been more parsimonious in her British
bridge-building.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] The orang in the Eastern islands, for example, and the
chimpanzee in Africa, build platforms on which they
sleep.
[35] White of Selborne notes this fact. And Darwin notes
two others of equal interest. He says: “The orang is
known to cover itself at night with the leaves of the
Pandanus; and Brehm states that one of his baboons
used to protect itself from the heat of the sun by
throwing a straw mat over its head. In these several
habits we probably see the first steps towards some
of the simpler arts, such as rude architecture and
dress, as they arose among the early progenitors of
man.” Darwin refers to architecture as well as dress
because of an earlier sentence on the platforms built
by anthropomorphous apes.
[36] But for this habit we should be less horrified by the
acts of German “culture” in a time of war. I add this
note to my proofs, September 26, 1914.
[37] Better in many respects, but not in all; for as
Darwin points out, it was the self-condoning mind of
man, not the instinct of any brute beast, that came
to use infanticide as a custom. “The instincts of
the lower animals are never so perverted as to lead
them regularly to destroy their own offspring.” Only
arguments can choose and approve unnatural habits.
[38] “Daily Telegraph,” September 8, 1913, p. 5.
[39] “A Book of North Wales,” by S. Baring-Gould, pp. 2-3.
[40] These calculations can be studied at the British
Museum side by side with an excellent model of
Stonehenge. On the supposition that Stonehenge was
a sun-temple, its date has been astronomically
determined as about 1680 B.C., with a possible error
of two centuries either way.
[41] Emiland Gauthey, “Traité de la Construction des
Ponts,” A.D. 1809-1816.
[42] “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Everyman’s Library, p.
315. It is to be remembered that Marco Polo’s “paces”
are geometric.
[43] Professor Fleeming Jenkin’s “Essay on Bridges.”
[44] For criss-cross piers, see Index.
[45] Forked boughs were used in the building of roofed
walls, and bent trees in the building of gabled cabins.
[46] Sir Ray Lankester, “Daily Telegraph,” August 27, 1913,
p. 6.
[47] Robert Munro’s “Archæology and False Antiquities,” p.
12.
[48] Tacitus remarks of these wild tribesmen: “They are
accustomed to make artificial caves in the ground, and
they cover them with great heaps of dung, so as to
form a shelter during the winter, and a storehouse for
the produce of the fields. For in such dwellings they
moderate excessive cold, and if at any time an enemy
should come, he ravages the parts that he can see, but
either discovers not such places as are invisible, and
subterraneous, or else the delay which search would
cause is a protection to the inmates.”
[49] Boyd Dawkins, “The British Lake Village,” 1895; Sidney
O. Addy, “The Evolution of the English House”; “The
Times,” September 19, 1895; “Manchester Guardian,”
September 22, 1896; and A. Bulleid, “Somersetshire
Arch. and Nat. Hist. Society’s Proceedings,” 1894,
reprinted in 1895.
[50] The making of a Roman road was a formidable
enterprise. H. M. Scarth, in his “Roman Britain,”
relates how a portion of the Fosse Road at Radstock,
about ten miles south-west of Bath, was opened in
February, 1881, and that its work showed the following
details in constructive method. 1. Pavimentum, or
foundation, fine earth, hard beaten in. 2. Statumen,
or bed of the road, composed of large stones,
sometimes mixed with mortar. 3. Ruderatio, or small
stones well mixed with mortar. 4. Nucleus, formed by
mixing lime, chalk, and pounded brick or tile; or
gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay. 5. Upon this
completed foundation the _summum dorsum_, or surface
of the paved road, was laid with infinite care. So the
men of a day built roads for the centuries, and were
proud to be servants to the unborn.
[51] Professor Fleeming Jenkin. If any reader wants to
continue the study of timber bridges, let him turn
to Colonel Emy and to the huge volumes compiled and
edited by Hosking. But it is clear enough that timber
bridges belong to the past; in these days they are
ludicrously out of joint with the needs of social
life, owing to the rapid advance which “progress” has
made in artillery, in high explosives, in airships,
and in aeroplanes.
[52] These date from about the year 1816, when Galashiels
Bridge was constructed. It was only 112 ft. in length.
But in 1819 Telford designed the Menai Bridge, in
which the span of the catenary is 570 ft. and the dip
43 ft. The success of this work gave rise to much
imitation, and in several places very great projects
were carried through with success. At Pesth, for
instance, the span was 666 ft., and at Fribourg 870
ft. But engineers, having no imagination and but
little prudence, went too far, so they had to retreat
from their cocksureness. Soon it became evident that
a long suspended bridge of metal suffered much from
the lateral oscillation caused by wind, and that its
flexibility made it unfit for railway traffic. “The
platform rose up as a wave in front of any rapidly
advancing load, and the masses in motion produced
stresses much greater than those which could result
from the same weights when at rest. Moreover, the
kinetic effect of the oscillations produced by bodies
of men marching, or even by impulses due to wind,
may give rise to strains which cannot be foreseen,
and which have actually caused the failure of some
suspension bridges. On the 16th of April, 1850, a
suspension bridge at Angers gave way when 487 soldiers
were passing, and of these 226 were killed by the
accident.”--Professor Fleeming Jenkin.
[53] From information kindly supplied by the Rev. O. M.
Jackson.
[54] “A Voyage to South America,” Antonio de Ulloa,
translated from the Spanish by John Adams, Fourth
Edition, Vol. II, p. 164.
[55] Such caves are frequent on the coast of Pembroke, in
the Little England beyond Wales. Lydstep Arch is a
far-famed example, and the Devil’s Punch Bowl, opened
within the area of a prehistoric camp by the falling
in of the roof, has an archway to the sea. “Bocherston
Mere is a very small aperture, which, like a widening
funnel, spreads out below into a large cavern. During
the prevalence of gales from the south-west, the sea,
driven by wind and tide in at the arched entrance,
is ejected through the upper hole in jets of foam
and spray some forty or fifty feet high, like geyser
spouts. The limestone naturally pierced with caverns
lends itself to be thus riddled and rent.”--S.
Baring-Gould, “Book of South Wales,” p. 196.
[56] There is no need to multiply examples, for every
reader must have seen how rocks have been vaulted,
and lands tunnelled, by underground rivers. At one
part of her course, for example, the Guadiana flows
underground for twenty miles, forming a vast bridge
above which 100,000 sheep can pasture.
[57] When the glacial theory of their formation was young
and argumentative it encountered at first a sneering
opposition from Sir Roderick Murchison, the famous
geologist, who in 1864 wrote as follows to Sir William
Denison: “In my anniversary address to the Geological
Society you would see the pains I have taken to
moderate the icemen, who would excavate all the
rock-basins by glaciers eating their way into solid
rocks.” But he failed to “moderate the icemen”; and
Sir Roderick himself, a few years before his death,
gave what is called “a tardy acquiescence” to their
evidence. He became a frigid iceman. As Dr. Robert
Munro has said, evidence which may be clear and
convincing to one trained mind may not have the same
effect on another--a fact which should at least warn
us to be tolerant in matters of opinion.
[58] Dates in Egyptian history are obscure, but these give
the period approximately.
[59] “Encyclopædia Britannica,” 11th edition, article
“Arpino.”
[60] M. Degrand, in his “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” draws
attention to the fact that arches of this elementary
sort have been discovered in Mexico where they
represent a dead civilization to which no date can
be assigned. Degrand draws his information from two
books; “Histoire du Royaume de Quito,” par Don Juan
de Velasco, Paris, 1840, and “Monuments anciens du
Mexique,” par de Waldeck et Brasseur de Bourbourg,
Paris, 1866. At Palanqué, in a building supposed to be
a temple of the sun, a large bay that opens into the
sanctuary has an elliptic arch formed with courses of
dressed stone that project one beyond the other: “_un
arc surbaissé formé d’assises de pierres de taille
posées avec une forte saillie les unes par rapport aux
autres._”
[61] “Encyclopædia Britannica,” article “Mycenae”; see also
Sir William Smith, “Dictionary of Greek and Roman
Geography”; and note what M. Degrand says in his
“Ponts en Maçonnerie.”
[62] See E. Degrand, Vol. II, p. 124; and see also the
“Traité d’Architecture,” by Léonce Reynaud.
[Illustration: SMYRNA: ROMAN BRIDGE AND AQUEDUCT--THE POINTED ARCHES
ARE EASTERN RESTORATIONS]
CHAPTER THE THIRD
A FEW WORDS ON THE ROMAN GENIUS
I
What are we to think of the Roman bridges and aqueducts? Are we to be
men in our attitude toward them? or shall we try to see them with the
unfriendly eyes of Grecian supermen?
It seems to me that many Grecian supermen are terrible persons in their
criticism of architecture. Often they are so cocksure in their contempt
for Roman art that they write down their verdicts without any thought,
and also in uncouth English, as if a slatternly habit of mind were a
fit companion for their proclaimed belief in the supremacy of Greek
masterpieces. Years ago, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” one of these
superlative judges told the world that Roman bridges and aqueducts
“were really of a more engineering than architectural character, being
in the main utilitarian.” What does this ungainly language mean? Was
a Roman temple less utilitarian than a Roman aqueduct? less needful
as a part of the national life? Why should a lover of Greek art write
absurdly on the Roman genius? I am told, for instance, by another
Grecian, that the Pont du Gard, a Roman masterpiece, three or four
leagues from Nîmes, in France, has “rough masonry.” What next? A very
strong man, a Sandow, in comparison with a Tom Thumb, is a man of rough
muscle and sinew, and if Tom Thumb is to be our standard of symmetry
and grace, then Sandow is a masterful error in proportion and vitality.
To describe the Pont du Gard as “rough” is to be a pigmy in a very
foolish attitude to Roman power; and it proves also that the critic
has a defective appreciation of his own vaunted hobby, the might and
magnificence of Greek architecture.
Does anyone know why British writers are reluctant to admire in art
those virile gifts of the spirit that win victories and promise a great
future? Why is it that our criticisms are honeyed with sweet phrases?
We prattle about “tender sentiment,” and “exquisite refinement,” and
“gracious and gentle tact,” as if these female qualities only and alone
could make fame permanent in the arena of the centuries. Is a passion
for “refinement” to turn us into valetudinarians? Surely the Roman
genius, in a supreme monument such as the Pont du Gard, is the very
tonic for which we ought to have an inborn care and liking? Yet some
professors of taste, being devotees of the epicene, condemn it as a
“rough” genius, just as bad climbers revile the Alps.
When J. J. Rousseau visited the Pont du Gard he was awed into silence
by the immensity of the three arcades. For the first time in his
life he understood the grandeur of the Roman spirit in adventurous
achievement. “Le Pont du Gard,” he wrote in his “Confessions,” “était
le premier ouvrage des Romains que j’eusse vu. Je m’attendais à un
monument digne des mains qui l’avaient construit; pour le coup, l’objet
passa mon attente, et ce fut la seule fois en ma vie. Il n’appartenait
qu’aux Romains de produire cet effet. L’aspect de ce simple et noble
ouvrage me frappa d’autant plus, qu’il est au milieu d’un désert où le
silence et la solitude rendent l’objet plus frappant et l’admiration
plus vive; car ce prétendu pont n’était qu’un aqueduc. On se demande
quelle force a transporté ces pierres énormes si loin de toute
carrière, et a réuni les bras de tant de milliers d’hommes dans un lieu
où il n’en habite aucun? Je parcourus les trois étages de ce superbe
édifice,[63] que le respect m’empêchait presque d’oser fouler sous mes
pieds. Le retentissement de mes pas sous ces immenses voûtes me faisait
croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avaient bâties. Je me
perdais comme un insecte dans cette immensité: je sentais, tout en me
faisant petit, je ne sais quoi qui m’élevait l’âme, et je me disais en
soupirant: ‘Que ne suis-je né Romain!’ Je restai là plusieurs heures
dans une contemplation ravissante; je m’en revins distrait et rêveur,
et cette rêverie ne fut pas favorable à Mme. W---.... Elle avait bien
songé à me prémunir contre les filles de Montpellier, mais non pas
contre le Pont du Gard! On ne s’avise jamais de tout.”
I give this quotation in the original French because the flavour of
Rousseau cannot be translated. As well try to keep the flavour of
champagne by mixing this wine with water. Besides, I wish to contrast
the elusive vanity of Rousseau with the alert and appealing manliness
of Charles Kingsley, another ardent devotee of the Pont du Gard. In
1864 he wrote as follows to his wife:--[64]
“My first impression of the Pont du Gard was one of simple fear. ‘It
was so high that it was dreadful,’ as Ezekiel says. Then I said,
again and again, ‘A great people and a strong. There hath been none
like before them, nor shall be again for many generations.’ As, after
fifteen miles of the sea of mulberry, olive, and vine, dreary from
its very artificial perfection, we turned the corner of the limestone
glen, and over the deep blue rock-pool, saw _that thing_ hanging
between earth and heaven, the blue sky and green woods showing through
its bright yellow arches, and all to carry a cubic yard of water
to Nismes, twenty miles off, for public baths and sham sea-fights
(_naumachiæ_) in the amphitheatre, which even Charlemagne, when he
burnt the Moors out of it, could not destroy!--Then I felt the brute
greatness of that Roman people; and an awe fell upon me as it may have
fallen on poor Croc, the Rook, king of the Alemans--but that is a long
story--when he came down and tried to destroy this city of the seven
hills, and ended in being shown about in an iron cage as _The Rook_.
But I doubt not when he and his wild Alemans came down to the Pont
du Gard they said it was the work of dwarfs--of the devil? We walked
up to the top, through groves of _Ilex_, _Smilax_, and _Coronella_
(the first time I have seen it growing), and then we walked across
on the top. The masonry is wonderful, and instead of employing the
mountain limestone of the hills, they have brought the most splendid
Bath oolite[65] from the hills opposite. There are the marks cut by
the old fellows--horse-hoofs, hatchets, initials, etc., as fresh
as paint. The Emperor (1864) has had it all repaired from the same
quarries, stone for stone. Now, after 1600 years, they are going to
bring the same water into Nismes by it. When we crossed, I was in a
new world. _Genista anglica_, the prickly needle furze of our commons
(rare with us), is in great golden bushes; and box, shrubby thyme,
a wonderful blue lily, bee-orchis and asters, white, yellow, purple
(which won’t dry, for the leaves fall off). Then wild rosemary, and
twenty more plants I never saw. We went below into a natural park of
ilex and poplar (two or three sorts), and watched such butterflies
and the bridge, till C---- said, ‘This is too perfect to last,’ which
frightened me and made me pray. And there was reason--for such a day
I never had in my life of beauty and wonder ... and yet there is one
thing more glorious and precious than the whole material universe--and
that is a woman’s love....”
[Illustration: THE PONT DU GARD FROM ABOVE THE FIRST TIER; SHOWING
BELOW THE MODERN BRIDGE FOR GENERAL TRAFFIC OVER THE GARDON]
A classic tradition says that the huge stones in the Pont du Gard
were joined together by iron clamps. Is this true? Each iron clamp,
if any were used by the masons, connected a voussoir to an interior
archstone.[66] From time to time the Romans employed iron rods bent
at the ends and fastened into stones with molten lead; such rods
have been discovered among the ruins of a Roman bridge over the North
Tyne, at Chollerford, near Hexham. This was a bridge with a wooden
superstructure, probably, as no voussoir has been found among the
litter of pier-stones.
The Pont du Gard is very tall; it soars, and to a height that exceeds
forty-seven metres. The first tier has six arches, the second has
eleven, the third has thirty-five. In the middle tier the length is
257 m. 90 cm. Note, too, that the architectural centre of the design
is determined by the rocky channel of the Gardon; we find it not in
the centre of the bridge but on the north in the arch under which the
river flows. It is the biggest arch of all, with a span of 25 m. 30
cm., while the neighbour on each side is narrower by nearly six metres.
The other bays of the first arcade dwindle in span to 15 m. 75 cm.[67]
As to the centre of the second tier, it corresponds with that of the
first, for the largest vault is above the river; it carries four little
arches of the third arcade, while its companions support only three.
Some critics see nothing more than the unequal size of these arcades,
when the real point is to find the architectural centre, whence the
composition radiates, majestic and imperious. The topmost arches and
their crowning dignify the whole structure with a completeness akin to
that which is given to a long range of columns by a fine entablature
and cornice.
And we must note the symbol of prosperity--a phallus--carved twice
in low-relief on the Pont du Gard. On the western side it graces a
springing voussoir in the third arch of the second tier; and there is
another on the keystone of the greatest arch, where the river passes.
Here the emblem is a double phallus, and when it is touched by sunlight
it looks as young as hope, not as uncertain as prosperity.
We cannot put a date on this Roman masterpiece, because in this matter
there are differences of opinion. M. Ménard, historian of Nîmes,
attributes the work to Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, who is said to
have ordered its construction about nineteen years before the Birth of
Christ. The architecture belongs to the Tuscan order. Its vaults are
semicircular, and spring from ledges, or imposts, about 50 centimetres
high, and as much in projection. There are four parallel rings of stone
in the vaults of the first tier, and three in the second, while the
third tier has either one or two. This Roman method of building the
under surface of an arch, by laying stones in parallel bands or rings,
side by side, but not bonded together, was copied in the Middle Ages
(p. 82). One point more: the water channel of the aqueduct, placed on
top of the third arcade, is 1 m. 30 cm. wide and 1 m. 60 cm. high;
it is nearly blocked up with a thick deposit of lime, but when this
substance is detached we find on the side walls a deep layer of cement
coloured red. The bed of this channel is a solid floor, 22 cm. in
thickness, and its component parts are small pebbles mixed with lime
and gritty sand.
Like other antique monuments, the Pont du Gard has been ravaged by
the brutality of mankind. At the end of the seventeenth century, for
instance, during years of religious warfare, so called, the Pont du
Gard was often crowded with fugitives and with troops, who made a
footway for themselves along the upstream side above the first arcade
by means of a strong platform corbelled out from new imposts. Over this
road cavalry and artillery passed at full speed, not only shaking the
bridge, but causing the topmost tier to develop a curve which is still
noticeable. At last the province of Languedoc interfered, and in 1670
careful restoration was begun.
Years later, in 1743, the _états généraux_ decided that a good highway
should be built up against the eastern side of the Pont du Gard;
and this new bridge, finished in 1747, was perhaps justified by its
utility, though it harmed a classic monument. There have been a good
many modern restorations, and one day the aqueduct itself may be
brought into use again, in accordance with the wishes expressed by a
great many persons.[68]
II
France happens to be rich in fine relics of Roman bridge-building.
Among her antique monuments there are remains of three aqueducts, at
Fréjus and Lyon and Luynes; and every pontist has seen photographs of
the aqueduct at Lambèse, in the department of Constantine, Algeria. At
Vaison, in Vaucluse, over the river Ouvèze, we find an important Roman
bridge, built on two rocks, with a single arch not less than thirty
metres in span; and along one embankment is a range of tall and narrow
arches that start out from the abutment of the bridge. The Pont de
Vaison is not in all respects representative of the best Roman work,
for its voussoirs, instead of being rimmed and extra-dossed, are fitted
into the spandrils (p. 282). I do not know the date of this bridge, but
Vaison descends from a famous Roman town, Vasio by name, mentioned by
Mela (ii. 5) as one of the richest towns of the Narbonensis.
It is common knowledge--or it should be--that the Romans adorned some
of their bridges with a triumphal arch; and it happens, by rare good
fortune, that France owns a small example of this Roman pride. It is
the Pont Flavien at Saint-Chamas, which in a single arch, forty-two
feet wide, spans the rocky bed of the Touloubre. At each entrance
there is a triumphal arch seven metres high, flanked at each side by
two Corinthian pilasters, upon the summit of which the entablature
rests. There is a stone lion at each extremity of the entablature; it
stands rampant and looks out into the open country, as if to symbolise
for ever the wakeful power of Roman thoroughness. Only one of the four
lions belongs to Roman workmanship; the others are much younger, and
their proportions are bigger. This bridge, again, which I believe to be
unique, bears an inscription, from which we learn that it was founded
by a certain L. Donnius Flavus, a flamen of Rome and of Augustus. But
the name Augustus was a title of veneration given by custom to all the
Cæsars, so that Donnius Flavus and his bridge have uncertain dates.
And now we will take a devious walk along some Roman roads through
Gard-Hérault, to see what we shall find in the way of antique
bridges. From north-east to south-west the region is crossed by the
Via Domitiana, which runs from Lyons to the Pyrenees, going over the
Rhône at Arles, and passing by Nîmes, Pont Ambroise, Substantion,
Saint-Thibéry, Béziers, and Narbonne. At Pont Ambroise the river
Vidourle is partly spanned by the ruins of a very picturesque Roman
bridge, but its points of interest belong to an earlier chapter (p.
82). Near Castelnau, or Substantion, the Via Domitiana crossed the
river Lez by a bridge now wholly destroyed; its abutments can be seen
when the water is low, but they add nothing to our knowledge of Roman
masonry. In mediæval times this bridge was called the Pont Lairou,
Lero being the Latin name of the river Lez.
Not far from Saint-Thibéry the Via passed over the Hérault at that
point where, in the seventeenth century (about the year 1678), the
river was split into halves by a great flood, which formed the Île
des Bénédictins; the Roman bridge is on the western branch of this
divided river. Four arches exist, but originally there were nine, with
spans ranging from ten to twelve metres. The piers have cutwaters both
upstream and downstream, with circular bays nearly two metres high for
the relief of spate water. The facing stones are long, and the filling
is local volcanic rubble. This bridge was wrecked by a flood before the
year 1536.
The Via Domitiana was carried over the Orb, and then, following the
ancient road of Colombiers, it crossed the Capestang by a Roman viaduct
called the Pons Selmis or Pontserme, which in 1430 was repaired with
500 quarters of stone 2½ pans long by 1¼ pans thick and wide. It was
a tremendous viaduct, its length being 1500 metres; the width did not
exceed three metres. In the sixteenth century it fell in for want
of repair. At the present time only an isolated arch remains, with
fragments of two others. In a document of A.D. 782 this bridge is
called Pons Septimus.
Another Roman road left Nîmes in the direction of Larzac, and near
Lodève apparently it joined the ancient road from Saint-Thibéry to
Millau; at Sommières it crossed the Vidourle by a magnificent Roman
bridge which had no fewer than seventeen arches. To-day only eight
arches are visible, the others having been buried under a great
accumulation of soil on both banks.[69] Yet the Pont de Sommières,
though deprived of nine arches, has a high place among the Roman
monuments.
I have now to mention a Roman byway that branched out from the main
road on the right bank of the Vidourle, at a little distance from
Sommières; it ran toward Substantion, passing by Castries and joining
the Via Domitiana near Vendargues. At Boisseron it crossed the river
Bénovie, a small tributary of the Vidourle, by a bridge which to-day
is extant, though disfigured by modern work. It has a shelving parapet
and road, but we cannot describe it as a gabled bridge (p. 27). There
are five arches of unequal size, the piers on the upstream side have
cutwaters, and rectangular bays above the cutwaters ease the pressure
of floods.
Frank Brangwyn has drawn for us the wreck of a Roman bridge over the
Loire, at Brives-Charensac, in the neighbourhood of Puy; and the big
arch, which springs from water-level, is particularly interesting
because it has a double ring of voussoirs. The smaller arch belongs to
the Middle Ages, for it has a pointed shape. [Illustration: RUINS OF A
ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE LOIRE AT BRIVES-CHARENSAC, FRANCE]
We pass on to Spain, which has been called the land of bridges and
aqueducts. A pontist may live there for many years and be happy all
the time. Even a hurried author, who visits the antiquity of Spain
as a mere journalist, and who mimics vainly the travel books of
Alexandre Dumas, finds that the many bridges put some thoroughness
into his own work, acting as a drag on the far-sought and dear-bought
liveliness with which the million may be charmed. There is the case
of S. R. Crockett, who was commissioned to be lively and daring among
the Spaniards, so he published in 1903 “The Adventurer in Spain,”
a poor copy both of Borrow and of Dumas. “I would like to write a
book--copiously illustrated--upon Spanish bridges alone,” he told
his readers in a moment of zeal, adding briskly, “that is, if I
thought anybody could be found to buy it.” In one passage thought and
enthusiasm very nearly broke loose from the discipline of “a popular
style”:--
“Many bridges, too, there were--wonderful in a country where, as in
Spain, there are neither roads to travel upon nor waters to cross--nor
even, it may be added, travellers to cross them. Yet in our first
hour we had passed, we five apprentice Carlists, at least as many
admirable bridges--clean-shaped, practical, suited to the place and
to the landscape as a becoming dress fits a pretty woman. This is
a rare thing in bridges, and one which is almost never to be found
in new countries, where a bridge is invariably an outrage upon the
surrounding scenery. Queer bridges we found--triangular bridges,
unnecessary bridges, of wood and stone and straw and stubble--but
never ugly bridges.”
Mr. Crockett did not understand the rivers of Spain, many of which
after a storm leap from their dry beds into raging torrents, and give
rough-and-tumble lessons to bridge-builders. From Roman times to our
own, these freakish waterways have inspired noble work, that cannot
well be rated at too high a level. At Mérida alone a pontist can dream
over the past for several months, not only studying the remains of
three Roman aqueducts, upon which storks hold their parliaments, but
making friends with two Roman bridges, one of which puts the Roman
genius in scale with the Guadiana. It is a huge structure, not less
than 780 metres in length, with sixty-four arches of granite. Books
of reference mention eighty-one arches, but this number includes the
relief bays for floods tunnelled through the piers above the cutwaters.
Some writers believe that the greater bridge at Mérida was built under
Trajan, while others give it to Augustus, who founded Mérida as a
home of rest for the veteran soldiers of his last campaign. In 686
the Visigoths restored this bridge; in 1610 it was repaired by Philip
III; in 1812, during the siege of Badajoz, seventeen of the arches
were wrecked in order to close the river. At the northern end we find
a Roman castle, now in ruins, so we are able to study a battle-bridge
dating from those times when Rome turned wars into colonies.
The Roman bridges of Spain may be divided into five classes:--
1. Those which are low and many-arched, as at Mérida and Salamanca.
2. Those which have two or three arches with shelving parapets and
roads, as at Alcantarilla[70] and also near Villa del Rio;[71]
3. One or two with a single arch, as at Ronda;
4. Several in which Roman and Moorish masonry are combined, as at
Córdova; and
5. There is one Roman bridge so lofty that its parapet is separated
from the river-bed by a distance of more than fifty-nine metres. I
refer to the famous Puente Trajan over “the melancholy Tagus” at
Alcántara. This herculean masterpiece has six arches, his length is a
hundred and eighty-eight metres, and the roadway is eight metres wide
and quite level. A triumphal archway thirteen metres high stands in the
middle, but I regard its Roman origin as doubtful, as the design is not
quite in scale with the majesty of the bridge.
Who can say how many writers have tried to describe the Puente Trajan?
No description can summon up before the mind an image of his marvellous
power and nobility, for these qualities produce a feeling of awe and
take from us the wish to write. That he came from an architect and
was put together by common masons, huge stone after huge stone, is
a fact very hard to believe, as only two things in this bridge mark
the littleness of man: one is the archway, that fails to triumph
with a Roman spirit, and the other is an arch of modern workmanship.
Everything else recalls to my mind a good saying that fell from
Marshal Ney when he noticed in the aqueduct of Segovia the startling
difference between the craft of modern masons and the ancient Roman art
in thorough construction. In the fifteenth century some vaults of the
Segovian aqueduct were destroyed by wars, and Isabella the Catholic had
them rebuilt in the most careful manner. Yet the work was not careful
enough, for in less than three hundred years the reconstruction had to
be renewed, while the Roman art remained youthful and immovable. In
1808 Marshal Ney was greatly impressed by these facts, and, pointing to
the first arch of the modern portion, he said: “C’est ici que commence
le travail des hommes.” Even the people of Segovia feel that their
soaring aqueduct has in it something far beyond their reach, something
grand enough to be called superhuman. Custom has deadened their
admiration, of course, has enabled them even to build silly little
houses amid the shadows thrown by their antique monument; but yet they
doubt the human origin of such perfect masonry and give it to the
Evil One, who comforts himself with a tremendous deed of architecture
whenever he is greatly bored by the feeble gullibility of mankind.
[Illustration: THE ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT SEGOVIA IN SPAIN, WITH MODERN
HOUSES CLUSTERED AROUND ITS BASE]
Nothing is more difficult than to express in words this unhuman
character of the best Roman bridges, which reveal eternal manhood and
courage in the work done by the men of a day. For instance, here is the
Alcántara over the rocky gorge of the Tagus. He was erected for Trajan
by Caius Julius Lacer; and we know that Lacer was buried quite close to
his bridge, and that his tomb remains on the left bank. These facts
are trite and tame, but when we turn from them to the supreme bridge we
pass from bald history into a creation that seems miraculous.
“It is long before the eye can learn to grasp his[72] full
dimensions; all around him is rock and mountain, there is
nothing to give scale. We are warned of this ... by the
camera, for the lens will not look at so wide an angle....
Presently, as we peer over the parapet into the depths of
the gulf below us, we realise that there is a man down there
walking by the waterside, with a dog that seems to bark
though we cannot hear the sound. Slowly our eyes measure the
voussoir above which we are standing; it is a twelve-ton
block of granite; and the huge vault with its eighty such
voussoirs seems to widen and deepen beneath us as we gaze;
for the brook that it spans is the river Tagus, whose waters
have their source three hundred miles away.
“Thus hint by hint we have pieced together the astonishing
conclusion that the span of each of the two great central
arches is rather wider ... than the interior of the dome of
St. Paul’s; and that the height of the railway lines above
the Firth of Forth is twenty feet less than that of the road
above the Tagus! What must the scene be like in winter, when
the waters are foaming against the springer stones one
hundred and forty feet above their summer level! How vast
the strength of these massive piers which for eighteen
hundred years have defied the fury of the floods!
“Where now is the great _Via Lata_ that ran from Gades to
Rome? Where are the famous cities which it threaded on the
way? The vine and olive grow in the forum of Italica, and
the Miracles of Mérida are a dwelling for the stork. But
here at the wildest point of all its wild journey our eyes
may still behold a memorial which nature has assailed in
vain: ‘Pontem perpetui mansurum in sæcula mundi’;--the
monument of Caius Julius Lacer, more enduring even than
Wren’s.”[73]
Many persons believe that Wellington’s troops, in 1809, blew up one
of the smaller arches, but this is untrue. The history of the ruined
arch has been given by Larousse. It was cut on two occasions. In 1213
the Saracens destroyed it, and Charles the Fifth rebuilt it in 1543.
Two hundred and sixty-five years passed, and then the French in 1808
were compelled by the policy of war to wreck the same arch, and I
have already described how Wellington bridged the gap with a netting
of ropes--a suspension bridge of ships’ cables--covered with planks
(p. 16). This temporary work was displaced by a wooden arch, which in
1818 was burnt down; and between this date and the Carlist wars no
restoration seems to have been attempted. “The Spaniards were long
content with a ferry,” says Mr. Wigram. But now they have renewed the
arch “in its native granite, a feat of which they are justly proud.
Only, seeing that no cement at all was used in the original building,
it was really a little too bad of them to insist upon pointing _all_
the joints!” True; but the workmen were modern, not Roman, and it was
humility on their part to advertise their cement, their most evident
strength.
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT ZARAGOZA, PARTLY ROMAN]
The Moorish words _Al Kántarah_ mean THE BRIDGE, and we know that the
Titanic masterpiece of Julius Lacer has but few rivals. Let us put it
side by side with the most stately bridges at Isfahan in Persia, whose
august charm is not so masculine (p. 268); then we do honour to the
finest pontine architecture in the world. The Alcántara is a King, a
Cæsar, while the two Persian achievements are Amazon Queens.
Several bridges in Spain have the honorary title of being Roman, either
because they exhibit a combination of Roman and Moorish masonry like
the sixteen-arched example at Córdova, or because they may have in them
some Roman workmanship, like the Puente de Piedra over the Ebro at
Zaragoza, which has seven arches and six very massive piers, far too
ungainly to be Roman. Indeed this bridge dates from 1437, but it was
built on a classical site, and on Roman foundations. Some houses give
interest to the upstream side of the piers, but their roofs do not rise
above the level of the parapet.
As for the bridge over the Guadalquivir at Córdova, it is more Moorish
than Roman, for most of the Roman arches were destroyed by the eighth
century, and they were reconstructed by the Arabs, who established
themselves at Córdova in 711. Recently this bridge has been so much
repaired that it looks almost new. A big tower, very Moorish in style,
the Calahorra, keeps guard at the end remote from the town; and the
city entrance has a worn classic gateway and an elevated statue of
Saint Raphael, the patron saint of Córdova.
[Illustration: THE HUGE DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT CÓRDOVA IN SPAIN.
ORIGINALLY ROMAN, BUT REMODELLED BY THE MOORS IN THE NINTH CENTURY,
RECENTLY SO MUCH REPAIRED THAT LOOKS ALMOST NEW]
III
A few remarks must be made on the technique of Roman bridges and
aqueducts. Vitruvius mentions a method known as _opus quadratum_
in which stones were put in regular courses of headers[74] and
stretchers[75]; they were big stones, about two feet by four feet and
two feet high, as in the Marcian Aqueduct dating from B.C. 145.[76]
Each stone was bordered with a draft cut one and a half inches wide,
and the middle surface was roughed with a pick. This technique may be
studied in the aqueducts at Segovia and Tarragona. The arches were set
back at their springing behind the imposts, leaving ledges upon which
the scaffolds rested.
Not all the Roman aqueducts were of stone. The one named after Nero was
in brickwork of the finest kind; and another, the Alexandrine, that
brought water to the Thermæ of Alexander Severus, was faced with bricks
over concrete. At Minturnæ, a town of the Volci, a decorative effect
was given to the wall surfaces by means of coloured tufa arranged
in geometrical patterns. This is enough to show that the virile
conservatism of Rome did not stereotype building methods.
Many persons believe that the Romans built aqueducts because they were
unacquainted with the hydraulic principle that water in a closed pipe
finds its own level. Yet Vitruvius gives an account of the leaden pipes
that distributed water in Roman towns; and Pliny says that this piping
was used very often for rising mains to carry water to the upper floors
of houses. But lead pipes might burst, and they were costly; it was
cheaper to build aqueducts, for their materials belonged to the State
and slave labour was in vogue.[77]
Finally, we should pay attention to the Roman aqueducts because they
were an apprenticeship in the building of lofty and daring arches. In
the Anio Vetus, for example, which dates from about the year B.C. 272,
some of the arches rise to a height that exceeds ninety feet. And any
architect who conceived and brought to completion a fine aqueduct, such
as the Pont du Gard, or the wonderful structure at Segóvia, deserved to
take rank with Caius Julius Lacer. No problem of bridge construction
would have baffled his matured knowledge.
It is said that the earliest vaulted bridge of the Romans was erected
under the elder Tarquin, about six hundred years before the Birth of
Christ. Emiland Gauthey says, for example, “Pont Salaro, à Rome, sur
le Teverone. Cet ouvrage, composé de trois arches en plein cintre, de
16,6 à 21 mètres, et de deux arches plus petites, de 6,8 mètres, fut
élevé sous Tarquin l’ancien, six cents ans avant J. C.” Yet there is no
evidence to justify this dogmatism. The bridge may have been a timber
one, like the Pons Sublicius. It carried the Via Salaria over the Anio
(_Teverone_) about two and a half miles from Rome, and was called
usually the Pons Salarus. Livy speaks of it under another name, Pons
Anienis, and makes it the theatre of an immortal fight, the one between
Manlius and a gigantic Gaul, B.C. 361. In single combat Manlius killed
the barbarian, and took a chain (_torques_) from the dead body, and put
it around his own neck, as a proof of his victory, winning by this act
the surname of Torquatus.
The Pons Salarus does not appear again in early history. By the
year B.C. 361 it may have been made into an arched bridge of stone,
though it was not till B.C. 313 that the first aqueduct to Rome was
constructed. In any case, however, we learn from an inscription, which
Sir William Smith accepted as authentic, that the Pons Salarus was
rebuilt in the sixth century A.D., by Narses, general and statesman,
in the reign of Justinian. If in this reconstruction any earlier work
was preserved, we must look for it in the smallest arches described
by Gauthey, for we find narrow spans in the earliest Roman aqueducts.
Those of the Marcian are only eight metres. The Ponte Salaro existed
till 1867, when it was blown up during a panic caused by Garibaldi’s
march to Rome. A fortified castle stood above one side of the central
arch, rising from the footway, whose width was more than eight metres.
The bridge was about a hundred metres long, and its vaults were built
with exceedingly heavy stones remarkable for their bossage work. A
woodcut of this late Roman bridge is given by Professor Fleeming
Jenkin, but it differs from the illustration in Emiland Gauthey’s
“Traité de la Construction des Ponts,” Paris, 1809-16, Vol. I.
[Illustration: PONTE ROTTO AT ROME, ANCIENTLY THE PONS PALATINUS OR
SENATORIUS]
There has been so much controversy over the antique bridges at Rome
that the steadiest head becomes giddy while reading Palladio, Becker,
Bunsen, Piranesi, Sir William Smith, and other experts. Perhaps we may
be on safe ground when we step delicately on tiptoe into the historic
environment of the Pons Palatinus, a bridge which seems to have been
erected in the year B.C. 179.[78] A good part of this bridge was
rebuilt in the time of Pope Gregory XIII (1572-85), but in 1598 it was
wrecked by a terrible flood, and people began to speak of it as the
Ponte Rotto, or broken bridge. From Palladio’s book on architecture,
printed at Venice in 1570, we learn that the Pons Palatinus, or
Senatorius, was known also as the Ponte Santa-Maria, so Rome must have
been horrified when a classic bridge recently dedicated to the Virgin
was overthrown by a spate, which spared the Pons Cestius and the Pons
Fabricius.
The arches of this bridge were rather more than twenty-four metres in
span, and their large archivolts were boldly prominent. The piers,
about eight metres thick, were protected by angular cutwaters, and
above each cutwater was a tall niche flanked by pilasters whose
capitals touched the broad cornice that framed the spandrils in a
vigorous manner. Each spandril was ornamented with a sea-horse carved
in relief; and this decoration was foiled by the plain, deep parapets
whose horizontal lines were diversified here and there by a projection.
Brangwyn’s drawing of the Ponte Rotto gives all the architectural
character, and we see that this bridge was a great Roman citizen,
manly and brave and noble. Further, when we speak of any bridge as
virile as this one arch, we have a right to use masculine pronouns,
“he” and “his” and “him.” The trivial word “it” is a feeble neutrality
that belongs to a great many bridges, both ancient and modern; but a
Cæsarian achievement like the Pons Palatinus, or the Pont du Gard, or
the Puente Trajan at Alcántara, takes rank among the rare deeds that
do honour to a splendid manhood; and this we should recognise in our
pronouns.
Palladio says that in his time, from 1518 to 1580, three other bridges
over the Tiber, at Rome, were in good preservation. Let us take a
glance at them:--
1. The Pons Ælius, called then, as now, the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, built
by Ælius Hadrianus, who reigned from A.D. 117 to 138, and who erected
his bridge as a passage over the Tiber to his own mausoleum, which
forms the groundwork of the present castle of St. Angelo. An earlier
bridge connected the Vatican and its neighbourhood with that part
of the city which Caligula and Nero had beautified with gardens;
and remains of it still exist near S. Spirito. The date of its
disappearance I do not know, but in the days of Procopius, the sixth
century of the Christian era, the Pons Ælius was the only communication
between the city and the Vatican district. Either legend or truth says
that the Ælius had a bronze cover upheld by forty-two pillars. If this
gleaming roof ever existed (and writers should be afraid of pretty
details in ancient history), it must have been damaged very much when
the parapets were broken down in the fifteenth century. This accident
was caused by a great crowd that lost control of itself on the bridge,
when thronging to St. Peter’s to receive the Pope’s benediction. At
last the parapets gave way, and ninety-two persons were either drowned
or crushed to death. Long afterwards, as we know, Giovanni L. Bernini
(1598-1680) designed balustrades of iron and stone, but dwarfed them
with ten huge statues commissioned by Pope Clement IX (p. 324). The
figures of St. Peter and St. Paul at the city entrance were put up
by Clement VII. The bridge itself--or himself, shall we say?--has a
technical inspiration akin to that of the Pons Palatinus; but there is
less ornament, and above the cutwaters, instead of tall niches, we find
rectangular pillars with plain capitals, upon which Bernini erected
pedestals for his “breezy angels.”
2. The Pons Fabricius, connecting Rome on the city side with the Insula
Tiberina. In very early times this island in the Tiber was united to
each bankside by a bridge, and hence it was called _Inter Duos Pontes_.
The present Pons Fabricius was either founded or restored by L.
Fabricius, curator viarum in B.C. 62, as appears from the inscription
on it, and from Dion Cassius. It is mentioned by Horace as a bridge
very attractive to suicides:--
... jussit sapientem pascere barbam
Atque a Fabricio non tristem ponte reverti.
Since Palladio’s time, if not from a much earlier date, the Pons
Fabricius has been known as the Ponte Quattro Capi, because its
entrance from the left bank has a protective emblem, a quadrupled head
of Janus, the guardian deity of gates, and a divinity with many other
occupations, all very alert and troublesome. So we must add this pagan
emblem to the other symbols of religious faith with which bridges
have been sanctified. In 1680 the Pons Fabricius was repaired by Pope
Innocent XI. There are two arches, each with a span of 25, 34 metres;
and there used to be two other arches, only 3, 50 metres wide, pierced
through the abutments, but they have disappeared among the houses on
each bankside. The bridge in its greatest width measures a little more
than 15 metres. It has a bold cornice ornamented with mutules, and its
relief bay for spate water is flanked by pilasters. M. Degrand says
of the Pons Fabricius: “C’est le premier pont dans lequel les têtes
des voûtes ne forment pas des demi-circonférences: l’intrados est un
arc de cercle de 25 m. de rayon et de 20 m. de flèche.” Here we find a
starting-point for the lovely arch invented at Avignon by Saint Bénézet
(p. 81).
3. The Pons Cestius, on the other side of the island, known to-day, and
in Palladio’s time, as Ponte S. Bartolommeo. Yet its inscription, which
is mentioned by Canina and by Sir William Smith, speaks of it as Pons
Gratianus, and commemorates its repair by Valentinian, Valens, and
Gratian. It has but one arch, nearly a metre less in span than those
of the Pons Fabricius. These two bridges, according to Piranesi, were
founded in a very remarkable manner, on reversed arches built under
water. Gauthey gives two drawings of this construction, but he does not
guarantee the truth of Piranesi’s details.
Five other antique bridges crossed the Tiber at or near Rome, but
Palladio found nothing more of them than a few remnants. Already I
have spoken of two, the Pons Sublicius and its understudy (p. 140). On
the left bank, facing the church of S. Spirito, Palladio saw remains
of the Pons Triumphalis; but Piranesi and Bunsen do not agree with
Palladio. They place the Pons Triumphalis beyond the Pons Ælius, and
Sir William Smith thinks it probable that the remains near S. Spirito
belong to a bridge which the _Mirabilia_ names Pons Neronianus, and
which ancient topographers describe as Pons Vaticanus. Then there was
the Janiculine bridge upon the foundations of which, between 1471 and
1484, Pope Sixtus IV had erected the Ponte Sisto. As the Janiculine
bridge went from the Janiculum to the Porta Aurelia, it was known also
as Pons Aurelius; and in the Middle Ages it seems to have been called
Pons Antoninus. As for the Ponte Molle, anciently the Pons Milvius, it
belonged to the Flaminian Way, crossing the Tiber beyond the walls of
Rome, a mile and a half outside the city. Its founder was said to be
the earlier Æmilius Scaurus, who died about eighty-five years before
the Birth of Christ. Yet it certainly existed in B.C. 207, for Livy
relates how the people poured out of Rome as far as the Milvian bridge
in order to meet the messengers who brought tidings of the defeat of
Hasdrubal. This may have been a timber bridge, and Æmilius Scaurus may
have displaced it for a stone bridge during his consulship, B.C. 110.
Only a few fragments of the Pons Milvius existed in Palladio’s time;
and so the Ponte Molle now extant has a false reputation of being
Roman. In fact, it is a very poor structure, badly designed and very
uncouth.
IV
There was in Italy a Roman bridge built of white Istrian stone that
Palladio admired much more than any other; indeed, he admired it too
much, for he copied it in most of his pontine architecture, as if he
had no right to make use of his own originality! And since his time
many architects have cribbed from the same shining model, the Ponte
Augustus over the Ariminus, at Rimini. Two Roman bridges are found in
the neighbourhood of this town, one with seven arches and one with
five; both date from the same great era, and in both the roadway is
not carried through on the same level, but has an ascent at each end,
like the two bridges of Roman origin at Vicenza. It was the bridge
with five arches that Palladio preferred at Rimini, and his fondness
for it--or, rather, for _her_, as this Roman bridge has a charm
somewhat feminine--is approved by recent experts, and notably by R.
Phené Spiers and M. Degrand. She is a bijou among bridges, and not a
male prodigy, like the Puente Trajan. Her arches are small in span,
ranging from 8m.77 to 7m.14, according to Gauthey,[79] the narrower
ones being at the sides, and the three larger bays in the middle.
Their form is semicircular, and their springing does not rise from low
water-level, like that of the arches in the Roman bridge at Mérida; it
is placed four or five metres[80] above low water, and this planning
adds lightness and grace to a fortunate design. As usual, the piers
are too heavy, their thickness being about equal to a half of the
adjacent voids; they are protected by very vigorous cutwaters that
break the current with angular wedges of ninety degrees. The spandrils
are decorated with niches, and every niche is flanked by pilasters
carrying entablature and pediment. A beautiful cornice supported by
modillions crowns this bridge, which was begun by Augustus and finished
by Tiberius.
[Illustration: PONTE MAGGIORE OVER A RAVINE OF THE TRONTO AT
ASCOLI-PICENO IN ITALY; BUILT IN THE MIDDLE AGES, BUT ROMAN IN STYLE]
Brangwyn is fascinated by the bridges at Ascoli-Piceno, the Asculum
Picenum of the Romans, that gleams on a terrace dominating the Tronto,
about twenty miles from Porto Ascoli on the Adriatic. The town is
defended by ravines, across which four great bridges are thrown. The
Ponte di Porta Cappucina is a Roman bridge, a fine example with a
single arch of 71 ft. span; and the Ponte de Cecco is Roman. It has two
arches and belongs to the Via Salaria. As for the Ponte Maggiore and
the Ponte Cartaro, they are mediæval, but the former is an adaptation
from Roman aqueducts, and in the latter there appear to be some traces
of antique craftsmanship. All these great viaducts are marvellously
constructed, for they resisted the earthquake that shook Ascoli in
1878.
V
Very little is known about the Eastern bridges constructed by the
Romans. In Jebb’s “By Desert Ways to Baghdad” an illustration is given
of a Roman bridge over the Tigris at Diarbekr; and on the same river,
at Hassan, between Diarbekr and Mosul, there are ruined piers of
another Roman bridge. Again, at Shushter, in Persia, we find a dike and
a bridge ascribed to the Roman Emperor Valerian, whom Shapur the First
took prisoner at Edessa, A.D. 260. The dike is called the Band-i-Mizan,
the bridge the Pul-i-Kaisar. But if Valerian helped to build these
huge monuments, very little Roman work now remains; seventy yards of
dike and bridge were swept away in 1885; and the Pul-i-Kaisar has been
rebuilt several times. Indeed, as Brangwyn’s pen-drawing shows, the
arches (there are forty in all) differ in style as well as in size and
material.
[Illustration: THE PUL-I-KAISAR AT SHUSHTER IN PERSIA. ITS LENGTH IS
560 YARDS, AND ITS ROADWAY IS 7 YARDS WIDE]
“Persian tradition has it that Ardashir (either Artaxerxes of the old
Persian kings or Ardashir of the Sassanians) built the first dike
across the river Karun in order to raise the water of the river to the
level of the Darian canal. The dike became destroyed and was renewed
under the Sassanian Shapur I, by Roman workmen sent for by Valerian,
who had been captured by the Persian king in 260. That Valerian had
a part in constructing these remarkable works does not rest upon any
historical basis; we may, however, believe that the Sassanian Ardashir,
or his son Shapur I, finding that the river, with its bed in friable
soil, was daily getting lower and finally threatened to leave the
town and the Mian-do-ab district dry by not filling the Darian canal,
engaged Roman workmen. The Gerger canal was cut and the river diverted
from west to east of the town. The old river then became emptied and
its bed was raised and paved with huge flags, to prevent further
erosion and washing away of the soil and a consequent fall of the
river. Then the Band-i-Mizan and the great bridge were erected....”[81]
In every chapter of this monograph other references to Roman work will
be found.
FOOTNOTES:
[63] If Rousseau walked along the three tiers of this
bridge-aqueduct, then he had what climbers call “a
good head,” for there is but little space between
the piers and a most unpleasant fall into the river
Gardon. Most of us have passed over the top, leaving
Alpinists to explore the rest of this wonderful
structure.
[64] “Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his
Life.” Edited by his Wife. 1879. Vol. II, pp. 176-7.
[65] Sir William Smith, in his great “Dictionary of Greek
and Roman Geography,” gives a detailed account of the
stonework. “The stone of this bridge is a yellowish
colour. Seen under the sun from the west side, the
bridge has a brightish yellow tint, with patches of
dark colour, owing to the weather. The stone in the
highest tier is a concretion of shells and sand, and
that in the lower tiers appears to be the same. In
the stones in the highest tier there are halves of a
bivalve shell completely preserved. The stone also
contains bits of rough quartzose rock, and many small
rounded pebbles. In floods the Gardon rises 30 ft.
above its ordinary level, and the water will then
pass under all the arches of the lowest tier. The
piers of this tier show some marks of being worn by
the water. But the bridge is still solid and strong,
a magnificent monument of the grandeur of Roman
conceptions, and of the boldness of their execution.”
[66] Later we shall see that Perronet, a famous
bridge-builder of the eighteenth century, used iron
clamps for this purpose.
[67] I believe these measurements to be strictly accurate,
unlike those in many books of reference.
[68] Let me add to this account a few details from Sir
William Smith’s “Dictionary of Greek and Roman
Geography.” “It is generally said that the bridge is
entirely built of stones, without mortar or cement.
The stones of the two lower tiers are without cement;
but the arches of the highest tier, which are built
of much smaller stones, are cemented. At the north
end of the aqueduct the highest tier of arches and
the water channel are higher than the ground on
which the aqueduct abuts, and there must have been a
continuation of small arches along the top of this
hill; but there are no traces of them, at least near
the bridge. On the opposite or south side the aqueduct
abuts against the hill, which is higher than the level
of the channel. There is no trace of the hill having
been pierced; and an intelligent man, who lives near
the bridge, says that the aqueduct was carried round
the hill, and that it pierced another hill further on,
where the tunnel still exists....”
[69] See Grangent, Durand et Durant, “Description des
Monumens Antiques du Midi de la France,” Paris, 1819,
I, p. 113, and Plate XL; see also “Géographie Générale
du Département de l’Hérault,” published by the Société
Languedocienne, Montpellier, 1905. Vol. III, part II.
p. 310.
[70] Two arches over the Salado river, some thirty miles
below Seville (p. 367).
[71] Between Córdova and Andujar, over a small tributary
flowing into the Guadalquivir from the south. This
bridge has three arches, one a good deal larger than
the others; bays are driven through the spandrils for
spate water to pass through. The masonry consists
of stone in big blocks, and the craftsmanship has
a very peculiar feature: the voussoirs are notched
or joggled one into the other, like those in the
Elizabethan bridge at Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.
This technique is a thing to be remembered: it occurs
in no other Roman bridge that is known to me. The
notching adds much to the endurance of an arch ring,
yet it has never entered into the technical routine of
bridge-builders. Perhaps the dovetailing of the stones
has been looked upon as too costly, for it needs much
skill and care and time. Mr. Edgar Wigram drew my
attention to this little-known Roman bridge, and to
the one at Alcantarilla (p. 367).
[72] This bridge is a soldier, and claims masculine
pronouns.
[73] “Northern Spain,” by Edgar T. A. Wigram, London, 1906,
pp. 231-2.
[74] The stones laid end-foremost.
[75] The stones laid at full length.
[76] There is conflicting evidence on the date of this
monument. Pliny attributed the Marcian Aqueduct to
Ancus Marcius, whereas Strabo and Frontinus conjecture
that the building got its name from Marcius Rex, a
pretor, who in the year B.C. 145, or thereabouts,
restored some ancient aqueducts whose first
construction did not go back beyond the year 272 B.C.
Sextus Julius Frontinus, governor of Britain (A.D.
75-78), was the author of two monographs that are
still extant--one on the Roman aqueducts, and another
on the art of war. He was nominated _Curator Aquarum_,
or Superintendent of the Aqueducts, in 97, nine years
before his death. Sir William Smith tells us that the
earliest aqueduct was not older than the year B.C.
313. In earlier times the Romans had recourse to the
Tiber and to wells sunk in the city. During the sixth
century of the Christian era there were fourteen
aqueducts at Rome.
[77] Mr. R. Phené Spiers has written admirably on these
technical matters.
[78] I take it that the Pons Palatinus, or Senatorius,
mentioned by Palladio, was the bridge called by
ancient writers the Pons Aemilius, whose piers were
founded in the censorship of M. Aemilius Lepidus
and M. Fulvius Nobilior, B.C. 179; the arches were
finished some years later, when P. Scipio Africanus
and L. Mummius were censors. Becker and Canina assume
that the Pons Aemilius became the Ponte Rotto, and
Degrand and others identify the Palatine bridge of
Palladio with the Ponte Rotto.
[79] Degrand says 10m.56 and 8m.1. R. Phené Spiers gives 27
ft. for the spans of the three central arches, and the
side ones about 20 ft.
[80] Gauthey says four, Degrand says five.
[81] Sir A. Houtum-Schindler, C.I.E., “Encyclopædia Brit.,”
1911, article “Shushter.”
[Illustration: DURHAM]
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
OLD BRIDGES, EUROPEAN, PERSIAN AND CHINESE
I
Mediæval England was a forrestial country, and many a roadside wood
gave shelter to footpads and bandits, who planned ambuscades, and
amused themselves with rape and rapine and murder. If they were less
ready to cut a throat than to broach a tun of wine[82] the terror
inspired by their evil reputation told lies that duped everybody.
In fact, travellers were pitied by Acts of Parliament, but they had
greater faith in the Church, which enabled them to renew their failing
courage with frequent prayer at shrines by the wayside. Saint after
saint was called to their aid; and from the time of St. Dunstan the
Church reckoned the building of bridges among the most urgent duties of
charity. Some good must have been done, yet rivers and journeys were
feared very much; fords were common, and an ambush near a ford was
a peril difficult to encounter. In the “Ballad of Abingdon Bridge,”
which dates from the time of Henry V, we see what fords were like and
how their guardians behaved to travellers. “Another blissed besines
is brigges to make,” the rustic poet cries, thinking of unfortunate
wayfarers who were washed from their saddles into a flooded river:--
And som oute of their sadels flette [fall] to the grounde,
Wente forthe in the water wist no man whare,
Fyve wekys after or they were i founde,
Their kyn and their knowlech [acquaintance] caught them up
with care.
And this life-tax claimed by rivers was not the only trouble. The
keepers of a ford knew no pity, but got their toll in relentless ways,
taking bread from the beggar’s wallet and “a hood or a girdel” from
“the pore penyles.” Very often, too, great woods encircled riverside
towns and manors, so that outlaws after dark could steal up close to
the houses and the bridge; it was then that pilgrims welcomed with the
greatest relief the cresset-lights that glimmered from some friendly
building on the bridge--from a chapel, or a defensive gateway, or a
small bickering windmill, or a good watermill buttressed against a pier
and rising high above the parapet.
And now we must pass in review six old species of bridge:--
1. The Housed Bridge, such as we find in Brangwyn’s beautiful
monochrome of the quaint bridge at Kreuznach, in Germany.
[Illustration: OLD BRIDGE WITH HOUSES AT KREUZNACH, ON THE RIVER NAHE,
IN PRUSSIA. AN OLD MILL BRIDGE, SEEMINGLY]
2. The Shrined Bridge, as in Brangwyn’s alert impression of the Gothic
bridge at Elche, in Spain.
3. The Bridge of Mills, as represented in the very romantic sketch
of the old and broken bridge at Millau, in Southern France, at the
confluence of the Tarn with the Dourbie. Another example, much
modernised, exists in France, at historic Meaux, about thirty-two miles
from Paris.
4. The Chapelled Bridge, as at Wakefield, and Rotherham, and Pisa, and
Avignon (see Frontispiece), and elsewhere.
5. The War-Bridge, which in Brangwyn’s art receives the most varied and
vigorous recognition. Never before have they been studied so completely
by an artist.
6. The Bridge of Shops, as at Venice in the Rialto.
II
We ought not to be surprised that mediæval bridges were connected in
a self-evident manner with all the principal motive-powers of social
life. They were excellent places where kings and nobles could show off
their military ambition, and where the Church could be active in good
work done for the safety of wayfaring. Shops on a bridge were valued
because of the continuous traffic that brought trade to their doors;
and a few private houses on a market bridge gratified a middleclass
vanity, that took pride in paying the higher rents of a business
thoroughfare. To live on Old London Bridge was a distinction; to be a
tradesman on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, or on a timber bridge in
Paris, was to be prosperous, for no bridge of shops was wide enough to
be unpopular among those who had money to spend. Can anyone explain why
the feminine joy of going to market has ever been most adventurous in
narrow streets, or in short streets of a medium width?[83]
Whatever the reasons may be, here is a point to be remembered when
we study such a bridge as the Rialto, at Venice, which carries three
little streets on an arch twenty-four feet six inches high, and
ninety-one feet in span, with a soffit about seventy-two feet wide.
To-day the Rialto shops are trivial and mean, but in the great time of
the Republic they displayed the most luxurious oddments of fashion,
and delighted the idle rich. Very often it is said that the Rialto
was built from a design by Michelangelo, as if this wonderful master
of a tragic and supreme dignity could have amused his leisure with
such a pretty whim in ornate building! Modern criticism shows a very
poor taste when it repeats this old fallacy, or when it describes the
Rialto as a masterpiece of architecture dating from the Renaissance. In
comparison with the bridges of Isfahan, which belong to the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the Rialto is a mere toy. Its origin is the
subject of Rondelet’s “Essai Historique sur le Pont de Rialto,” where
we watch a great competition between Palladio and Antonio da Ponte.
Palladio was the greater man, but the Senate rejected his designs,[84]
and in 1588 Antonio da Ponte built his arched scaffold or centring and
laid the first blocks of Istrian marble.
In Brangwyn’s picture the Rialto is gay enough to belong to the
joyous times of the Republic; and by comparing this picture with the
pen-drawings of the bridges at Isfahan, in Persia, it is easy to note
the difference in spirit between two cities that attained in the same
age their greatest prosperity. In 1590, Isfahan became the capital of
Persia; and by this year Venice had recovered from the destructive fire
of 1577, and was beautifying herself in many ways, as with the Piazza
di San Marco.
[Illustration: THE RIALTO, VENICE DESIGNED IN 1588 BY ANTONIO DA PONTE,
ARCHITECT]
At Isfahan no fewer than five old bridges cross the Zendeh Rud, the
most ancient being the Pul-i-Marnun, which was built by Shah Tahmasp,
who reigned from 1523 to 1575. It is not a great bridge, so it stands
apart from the Pul-i-Khaju and the vast Bridge of Ali Verdi Khan, which
undoubtedly are among the finest bridges in the world. Their beauty
has such a gracious power, such brightness and grandeur, that even the
Roman bridge at Alcántara may seem to rival it unsuccessfully. Brangwyn
has drawn these Persian masterpieces, but the Pul-i-Khaju alone
belongs to this section on housed bridges--except in some architectural
points common to both. Their arches are Moorish, and their builders may
have borrowed from the Romans an idea which has come down to our time
in at least one antique monument, namely, the ruined aqueduct at Lyon,
not far from Saint Irénée. Through the piers of this aqueduct arches
are cut transversely, so as to form a side arcade all along the length
of the structure. These lateral arches vary much in size, and some of
them have been built up. I know not for what purpose they were used;
but they lighten the piers, which are uncommonly massive. It is this
arrangement--a vaulted gallery cut through the sides of piers--that we
find also at Isfahan in the two historic bridges of the Sefi kings.
[Illustration: THE PUL-I-KHAJU OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN, PERSIA]
The Pul-i-Khaju has been described many times, but Lord Curzon’s
account of it is by far the most valuable:--
“The Pul-i-Khaju is shorter than the bridge of Ali Verdi
Khan, being only 154 yards in length, owing to a
contraction in the bed of the river, which here flows over
a ledge of rock. The structure consists, in fact, of a
bridge superimposed upon a dam. The latter is built of
solid blocks of stone and is pierced by narrow channels,
the flow in which can be regulated by sluices. This great
platform is broken on its outer edge, the stones being
arranged in the form of steps descending to the
river-level. Upon the platform or dam repose the
twenty-four main arches of the bridge, which is of brick,
and the chief external features of which are four
projecting two-storeyed hexagonal pavilions, one at each
corner, and two larger pavilions of similar shape in the
centre, a third storey being erected upon the roof of the
more westerly of the two. As in the case of the Julfa
Bridge,[85] the basement is pierced by a vaulted passage,
running the entire length of the bridge through the piers
on the top of the dam, and crossing the successive channels
by stepping-stones six feet deep. The main roadway of the
bridge, twenty-four feet broad, is also flanked by a
covered gallery on each side, leading to the hexagonal
pavilions, and opening by a succession of arches on to the
outer air. Finally, there is a terrace-walk at the top,
which was originally protected by a double parapet and
screens. The pavilions were once adorned with rich
paintings and gilding, and with panels containing
inscriptions. The decoration is now more jejune and vulgar,
and the spandrils of the arches are mostly filled in with
modern tiles. In olden days this bridge was a favourite
resort in the evening, where the young gallants of Isfahan
marched up and down, or sat and smoked in the embayed
archways overlooking the stream. Now it is well-nigh
deserted save in the springtime, when the snows melt in the
mountains, and in a few hours the Zendeh Rud is converted
from a petty stream into a foaming torrent. Then the good
folk of Isfahan crowd the galleries and arcades of the
bridge, and shout with delight as the water first rushes
through the narrow sluices, then mounts to the level of the
causeway and spills in a noisy cascade down each successive
stairway or weir, and finally pours through the main
arches, still splitting into a series of cataracts as it
leaps the broken edges of the dam.”[86]
Such is the Pul-i-Khaju. Her architect’s name is unknown, but she dates
from the time of Shah Abbas II, who reigned between the years 1641
and 1666. Even in photographs she is a bridge of enchantment where
from time to time all the tired geniuses of the world should go for a
romantic holiday; the pavilions certainly await the coming of worthy
guests, who would save them from the vulgar decoration which has
displaced the old paintings and enrichments. That vaulted arcade in the
basement, running transversely through all the piers, and crossing the
channels by huge stepping-stones (one of the earliest bridges copied
by primitive man from Nature’s object-lessons), has a great historic
interest, though in pictures and photographs it attracts very little
attention. Was it suggested by a Roman model, or was it rediscovered
by the originality of a great architect? I have searched long for an
answer to these questions, but in vain.
Perhaps Old London Bridge at her best, after the building of None-such
House, in 1576, may have been as entertaining to the eye as is the
magic of the Pul-i-Khaju, though inferior to this masterpiece as a
work of art. The earliest representation of Old London Bridge comes to
us from the fifteenth century, in a miniature that graces the poems
of Charles d’Orléans.[87] It shows five piers much broader than the
adjacent voids, also a line of picturesque timber houses jutting out
from the parapet, and a great chapel of apsidal form, with wrought
pinnacles and two tiers of decorated windows. This Gothic church,
dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, rises from water-level to a height
exceeding that of the tallest house on the bridge.
In Howell’s “Londinopolis” (edition of 1657) it is said that during
King John’s reign, 1199-1216, a mayor of London, “being master workman
of the bridge, builded from the foundation the large chappel on the
bridge upon his own charges, which chappel was then endowed with two
priests and four clerks, beside chantries.” It was put on the east
side; there were two storeys, one with an entrance from the river, the
other with a porch on the roadway. So boat-farers had their own place
of worship on London Bridge, and they walked to their praying-stools
over a pavement of black and white marble. Both storeys were
brilliantly lighted; in the upper one there were eight windows.
The first architect of Old London Bridge, Peter Colechurch, “priest and
chaplain,” died in 1205, and was buried in the Chapel of St. Thomas,
just twenty-two years after Saint Bénézet was laid to rest in his
bridge chapel at Avignon. Between 1176 and 1183 Colechurch may have
had some correspondence with Bénézet, for both were heads of religious
bodies engaged at the same time on similar work. “Their letters to one
another would interest engineers,” remarks Professor Fleeming Jenkin,
as if engineers alone were attracted by Old London Bridge.
In 1176, when Colechurch prepared his designs, everybody was excited
about a great and very useful enterprise. The King, the clergy, the
citizens of London, even country-folk, endowed the bridge with lands
or sent money to hasten its completion. The Archbishop of Canterbury
subscribed a thousand marks. During the sixteenth century the list of
donors was still to be seen “in a table fair written for posterity,”
treasured in the chapel on the bridge.[88] Stow makes no reference to
the mayor who at his own expense built the chapel; he says only that
Colechurch was buried “in the chapel builded on the same bridge in the
year 1205.” Four years later the bridge was finished by three “worthy
merchants of London--Serle Mercer, William Almaine, and Benedick
Botewrite, principal masters of work.” Their director-in-chief was
a Frenchman, brother Isembert by name, whose magnificent bridge at
Saintes had delighted King John, and who was chosen to superintend
the finishing of Old London Bridge a little while before the death of
Colechurch.
In July, 1212, a terrific fire occurred on the bridge, beginning
at the Southwark end, but spreading to the houses at the north end
also; no fewer than 3000 persons lost their lives. Citizens gathered
at the north end to watch the spectacle, and were overtaken by the
swift-travelling flames and by panic also. Many jumped into the river
and were drowned; others were killed by falling timbers, and many were
scorched to death. Again and again, in after years, London Bridge and
her chapel were ravaged by fire; as in 1300, in 1471, in 1632, in 1666,
and in September, 1725.
Here is Stow’s picture of the houses:--
“The building was of timber, very substantial and beautiful,
for the houses were three stories high, besides the cellars,
which were within and between the piers, and over the houses
were stately platforms, leaded, with rails and ballasters
about them, very commodious and pleasant for walking and
enjoying so fine a prospect up and down the river, and some
had pretty little gardens with arbours.”
All this fine architecture was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but
a still better pile of buildings was put up, and now the houses were
separated by a roadway twenty feet wide. In earlier times the passage
between the houses ranged in width from twelve feet to fourteen. At
last, in 1756, every house on the bridge was pulled down, but the
chapel was granted a few years more of life. Guess why? Because some
vandal or other was willing to use the chapel as a warehouse. At about
the same time the chapel on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire, was a tobacco
shop. As for the merchant who leased the Chapel of St. Thomas à Becket,
he built a new ceiling with heavy beams that crossed each other; soon
he tired of his warehouse, and then--then the historic old fane was
destroyed. A city is like a board meeting--from time to time it has a
conscience.
Two other historic facts find a place here. In March, 1782, the right
of toll was discontinued, so that Londoners were separated from a
direct personal interest in the welfare of their bridge, just as free
education separates parents from their most sacred duties. Eight years
earlier, in 1774, the waterworks of little windmills were destroyed
by fire, after bickering for 192 years under the shadow of Old London
Bridge.
The end was drawing near. New London Bridge was begun on March 15th,
1824. George Rennie made the designs after studying the Bridge of
Augustus at Rimini, and his brother, Sir John Rennie, directed the
workmen on a site 200 feet west of the Old Bridge; just as Peter
Colechurch crossed the Thames a little west of the earliest known
timber bridge built by Londoners.[89] It took only seven years to carry
out the designs of Rennie, whereas Colechurch and his successor, the
Frenchman Isembert, were busy for thirty-three years. On August 1st,
1831, New London Bridge was opened by William IV, and by the second
year of Victoria’s reign the old bridge was dead and gone. It had taken
a long time to murder her, fragment by fragment, but yet she lived
almost as long as the first Westminster Bridge, designed by M. Labelye,
which lasted from 1750 to 1853.
[Illustration: NEW LONDON BRIDGE, DESIGNED BY GEORGE RENNIE, AND
CARRIED OUT BY HIS BROTHER, SIR JOHN RENNIE. OPENED TO THE PUBLIC IN
1831]
One purpose of Old London Bridge has been forgotten: she was an arcaded
dam, and she deepened the water for shipping on the eastern side.
According to Arber’s reprint of “Euphues and his England,” there were
twenty arches in all, “whereof each one is made of excellent freestone
squared, every one of them being three-score foote in height, and
full twenty in distance one from an other.” This latter statement is
incorrect. The arches ranged in width from 18 feet to 32 feet 6 inches,
and the piers varied in breadth from 25 to 34 feet; they were raised
on strong elm piles, covered with thick planks bolted together, and
they occupied not less than two-thirds of the waterway. Yet modern
engineers played the fool with this ancient breakwater. Several arches
were thrown into one large span, so the Thames poured through the
bridge with an increased and uneven force; the ground current developed
a scour that dug deep holes under the piers, and into these holes tons
of stuff were poured ineffectually, for the scour continued to undercut
the foundations. Even Labelye’s bridge at Westminster was affected very
much by this new devilry in the ground current of the Thames.
It was Euphues who described the old bridge as “a continuall streete,
well replenyshed with large and stately houses on both sides.” To-day
we have one bridge well replenished with houses (unless the vandalism
of trade has made a recent feast of it), but its architecture is not
large and stately. I refer to William Pulteney’s Bridge at Bath, an
experiment of the eighteenth century, when amateurs trifled with
architecture, and architects trifled with amateurs. The structure is
sedately prim and dull, but yet it is admirable, for it has tried to
renew in England a generative tradition that links every housed bridge
to the earliest lake-villages.
So I am glad to say that the crippled old buildings on the High Bridge
at Lincoln--a favourite subject of Peter de Wint--have been restored.
This work was done, and done very well, thirteen years ago, under the
direction of two architects, and a long account of the repairs, with a
full-page illustration, was published in “The Builder,” March 21, 1903.
The illustration shows the back view of the houses with the bridge
beneath and beyond. The restoration is conservative and excellent,
but time alone can mellow it from a thorough newness into a ripe
completeness. Even then it will be a poor little monument when compared
with its Florentine superior the Ponte Vecchio, which history gives to
Taddeo Gaddi and the fourteenth century.
The Ponte Vecchio has but one fault--the long and level roof, which
has two parallel lines of a most unpliant straightness. Why should an
architect put himself at odds with the curved witchery that Nature
gives to her sky-lines and horizons? In other respects the Ponte
Vecchio has a charming citizenship haunted by romance. Even the beaked
piers are not too large, though they are said to date from the year
1355. Perhaps they were remodelled by Renaissance art; certainly they
have a style not unlike that of the great Ammanati. As for the three
arches, they are well balanced, their roadway has a gentle slope, and
their shape goes about half-way between a cycloid and a surbased round
arch. The cycloid form appears in the arches of another Florentine
bridge, Ammanati’s masterpiece, the incomparable Ponte della Trinità.
Some of the many-windowed tiny cots that project from the parapet of
the Ponte Vecchio seem to be stuffy compromises between tombs and
homes; they would be fit resting-places for the occasional ghosts that
men of science welcome, after infinite hesitation unrelieved by humour.
But I regret always that from the Ponte Vecchio I can get no idea of
the effect made in nature by Old London Bridge. Is there extant any
bridge that helps us to realise the work of Colechurch and Isembert?
The once famous watermills at Meaux, in Brie, and the Pont du Marché
there, are somewhat of an aid in this matter. Brangwyn visited them in
1913, and was fascinated. Some writers say that the first watermills
at Meaux were built in the twelfth century; and on a recent photograph
taken from a picture I read: _Meaux, Les Moulins sur Pilotis, xii.
siècle_. But these mills disappeared before the year 1835, and they
belonged to the end of the fifteenth century, not to the twelfth.
Viollet-le-Duc put this date on record, together with the fact that the
bridge and its mills were entirely of wood.[90] In 1420 the English
captured Meaux, and they held it till 1438, when they were defeated
by the Constable de Richmont. Had they retained the little town till
the end of the century, we might venture to suppose that the timber
bridge and its wooden mills were built by our ancestors, in order to
keep themselves in mind of Old London Bridge. The modern mills are
many-storeyed places of business, and they stand very erect on stone
piers. To-day the Pont du Marché has eight stone arches, and a single
row of early timbered houses. I have four photographs of it, and in
each it is charming. Next summer I may see it in nature, but if a
pontist travelled to see all the bridges that attract him, he would
need a life of several hundred years and a river Pactolus to finance
his research.[91]
Is there any reason why England should not have a great bridge of
shops, or of watermills, or of houses? Let Brangwyn and Mr. Lutyens
collaborate, and then we shall have a masterpiece indeed! Here and
there we have a small bridge with a watermill close at hand; there is
one in Sussex between Midhurst and Easebourne, for example, but I know
not one that warms my patriotism with a glow of pride. Viollet-le-Duc
draws three charming pictures of French mill bridges which have
disappeared. There was the Pont aux Meuniers at Paris, that crossed the
great arm of the Seine below the Pont au Change, facing the Palais;
it resembled the Millers’ Bridge at Meaux. A great stone bridge at
Châlon-sur-Saône was decorated with round towers above the piers, and
between these towers, on the right of every arch, a little mill was
busy. This mediæval arrangement, so rich with a quaint citizenship,
lasted till the seventeenth century. Over the Loire at Nantes was
another picturesque bridge that united in itself the merits of many
good burgesses. Impudent houses with peaked roofs were balanced on the
piers and throve well as shops; a footway of wood was corbelled out
from the parapet; and between some of the piers windmills behaved like
human creatures, for the harder they toiled over the business of daily
bread, the more loudly they complained. Their noise implied that corn
was very hard to crush; and the reluctant movement of their revolving
wind-sails was an image of self-pity.
[Illustration: THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE AT VENICE, OVER THE CANAL OF ST.
GIOBBE. BRICK AND STONE. RENAISSANCE]
As mediæval towns of importance were encompassed by walls and defended
by castles, there was little free space; hence the building of a
new bridge was always a great event; it enlarged the civic life and
prepared a foundation for a new street or for a fresh line of defensive
works. Thus the Bridge of Saintes was a long line of fortifications
(p. 300), while the bridges of Paris were housed and populous, unlike
many a village where poor Jacques, in the midst of unceasing war, lived
the life of a hunted wolf. Unfortunately, the tenants of Paris bridges
wanted to thrive at their landlords’ expense, and at last they ruined
the landlords, who were bridges, not men, I am sorry to say. The great
corbels that supported the houses pressed too heavily on the spandrils;
caves and hiding-places were dug into the piers; and when the houses
were removed from the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont Saint-Michel, it was
found that every tenant had misused his home, even to the extent of
excavating secret chambers behind the haunches of an arch. For human
nature has ever claimed the privilege of doing justice to itself in
actions of foolish violence.
For instance, it is disgusting to read about the desecration thrust
upon English bridge chapels after the reign of Henry the Eighth.
As an example we can take the Chapel of St. Mary on Wakefield
Bridge, Yorkshire, a beautiful piece of Decorated Gothic dating
from the fourteenth century. After the Reformation it became many
profane things, including an old clothes shop, a warehouse, a den of
flax-dressers, a newsroom, a cheesecake house, a tailor’s shop, and
I know not what else; so “we think upon her stones, and it pitieth
us to see her in the dust.” At last--it was in 1847--an effort was
made to rescue her from further degradation: quite a big effort, for
it cost £3000, yet the cause had nothing to do with sport or with
self-advertisement. To raise so much money in the service of history
was a great achievement. But the chosen architect was less fortunate
than he might have been; he was one of those Victorian “restorers”
whose zeal at times was excessive. In a few months the Chapel of St.
Mary was rebuilt, almost, so thorough was the renovation. Even the
original front was torn off and carted to the grounds of Kettlethorpe
Park, where it still remains, I believe; and not enough care was shown
in the choice of building materials, for the new work was carried
out in Bath stone and Caen stone, which were much too soft for the
Wakefield atmosphere. Indeed, the new front perished so quickly that
in less than forty-five years a part of its detail looked more friable
than the ancient work at Kettlethorpe; and a second renovation became
necessary.
The subscriptions raised for these remodellings and repairs call to
mind the fact that in much earlier times Wakefield Bridge and its
chapel were objects of charity. For example, in 1391, the fourteenth
year of Richard II, William de Bayley, of Mitton in Craven, left _C sol
ad confirmacionem cantarie in Capella Sce Mariæ sup Pont de Wakefield_;
and a deed dated the 27th of September, 1454, the thirty-second year of
Henry VI, mentions a yearly dole of three shillings to be paid to the
bridge chapel at Wakefield. At an earlier date, in 1398, two chantries
were ordained in St. Mary’s Chapel, thanks to the generosity of William
Terry and Robert Heth, who obtained licences from Richard II “to give
and assign to two chaplains celebrating divine service in the chapel
of St. Mary, on Wakefield Bridge, lately built, ten pounds rent in
Wakefield, Stanley, Ossett, Pontefract, Horbury, Heckmondwike, Shafton,
Darfield, Preston, Jackling, and Frystone by the water.” Norrison
Scatcherd gives this quotation from a document in the archives of the
Hatfield family, but I know not what to say of it; for a charter of an
earlier date mentions a sum of £10 and two chaplains (p. 230).
However, the chapel is built on a little island in the river Calder,
and the plan is arranged below so as to offer the least resistance to
the river. “The extra width required for the chapel above is obtained
by corbelling out on each side, which gives a total external width
of about twenty feet. The total length is about forty-five feet. The
front towards the bridge is very elaborate, and is divided into five
ogee-headed compartments, with buttresses between. Three of these, the
centre and two ends, are doorways, the other two being panelled. Over
this is a series of five panels filled with sculpture representing the
Annunciation, the Birth of Jesus, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and
the Descent of the Holy Ghost on the Disciples. Surmounting the whole
are battlements; and a bold group of pinnacles at each end of the front
over the buttresses. Each side has three three-light windows, and the
east end has a large window of five lights; all have rich Decorated
tracery. A well-designed turret stands at the north-east angle, and
contains the staircase which communicates with the roof and crypt. On
the north, south, and east fronts is a panelled parapet, and there is
a canopied niche over the east windows. There was formerly a priest’s
house adjoining, but the last vestiges of it were removed in 1866....
The windows on the south and east are filled with stained glass. The
interior is in good repair, and is fitted up for service.”[92] And
service also is held there.[93]
Leland, who returned from his antiquarian tour in 1542, collected in
Wakefield a good many suppositions about the origin of St. Mary’s
Chapel. He was happy there, because a right honest man fared well for
“2 pens a meale.” On the east side of a fair bridge of stone, under
whose nine arches the Calder flowed, Leland was charmed to see a right
goodly chapel of Our Lady, with two cantuary priests founded in it,
by the townsmen, as some say; but, on the other hand, the Dukes of
York were taken as founders because they had obtained the mortmain. He
heard someone say that Edward IV’s father, or else the Earl of Rutland,
brother to Edward IV, “was a great doer of it,” for “a sore batell was
fought in the south feeldes of this bridge,” and in the flight of the
Duke of York’s party, either the duke himself, or his son the Earl of
Rutland, was slain a little above the bars, beyond the bridge, going up
into the town of Wakefield. “At this place is set up a cross in _rei
memoriam_.”
Very often to-day, as in Leland’s time, the Chapel of St. Mary is
supposed to have been founded later than 1460, partly to commemorate
the battle of Sandal Castle Field, now called the battle of Wakefield,
and partly as a monument to a boy of eighteen, poor Edmund Earl of
Rutland, second son of the Duke of York, who was murdered by the “black
Lord Clifford,” called the Butcher. Then a royal chantry seems to have
been founded in St. Mary’s Chapel, and endowed; but chantries were
founded often in bridge chapels, as we have seen in the case of London
Bridge (p. 217); and so we must not suppose that “chantry” and “chapel”
mean always the same thing. Moreover, in architectural character the
chapel belongs to about the time of Edward II, who died in 1327.
This was proved by Buckler, and in a charter of about 1358, dated
at Wakefield, Edward III settled “£10 per annum on William Kaye and
William Bull and their successors for ever to perform Divine Service in
a chapel of St. Mary newly built on the bridge at Wakefield.”[94]
Still, the precise date of the foundation is unimportant. Scatcherd
ascribes it to a time earlier than 1357, and dwells upon a resemblance
between St. Mary’s Chapel at Wakefield and Prior Crawden’s Chapel at
Ely, 1321-40; he is “almost persuaded” that they were built by the same
great architect, Alan de Walsingham.[95]
I chose the story of this bridge chapel as an instance of the
desecration thrust upon old English shrines after the Reformation
had let loose the creed of self into sect-making zealotry. In the
presence of fine art Puritans were often like starving dogs in the
presence of raw meat. Though every mediæval bridge without exception
was united to the Church by a Christian symbol, a cross or a crucifix,
yet the Puritans were so thorough in their fanaticism that only a
bridge here and there was allowed to keep even the stump of a smashed
cross. Some broken crosses were handed on to Victoria’s time, but
highway boards and their parapet repairs destroyed the stumps one by
one, as in the case of Ashford Bridge, Derbyshire. A few years ago
the stump of a cross had not yet been stripped from one Derbyshire
bridge, the Derwent packhorse bridge, but I dare not say that it still
remains. At any moment the vandalism of a “restoration” may remind
us that our highway boards ought to be guided and disciplined by
independent committees of architects and artists. Their work is far
less intelligent than that of the _Ponts et Chaussées_ in France. And
so, what with the ravaging hands of our roadway officials, and what
with the destructive sanctity of Puritans, our old bridges and their
religious adjuncts have suffered long and much and continually. Many
bridge chapels have been destroyed, as at Cromford, Doncaster, Ludlow,
Bideford, Richmond (Yorks), Leeds, Newcastle, Barnard Castle, Durham
(on the Elvet Bridge), Catterick, Bridgenorth, Bristol, Wallingford,
Bedford (St. Thomas’s Chapel, Bunyan’s gaol), and Droitwich, where the
high road passed through the chapel, and separated the congregation
from the reading-desk and from the pulpit! What a relic of old
wayfaring life! Yet it was cleared away as hateful to progress.
A small oratory remains on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire.
It is not quite on the same lines as the original structure, for in
the seventeenth century its roofing was altered into a sort of dome
built with stone. It is a “housing,” a tiny place for a passing prayer,
not a chapel; and this class of bridge oratory has become so uncommon
that I doubt whether another exists. As Mr. Emanuel Green has said,
it “is now perhaps unique,” and “should be carefully preserved.”[96]
In recent times neither reverence nor care has been bestowed on this
oratory. After the Reformation it was profaned, as a matter of course.
For a long time it was used as a “lock-up,” and in 1887 it was a powder
magazine!
Its pyramidal roof is crowned with a tall finial, which in its turn
carries a pretty wind vane; and in the wind vane we find the emblem of
St. Nicholas--a gudgeon. The townsfolk used to be known as Bradford
gudgeon, and those of them who had been shut up in the little prison
on the bridge were said to have been “under the fish and over the
water.”[97]
At St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, called Slepe in “Domesday Book,” and
Asleep to-day, there is another degraded oratory, a bigger one, with an
apsidal termination eastward. Its original parapet has been torn down,
and a brick house of two storeys adds greatly to its height. Derby
also has a bridge chapel, whose history may be studied in the works of
the Rev. Dr. Cox; but I am more interested in the oratory on Rotherham
Bridge, Yorkshire. Here, as at Wakefield, the chapel stands on a small
island, the upper part is corbelled out on each side, and the end
against the bridge is carried by a half-arch. The plan is a rectangle
about 30 ft. by 14 ft., while at Wakefield the external width is 20 ft.
and the total length about 45 ft. During many years Rotherham Chapel
was almost as beautiful as the masterpiece at Wakefield; and even now,
after infinite ill-usage, there is charm in the embattled parapet
graced with pinnacles.
[Illustration: GOTHIC BRIDGE AT BARNARD CASTLE, YORKSHIRE]
We hear of this chapel for the first time in the will of one John
Bokyns, who in 1483 left three and fourpence “to the fabric of the
chapel to be built on Rotherham Bridge.” There seems to have been no
endowment, as this chapel was unnamed by the Commissioners of Henry
VIII. In 1681 she was turned into an almshouse, she was a prison in
1778, and also in 1831; but at last she became more reputable as a
warehouse. May we hope that her lost window tracery will be renewed,
and will she ever be restored to the service of the Church? Her
degradation has lasted far too long, certainly, but it is not easy to
collect money for church restoration. If our golf fanatics took the
matter in hand and made an appeal to the public, their popularity would
bring in subscriptions.
From a standpoint of historic social life this irreverence to ancient
bridge chapels cannot be anything less than horrible, because the
earlier England owed all her best qualities to that faith which
preceded Protestantism, and which passed without much injury through
the terrible alembics of mediæval war and of social egotism. In
Shakespeare himself we find a product of the spectacular display which
the old Church had encouraged by her festivals; and it is certain also
that Shakespeare could not have been a dramatic poet if the Puritanism
of his time had been a leading motive-power of public life, and not
merely a writer of unpopular books. No pontist should fail to read
the early Puritan scribblers, who give in a frenzy of caricature much
valuable social history, without a knowledge of which the sixteenth
century cannot be understood. Their language is graphic, and so
violent that it takes one’s breath away; but in all reprints, as in
those of the New Shakespeare Society, it is kept away from the general
reader by the dismal pedantry which copies the freakish spelling of
sixteenth-century books.
Let me give, with modernised spelling, an abridged extract from an
Elizabethan Puritan, Phillip Stubbes, whose “Anatomy of Abuses” has
come at last into the history of historians. My aim is to show three
things: a spirit of fierce intolerance not yet popular enough to close
the theatres of London, but foolish enough to wreck shrines and to
take pride in a very bad system of supposed moral teaching. It was the
earlier Cromwell who appointed Sir William Bassett, Knight, to the holy
office of shrine destroyer and image breaker; and Bassett, whose humour
was killed by zealotry, regarded as sinful things even the baths at
Buxton, for he locked them up and sealed them, “that none shall enter
to wash ... until your lordship’s pleasure be further known.” Into
this novel sanctity Phillip Stubbes poured his abundant venom. Being
at heart a thorough Puritan, it never occurred to him that it would be
better to educate human nature than to take away from it the discipline
of temptation. As in earlier times the better minds and characters
had sneaked away from life into nunneries and monasteries, so Phillip
Stubbes wished mankind to be a recluse, a hermit, separated by stern
laws from everything that folly could abuse. Because minstrels and
mimics sang many a lewd song, as do fools to-day, Stubbes raged against
all itinerant clowns, buffoons, and singers, and demanded that they
should be put down; by no other means could men be taught to value a
little decency and self-respect. His language runs thus:--
“Such drunken sockets and bawdy parasites range the
country, rhyming and singing unclean, corrupt and filthy
songs, in taverns, ale-houses, inns, and other public
assemblies.... Every town, city, and country is full of
these minstrels to pipe up a dance to the devil.... But
some of them will reply, and say, ‘What, sir! we have
licences from justices of the peace to pipe and use our
minstrelsy to our best commodity.’ Cursed be those licences
which license any man to get his living with the
destruction of many thousands! But have you a licence from
the archjustice of peace, Christ Jesus? If you have not ...
then may you, as rogues, extravagants, and stragglers from
the heavenly country, be arrested of the high justice of
peace, Christ Jesus, and be punished with eternal death,
notwithstanding your pretended licences from earthly
men....”
Briefly, the people had degraded their singers, just as to-day they
degrade those Sunday newspapers which have the widest circulation; yet
Stubbes believed that the people could be saved from themselves if
their victims were condemned to everlasting punishment by “the high
justice of peace, Christ Jesus.” In like manner the people were to
be improved somehow by the destruction of old votive shrines, or by
the desecration of the bridge chapels in which for ages the pilgrims
of England had solaced their long journeys. Henry VIII himself, in
1510, is said to have made a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham,
barefooted, and carrying a rich necklace--a light but expensive gift
that did not add to his fatigue. Erasmus visited the same great shrine
and kissed the relics, and all at once the Virgin nodded at him,
owing to the indiscretion of a priest who pulled some strings. In the
fourteenth century thirty-eight shrines drew pilgrims to Norfolk; for
illness rambled from place to place, feeding a superstitious piety, and
praying for that relief which doctors in their wild ignorance could
not give. The shrines of Europe were the only physicians that the sick
dared to trust.
[Illustration: GOTHIC BRIDGE WITH SHRINES AT ELCHE IN SPAIN]
Many a pilgrim visited the Pont St. Bénézet at Avignon, and legend
speaks also of miracles; the good friar was buried in his bridge
chapel, and during his life he healed the sick and the maimed. I
know not why legend should say these things, since Bénézet did quite
enough good work by building his noble structure over the Rhône, a
terrible river. A Roman bridge had occupied the same spot, so that
Bénézet may have used some of the Roman foundations. His work, in any
case, was done with unusual rapidity, being finished in eight years
(1177-1185).[98] In Brangwyn’s glorious picture of the Pont St. Bénézet
one romantic feature is the friar-architect’s tomb, the venerable
Chapel of St. Nicholas; and historians dwell upon the fact that never
once has the chapel been injured by floods or by wars. All has been
wrecked except the four arches dominated by the shrine of St. Bénézet.
Pope Clement VI (1342-1352) had to rebuild four arches; in 1395, during
a fierce attack on the palace of the Popes, the bridge was cut by the
Catalans and Aragonese, who destroyed an arch; and this breach was not
repaired with stone till the year 1418. The masonry was not good, for
in 1602 the arch gave way and caused the loss of three others. Disaster
followed disaster, two arches falling in 1633 and two in the winter
of 1670. Turn to the Sieur Tassin’s “Plans et Profils des principales
Villes et Lieux considérables de France,” issued in 1652, and you will
find a view of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, with two arches missing on
Barthelasse Island, and three on the great arm of the Rhône. As a rule
such gaps were bridged with timber, because a French bridge cut in war
could not be repaired until permission had been gained from the foe who
had done the damage. This curious fact in mediæval history I take from
Viollet-le-Duc; and it may help to explain why the masterpiece of St.
Bénézet was allowed to perish.
Bénézet constructed twenty-one[99] arches, and the line of his bridge
made an elbow pointing upstream, beyond Barthelasse Island, on the
Villeneuve branch of the Rhône. Two ideas governed this angular
disposition: first, to thrust into the river a tremendous wedge of
arcaded stonework to resist floods; next to thwart an attack by cavalry
and infantry; since a bridge with a bend in it would be more difficult
to storm than a level and straight footway. In Spain there are several
bridges of this angular sort, notably a very long one over the
Pisuerga at Torquemada; and in Corsica also there is a fine example,
but in caricature, the bridge over the Tavignano being shaped like a
Z. Bénézet made another concession to tactical defence: his bridge was
only 4 metres 90 wide, including the thickness of the parapets, so it
was very narrow in proportion to the nine hundred metres of its
length. Just a few soldiers in a line could have walked along it from
end to end; and wheeled traffic must have been hindered, for at one
point--face to face with the chapel--the roadway dwindled to half its
breadth. Even in times when carts and chariots were long and narrow, a
journey across this bridge on a market day must have been an
adventure.
This cramped road over the Rhône was the only permanent way connecting
the Papal territory of Avignon and the French territory of Languedoc.
Many troubles arose on this account, and France never rested till she
had gained control over the Pont Saint-Bénézet and Avignon. A century
after Bénézet’s death the King of France put up a bullying fortress on
the right bank, and closed the Villeneuve entrance whenever he liked.
For about fifty years Avignon took no steps to counterbalance this
attack on her liberties; then a Bastille was built on her side of the
river, and now the Pont Saint-Bénézet was nearly as martial as the
Bridge of Saintes (p. 300) or as the Pont d’Orléans, which from October
12, 1428, to the arrival of Jeanne d’Arc on April 29, 1429, aided
Gaucour to baffle the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk. In the eighth
year of the fifteenth century the contention between France and Avignon
reached a crisis, not at all an infrequent thing in their history;
but this crisis of 1408 unseated the Papacy at Avignon, and expelled
Benedict XIII, bringing to an end a religious domination which had
lasted in the city for ninety-nine years.
It is clear from this brief record of events that the Pont St. Bénézet,
like many another great bridge of the Middle Ages, had but a poor
chance of becoming social and useful. Instead of being an open road to
the democratic spirit and the growth of trade, she kept watch and ward
incessantly, and aided the misruling class to nourish their egotisms
without any care at all for the common weal. It said very little for
the half-sense of ordinary men that they in their millions were unable
to defend themselves against a tiny class of despots. The people were
like leaves on forest trees, that fluttered ineffectually as soon as a
gale began to blow. For the ounces of brain in each human skull have
never been of any real worth until genius has taken control of them,
for good or for ill. More than one insect has had a brain more fertile
than that of the average man. Thus the cerebral ganglia of the ant,
though not so large as a quarter of a small pin’s head, have evolved
a marvellous routine of life, which includes the making of bridges and
the boring of tunnels under running water. Ants were civil engineers
long before men had constructed their first tunnels and drains. Have
you ever tried to imagine what would have happened in the world of
primitive men if every atom in every ounce of human brain had been as
fertile as the cerebral ganglia of the ant? A civilization no worse
than our own might have been evolved by the year 100,000 B.C., if not
earlier.
From time to time, however, amid the congealed blood that lay so thick
over the mediæval history of France, some true social justice did shine
out, here and there. A few French nobles built communal bridges, and
set the Law to keep them for ever from the tyrannies of a superior
class that found in ordinary men neither the intelligence of ants nor
the discipline that united wolves into formidable packs. The people
being too silly to defend their own rights, these few good nobles
tried to foresee all dangers, but their legal documents were rarely
strong enough to resist their incessant foes, the stupidity of the mob
and the gradual encroachments of military leaders. When Eudes, Count
of Chartres, built a bridge at Tours, as an act of piety that would
benefit his soul, he decreed that its public value for all time was to
be as free from all restraints as a church. At an earlier time, in a
deed of 998, William the Great, Duke of Aquitaine, went so far as to
forbid _pour toujours_ a collection of tolls on the Pont Royal. He did
not realise that his populace would cease to value the bridge as soon
as they got the freedom of it for nothing. Again, in France during the
Middle Ages no bridge could be fortified without permission from its
founder or founders. This was a rule or law, and yet it must have been
broken hundreds of times, for what bridge of any importance did not
become a fortified work, a genuine stronghold?
[Illustration: OLD BRIDGE OVER THE BORNE AT ESPALY, NEAR LE PUY IN
FRANCE; BEHIND THE CROIX DE LA PAILLE, A ROCK OF VOLCANIC BRECCIA, WITH
HOUSES, AND WITH RUINS OF A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CASTLE]
One form or custom of the Middle Ages tried to encompass bloodshed
with the glamour of religious fervour. After the battle of Towton, for
example, a chapel was built on the stricken field by the Yorkists as a
memorial to the souls of their dead. And a famous chapel on the Ouse
Bridge at York is said to have been erected after a stiff fight between
the citizens and a Scotchman named John Comyn. The fray happened on the
bridge itself, in 1168, or thereabouts, and John Comyn lost several of
his followers. Then came some negotiations, in the course of which it
was agreed that the city should erect a chapel on the spot, and find
priests to celebrate mass for the souls of the dead. Another story
relates that in 1153, when Saint William was restored to the See of
York, a vast crowd assembled on a timber bridge that crossed the Ouse,
so eager were the citizens to welcome their prelate, who in 1147 had
been deprived of office after a reign of three years. In the hustle and
excitement of the home-coming, the bridge gave way, and many persons
fell into the river, but no one perished because William prayed and his
prayer was answered. To commemorate this miracle a chapel was built on
the new bridge. This legend may have some truth in it, for the chapel
was dedicated to Saint William; and perhaps the other legend about John
Comyn is not entirely mythical.
One thing is certain: that in Norman times a stone bridge was built
at York and graced with a fine chapel. Between 1215 and 1256 it was
reconstructed by Archbishop Walter de Gray, who preserved some portions
of the Norman chapel. More than three centuries later, in 1564, two
arches were destroyed by a flood, with twelve houses that stood upon
them; and for nearly two years the bridge remained in a ruined state.
Then the broken arches were rebuilt in the thirteenth-century style.
Among the contributors to this work was Lady Jane Hall, whose donation
was recorded on a brass plate on the north side of the bridge. The
inscription was quaint:--
=William Watson, Lord Mayor, An. Dom. 1566. Lady Jane Hall
to: here the works of faith doth shew; By giving a hundred
pounds this bridge to renew.=
On the west side of Ouse Bridge there were several houses, which
flanked the Chapel of Saint William. At the Reformation the chapel
contained several chantries, the original grants of which are still
among the records of the city. After the Reformation, of course,
these pious endowments were confiscated, and the beautiful little
building was turned into an exchange where the York Society of Hamburg
Merchants assembled every morning to transact business. At last, in
1810, the chapel was removed. Some parts of it were excellent work
in the Early English style, while the porch and a stone screen were
enriched with cable and chevron ornaments, characteristic of Norman
work. A few etchings of these charming details were published in Cave’s
“Antiquities of York” (1813).
At the east side of Ouse Bridge stood the old gaol for debtors, built
in the sixteenth century. It lasted till 1724, when it was purchased by
the city and the ainstey, and a better place was built, by assessment,
as a free prison. The old bridge was condemned as dangerous in 1808,
and on December 10, 1810, the foundation-stone of a new bridge was
laid.[100]
Among my thousands of notes and papers I have a good article on ancient
bridge chapels written in 1882 by the late S. Wayland Kershaw, F.S.A.,
of Lambeth Palace Library. Mr. Kershaw made a study of old Rochester
Bridge and its chapel, which stood on the main road to the Continent,
close to the great cathedral, whose main architects were Bishops
Ernulph and Gundulph. These bishops favoured the bridge, partly because
it brought pilgrims to the shrine at Rochester, and partly because
it was a kindness to all wayfarers. “The Crusader on his way to the
East, the stately cardinal and foreign prince, the wayworn pilgrim, and
the merchant-voyager would form but a few of the passengers ... who
would say a passing prayer at the Bridge Chapel of All Souls.”[101]
Rochester Bridge in mediæval times was closely linked to the history
of the cathedral. The first bridge was constructed of wood, and,
according to Prior Ernulph’s testimony, it existed before 1215. In
Vol. VII of “Archæologia,” the Society of Antiquaries published a plan
of this ancient timber bridge, with a most valuable description. At
the east end there was a tower of wood, with strong defensive gates,
which may have resembled the timber fortifications with which the
Romans barred their wooden bridges. In 1281, according to Kilburne’s
“Survey of Kent,” the earliest bridge at Rochester was borne down by
the Medway after a severe winter; and there is no mention of another
bridge till the year 1387, when Sir John Cobham and Sir R. Knolles
put up “a fair bridge of stone.” Such was the slack and lethargic
citizenship of Rochester. About 1800 years after the Pons Sublicius
was thrown across the Tiber, a common timber bridge was carried over
the Medway in an effort of progress. As for the belated stone bridge,
the charter of its foundation is preserved in the Bishops’ Registers,
and a transcript of it is given in Thorpe’s “Custumale Roffense.”
Philipott, in his “Kent Surveyed,” 1659, says that the chapel on
Rochester Bridge was founded in 1399 by John de Cobham, and dedicated
to the Holy Trinity, but called at its first institution All Souls’
Chapel, because prayers and orisons were to be offered up there for the
health of all Christian souls. Two earlier writers--Fabyan in 1406,
and Grafton in 1409--attribute the finishing of the chapel to Sir R.
Knolles, Knight.[102] Another chapel, a small one, was built on the
stone quay at the Strood end of the bridge, its founder being Gilbert
de Glanville, Bishop of Rochester (1185-1215). “We learn that Queen
Isabella, when she came to Strood in 1357, entered the Chapel of St.
Mary, and offered an oblation of six and eightpence in honour of the
eleven thousand virgins.” Gracious! This army of fair saints inspired a
very wee act of devotional charity. There is reason to believe that the
larger chapel was not closed by legal dissolution, but passed out of
use when pilgrims became afraid to anger their Protestant neighbours;
for in the nineteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign Thorpe wrote as follows
in his “Custumale Roffense”:--
“The Queen’s Attorney-General sued the wardens of the
bridge for £513, being the amount of £18 per annum for
twenty-eight years and a half, the last past, which sum was
at that time presumed to be forfeited and due to the Queen
by virtue of the Act 1, Ed. VI, for dissolving charities.
It not appearing to the jury that any service had been
performed here, nor a stipend paid to any chaplain or
chantry priest for officiating here, for five years next
before the passing that Act, a verdict was given for the
Wardens.”
In 1882, when Mr. Kershaw wrote his paper, the Chapel of All Souls
was roofless, and nearly hidden by new buildings. Its width was about
fifteen feet, and its length about forty feet. Windows were pierced in
the north and south walls, and two of them were filled with brickwork
or with masonry. In the south wall were traces of a piscina, and some
ornamental details had been saved from the general wreckage.
Much more might be written on bridge chapels and crosses, but this
monograph is only a brief introduction to a vast subject, and we must
pass on to the other topics after noting two points more. Both concern
the sanctification of bridges by means of religious emblems. It seems
quite certain that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were most
favourable to wayside crosses. By then very popular saints had been
added to the old shrines, and the custom of making pilgrimages was
tormented by fewer dangers, as a rule. Many a cross was a simple
thing of wood fixed in a stone base, and sometimes it carried at
top a small wind vane or weathercock. Many crosses were raised to
commemorate historical events, while others were put up by sinners who
wished to announce their repentance. Here and there a beautiful cross
became celebrated. For example, the Belle Croix on the old bridge at
Orléans was a nobly modelled crucifix of bronze that stood up high
from the buttress of the middle pier; its pedestal was ornamented
with low-reliefs representing the Holy Virgin, St. Peter, St. Paul,
St. James, St. Stephen, and the bishops St. Aignan and St. Euverte.
As we have seen (p. 230), the centre of a mediæval bridge was marked
invariably by a cross. To-day, on the Continent, this old religious
custom gives grace to a few bridges, and I value a large photograph of
Trier Bridge over the Moselle, where the Virgin is enniched above the
middle buttress, and where a crucifix, flanked by two columns, rises
above the parapet.
Yet we must not rush to the conclusion that this old sacred custom
had its original source in the Christian religion. At first it may
have belonged to a faith in evil spirits, whose power for mischief may
have seemed to be increased by every roadway that enabled them to pass
over running water. I have by my side the photograph of a steep bridge
in Western China, at Shih-Chuan, and here below the middle of the
parapet is a small image of stone representing a tutelary god! To me
it is a curious little bit of rude sculpture, all head and stomach and
truncated thighs. Its position on the bridge corresponds with that of
the cross on mediæval parapets--a fact of great interest.[103] Brangwyn
depicts, in a very brilliant pen-drawing, a Chinese bridge larger and
finer than the one at Shih-Chuan, but there is no image, so I set
great store by the evidence of idolatry in the smaller bridge.
[Illustration: STAIRCASE BRIDGE IN CHINA]
Again, the province of Sichuan (pronounced Sit-you-on), in Western
China, preserves another ancient custom. When a flood threatens to
overwhelm a bridge, and particularly a bamboo suspension bridge, which
is a common thing in the mountains, “the local official and the people
throw a living pig into the river, to stay the rising water: the pig
disappears, and the flood goes on.”[104]
This dire superstition is far more primitive than the idol fastened
below the parapet of a Chinese bridge; and so, perhaps, we find in
these things a parent emotion and its improved offspring. Perhaps: for
Superstition rests on dark foundations; we know not precisely where it
fades into a belief that is genuinely kinder.
III
We pass on to some important topics that worry a writer because they
cannot be arranged in a neat scheme. Some of them are technical, but
everybody will be able to understand their bearing on the main subject.
We have seen that fords gave place to bridges very slowly, even in
some neighbourhoods where the Church was exceedingly active, as at
Rochester.[105] Can you explain why? There were a good many reasons,
and among them is the fact that it was a long time before bridges won
a good reputation among the people. Wood being abundant everywhere,
they were timber bridges at first, and rudely built; many of them were
carried away by storms, as Matthew Paris related in the thirteenth
century. So people set their hearts on the greater safety of stone
bridges; but money was difficult to collect, and stonework cost a great
deal more than timber; and no bridge could be built until permission
had been gained from the King, often after tedious negotiations.
Further, the lands through which rivers flowed were owned at times by
rival noblemen, who put a veto on the project, either in a spirit
of perverse antagonism or because a stone bridge might benefit one
landlord more than another. And it was easy for the stronger man to
explain his antagonism in a reasonable manner, for he could say that
the cofferdams used in grounding piers diverted rivers from their
channels, causing inundations. This objection seems to have been raised
pretty often, as many piers were grounded in a very primitive fashion,
just by throwing down stones and cement till a bed of masonry rose
above water-level.
In the Ballad of Abingdon Bridge, written by Richard Fannande Iremonger
in the thirty-sixth year of Henry VI (1458), we find most of the
difficulties that attended mediæval bridge-building. Till the fourth
year of Henry V (1417) the townsfolk of Abingdon and Culham had nothing
but a ford, which could not be passed after a storm of rain or after
a thaw. Yet Abingdon lived under the shadow of a great monastery,
and roads were constructed from her streets to the ancient or Roman
highways. Not even a timber bridge preceded the charming stone one
that charity built in 1417, the very year in which Henry V sailed from
England with 16,000 men and ravaged Normandy. But in the Middle Ages
most people regarded bridges as we in our ignorance regard hospitals,
as useful and necessary things to be supported by charitable doles,
and not by district rates. To beg is a degradation, no matter what
the cause may be, and many a small town could have built for itself a
bridge but for the ruling custom that taught it to be a mendicant.
Culham and Abingdon waited a very long time before almsgiving got rid
of their dangerous ford. The Abbot gave his aid, and Geoffrey Barber
paid a thousand marks to the workmen, and Sir Peris Besillis, Knight,
provided the stone, and “the gode lorde of Abendon left of his londe,
for the breed [breadth] of the bridge, twenty-four fote large”:--
It was a greet socour of erthe and of sonde,
And yet he abated the rent of the barge.
An C. Pownde, and xvˡⁱ was truly payed
By the hondes of John Huchyns and Banbery also,
For the waye and the barge, thus it must be sayed.
But I am happy to add that “the Commons of Abendon” had to do something
for themselves. It was “set all in one assent that all the brekynges of
the brige the town bere schulde.” In other words, charity had produced
a free town bridge, leaving the inhabitants to pay for its upkeep.
During the building of this pretty structure an unsuccessful attempt
was made to ground the piers while eleven men baled water from the
river. Then a dam was built, and trenches were dug to prevent the
water from overflowing the dam. This I gather from the ballad, but
the wording is not at all graphic in any technical matter.[106] We
are not told why cofferdams[107] were not tried. In the Middle Ages
cofferdams were known as brandryths or brandereths; by this name they
are mentioned in the Contract Deed for the building of Catterick
Bridge over the Swale, A.D. 1421; and they were large enough to
obstruct most rivers, for they had to surround enormous piers, and
the thickness of their sides was never less than from four to six
feet. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that during the
construction of Old London Bridge, between 1176 and 1209, the Thames
“was turned another way about by a trench,” which, according to Stow,
began east near “Rotherhithe, as is supposed, and ended in the west
about Patricksey, now termed Battersea.” In those days no embankments
controlled the Thames at London; wide shores, littered with the odds
and ends of a waterside life, were playgrounds for the ebb and flow of
the tidal waters; and the main purpose of the “trench” or canal was
to lessen the risk of floods while the huge piers were being founded.
Stow’s words give us to understand that _all_ the water in the
Thames “was turned another way about”; a very important feat of civil
engineering. Perhaps the purpose of the canal was not so thorough;
perhaps it drew from the river sufficient water to lower its normal
level by several feet and to diminish the force of the tidal current.
In any case, however, Stow’s evidence has great interest.
One of Brangwyn’s animated drawings, the Pont des Consuls at
Montauban, comes in here to illustrate the many troubles of mediæval
bridge-building. In 1144, when Montauban passed from an unknown
village into a known town, its patron or founder, Alphonse Jourdain,
Count of Toulouse, commanded that a bridge should be made at once,
and that the little township should keep it in repair; but, somehow,
for many generations, nothing was done. Sometimes poverty was pleaded
as an excuse, and sometimes the Albigeois wars were blamed; but at
last, in 1264, the good men of Montauban ventured on a little action.
Indeed, they stretched themselves yawningly, and said that a bridge
over the Tarn would be a boon indeed. Their ferry was a slow nuisance,
we may presume, and their trade ought to be increased by better
communications. For twenty-seven years they repeated these truisms;
then, in 1291, they bought the island of Castillons or of Pissotte
to serve as a foundation for several piers. Tired by this unwonted
exertion, Montauban wished to take a long holiday, but Philip the Fair
came forward and asserted himself as a king. A bridge over the Tarn
must be built! It should have three fortified towers, one at each end,
the other in the middle; and these towers were to be garrisoned by
royal troops, so that no harm should happen to the king’s authority. In
order to collect money for the bridge-building a tax was to be levied
on all visitors to Montauban, and two consuls were to overseer the
work. His Majesty chose Mathieu de Verdun, a citizen, and Étienne de
Ferrières, who was keeper of the town. They seemed to be honest men,
but funds collected for the bridge were used for other purposes, and I
know not if this action was justified. It was in 1304 that Philip the
Fair gave his instructions, and the bridge was not finished till 1335.
Still, the dilatory township had achieved a very fine work of art,
noble in design and very well constructed.
It is a brick bridge, 250 m.[108] 50 cm. in length. The bricks are
excellent in quality, and measure 50 centimetres in thickness, 40
centimetres in length, and 28 centimetres in width. The roadway is
nearly flat, and its height above the level of the Tarn is 18 metres.
There are seven pointed arches with an average span of 22 metres;
and the six piers armed with cutwaters at both sides are 8 m. 55 cm.
in thickness. Note how the spandrils are pierced with high arched
bays to facilitate the passage of water during floods. These relief
arches were copied from Roman models. As for the defensive towers
they exist no longer, but the strongest one kept watch and ward over
the entrance across the river; it was square in shape, and its summit
was a crenellated platform fringed with machicolations. The other end
tower--the one on the town side--was also square in form, while the
central defence was triangular. It stood on the middle buttress on
the side looking downstream, and the lower part of it was used as a
chapel dedicated to St. Catherine. A flight of winding steps went down
to a postern, cut through the buttress a little above water-level;
and at the other side of the pier, just below the arched bay, was an
instrument of torture, a see-saw that carried an iron cage in which
blasphemers were ducked in the river.
The Pont des Consuls has one quality that Englishmen ought to study
with the greatest care; it is in scale with a great river. To build a
vast bridge for a little township was in part a just tribute to the
beauty of a noble site, and in part a prophetic compliment paid to
the future history of Montauban. How differently we have acted in our
London bridges! We have disgraced the Thames with the Railway Viaduct
from Charing Cross, for instance, and neither Waterloo nor London
Bridge does justice to the size of our Nation-City. There are three
or four good bridges on the Thames, notably those at Maidenhead and
Richmond, but they are nothing more than delicate works of refined
engineering. Not one is inspired by awe, the only feeling that can
bring home to our minds the wondrous grey antiquity of the Thames and
the immensity of London. So we have feared to be great in the historic
symbolism of bridge-building, unlike the citizens of Montauban, who
were lifted far above their indolence by a brave inspiration as ample
as was the Tarn after a flood.
[Illustration: LE PONT DES CONSULS OVER THE TARN AT MONTAUBAN IN
FRANCE, FOURTEENTH CENTURY]
In 1823-4, when George Rennie designed New London Bridge, London was
probably two hundred times as big as was Montauban in the fourteenth
century; and certainly the Thames was not inferior to the Tarn as a
historic inspiration. Yet Rennie failed to understand the importance
of being large in scale. In less than fifty years his work was
“insufficiently wide for the traffic”;[109] and since then, on a
good many occasions, we have been asked to disfigure London Bridge
with overhanging footpaths. “London can well afford to pay for new
bridges, but can by no means afford to part with a single object of
real beauty.”[109] For Rennie’s bridge, despite all errors of scale,
has points of charming interest. Her roadway has a graceful curvature
that delights the eye, her arches have an excellent shape, and the
variation in their size could not well be bettered.[110] Later we shall
see (p. 325) that much money was ill-spent on hammer-dressing the whole
external face of the masonry; but an engineer with a very weak feeling
for scale was afraid to use either scabbled stone or stone with a
rough-axed facing. Rennie learnt all that he could learn by studying
fine models of style, such as the Roman bridge at Rimini, but his own
equipment as an artist was terrene.
Would that we had in England an old bridge equal to the Pont des
Consuls! Would that old London Bridge had been delivered down to our
sixpences and shillings! Yet I suppose we must consider ourselves
lucky in the fact that historic bridges in Great Britain, though much
inferior to those on the Continent, are fairly numerous in districts
where there has been but little increase of traffic. We possess three
bridges with defensive gateways (Stirling, Warkworth, and the Monnow
Bridge at Monmouth); five with chapels, or with relics of chapels
(St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, Derby, Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire,
Wakefield, Rotherham); and many good specimens exist of bridges with
angular recesses built out from parapets and forming part of the
piers.[111] These recesses were designed not only as shelter places for
wayfarers, but because they lessened the cost of production, inasmuch
as they gave width to narrow footways; and so their value in an old
bridge is very similar to that of bay-windows in cottage rooms.
Very often the modern engineer has misunderstood their origin, and,
regarding them as decorations, he has used safety recesses to ornament
his wide bridges, just as he has put battlements on iron parapets and
stuck machicolations on defenceless gateways. Brangwyn has drawn for
us three or four big Gothic bridges with safety recesses. Among them
is a fine structure over the Main at Würzburg, in Bavaria; there are
eight arches, and the length is 650 ft. This bridge dates from the year
1474, but his adornment with statues of saints belongs to later times.
Indeed, the architecture and decoration take us from the end of the
Middle Ages to the year 1607, when the spirit of the Renaissance was
active and generative.
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE OVER THE MAIN AT WÜRZBURG IN BAVARIA
(1474-1607)]
Here is an old defensive bridge that does not resemble a common
man-at-arms: in him there is a fine courtesy, as of a knight long used
to the etiquette of tournaments; but yet the technical inspiration is
rather inferior to that in his great rival, the Moselle Bridge at
Coblentz, built in 1344, by the Elector Baudouin, and charmed with a
mellow grace that imparts a rare distinction to the vigour of fourteen
bold arches. The Moselle Bridge is 1100 ft. long, or ninety-five longer
than London Bridge. There is but one fault, and this one fault belongs
to the Middle Ages: the ten piers obstruct the river too much, and two
or three of them might have been omitted without harm to any strategic
consideration.
In the Middle Ages almost everything was looked at from the standpoints
of attack and defence. Bridges as well as soldiers needed armour, so
their gateways and towers were built in a military fashion, and at
times curious traps were devised along the footways. For example,
consult the “Pacata Hibernia,” and you will find an engraving of
Askeaton Bridge,[112] with a sort of hangman’s trapdoor at each end
of the footway. In 1586, or thereabouts, Askeaton Bridge had another
peculiarity: a castle stood close to it on an island in the river; and
between the castle and the bridge was a fortified platform with two
gateways.
It happened often, in mediæval times, that one arch was a drawbridge.
Take Old London Bridge as an example. One of her twenty arches--the
thirteenth from the City end--was a toll-gate for merchant shipping,
and a drawbridge to gap off enemies from the town. It served this
latter purpose in 1553, when Sir Thomas Wyatt and his insurgents tried
to enter London. Everybody knew which was the movable arch, because it
was connected in all popular talk with the tower that rose beside it, a
terrible and gruesome tower, for on its summit executioners displayed
the heads of decapitated persons, who ranged from common bandits to the
great Sir Thomas More.
Some defensive bridges in Old England had an important look as late
as the reign of George III. This applies to the Welsh Bridge at
Shrewsbury, which had a noble tower at the entrance that looked towards
Wales. Perhaps it belonged to the reign of Edward I, as a statue of
Llewellyn was placed over one of the arches. At the present time our
fortified bridges are minor specimens. The “auld brig” over the Forth
at Stirling, once “the key of the Highlands,” is the most interesting
architecturally. He still retains a defensive gateway at each end,
and his four arches, now closed to traffic, have a bold and pleasant
rhythm. They date from the last years of the fourteenth century.
From this century also Warkworth Bridge comes to us; it is a smaller
structure, with a triangular recess at each side, projecting from
the parapet into the central pier. The gate-tower is at some little
distance from the abutment; it has a low and narrow archway under which
carters swear unhopefully, believing that their wagons will stick fast.
A person who was present on the occasion told M. J. J. Jusserand that
a gipsy’s caravan, not long ago, was stopped at the tower on Warkworth
Bridge, and waited there while the pavement was being hollowed out to
make the passage deep enough for a safe journey.
The pier midstream is triangular, and almost as sharp as an arrow-head.
This shape is very common in mediæval cutwaters, but it belongs to
a technical routine which cannot be regarded as practical. Floods
cannot eddy around the flat surfaces of a triangle; they are cut into
waves that soon break with an increasing force against the piers and
spandrils. On the other hand, when a cutwater is shaped like a Gothic
drop arch, or like a tierce-point arch, it meets the current with a
much bolder wedge of stone, whose curved sides are better playgrounds
for water in spate. Cutwaters of this improved sort are uncommon in
mediæval bridges, but some are to be found in French work of the
Limousin.
Viollet-le-Duc was the first critic who called attention to this
technical matter, and no pontist should fail to note how cutwaters are
designed. For example, in a bird’s-eye view of the bridge at Avignon
the buttressed piers jut out on each side beyond the narrow footway,
looking like boats that support a long line of planks; and I have no
doubt that Saint Bénézet had in mind this figure of boats when he
planned his roadway over “the arrowy Rhône.” It is far from my wish to
compare the little Warkworth Bridge with this French masterpiece, but
let us note in its cutwaters a similar character.
Again, when you remember that Warkworth Bridge belongs to the
fourteenth century, do you not expect to find in it the pointed vault,
whose lighter grace is among the most beautiful things both in Eastern
and in mediæval architecture? Yet the two ribbed arches are segments
of circles. For many a generation Northern England has been famed for
three things--a long-headed thrift, a discontent that is said to be a
Radical in politics, and a stubborn hatred for any new knowledge that
attacks the dull mimicry of customs. It is to Lancashire, for instance,
that you must go if you wish to study in old packhorse bridges the
retention of Romanesque forms. A considerable number are described
popularly as Roman bridges, probably because they are found on the
old pilgrim ways, which, after the Reformation, were scorned as Roman
Catholic.
For some reason or other Northern England welcomed in bridges the bluff
economy of ribbed arches, while neglecting the more gracious thrift
of Early English or pointed vaults. These are easier to build because
they need lighter centres or arched scaffolds, and their thrust being
less powerful than that of round-headed arches, they require less
bulk in the piers. Some writers say that pointed arches interfere
with sailing-boats, but this depends on the size of their spans. At
Montauban there is room enough for ordinary boat traffic under the Pont
des Consuls.
The Pont Valentré at Cahors has ogivale arches, and in one fine
drawing Brangwyn studies the technique of their construction. For
instance, the embattled piers are triangular, and each of them is
pierced transversely by a bay or passage, which is put on a level
with the springing of every arch. Below this bay are three holes;
and another line of holes runs across the under surface of the arch
beneath the springing.[113] Now, these holes and the bays have a great
technical interest, they remind us how the Pont Valentré was built in
the thirteenth century. With their help simple scaffolds were erected.
The first step was to thrust fir saplings through the holes in a pier
till they jutted out on each side; then they were covered with planks
and used as footbridges by the workmen, and also as resting-places for
barrow-loads of dressed stone, which were lifted up by movable cranes.
The service of the masons was effected through the bay in a pier,
and the centring of every arch was fixed in those other holes which
Brangwyn has represented in his vivacious water-colour.
Not more than two arches were built at the same time. At any moment, in
those rude, warfaring periods, work might be interrupted by strife, and
its progress was so very slow that it took from ten to thirty years to
bring a bridge to completion, usually after a continuous fight against
money troubles. Many a hint on economy was borrowed from the Romans,
whose enterprise was far in advance of their current cash. Piers that
look marvels of solid masonry may be nothing more than shells filled
with beaten earth and gravel; and those passages through the piers at
Cahors have one thing in common with the relief arches that pierce
the spandrils of the Pont des Consuls at Montauban: they enabled the
builders to be thrifty.
[Illustration: PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS-SUR-LOT A FORTIFIED BRIDGE,
THIRTEENTH CENTURY]
In a Persian bridge (on the way between Resht, on the Caspian Sea, and
Teheran, the capital) thrift hollowed the spandrils into chambers, some
of which were used by travellers. This bridge carried a rough highway
over the Kâredj River, which runs down from the Elburz Mountains
between Kasvîn and Teheran, and disappears in a gravelly plain. In
1874 the Kâredj Bridge was studied in measured drawings by J. Romilly
Allen, and eighteen years later (November 19, 1892) the drawings were
published in “The Builder,” with a most valuable description. Let
us linger for a few minutes over Romilly Allen’s research, as the
technique of old Persian bridge-builders has points in common both with
Gothic methods and with modern practice also. Some mediæval spandrils
are hollow, for example; and a very noted French architect of the
eighteenth century, Perronet, not only left empty spaces behind the
haunches[114] of an arch, but made tunnels in piers, after the manner
used by Pope Sextus IV in the Ponte Sisto. And the bridge of Glasgow
over the Clyde has tunnelled piers, so this technical detail has a long
and entertaining history.
In the Kâredj Bridge, then, the builders had to solve three or four
difficulties that strained the usual penury of Persian finance. The
river itself must have been a constant trouble while the bridge was
being constructed. A rapid mountain torrent with precipitous rocky
banks, it pours through a gorge of rock, and at one spot only it forms
a good foundation for a wide pier; but this spot has a situation that
divides the bridge into inharmonious parts, making symmetry impossible.
Allen’s drawing shows both arches, one with a span of 23 ft., the other
with a span of 72 ft. 9 in.; and between them is a vast pier not less
than 31 ft. 9 in. wide. Forty-six feet separate the highest point of
the parapet from water-level; and from water-level to the peak of the
big pointed vault is thirty-seven feet. In width the bridge measures
thirty feet across the outside of its parapets, and twenty-six feet
across the roadway, so there is room for a great deal more wheeled
traffic than Persia has yet developed along her dusty trade routes.
From this description it is evident that the builders had a stiff
job. Timber for centring has ever been scarce in Persia[115]; so in
Persian bridge-building the usual plan is to set up a light scaffold
just strong enough to bear its own weight and a few rings of brickwork.
After a single rib of bricks has been made, other bricks are dabbed
against the first set, more being added at the abutment ends than in
the centre of an arch; and so, as the work goes on, the arch grows to
be self-supporting, like a cantilever bridge. When the middle part of
the span has been covered over, the remaining courses at each side are
completed with bricks set at right angles to the others. In looking
upward at the under surface of a Persian vault a pontist sees that the
courses of brick go in two directions, one parallel to the central
axis of the bridge and another at right angles. Such is the Persian
method of building a brick arch; its main object is to evade, without
too much risk, the cost of heavy centring, timber being so difficult to
get and so expensive to carry about.[115]
In the four bridges that Romilly Allen studied, between Resht and
Teheran, the building was brickwork, and the bricks were rather like
Roman tiles; they measured 10 in. by 10 in. by 2½ in. At Kâredj the
mortar joints were about ¾ in. thick, so that twenty-four courses of
bricks with their mortar joints built a wall about 6 ft. 2 in. high.
At the thinnest part of the big arch there were only three bricks,
giving a thickness of 2 ft. 6 in.; further on there were five bricks,
and two more were added at the abutments, where the walls were 7 ft.
6 in. thick. Here is much economy, for thick joints of mortar are not
praiseworthy (p. 175); and thrift is very noticeable in other details
of the workmanship. Beneath the roadway were two chambers with pointed
barrel vaults, which were built partly to relieve the haunches of the
big arch, and partly to save materials. On one side of the arch the
chamber was about 12 ft. high; its length, varying with the curve of
the voussoirs, and extending across the abutment, ranged from 27 ft. to
49 ft. On the pier side of the big arch the chamber was not so long,
but its height was 12 ft.; and the pier itself was chambered in its
upper part and pierced below with a Tudor-like arch about 14 ft. wide
and 11 ft. 6 in. high. The chamber above had a cone-shaped roof, and
at each side of it were three square-headed windows that measured 3 ft.
6 in. wide by 6 ft. high. I am speaking in the past tense, for I know
not whether this bridge is still in use; but now we will return to the
present tense in a short quotation from Romilly Allen:--
“This chamber appears to be ... a temporary living-room for
travellers. It ... communicates with the cells above the
haunches of the arch by an opening 4 ft. 6 in. high. The
inner room is probably intended to afford sleeping
accommodation. The living-room is approached by a staircase
in the thickness of the wall leading up from the top of the
pier. The Persian name for an upper chamber of this kind is
‘bala-khana,’ literally ‘a house up above.’”[116]
Perhaps the finest bridge in Persia is the far-famed Ali Verdi Khan at
Isfahan.
Ali Verdi Khan was the general of Shah Abbas, and his bridge, if not
the greatest in the world, has no rival that excels it in stateliness.
As Lord Curzon has said, it alone is worth a visit to Isfahan to see.
I know it in photographs only, and in written descriptions, but I
feel its beauty and magnificence. In many respects it resembles the
Pul-i-Khaju (p. 213), but it is a great deal longer, and no pavilions
rise above its tiers of arches. To my mind the pavilions of the
Pul-i-Khaju have an architectural value that cannot be rated at too
high a level. So I miss their grace in the Ali Verdi Khan, though
this noble structure ought not to be criticised--except in an ashamed
whisper.
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF ALI VERDI KHAN OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT
ISFAHAN, PERSIA]
There is a gateway at the north end, so we must place the Ali Verdi
Khan among the minor defensive bridges. A paved ramp or causeway leads
from a great avenue to the gateway; and then a visitor has 388 yards
to walk before he reaches the far end. The main road is paved, and its
width is thirty feet. Upon each side is a gallery, or covered arcade,
two and a half feet wide, which is pierced through the outer wall of
the bridge from one end to the other; it communicates with the main
road by frequent arches, it opens by similar arches--over ninety in
number--on to the river view, and here and there it expands into large
chambers, as we see in Brangwyn’s pen-drawing. The chambers used to
be decorated with “not too proper paintings,” done in the time of
Abbas II. At both entrances the Ali Verdi Khan is flanked by round
towers, and staircases in the towers go up to a fine platform which
in earlier times was a favourite promenade; but now it is disfigured
by telegraph poles, the modern spirit everywhere having an unrivalled
vulgarity.[117] “Similar staircases, cut in the basements of the
towers, and also at regular intervals in the main piers, conduct from
the road level to a lower storey, where, but little elevated above
the bed of the river, a vaulted passage runs along the entire length
of the bridge, through arches pierced in the central piers, crossing
the channel of the river by huge stepping-stones planted in its bed.
Colonel Johnson gives the dimensions of these transverse arches as ten
feet span and nine feet high; and of the main arches (thirty-three in
number) which they bisect, as twenty feet span and fifteen feet high,
separated by piers eleven feet thick. There is thus a triple promenade
on this remarkable bridge--the vaulted passage below, the roadway and
lateral galleries above, and the open footpath at the top of all. I
should add that the upper part of the bridge is of brick, the piers and
towers are of stone.”[118]
There is no European structure akin to this, but for a long time
Rothenburg on the Tauber has been famous for a two-storeyed bridge;
also we know that some modern commercial bridges have an upper road and
a lower one, like the High Level Bridge at Newcastle. In every case
the idea was suggested by the Roman practice of building aqueducts in
tiers.
IV
And now let us give all our attention to the more military bridges.
Brangwyn has studied them with the utmost care and interest; there
are but few variations of the war-bridge that his art has not yet
represented. Let us see, then, what his research has found.
1. This bridge from Bhutan has the same technique as the cantilever
bridges of Kurdistan (p. 74); but the gateway towers mark an advance.
They are militant works, partly because they control the traffic, and
partly because they are open below the eaves for archery and for other
defensive warfare. Brangwyn suggests that gateway towers of this kind
may have been brought to India by Darius Hystaspes (512 B.C.) or by
Alexander the Great (327 B.C.). On this point there is no evidence. On
the other hand, there seems to be no doubt that the timber gateways on
Roman bridges in England, as in Gaul, were prepared for defence, though
their main use was to limit the freedom of a public thoroughfare,
invariably after sunset, and during the day in times of unrest. This
was the first aim of defensive bridges, so the gateway towers in Bhutan
are suggestive things to study. They are too light in structure to give
us an idea of the bold and stern gateways built by the Romans with
newly-felled trees; but yet they help us to realise vaguely what every
young civilization must have done when it learnt from a free use of
bridges that foes as well as friends were eager to pass without danger
across rivers.
[Illustration: PRIMITIVE TIMBER BRIDGE IN BHUTAN, INDIA]
Again, the earliest defensive bridges had another point in common with
the primitive carpentry of Bhutan: they were made with tree-trunks
resting on supports, and, when necessary, a part of their footways
could be removed. Diodorus Siculus wrote a flaming account of a great
bridge built by Semiramis over the Euphrates, rather more than two
thousand years before the birth of Christ. After making due allowance
for the frolicsome legends with which ancient history is enlivened,
there are things worth noting in the enthusiasm of Diodorus. Herodotus
attributed the same bridge not to Semiramis but to Nitocris, so
evidence can be drawn from two authors. Pontists gather from the
evidence that stone piers were connected by planks, which were taken
up at night, just as the central part of a bridge in Bhutan could be
removed as a military precaution. Diodorus draws entertaining pictures,
and tries to prove that bridge-building was far advanced twenty
centuries before our era began. If Semiramis collected architects
and craftsmen from all the known civilizations, until at last she
had at her beck and call a great host of capable servants, it is not
surprising that she was able to build a fine bridge as well as to
enlarge Babylon. The piers were grounded in deep water; their ends
were protected by triangular buttresses; their stones were clamped
together with thick bars of iron, which were soldered into the stones
with molten lead. As for the superstructure, it was thirty feet wide,
and all of wood--cedar, and cypress, and palm tree. In all this,
probably, there is some exaggeration, but a famous bridge did exist
at Babylon, and a combination of timber with stone piers was the most
logical development from the simplest natural bridges--the fallen tree
and the bridge of stepping-stones. Also it is likely enough that metal
clamps were employed; iron was in vogue, and by using it in stonework
under water an architect would feel less mistrustful of his cement and
less anxious about the risks of floods. Further, it is quite probable
that the entrance at each side was protected by a sort of drawbridge,
because the times were lawless. Semiramis herself was put to death by
her son Ninyas, and Ninyas in his turn was murdered.[119]
An important timber bridge with stone piers belongs to a handicraft
more advanced than that in the bridges of Bhutan; it comes between
the primitive inspiration of the Bhutan carpenters and the simplest
arched bridges with plain gateway towers. It has not yet vanished
from Europe, for a Gothic example exists at Thouars, in Deux-Sèvres,
France, according to a photograph sold by Neurdein, of Paris. Another
example crosses the Guadalaviar above Albarracin, in Aragon; and let
us remember also that the tree bridge resting on stone piers has
influenced some metal viaducts, such as Runcorn Bridge, near Liverpool,
dating from 1868. In principle the construction is the same, timber
being displaced by metal. At the end of its approach arches, where
the metalwork begins, Runcorn Bridge has two gateways, each with twin
turrets, and a great display of battlements and of machicolations.
Although this make-believe of war has a farcical bad taste, like the
assumed erudition that keeps dummy books in a library, yet Runcorn
Bridge has a well-defined interest: it mimics a phase of military
architecture which was evolved from such carpentry as to-day we find in
Bhutan.
[Illustration: DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT SOSPEL]
2. Gateway Bridge at Sospel, in the Italy of France. This drawing
illustrates very well the transition from the primitive bridges of
Bhutan to a simple arched bridge guarded by a gatehouse of control. It
is a poor little house, its architecture being less intelligent than
that in the Bhutan gateway towers. In these there is cleverness enough
to prove that the bridge represents a stale old custom which has
lagged behind the advance of handicraft, whereas the bridge at Sospel
is far in advance of the tawdry little gatehouse. A span separates the
gatehouse from the town, and the roadway is not on the same level above
both arches.
[Illustration: AT NARNI IN ITALY: THIRTEENTH CENTURY]
3. A Broken War-Bridge of the Thirteenth Century, Repaired with Timber.
A very valuable illustration, and for several reasons. The gatehouse
with its pointed archway is unusually tall; and the machicolated
box below the slightly gabled roof is unique in my experience. The
holes above this defensive work are partly for ventilation and partly
for crossbowmen, whose fire would “puncture” an attack on the right
entrance of the bridge. There is but one arrow-hole on the first
storey, and I should not care to shoot through it while molten lead or
boiling oil came sizzling down in two streams from that machicolated
box. I do not know why the gate-tower was made so very high, but
suppose that its engineer wished to build a place of vantage from which
the movements of an attack could be seen afar off, beyond the entrance
gates. In any case it failed to save four of the arches from gunpowder
wars; and note the restoration! Could anything speak to us more clearly
of the primitive bridge with stone piers united by rough timbering?
[Illustration: WAR-BRIDGE OVER THE GAV-DE-PAU AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE]
4. The War-Bridge at Orthez.
In the wizard country of the French Pyrenees there are some very
notable bridges, such as the Pont Napoléon, near Saint-Sauveur, the
Pont d’Espagne, beyond Cauterets, and the Vieux Pont at Orthez.
To study these three works, side by side, is to learn that modern
bridge-building has achieved in stone a few great works as daring as
any that the Middle Ages produced. The Pont d’Orthez has a graceful
distinction, and for nearly six hundred years it has borne the
formidable spates of the Gav-de-Pau. In the tierce-point arches, and
particularly in the largest one, there is good drawing; the spandrils
are relieved from dullness in a simple and effective manner that gives
support to the base of the parapet; perhaps the roadway dips too much
on the left-hand side, and the fortified tower is too slim to be in
scale with the broad pier from which it ascends. Add twelve inches
of width to the side face, and see how different the tower looks! In
fact, Brangwyn has done this instinctively, as I find by comparing
his vigorous pen-sketch from nature with my photographs. The tower
has but one machicolation, it guards the base of the pier from boat
attacks and scaling ladders; but the spy-holes below the roof served
many purposes, including those for which machicolations were invented.
A vaulted passage conducts the road through the tower; it is lighted
on the far side by an opening called the Priests’ Window, because the
priests and monks of Orthez jumped through it into the river, driven to
this act by the orders of Gabriel de Montgomery. Such is the legend,
and there’s not a word of history in its drama. For the rest, Orthez
has seen no war since the great combat of February 27, 1814, when
Wellington prepared the way for the battle of Toulouse by defeating the
French, under Soult.
But this old bridge, with all its charm and interest, is eclipsed as a
work of art by the Pont Napoléon, whose gigantic arch, in a very noble
curve, spans the rocky and precipitous gorge of the Pas de l’Échelle,
along which the furious Gave de Gavarnie pursues a foam-bubbled
race against time, sixty-seven metres below the bridge. Here is a
masterpiece that rivals the Puente Nuevo at Ronda, thrown across the
tremendous chasm of the Guadalvia.[120]
5. The Monnow Bridge at Monmouth.
[Illustration: WAR-BRIDGE AT MONMOUTH]
This bluff old gate-tower is a bolder specimen of mediæval work
than the smaller one at Warkworth. We are lucky indeed to possess
a war-bridge which has suffered so little from time and trade and
highway officials. If you compare it with the Brangwyn water-colour
of Parthenay Bridge, over the Thouet, you will be better able to put
the Monnow Bridge in its proper place as a work of defensive art. The
French tower is far and away superior: it has scale and dignity: it is
a work of architecture as well as an instrument of war. At Monmouth,
how different is the technical inspiration! Not a trace of good design
saves the gate-tower from being no more than a weapon for ruthless men.
A Peace Society could publish the Monnow Bridge as a fact to prove that
slaughtering wars have been more vulgar even than the cruel battles
of finance. It is the undefensive parts of this bridge that I admire.
The ribbed arches are good (p. 93), and in them a slight tentative
effort has been made to free the ring of voussoirs from the oscillation
sent down through the spandrils when a great weight passes along the
footway. “A slight tentative effort,” I repeat, because the archstones
have not been made independent from the spandrils.
6. To find arches of this kind we must return to the Pont Valentré at
Cahors, which dates from the middle of the thirteenth century. In this
noble bridge the voussoirs of all the arches look isolated from the
spandrils, as they are rimmed and “extra-dossed.” It was the Romans who
invented the “extra-dossed” arch, and they proved that by separating
archstones from the spandrils a bridge was relieved from much wear
and tear. On the other hand, when archstones are unequal, when they
are thicker in their haunches than at the crown, oscillation goes
along the full length of a bridge, fatiguing the piers, and causing
at times a noticeable shiver, as in the Llanrwst Bridge, designed by
Inigo Jones.[121] Even Perronet forgot this effect of repercussion
when he built his bridge in the Place de la Concorde at Paris; and ever
afterwards he clamped the headers with iron to the interior archstones,
as if iron fastened into stone could never become a destructive agent.
The architect of Valentré Bridge was wiser than Perronet, every arch
in his work being an elastic bow that moves between two piers without
conveying its oscillation beyond these supports. To our modern eyes, no
doubt, there are too many arches across the River Lot at Cahors, but
this defect seemed necessary in the Middle Ages, and for two reasons.
It was regarded as a defensive precaution, because narrow arches were
easier to protect from the roadway when an enemy tried to assemble
boats under a bridge; and since in the frequent wars of those days a
bridge had often to be cut as a final resource against defeat, it was
essential that the destruction of one arch should not upset another by
the withdrawal of a counterbalancing thrust from one side of a pier.
Many piers of a large size were looked upon as particularly needful
when the greater lateral thrust of round arches had to be considered in
its relation to a bridge cut in a single place. Also, as we have seen
(p. 264), bridges in the Middle Ages were built very slowly, and as war
at any moment might stop the masons, piers were regarded as abutments
and made very strong.
This much is known, but none can say why piers were built unreasonably
large. Frequent inundations from obstructed rivers were as evidently
harmful as weak piers that floods overthrew; and the genius that solved
so many problems in church architecture ought to have shown in bridges
a riper discretion. Often piers and arches were of the same width--a
waste of labour and material, as well as of space in the waterway. Even
the Romans, though their piers were less bulky, impeded the current
of rivers with too much stone; and to save their work from the floods
which they provoked, they built relief bays for spate water above that
part of their piers where adequate resistance had been obtained against
the lateral thrust of heavy arches.
In the Valentré at Cahors the architect scorned the aid of relief
bays, and grew five vast piers from the river-bed; not a courteous
thing to do, seeing that the word river in French is a lady-word, “La
rivière”--the very sound of it is a sweet compliment to the youthful
waywardness of running water. Yet French bridge-masters have sinned
against rivers as frequently as we English. If the Valentré had one
pier less, how ample and noble the design would be! Even now the design
is so virile, so masculine, that we ought to speak of this bridge as
we do of a great soldier. The feeble word “it” does not belong to
the Pont Valentré. “He” and “him” and “his” are the right pronouns.
According to many writers he is the finest military bridge in the
world, but comparisons are difficult and risky: they are affected too
much by a writer’s moods. One thing is certain--that the Valentré has
no superior in his own line. His most celebrated rivals, two bridges
at Toledo, in Spain, have a feminine grace; they are too courtly to
be typical soldiers. There is another Spanish bridge that ranks high
as a fortified work: it dates from the fourteenth century, and, in
sixteen pointed arches, crosses the Duero at Zamora. Brangwyn prefers
the Toledo bridges, the Alcántara and the Puente de San Martin, because
they are lofty as well as spacious, while Zamora Bridge is long and
low, like a good many Spanish bridges, both Roman and mediæval.[122]
[Illustration: THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO, SHOWING THE MOORISH GATEWAY
TOWER AT THE TOWN END OF THE BRIDGE]
7. The Alcántara at Toledo. From every point of view this bridge
makes a good picture, but I like her best when she is seen from a
level only a little below the footway. Then I look down at the upward
flight of her architecture, and watch how a luminous patterning of
shadow enriches the suave yet austere masonry. Somehow I think of a
courtly abbess whose half-smile is a discipline feared by everybody.
In no other way can I describe the technical inspiration that makes
this bridge very uncommon. Looking down again, I see that the Spanish
masons--or shall we call them Hispano-Moresque?--were as thrifty as
the Frenchmen at Cahors; across the breadth of the bigger arch, and
below the springing, there are seven holes, from which the centring
was scaffolded. Technically the arches are inferior to those of the
Pont Valentré, because their rings are not sufficiently rimmed and
extra-dossed, so they lie too close into the body of the spandrils. The
pier is designed very well, it has a distinction of its own and forms
on each side of the roadway a narrowing shelter-place with four angles.
Lower down, near the Moorish adaptation from a Roman triumphal arch, a
long recess carried by five brackets varies the line of each parapet,
in which there is no pretension, no swagger, no balustraded bombast.
On the town side the bridge is guarded by a Moorish gate-tower, while
across the river is a gateway dating from the time of Charles the Fifth.
A Roman bridge crossed the Tagus at this great spot, and was repaired
in 687 by the Visigoths, but in 871 it disappeared, I know not how or
why. Then a bridge was built by Halaf, son of Mahomet Alameri, Alcalde
of Toledo, but Halaf obeyed a command from Almansor Aboaarmir Mahomet,
son of Abihamir, Alquazil of Amir Almomenin Hixem. I hope you like
these names and titles? They are given by George Edmund Street,[123]
who quotes from Cean Bermudez; and so with confidence we may add Halaf
Alameri to the few early bridge-masters who are known to us by name.
For 340 years no accident seems to have happened to Alameri’s work.
Then in 1211 a part of the bridge fell into the river; and six years
later, during its restoration, Enrique I had a gate-tower set up
by Matheo Paradiso, a military architect with too angelic a name.
Forty-one years passed, and then the bridge was renewed once more,
this time by the King D. Alonso, who put the following inscription on
a piece of marble above the point of the arch: “In the year 1258 from
the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ was the great deluge of water,
that began before the month of August, and lasted until Thursday the
26th of December; and in most lands the fall of rain did much damage,
especially in Spain, where most of the bridges fell; and among them was
demolished a great part of that bridge of Toledo which Halaf, son of
Mahomet Alameri, ... had made ... in the time of the Moors, 387 years
before this time; and now the King D. Alonso, son of the noble King D.
Ferrando, and of the Queen Doña Beatriz, who reigned in Castile, has
had it repaired and renovated; and it was finished in the eighth year
of his reign, in the year of the Incarnation 1258.”
Even then some of Alameri’s work remained, but I fear that it all
vanished in 1380, when Archbishop Pedro Tenorio, a kinsman of Don Juan,
and a great pontist, became patron of the Toledo bridges and gave to
the Alcántara the appearance that we know, apart from the fortified
gateways, which were either altered or built by Andres Manrique, A.D.
1484.
8. Brangwyn has sketched the other great bridge at Toledo, the Puente
de San Martin, a better work of art than the Alcántara. Here the style
is far more masculine, and there is no wide expanse of barren wall
such as we find in the Alcántara below the bracketed recesses. The
five arches vary much in size, no doubt, but yet they harmonise very
well, and the most important one is heroic in scale, being not less
than 140 Spanish ft. wide and 95 ft. high. As for the piers, each has
a character of its own: they have but one thing in common--bulk enough
not only to resist floods, but to be in keeping with a defile of rocks.
There are two gateways, and one of them has Moorish ornament and a
Moorish battlement.
[Illustration: A SPANISH WAR-BRIDGE--THE BRIDGE OF ST. MARTIN, TOLEDO.
ITS HISTORY SEEMS TO DATE FROM 1212, BUT IN THE XIV CENTURY IT WAS
REBUILT BY ARCHBISHOP PEDRO TENORIO]
The Puente de San Martin seems to date from the year 1212. In 1368 he
met with an accident that destroyed the big arch. Shortly afterwards,
about 1380, Archbishop Tenorio began the restoration, aided by a
careless architect. One day, in fact, the architect perceived that
his new arch would fall down as soon as the centring was removed.
Panic-stricken, he went home and consulted his wife, who happened to
be a forerunner of the Suffragettes. What could be done to save her
husband’s reputation? She could set fire to the scaffolding; and when
the arch fell Toledo was quite awed by the accident. All the usual
things were said about the terrible destruction that flames could do in
a brilliant hour; and then the architect was asked to renew what the
fire had ruined. This time he did his work admirably, and his wife was
too much elated by his complete success, for she gave discretion to
the winds and told the tale of her incendiarism. If Pedro Tenorio had
punished her by claiming payment for the new work from her husband,
Toledo would have been amused, perhaps; but the good Archbishop had
learnt too much in confessionals to expect very much from human nature.
He seems to have done nothing more than congratulate his architect on
the wife’s devotion.[124]
[Illustration: THE RABOT AT GHENT: A FORTIFIED LOCK]
9. Defensive Bridges in Flemish Towns. They represent the manly,
swaggering burghers who were not clever enough to keep their
liberties. The Pont des Trous at Tournai, for instance, guarded at each
end by a huge round tower, has more to say to us about the turbulent
old Flemish pride than have many chapters written by good historians.
It is a bridge enlivened by art, yet blinded by an excess of warlike
caution. There are three good pointed vaults, each with a double ring
of moulded voussoirs; and there are two piers equally well designed;
but the parapet rises into a high rampart pierced with nine arrow
slits, and the ungainly towers have such flat summits that they appear
to be roofless.[125] At Courtrai, on the other hand, we find the Pont
de Broel, whose tall round towers have conical roofs lighted in a
playful way by dormer windows, and graced with long weather-vanes. The
Pont de Broel is a small bridge with three round arches, it looks very
trivial between its formidable guardians. Both towers are encircled
by machicolations, whose snarling teeth make an unpleasant girdle
almost a third way down the walls. Between them and the roof are many
small openings, defensive windows let us call them; and beneath the
machicolations some other windows keep watch, with a proper respect of
scaling ladders. We pass on to Ghent, where fifty-eight bridges span
the canals, and connect the thirteen islands into which the brave old
city is divided. In 1488, after Frederick III, Emperor of Germany,
with his son Maximilian, had raised the siege of Ghent, the victorious
burghers began at once to build the famous Rabot Forts, which included
a defended lock. Brangwyn represents the Rabot lock and its bold
defensive towers. These have two points of interest. They do justice
to the character of mediæval Ghent, being bluff, stern, fanciful,
ambitious, but short-sighted; and they seem to be copied from the
Holsten Gate at Lübeck, built by this Hanseatic and republican city as
a protection against frequent attacks from Denmark.
10. Covered Defensive Bridges of Timber. In these the protection
has been of three sorts: against the weather, against riots, and
against primitive weapons. Thus the covered bridges of Sumatra, made
with bamboo and boards, are sunshades in bridge-building; and this
applies to the roofed timber bridges in Western China. Some of these
are carried over important rivers on stone piers, their roofing is
decorative, and even to-day they would be useful in a time of unrest,
especially to women and children. As for the Swiss variety of covered
timber bridge, it seems to date from the period of lake-dwellings. But,
whatever its lineage may have been, it is very ancient. Throughout the
Middle Ages it was valued in war as well as in winter, when its footway
was always free from snow. Often there was but a narrow space for
light and air between the overhanging roof and the balustrade of heavy
planks. It is not surprising that Swiss timber bridges were to mediæval
archers and crossbowman what Hougomont was to Napoleon’s troops. On
the other hand, it is surprising that these primitive structures are
still as popular among the Swiss as they ever were. The most remarkable
specimens are at Lucerne. In Brangwyn’s vivid pen-drawing we see the
Todentanzbrücke, which is decorated with thirty pictures of the Dance
of the Dead, by Meglinger.
[Illustration: TODENTANZBRÜCKE AT LUCERNE IN SWITZERLAND]
As for the Kapellbrucke, also at Lucerne, it dates from 1303, and its
length is 324 metres. It crosses the mouth of the river Reuss, that
flows impetuously under it in a limpid torrent. The timbers that
support the roof are ornamented with 254 scenes from the history of
Switzerland.
[Illustration: PONT SAINT-ESPRIT]
11. Pont Saint-Esprit, over the Rhône, below the confluence of the
Ardèche. This bridge, like the Pont Valentré, is a masculine structure,
so we must speak not of “it” but of “him.” Always there is a point
of sex to be considered in architectural inspiration. Some bridges
are women, either high-born or low-born; others are common soldiers;
a few are great men of action, like the Roman Alcántara in Cáceres;
while many have no distinctive sex, and we need pronouns with which to
describe their character. If we speak of a neutral bridge as “it” we
say nothing at all; but if we could refer to it as “itshe” or “ithe,”
then we could show in one word which sexual qualities predominate. In
old English bridges it is the neutral type that holds the field, very
often in the “itshe” class. We have nothing to place side by side with
the Pont Valentré and the Pont Saint-Esprit. Even Old London Bridge
was a heroine, not a hero. A certain weakness germinated in the past
of England, and influenced several phases of art and architecture. It
is from this weakness, which seems to be racial, that modern England
has grown by the score feeble artists limp with sentiment, and feebler
faddists troubled with “nerves.” Whenever I see one of our little old
ballad bridges--an “itshe” or an “ithe”--I say to myself, “Here is
modern England in embryo; here is the beginning of a weak sentiment
which in course of time will sap the vigour of our race.”
So the Pont Saint-Esprit is to my mind something more than a noble
achievement in manly bridge-building; he marks for me also a startling
difference between the undergrowth of the French character and the
undergrowth of the English genius. We are beginning to realise in our
own sports and games, as in boxing and in football, a truth which has
long been known to students of French art, namely, that although the
surface of the French character has boiled swiftly, like scum over
jam, yet no other people have had in equal measure the self-belief
that triumphs over frequent disaster, and the intrepid hope that
gives ample pinions to the imagination. Study the churches of France
in their historical sequence from their Romanesque period to the
last phases of Gothic; contrast their varied charm with the almost
incessant wars that devastated the country; and then lift your hat to
the greatness attained by the French genius in times, not of crisis
only, but often of catastrophe. We have reason to be very proud of our
own churches, but they do not equal the French when they are studied
side by side from large photographs. The unhappier country was the
more adventurous builder, notwithstanding the virile influence brought
to England by French Cistercian monks and by such bridgemasters as
Isembert. This fact is galling to our patriotism, but yet it helps us
to appreciate those Englishmen of genius who have risen far above the
many littlenesses which English public opinion has been overapt to
approve both in art and in architecture.
Again, there are three geographical reasons why the Pont Saint-Esprit
is very notable: he crosses the Rhône, one of the most treacherous
rivers in Europe; he belongs to the Department of Gard, where
historical bridges have been famed since the times of the Romans; and
he is in the district of Uzès, where we find the Pont Saint-Nicolas,
on the road to Nîmes, a lofty bridge of the thirteenth century, with a
beautiful distinction, built by the Priory of Saint-Nicolas-Campagnac.
Now these two bridges, so different in technical inspiration, yet
so alike in thorough scholarship, mark a very important time of
transition in French architecture. The Pont Saint-Esprit was designed
and built by the _Frères pontifes_, or Pontist Brothers, but already
the good example set by these friars was followed with enthusiasm by a
great many laymen, whose guilds were competing against the religious
corporations. Sooner or later, inevitably, civil work of every sort
would have to pass under the sway of laic schools and masters; but the
people of France were superstitious in their fondness for the Pontist
Brothers, whose ferry-boats had saved a great many lives, whose bridges
were famous everywhere, whose hospitals lodged and fed pilgrims, and
whose white dress was in harmony with their good work and their good
conduct. So the public was very far from pleased when a bridge of
importance was built without help from the Pontist Brothers. For this
reason, and no other, the Pont Saint-Cloud was called _un pont maudit_,
and its construction was attributed to the Devil. Still, the Pontist
Brothers had to go. During the thirteenth century their public value as
bridge-builders grew weaker and weaker, until at last their competition
against the trade guilds could be regarded no longer as a political
offence.[126] It says much for them that their last undertaking, the
Pont Saint-Esprit, was in most respects their best achievement: a fact
which time itself has recognised by keeping this bridge in use to the
present day.
[Illustration: THE PONTE NOMENTANO, A MEDIÆVAL WAR-BRIDGE IN THE
CAMPAGNA, THREE MILES FROM ROME. IT SPANS THE WILLOW-FRINGED ANIO, A
SACRED RIVER IN ITALIAN LEGEND]
The Pont Saint-Esprit was commissioned by the Abbey of Cluny, and in
1265 the Pontist Brothers began to found the piers, after discussing
their plans with Jean de Tessanges, Abbot of Cluny. Now, an earlier
work of the Pontist Brothers, the Pont Saint-Bénézet at Avignon, was
eighty years old in 1265, and his behaviour in the Rhône must have been
a subject of interest to the successors of Bénézet. I conclude, then,
that the Pont Saint-Esprit may be looked upon as a technical criticism
of the earlier bridge, and it approves in all respects the work of St.
Bénézet. Both bridges have relief arches for spate water, and when they
are examined in bird’s-eye views, both have an elbow opposed to the
current of the Rhône, and each suggests the image of a bridge of boats
to which already I have drawn attention (p. 262). This image is rather
more pronounced in the case of the earlier bridge, for the length of
Bénézet’s piers, in the direction of the current, is enormous, being
not less than thirty metres.
For the rest, the Pont Saint-Esprit seems to have an enchanted size,
his most confident historians giving neither the same dimensions nor
the same number of arches. Men with tape measures have grown tired of
their job, seemingly; and even in photographs some arches are omitted
while others are blurred by distance. On my table is an excellent
photograph: it takes in just a bit of the metal arch which, about fifty
years ago, displaced two of the old arches and made a passage for
boats. From this point to the elbow upstream, there are eleven arches;
beyond the elbow there are six more, and the bridge is not complete.
This is all the camera can do. According to Viollet-le-Duc, there are
twenty-two arches in a length of about 1000 metres; the roadway is five
metres wide. Larousse tells me, on the other hand, that the length is
738 metres, the width 5 metres 40, the number of arches twenty-six;
and another great work of reference, published also by Larousse, gives
919 metres for the length, and says that among the twenty-five arches
there are nineteen ancient ones. We ought to admire the variegated
self-confidence of historians.
But the main point is evident enough: the Pont Saint-Esprit is one of
the longest stone bridges in the world. And the construction is truly
marvellous. This was proved when a pier was pulled up to make room for
the iron arch. The labour required was astounding, so excellent was
the cemented masonry. But, of course, the bridge has passed through a
good many changes to keep him in touch with the increase of traffic.
In the seventeenth century he was still closed at both ends by strong
gateways, while on the town side was a quite important defence of the
fourteenth century, afterwards embodied in the citadel by which the
river was guarded above-bridge. These defensive works have all gone,
but their effect can be studied in “La Topographie de la Gaule,” where
an engraving gives a good idea of their appearance.
12. Ponte Nomentano in the Campagna, three miles from Rome. This, no
doubt, is the most romantic of all the fortified bridges that Brangwyn
has painted. Both bridge and castle are mediæval, but they rise over
the willow-frilled Anio, a river haunted by myths which to the ancients
were sacred truths. It was in the Anio that Rhea Silvia passed from the
brief hours of her mortality into the life of a goddess; and to this
river Silvia confided her two children, Romulus and Remus, the twin
Moses of Roman story, who were carried in their cradle to the Tiber,
where other waters bore them on and on till at last they came to land
under the fig tree at the foot of the Palatine hill. What a delightful
legend to be whispered by the current of the prattling Anio below the
uncouth stones of the Nomentano! What other war-bridge has been united
to such a gracious myth?
And history as well as legend has been busy on the banks of the Anio.
Into this river the ashes of Marius were thrown by the adherents of
Sulla; and beyond the bridge, on the right bank, west of the Via
Nomentana, is a very famous hillside, the Mons Sacer, to which the
plebeians retreated, as to a fortified place, when they asserted their
right to tame the patricians. Their first great strike, or secession,
occupied four months in the year 549 B.C., when four thousand of them
encamped on the friendly hill, leaving the crops unharvested, and the
city without a garrison. Mount Sacer became sacred to the People of
Rome, and to the historic sense it is the Hill of Liberty, sanctified
by the first brave ideals of a democratic justice. Yet in recent times
vulgarians have taken hold of Mount Sacer, and have carted it away by
the ton to be used as building material.
As for the Ponte Nomentano, he is nothing more than a burly soldier,
a common man-at-arms. The mediæval engineer was uninspired by an
enchanted site, and gave the whole of his attention to the pronged
battlements. He had no feeling for proportion, and no liking for
a stern eloquence of line such as we find in the noble castle of
Chenonceaux, a masterpiece of the French Renaissance, whose long wing
is carried by a bridge of five round arches, and whose turreted portion
is pierced by a single arcade.
13. The bridges of Laroque, near Cahors, on the river Lot. In this
rapid sketch Brangwyn represents a riverside Gibraltar upon which an
ancient village stands, partly on bridges. Its value in “the good
old times” as a stronghold fortified by Nature is patent, and the
watch-towers have an unsleeping alertness that looks out upon the world
through one eye or window. I should like to know who built the first
bridge at Laroque. There is a Romanesque form in the arch drawn by
Brangwyn, and the Romans were active in the neighbourhood. Over the Lot
at Divona, now called Cahors, they built a bridge, which perished some
years ago in a local storm of party feeling. To imagine Rome with a
Gibraltar on the Lot is a great pleasure.
[Illustration: LAROQUE ON THE RIVER LOT, NEAR CAHORS, A SORT OF INLAND
GIBRALTAR; A PART OF THE VILLAGE IS BUILT ON BRIDGES THROWN ACROSS
CHASMS IN THE ROCKS]
Before we pass on from the defensive bridges, I should like to give
you a picture of the famous old bridge at Saintes, in France, that
lasted to the year 1843, when it was destroyed. I know not why I use
the silly word “it,” for the bridge of Saintes was an exceedingly
martial structure that united all the main phases of military
art--the primitive, the Roman, and the mediæval. Let me give an
abridged description from Viollet-le-Duc’s “Dictionnaire raisonnée
d’Architecture”:--
“The first gate appeared on the right shore of the
Charente, on the side of the Faubourg des Dames; next came
the Roman arch,[127] the upper part of which was
crenellated during the Middle Ages; next on the side of the
town stood a tower of oval plan, through which the road
lay; the town gates with flanking towers closed the end of
the bridge. From the first gate to the Roman arch the
bridge was of wood, as was also the case between the great
tower and the town gates, so that by the removal of this
part of the roadway all communication could be cut off
between the town and the tower, as well as between the
bridge and the Faubourg; moreover, the parapets were
crenellated, so that the garrison of the town at any moment
could stop all navigation.”
V
A brief introduction to the history of bridges has so many difficulties
that I creep through my work, a few hundred words in a long day. To try
to plant an oak tree in a thimble would be more difficult, I suppose,
but gleaning here and there over vast fields brings trouble enough to
any writer. I go through scores of photographs, and turn over great
piles of notes, and seek for a topic that is not too technical for
the general reader, but that touches a really important phase in the
evolution of bridge-building. There is a species of bridge to which
the arches at Laroque belong; it may be called either freakish or very
exceptional. Let me give a few examples.
There is one at Crowland, a curious three-branched structure which
for many a year stood at the confluence of the Catwater drain and two
streamlets, the Welland and the Nyne. To-day no water flows under this
bridge, and common little modern houses do not make pretty pictures
when they are framed by the arches. There are three pointed arches,
with their abutments at the angles of an equilateral triangle; they
meet in the middle, and form three roadways and three watercourses.
They have three stone ribs apiece, and the nine ribs meet in the
centre I note, too, that these arches were built not by a bridgeman,
but by a mason skilled in church work, for their rings are moulded
elaborately as in Gothic windows and doorways. As for the style of
architecture, it is not older than the beginning of the fourteenth
century; but a much earlier bridge at Crowland, probably of wood, was
famed for its triangular shape, and mentioned in a charter of the year
943, when Edmund was King.
At the south-west entrance of Crowland Bridge, beyond the five steps,
there is a rough-hewn statue that represents a crowned and bearded
figure seated up high against the parapet walls, in an attitude of
sorrow, with arms folded (and perhaps they may be bound together)
over a long robe. Time has frayed and scarred this uncouth sculpture,
but not without leaving some mellow lines and planes. The archæology
of guesswork has called this effigy by various names, such as
Ethelbald, and Saint Guthlac, and Henry II, but I prefer to look upon
it as a simple Pietà chiselled by a mason who had been trained to
do enniched figures for church decoration--work without detail, to
make at a distance a broad effect. This conjecture is in accord with
the ecclesiastical moulding of the archstones, and with the mediæval
custom that united bridges to Christianity by means of sacred emblems.
Crowland Abbey ruled over the district, so one of the Abbots may have
built the bridge; and perhaps the pointed arches, three in number, with
their triple ribs, and their three pathways, and the three streams of
water, may have been intended as symbols of the Trinity. If so,--and
there is nothing in this view to clash with the spirit of the Mediæval
Church,--then a Pietà turned toward the west would be the most
beautiful symbol of that Light which went down with the sun, and then
rose again through the dark into the dusk, and through the dusk into
a dawn where faith for ever dwells. On the other hand, if the crowned
figure represents a mere earthly king, I know not why Ethelbald should
be chosen, for his reign of two years was not a creative time and he
died in 860, just eighty-three years before Crowland’s triangular
bridge was alluded to in the charter of the year 943. Alfred, Edward
the Elder, and Athelstan--these kings in succession were nearer to
the charter, and their longer reigns were more notable than the short
hours of Ethelbald. Alfred we should prefer, of course, but he has been
passed over by the busy minds that have weaved around Crowland Bridge
so many cobwebs of the study and so much haze of idle conjecture. My
own views are conjectures also, but they are taken partly from the
bridge itself and partly from the care and affection that the Church
during the Middle Ages bestowed on bridge-building.
And now a technical matter ought to be considered in its bearing on
the arches of Crowland Bridge. At a time when bridges were protected
by the Church, their arches were affected by changes of style in
ecclesiastical windows and doorways; but, of course, whatever shape
was given to them, they were treated differently from doorways and
windows, for these had to bear only a downward thrust, while bridges
had to withstand five trials: their own “spring,” the vibration
caused by wheeled traffic, the lateral pressure of flowing water, the
disturbance of gravity by immersion, and blows from drifting ice and
timber. With these problems to be solved, bridgemen set no store by
moulded archstones, a kickshaw of style. Sometimes they built the ring
of an arch with two or three sets of voussoirs,[128] but their aim
was practical, not ornamental; they wished to give greater resistance
to their work, and not merely to spend time and money on a decorative
effect. So when we find in the arches of Crowland Bridge such moulded
handicraft as was used in church decoration, we may surmise that the
architect and his masons were not bridge-builders, and that they worked
only for the light foot-traffic of a village.
It is worth noting that in the year 1752 a French architect named
Beffara took a hint from Crowland Bridge, and then achieved fame with
a daring structure built near Ardres, in the Pas-de-Calais. There are
four branches to this bridge, and they carry roads over two canals
that intersect at right angles. One canal goes from Saint-Ouen to
Calais and the other from Ardres to Gravelines. Beffara’s work is
placed by Larousse among the fifty-four most notable bridges in the
world, and this honour it seems to merit; but Frenchmen in their
vanity have tried to make it into a pretentious bridge by giving to
it a braggart name--_Le Sans-Pareil_. Gracious! It is fit for a café
or for a battleship, in whose nomenclature bravado and bombast rule
as customs. Poor Beffara! “Le Sans-Pareil,” like “Titanic” or like
“Dreadnought,” defies the powers of Nature, inviting them to do their
worst; and what good omen can there be in such bantam cockiness?
For a long time the old bridge at Bâle, over the Rhine, remarkable
for its length and for its beautiful site, was not only freakish but
exceedingly insolent. At one end, on the side of greater Bâle, was a
tower decorated with a grotesque head called Laellenkoenig, which,
in answer to the working of a clock, put out its tongue and rolled
insulting eyes at the opposite bank. Eight or ten times an hour this
abusive pantomime was repeated, and it never failed to anger little
Bâle, which had the pugnacious vanity of a small organism. I do not
know how many duels were fought, but at last a touch of Rabelaisian
humour suggested a mechanical revenge, far more regular in its action
than were fights and punctured bodies. A tall post was set up by the
inhabitants of Bâle junior, and on the top of it stood a hateful
statue that affected to turn its back on the enemy with a shameless
movement.
It is risky at the present time to say that a bridge has certain old
characters: change is so rapid that no pontist can keep in touch with
its vagaries; but I believe the old bridge at Bâle is alive, and that
it keeps in use the Gothic tower, a triangular defence of red sandstone
erected on the middle pier, and devoted now to a thermometer, a
barometer, and a table of weights and measures. Laellenkoenig has gone,
of course, and Bâle junior has grown much bigger and less techy.
The Bridge of Sighs, at Venice, must be included among the exceptional
bridges, being equally celebrated in history and in art. Who can say
how many times she has been etched and painted and engraved? She is
not very important as a work of architecture, yet artists are drawn
towards her invariably, and seldom do they fail to make her impressive.
Brangwyn loves the Bridge of Sighs, and does her much more than justice
in one of his finest etchings. There is something trivial in her
Renaissance ornament, and her proportions are not great, being only two
metres wide and six high; on the other hand, her abutments are famous
buildings, the ducal palace and the State prison. It is from the second
storey of the palace that we enter the gloom of her covered passage,
concerning which a Frenchman writes as follows: “_On pourrait presque
le comparer, en agrandissant les proportions, à nos fourgons d’armée_.”
It is said that only a prisoner here and there went over this bridge
more than once--in his compulsory walk from a dungeon in the prison to
the Council of the Ten. Those who awaited their trial in the dungeons
were looked upon as already condemned; their appearance before the Ten
was a formality, at least in public opinion; and for this reason the
dark corridor across the canal was called the Bridge of Sighs.
Among the bridges of the fourteenth century there are two that history
has set down as very exceptional. One of them is a covered bridge over
the Ticino at Pavia, erected under the care of Gian Galeazzo Visconti.
Professor Fleeming Jenkin says of it: “This bridge, which still exists,
has seven pointed brick arches, each 70 ft. in span and 64 ft. in
height; the depth of the arch ring at the crown is 5 ft. 6 in. The
tympanum is pierced; the bricks used in the arches are formed to suit
their position, and are hollow in the middle to diminish the weight.
The roof of the roadway is carried by a hundred rough granite columns.”
This neat description is accurate, but in it the bridge is not
visualised. Would that we had a Brangwyn sketch! I have by my side an
engraving of the bridge, and the effect of the design is that of an
open-work frieze. Each gracefully pointed arch is a repetition of the
other six; the piers also are uniform and graceful, being all 16 ft.
3 in. wide; and all the spandrils are pierced in the same triangular
fashion. The point of each triangle is turned downwards, its sides are
the inner surfaces of two arch rings, and its base, turned upwards,
and gracefully arched with seventeen long bricks, helps to support the
parapet. On this parapet at equal intervals rise the hundred granite
columns by which the covered roadway is carried. So the design is a
clever feat not merely of repetitive decoration, but of repeating
solids and voids that oppose each other in a harmony of contrasts; for
the empty spandrils in their form oppose the leaf-shaped openings made
by the arches, and all the curved solids of the bridge are foiled in a
rugged manner by the upright columns, as well as by the long horizontal
lines of the covered roadway. In the contrast between cold granite and
warm brick there is colour also, and it suits the pulsating light and
heat of Italy.
As for the second bridge of the fourteenth century, which architects
regard as very uncommon, it exists in drawings only, for it was
destroyed by Carmagnola. Its founder was a duke of Milan, Bernabò
Visconti, and it crossed the Adda at Trezzo. According to Hann and
Hosking, it had “a single arch of granite, very well constructed of
stones in two courses, the innermost 3¼ ft. thick in the direction of
the radius, the outermost 9 in., the span at low water 251 ft.; the
river rises sometimes 13 ft.” The radius of the arch was 133 ft. A span
of 251 ft. in a stone bridge was a noble achievement. It is the largest
that I remember. The Grosvenor Bridge at Chester has a span of 200
ft., just thirty yards wider than the central arch of Trajan’s Bridge
over the Tagus. New London Bridge in her finest arch attains a span of
152 ft., beating Waterloo Bridge by nearly eleven yards. Two French
bridges of the eighteenth century--the Pont de Lavaur and the Pont de
Gignac--have spans of 160 ft.; and let me refer you also to the Pont de
Neuilly-sur-Seine (p. 338).
Many uncommon bridges have been attributed to the Chinese, and I
know not what to say about some of them. Let me quote from Marco
Polo, giving also the excellent notes written by his editor Colonel
Yule. In the twenty-seventh chapter of his travels Marco Polo speaks
“of the river named Pulisangan, and of the bridge over it.” This
river, whose name is written variously, is believed to be the Hoen-ho
of the Jesuits’ map, which, uniting with another stream from the
north-west, forms the Pe-ho or White River. When Marco Polo comes to
the Pulisangan[129] he finds “a very handsome bridge of stone, perhaps
unequalled by another in the world.” “Its length is three hundred
paces, and its width eight paces; so that ten men can ride abreast
without inconvenience.[130] It has twenty-four arches, supported by
twenty-five piers erected in the water, all of serpentine stone, and
built with great skill. On each side, and from one extremity to the
other, there is a handsome parapet, formed of marble slabs and pillars
arranged in a masterly style. At the commencement of the ascent the
bridge is something wider than at the summit, but from the part where
the ascent terminates, the sides run in straight lines and parallel
to each other.[131] Upon the upper level there is a massive and lofty
column, resting upon a tortoise of marble, and having near its base a
large figure of a lion, with a lion also on the top.[132] Towards the
slope of the bridge there is another handsome column or pillar, with
its lion, at the distance of a pace and a half from the former; and
all the spaces between one pillar and another, throughout the whole
length of the bridge, are filled up with slabs of marble, curiously
sculptured, and mortised into the next adjoining pillars, which are,
in like manner, a pace and a half asunder, and equally surmounted with
lions,[133] forming altogether a beautiful spectacle. These parapets
serve to prevent accidents, that might otherwise happen to passengers.
What has been said applies to the descent as well as to the ascent of
the bridge.”[134]
I do not understand why this description is considered very difficult
to understand. It depicts a gabled bridge with a flat top, not an
uncommon form of bridge in China, I believe. The footway ascends to
the beginning of the middle arch, where it becomes flat and level;
it continues so for the full width of the arch, and then it descends
toward the abutment across the river. With this picture in mind it is
easy to decorate the bridge over the Pulisangan, or Hoen-ho, with the
accessories described by Marco Polo. The parapets have coping stones
of sculptured marble, and pillars are carefully set along the parapets
at an equal distance from each other. These pillars are of two sorts.
Those above the flat part of the roadway, where the parapets also are
horizontal, are tall and massive. On each side, at the brow of the
ascent, there is a tall pillar upon the summit of which is a stone
lion; and in the middle of each parapet, on this level part of the
road, there is a taller and heavier column, whose pedestal is a marble
tortoise, and whose summit carries a symbolic lion. Another lion is
placed near the tortoise, perhaps on a ledge of stone corbelled out
from the parapet. As for the parapets that slope up from the abutments
to the point where they become level, or horizontal, they, too, have
their emblematic lions carried by pillars, and these ornaments, in
accordance with the logic of design, are much smaller than those on
the summit of the steep bridge. For the rest, Marco Polo speaks of
twenty-four arches and of twenty-five piers; and if we give to the
arches an average span of fifty-two feet, and to the piers an average
width of thirteen feet, we get a bridge 1573 ft. long, or seventy-three
feet longer than the five hundred yards suggested by Colonel Yule.
Viewed in this way, apart from the vague glamour of enthusiastic words,
there is nothing extravagant in Marco Polo’s description.
Many writers have been astonished by another Chinese bridge, called
the Bridge of Cho-gan, in the province of Shen-si. Its great arch
is said to have had an unrivalled span. I am told that it was built
with huge blocks of stone, cut into voussoirs, the joints of which
converged towards a common centre, as in our own bridges. This may be
true, though in photographs of Chinese bridges which I have seen the
voussoirs do not resemble ours; not only are they much longer, they are
much narrower also, and recall to my memory a good description written
by Barrow, whose impressions of China are invaluable to students.
Barrow speaks of archstones from five to ten feet long, and says that
each stone “is cut so as to form a segment of the arch.” “There is no
keystone” when an arch is built in this manner. Again, “ribs of wood
fitted to the convexity of the arch are bolted through the stones by
iron bars, fixed in the solid part of the bridge”; sometimes no wood is
employed, and then “the curved stones are mortised into long transverse
blocks of stone.” It would be ridiculous to speak of this technical
method as one that employs voussoirs, since the arch ring is built with
a few segmental stones and without a keystone; and possibly the Bridge
of Cho-gan was constructed in this fashion. A drawing of it is given in
Kircher’s “La Chine Illustrée”--or, rather, in Dalquié’s translation of
Kircher’s book, published in 1670 at Amsterdam. It is not a geometrical
drawing, and the dimensions are given in Chinese measures, which do not
help us to love Kircher and Dalquié. M. Degrand is baffled by these
measures;[135] but he admits that the Bridge of Cho-gan must have been
a grandiose structure dating from a very remote time.
Gauthey speaks with admiration of the “Pont de Fo-Cheu sur le Min”--a
bridge not less than 7935 metres long by 19 metres 50 wide, with a
hundred arches, all semicircular, and thirty-nine metres in their
average span. The piers were nearly as broad, and their height was
thirty-nine metres. Here is a bridge that Dean Swift ought to have
put into his pictures of Brobdingnag. Gauthey seems to have faith in
it, while M. Degrand has doubts. He says: “Even if we admit that there
is no flagrant exaggeration in the documents from which the account
of this bridge is taken, the workmanship in its general character, as
shown in the drawing given by Gauthey, has a near resemblance to that
in Roman bridges, and ought not to be assigned to a period earlier than
theirs.” Gauthey describes the decorative treatment. Under the parapet
of white marble ran a line of consoles; the piers were surmounted by
figures of lions in black marble, cut from blocks seven metres long;
and above each twentieth arch the footway was guarded by a gateway, _un
arc de triomphe_.
For the rest, as I wanted to learn something more about this bridge
of a hundred vast arches over the Min at Fo-Cheu, I wrote to the Rev.
O. M. Jackson, whose kind help I have already acknowledged (p. 248).
There is a river Min in Sichuan, but no news of such a bridge has
reached Mr. Jackson, though he has worked in Western China for more
than twenty years, and has travelled on foot over a very wide area in
the province of Sichuan. Again, Mr. Jackson does not recognise the
spelling “Fo-Cheu,” but refers me to the city of Fu Chow in the coast
province of Fukien. One day, perhaps, research will bring me in touch
with the colossal masterpiece described by Gauthey, though at present
I am baffled by the variety of geographical names that travellers have
given to the bridges of China. Still, the Chinese have been great
bridge-builders, and some of their stone arches have been very high and
very wide. Perhaps the one described by Kircher may have been as wide
as Trezzo Bridge, over the Adda, with its wonderful span of 251 feet.
My favourite bridge in the class of exceptional merit is the Ponte
della Trinità over the Arno at Florence, designed in 1566 by the
architect of the Pitti Palace, Bartolomeo Ammanati, a devoted admirer
of Michelangelo. Both in science and in art the Ponte della Trinità
is complete as an original success. Its vaulting--I ought to say
_his_ vaulting, for in this bridge the male qualities of genius are
much stronger than the female--his vaulting, then, if not the most
scientific in the world, is not excelled by any other work either
ancient or modern. There are three arches, and their curves are
cycloids; the rise from the springing level is only a trifle more
than one-sixth of the span. How Ammanati managed to get his effect of
perfect balance and symmetry is a question very hard to answer, for
there is a considerable difference between the width of his arches,
the central one being 96 ft. in span, and the others 86 ft. and 88 ft.
This fact has been established by measured drawings, but do you notice
it out of doors, in the magic of this beautiful bridge? The piers are
simple and excellent. Their width, twenty-six feet, is not too much
for the spates of a freakish river, nor too heavy for the bridge as a
linear composition; on the upstream side they have stern cutwaters,
good foils in a piece of architecture that blends an alert grace with
a supple vigour. Another point worth noting is the gradient of a
roadway that starts out from low abutments. Ammanati was bent upon
being a friend to the traffic of Florence, and with the help of his
cycloid arches he kept the road on a mild curve. To-day this good point
attracts little attention, as most of us forget that steep bridges were
in vogue till late in the eighteenth century.
A Victorian pontist, William Hosking, endeavoured to prove that
Ammanati made one mistake in the Ponte della Trinità. It seemed to
Hosking that the piers were too bulky, so he cut them down in a sketch
and spoilt the whole bridge by altering the proportions. Architects
told him so, but Hosking crowed over his little sketch and published it
with pride, as you will find by turning to his “Architectural Treatise
on Bridge Building”--a valuable work from other standpoints.
VI
The great work of Ammanati sets thought in movement on bridge
decoration, and I wish to offer some hints on this subject, not for
the purpose of finding rules, but in order that a public debate may be
invited. Rules would be very useful if they could be formulated, but
in bridge decoration national sentiment and personal feeling have been
exceedingly active; no writer, then, can do more than offer suggestions
from his own point of view.
Less than twenty years ago a debate on this subject would not have been
easy, for good books on the technical history of bridges were uncommon,
and photographs of fine examples were far more difficult to get than
they are now. English books on bridges are still formidably dull; to
read them is perhaps as troublesome as hill climbing on a foggy day;
but the fear of being “ploughed” in a stiff examination helps young men
to be intrepid. In France, on the other hand, the public is served very
well by literary pontists. M. Charles Béranger, for instance, from his
Librairie Polytechnique in Paris, is publishing a series of thorough
books on bridges, as useful to us as they are to French students.
Already eight volumes have been issued. They include:--
1. “Ponts en Maçonnerie.” Par E. Degrand, Inspecteur-Général des Ponts
et Chaussées, et Jean Résal, Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées. Two
volumes, illustrated; 40 francs.
2. “Ponts Métalliques.” Par M. Pascal, Ingénieur. One volume; 15
francs; illustrated.
3. “Croquis de Ponts Métalliques.” Par Jules Gaudard, Ingénieur
Civil et Professeur Honoraire de l’Université de Lausanne. Profusely
illustrated; 20 francs.
4. “Cours de Ponts Métalliques.” Par Jean Résal. Vol. I, 375
illustrations; 20 francs.
5. “Manuel Théorique et Pratique du Constructeur en Ciment Armé.” Par
MM. N. de Tédesco et V. Forestier. One volume, 242 illustrations; 20
francs.
6. “Études sur les Ponts en Pierre remarquables par leur Décoration.”
Par F. De Dartein, Inspecteur-Général des Ponts et Chaussées en
Retraite, etc. Vol. I, “Ponts Français antérieurs au Dix-Huitième
Siècle”; not yet published. “Vol. II, Ponts Français du Dix-Huitième
Siècle--Centre”; published. Vol. III, “Ponts Français du Dix-Huitième
Siècle--Languedoc”; published. Vol. IV, Bourgogne; published. Vol.
V, “Ponts Étrangers antérieurs au XIX siècle--Italiens, Espagnols et
Anglais”; not yet published. Price, 25 francs the volume.
For this work M. De Dartein has made exact measured drawings from
sixty-eight bridges, and each example has a great historic interest.
The author has taken a line of his own, dwelling on the ornament of
bridges, their decoration; several of his volumes are long overdue, but
in his earnest study of the eighteenth century we see what he admires
in French design. M. De Dartein is thoughtful and thorough, but I wish
some photographs had been added to the illustrations, because measured
drawings give only the dry bones of architecture.
How to decorate a bridge is a question beset with so many problems,
some practical, and others æsthetic, that it ought to be debated at
an international congress of engineers and architects and artists.
There are persons who think that M. De Dartein will say the last word
on his important theme; but it is enough for me to believe that his
material and his personal taste will be invaluable, presenting facts
and provoking discussion. He lingers too often over details of trivial
ornament, which increase the cost of production without doing any good
at all to the architecture. In other words, M. De Dartein speaks too
often as an engineer.
The qualities of a great bridge should make their appeal in stern
lines, in ample proportions, in a scale that befits not the site alone
but the site and its history; for all fine architecture dwells with
the fugitive generations as a lasting citizen; it is an epitome of
racial character alembicated by genius. Bridges cannot be fine when
they are dwarfed by their environments, or when they are too big to
be in harmony with the externals of their setting. This, no doubt, is
a staring truism, yet it is unseen by most modern engineers, whose
metal monsters are often as wrongly placed in a gentle landscape as a
giant from Brobdingnag would be at Lilliput. On the other hand, can
you explain why the Roman bridge at Alcántara is tremendous art? Is
it not because he is in scale with the rocky gorge of the Tagus? This
virile bridge completes a grand site, and finds in the site his own
completion.
[Illustration: THE PONT NEUF AT PARIS, BUILT IN 1604; IT HAS BEEN MUCH
ALTERED SINCE THE RENAISSANCE]
Still, it cannot be said that Roman bridges were always free from
redundant ornament. There were times when pomp exerted a bad influence;
and later ages borrowed oddments of Roman decoration that weakened
in many countries the aspect of bridges. It is from such Roman work
as the Pont du Gard, where no detail was called for, and where the
architect’s aim was to be unpretentious, that we learn never to worry
a bridge with embellishments. To construct ornament is very often an
easy accomplishment of bad taste, while to ornament construction is
a very difficult problem of self-restraint in art, because judgment
tells us that a great design carried out in simple and thorough
masonry is in itself ornamental, if not complete. Applied decoration
is almost certain to harm it, just as a human face is disfigured by
sticking-plaster.
For example, turn to Frank Brangwyn’s drawing of the Pont Neuf at
Paris, and note under the parapet the well-spaced brackets. Each
bracket is decorated with a mask. Why? Simpler and shorter brackets
would have been more in keeping with the architecture, as these long
ones overlap the keystones--a serious blunder. Partly to hide a ring
of voussoirs is to blur the whole structural beauty of an arch. It
is like covering the eyes with blue spectacles. And there are other
mistakes of scale in the Pont Neuf. No fewer than six piers are crowded
into the Seine, as if inundations were amusements to be liked very
much. But the spirit of Renaissance art was overapt to be finikin. In a
fine bridge at Chatsworth, for instance, a charming effect is troubled
by a too expensive parapet; and statues are lodged on pedestals above
the cutwaters. Why? Is the cutwater of a bridge a convenient spot for
the display of sculpture? As many persons fear in talk a sudden silence
made by thought, so many architects in their revisions fear the plain
spaces left in their designs by a creative inspiration. Then in a hurry
they add some “ornament” such as we find at Chatsworth, or in Gauthey’s
Pont de Navilly on the Doubs. In this bridge narrow spandrils are
choked with an overturned vase surrounded by an ornament of bulrushes,
and over each cutwater there is a huge stone shaped like an egg and
garlanded. I decline to speak in technical terms because the folly of
using superfluous “ornament” is hidden by words that look erudite. Was
it an admiration for Moses that caused Gauthey to put bulrushes on a
bridge? And did he suppose that they suggested water and adventure? As
for those huge eggs of stone, if they came from some bird five or six
times as big as an ostrich, I should like to see them in a museum of
natural history, but without their ornamental wreaths.
In brief, are you attracted by any phase of modern bridge-building
that copies the decorations of civic architecture, displaying
columns, pilasters, niches, balustrades, battlements, towers, turrets,
pinnacles, or any other finery that serves no organic purpose in the
life of a contemporary bridge? Myself, I hate such a strumpet of a
bridge as the Hoogesluis at Amsterdam, with her ornate spandrils, and
her embossed masonry, and her balustraded parapet surmounted by a
row of obelisks around which lamps are bracketed. Also I hate such a
suspension bridge as the one at Conway Castle, where the metal rods
that support the roadway pass through a brace of turrets on each of
the embattled gateways. The effect is not only comic but ludicrous.
No engineer with any sense would have put a metal viaduct within a
few yards of Conway Castle. Or, if a metal suspension had been forced
upon him by his employers, he would have made in a modern style a
very simple and stern design. Instead, we have two vulgar gateways
rudely copied from Conway Castle, and then lacerated by five metal
rods that cut through each of the four turrets. I am reminded of an
absurd railway bridge at Cologne, whose parapets are--or were--flanked
by small turrets, and whose gateway has--or had--two high towers
formidably armed with make-believe battlements and machicolations. Such
futile pretension is a public insult; it implies that laymen have no
common sense at all in their attitude to “feats of engineering.”
But it is not the modern bridge alone that provokes criticism in this
matter of decorative art. Some ancient and famous bridges are hard nuts
to crack as soon as we pass from their structural fitness to their
ornamentation. As an example I may choose the Ponte Sant’ Angelo at
Rome, which has been copied feebly by the Schloss Brücke at Berlin.
Originally the Sant’ Angelo was the Pons Ælius, built by Hadrian (A.D.
13) face to face with his mausoleum, to-day the castle of Saint Angelo.
In the seventeenth century new parapets were added to the bridge, and
ten colossal statues by Bernini were put up on pedestals along the
parapets. Around these statues many a controversy has raged, and I am
not surprised. In my photographs there is a small lamp-standard between
each pair of huge figures; even the lights of Rome have to twinkle
below the decorations. The bridge looks burdened rather than adorned;
it is neither wide enough nor high enough to be used as a gallery for
sculpture modelled on a large scale. That a great effort was made
by an artist of power is evident, but the artist worked for his own
ambition, and not for the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. He had no conception of
the fact that the bridge and its environment were so good that they
could not be improved by huge “embellishments.” Yet there are writers
who say, “Yes, no doubt, Bernini’s bouncing figures are theatrical,
but, after all, their general effect is grandiose.” The truth is, every
great city needs a Parliament of Taste where questions of civic art
could be debated publicly, with help from lantern slides. No writer
can hope to do much in his defence of art. Indeed, books are studied
so infrequently that they cannot draw public attention to the larger
problems of architecture and decoration; whereas free debates in a
Parliament of Taste, centring always around object-lessons, might
restore to art the life of a great citizen.
In this matter we owe much to Hosking, the Victorian pontist, who cried
out against the blunders made in the ornamentation of bridges. As early
as 1842 he told the truth boldly, declaring that the most eminent civil
engineers, in their efforts to take hints from street buildings, had
failed to produce anything but meanness or absurdity, or a combination
of both. Hosking had faith in three simple principles:--
1. That bridges, in the combination of their leading lines, should be
bold and simple;
2. That their passage over dangerous places ought to be a secure
highway; and,
3. That in stone bridges far too much money had been wasted on the high
finish of exterior surfaces. In very ponderous language Hosking said:--
“It may be fairly questioned whether Waterloo and London
bridges would not have been finer objects had the masonry
of their external faces been merely rough-axed, or even
left scabbled, instead of being fair hammer-dressed; and
certainly many thousands of pounds might have been saved in
the execution of Waterloo Bridge, and a much better result
produced, by the omission of the coupled columns and their
immediate accessories, and by the use of a plain parapet of
a more reasonable height, instead of the high, the
enormously expensive, and absurdly ugly balustraded
enclosures which now aid the columns and their projected
entablatures to deform a splendid structure.”
This Puritan outlook appeals to me, for I believe that good bridges
should be as sternly efficient as were the Ironsides of Cromwell’s
army. Their beauty is a thing apart from any cavalier-like finery
of dressing ornament. It shows that all the parts of a bridge are
co-ordinated with fine judgment, and that each part is in nice accord
with its own work and with the great office which the bridge as a whole
has to fulfil daily.
When the railway viaduct at Ludgate Hill was finished, there was a
public outcry because of its gaunt and shabby ugliness; but Londoners
were appeased as soon as some “decorative” metalwork was nailed upon
the parapets. This “ornament,” a trumpery makeshift, was supposed to
have given merit to an imbecile design that disgraced the main road
to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As things of this sort are allowed to happen
in the heart of our great city, who can have confidence in civic
authorities? What chance is there that new projects for bridges will be
considered intelligently?
In 1815, when Rennie began his bridge over the Thames at Southwark,
neither the Government nor the City of London employed him; it was a
Company that approved his designs, and financed the undertaking. At an
expense of £800,000, three bad arches of cast-iron were put up from
“elegant” stone piers and abutments; yet London was charmed by “a
great feat of engineering,” partly because 5780 tons of ironwork had
been employed, and partly because the central arch had a span of 240
ft. From 1819 to November 8, 1864, the Company was a toll gatherer on
their industrial bridge; then the toll was done away with, and the
Company received from the City an industrial compensation. Here is
a financial adventure which might have been undertaken to benefit a
small township which had in its neighbourhood some new ironworks and
collieries. Still more farcical was the public lottery that helped to
collect money for the building of the first Westminster Bridge, between
1738 and 1750. Even now, after many lessons from past follies, London
has made more than one muddle over the project of St. Paul’s Bridge.
Not even the Tower Bridge, with all its blatant defects, has enabled
the City to be alert and clever as a pontist.
A more absurd structure than the Tower Bridge was never thrown across
a strategic river. What would be the use of those ornate towers if the
suspended roadway connecting them to the banksides were cut by a shell
or by a falling bomb? And what anachronism could be sillier than that
which has united the principle of metal suspension to an architecture
cribbed partly from the Middle Ages, and partly from the French
Renaissance? The many small windows, the peaked roofing, the absurdly
impudent little turrets, the biscuit-like aspect of the meretricious
masonry, the desperate effort to be “artistic” at any cost: all this,
you know, is at standing odds with the contemporary parts of the
unhistoric bridge, parts huge in scale, but so commercial that there is
not a vestige of military forethought anywhere. It is mere perishable
bulk.
[Illustration: THE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON]
FOOTNOTES:
[82] See the Statute of Winchester, A.D. 1285, and Statute
2, Richard II, A.D. 1378; see also the Rolls of
Parliament. Among the most dangerous rogues were
many lawless barons and their retinues, against
whom the Law protested vainly. In A.D. 1138 we find
them mentioned by the “Gesta Stephani,” and till
late in the fifteenth century the partisans of
nobles were feared on the roads. But for them the
Wars of the Roses would have been less horrible,
and wayfaring life would have been less barbarously
at odds with those Christian virtues which were
proclaimed everywhere by great symbols of religion:
manor churches, hopeful cathedrals, vast monasteries,
wayside chapels and shrines, and quiet homes
whispering with the prayers of gentle nuns. Brutal
strife among Christians had made the world into a new
Garden of Gethsemane over which the Spirit of Christ
brooded and wept.
[83] There seems to be only one exception to this rule.
I refer to some Chinese bridges of the thirteenth
century, mentioned by Marco Polo in his account of
the city Sin-din-fu, now called Ching-tu-fu, situated
on the western side of the province of Se-chuen,
of which it is the capital. Marco Polo says: “The
city is watered by many considerable streams, which,
descending from the distant mountains, surround and
pass through it in a variety of directions. Some
of these rivers are half a mile in width, others
are two hundred paces, and very deep, over which
are built several large and handsome stone bridges,
eight paces in breadth, their length being greater
or less according to the size of the stream. From
one extremity to the other there is a row of marble
pillars on each side, which support the roof;
for here the bridges have very handsome roofs,
constructed of wood, ornamented with paintings of
a red colour, and covered with tiles. Throughout
the whole length also there are neat apartments
and shops, where all sorts of trades are carried
on. One of the buildings, larger than the rest, is
occupied by the officers who collect the duties upon
provisions and merchandise, and a toll from persons
who pass the bridge. In this way, it is said, his
Majesty receives daily the sum of a hundred besants
of gold.” According to the Latin editions of Marco
Polo, the booths or shops were set up in the morning
and removed from the bridge at night. If so, then
the width of these bridges, described by Marco as
“eight paces,” must have been more than twenty-four
feet, since booths would have obstructed such narrow
footways. Marco Polo’s great editor, Colonel Yule,
interpreting the description of another bridge,
proves that the “paces” must be geometric.
[84] Degrand, in his “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” gives a
reproduction of Palladio’s drawing, which represents
an imperial scheme, far and away better than Antonio
da Ponte’s.
[85] The Bridge of Ali Verdi Khan.
[86] Lord Curzon’s book on Persia.
[87] British Museum, the MS. 16 F. ii, Fol. 73. The little
picture is drawn from nature; a bad reproduction of
it appears in M. Jusserand’s good book on “English
Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages.”
[88] J. J. Jusserand, p. 49. See also in Stow.
[89] This was finished in 1014; in 1136 it was burnt
down, and in 1176 Colechurch started upon his brave
enterprise.
[90] Viollet-le-Duc writes as follows (vol. 6, p. 410):
“Dans les villes, on profitait souvent des arches
de pont pour établir des moulins, et même alors
les ponts et moulins, bâtis en bois, ne formaient
qu’une seule et même construction. Avant 1835, il
existait encore à Meaux, en Brie, un pont de ce genre
entièrement en bois ainsi que les moulins y attenant;
cet ensemble datait de la fin du xvᵉ siècle....”
[91] Alas! The Great War has done much harm to the Pont du
Marché at Meaux. To-day (September 26, 1914) I saw
a photograph of its crippled condition. One arch at
least is ruined, and mended roughly with timbering.
[92] See “The Builder,” November 22, 1890.
[93] There has been much disputation over the origin of
St. Mary’s Chapel, and I refer you to the following
books: 1. “Remarks on Wayside Chapels,” by two
architects, J. C. and C. Buckler, 8vo, Oxford, 1843.
This book was approved by Parker, an excellent
recommendation. 2. “A Dissertation on Ancient Bridges
and Bridge Chapels,” by Norrison Scatcherd, 1828. 3.
“The Chapel of King Edward III on Wakefield Bridge,”
by Norrison Scatcherd, 1843. In the earlier treatise
the chapel is attributed to the reign of Edward IV.
Scatcherd belongs to an old school of polemical
swashbucklers, but what he says is worth attention,
though difficult to follow. 4. “The Histories of
York.”
[94] Camden’s “Britannia,” Ed. Gough, Vol. III, London,
1789, pp. 38-9.
[95] St. Mary’s Chapel was illustrated by Toms, after
George Fleming, 1743; by Lodge, in Thoresby’s
“Ducatus”; by Cawthorne, about 1800; and by “The
Builder,” November 22, 1890.
[96] “Bath Old Bridge and the Chapel Thereon,” by
Emanuel Green, F.S.A., F.R.S.L., p. 143, British
Archæological Association.
[97] “The Builder,” August 20, 1887.
[98] These dates I take from the catalogue of historic
monuments issued by the Ministère de l’Instruction
Publique et des Beaux-Arts. Some writers give the
dates as 1178 and 1188.
[99] According to Degrand; some other writers say
nineteen. The largest spans were a little more than
thirty-three metres; but even in these the size
varied somewhat.
[100] See Allen’s “History of the County of York,” 1832.
P. Atkinson was the architect of the new bridge,
and his work went on till March, 1810. As for the
old Ouse Bridge, good views of it will be found
in the “Antiquarian Itinerary,” Vol. I, 1815; the
“Antiquarian Cabinet,” Vol. III, 1817; and the
“Encyclopædia Britannica,” ninth edition. Let us take
a glance at one of the pictures. On the west end of
the bridge is a tall building carried by two pointed
arches and crowned with a small steeple. It is the
great Council Chamber, with a prison for felons
beneath it, according to the “Antiquarian Cabinet.”
We cross the river and find at the other side the
gaol which was rebuilt in 1724. Two small arches on
this side of the bridge balance those that arcade
the Council Chamber, and in the middle is a graceful
pointed arch with a span of 81 feet. The spandrils
are relieved by a well-marked string-course, the
parapets are fringed with railings and graced in the
centre with two finials, which displace the mediæval
cross.
[101] See Mr. Kershaw’s article, “The Builder,” April 29,
1882, p. 531.
[102] In Vol. X of the “Archæologia Cantiana” an inventory
is given of the possessions of the chapel in the year
1549.
[103] The photograph belongs to the London Missionary
Society. The bridge itself has points of interest
quite apart from the idol. There is a single arch of
a horseshoe form with long and narrow archstones. The
shelving parapets are decorated with small knobs of
stone, and they do not rise to a gable point, like
those in the Spanish variety of gabled bridge; there
is a flat space at the summit, and below the middle
of it the small idol is placed.
[104] From information sent to me by the Rev. O. M.
Jackson, who for more than twenty years has worked as
a missionary in Western China.
[105] Take the dates of a few important bridges in
Lancashire. Time of King John, Lancaster Bridge;
1225, Preston; 1305, Warrington; 1365, Salford; 1372,
Stockport; and 1490, Garstang Bridge. The first
Lancashire bridges were but narrow structures for
foot and horse. Some had very high single arches,
and those with from four to six spans were steep and
lofty; they seemed to fly away from spates.
[106] On the other hand, there is a good social picture,
showing that workmen in those days fed very well,
though they could not afford to subscribe to the
building of a bridge:--
Wives went out to wite [know] how they wrought;
Five score in a flock, it was a fayre syght.
In broad clothes bright white bread they brought,
Cheese and chickens clerelych a dyght [prepared].
[107] Cofferdams are embankments which surround the site
so as to exclude water from it. “They are formed in
general by driving two rows of piles round the site
so as to enclose between them a watertight wall of
clay puddle; in depths of less than three or four
feet, where there is little current, a simple clay
dam may be used. In greater depths, the timber walls
consist of guide piles at intervals, with some form
of sheet piling between them; in extreme depths the
timber walls may be composed of stout piles driven in
side by side all round. The dam must be sufficiently
strong to bear the pressure of the water against
the outside when the space enclosed has been pumped
dry.... The ‘Cours de Ponts,’ at the School of the
Ponts et Chaussées, states that a cofferdam need
never be made of greater thickness than from four to
six feet, as the interior can always be sufficiently
stayed inside. This method of founding is now seldom
practised; it is costly and causes great obstruction
in the stream.”--Professor Fleeming Jenkin.
[108] A metre = 1·093633 yards, or 39·37079 inches; a
centimetre = 0·39371 inch.
[109] Professor Fleeming Jenkin, Ninth Edition of the
“Encyclopædia Britannica.”
[110] The centre arch has a span of 152 ft., and rises 29
ft. 6 in. above Trinity highwater mark; the arches
on each side of the centre have a span of 140 ft.,
and the abutment arches 130 ft. Total length, 1005
ft.; width from outside to outside, 56 ft.; height
above low water, 60 ft. Centre piers, 24 ft. thick.
Materials: the exterior stones are granite, the
interior, half Bramley Fall and half from Painshaw,
Derbyshire.
[111] For example, King John’s Bridge at Tewkesbury; Barden
Bridge and Burnsall Bridge in Wharfedale; the Old Dee
Bridge at Chester; Huntingdon, Bridgenorth, Baslow,
Froggall, Brecon, and Llangollen. There are many
others.
[112] This valuable reference was brought to my notice
by Mr. H. T. Crofton, an able pontist, who sent me
his notes on bridges, asking me to cull from them
whatever information my own research had missed. A
hobby is the only altruism.
[113] _Springing._ The plane of demarcation between the
ring and the abutment is called the “springing” of
an arch. A “ring” is the compressed arc of materials
known as archstones or voussoirs; and the “springing”
marks the place where a ring starts out on its upward
curve from a pier or from an abutment.
[114] The _haunches_ of an arch are those parts that lie
midway between the springing and the crown: the crown
being the summit of a ring.
[115] “The Builder,” November 19, 1892, p. 394.
[116] “The Builder,” November 19, 1892, p. 394.
[117] If Cæsar’s bones were found they would be sold at
Christie’s to a tradesman millionaire.
[118] Lord Curzon’s “Persia and the Persian Question,”
1892, Vol. II, pp. 45-6.
[119] According to some writers, the earliest known
arches of handicraft--pointed, and round, and even
elliptical--are Babylonian, but I do not care to
be so dogmatic. Dates very often are as elusive as
dreams. But the influence of Babylon was, doubtless,
very great on the traditions of the building arts;
perhaps we find it even in the elliptic vault of
Chosroes’ great hall at Selucia-Ctesiphon. This
vault, dating from the sixth century A.D., was a
forerunner of St. Bénézet’s elliptic arch (p. 81).
[120] Brangwyn has drawn for the édition de luxe the bridge
at Ronda, which dates from 1761. Its architect, José
Martin Aldeguela, was even more unfortunate than were
Peter Colechurch and the good Saint Bénézet; these
masters died before their work was complete, while
poor Aldeguela fell from his bridge and was dashed to
pieces. Two other bridges, one Moorish and one Roman,
cross the chasm at Ronda, but at the upper end where
the depth is less prodigious; so their architects had
easier problems to solve, and yet they did not equal
in any respect the heroic inspiration of Aldeguela.
Mr. Edgar Wigram has said that although Ronda
Bridge owes much of its effect to its extraordinary
site, yet an extraordinary piece of architecture is
necessary to command the site; it is the triumph of
genius over nature that we feel both at Ronda and in
the Pont Napoléon.
[121] The middle arch of 58 ft. span, 17 ft. rise, and 14
ft. in width across the soffit, has archstones which
are only 18 ins. deep, and they vary in thickness
from 5 to 16 ins.: many of them are 8 and 9 ins.
Sometimes there are two headers to answer a course
of common archstones; and sometimes two courses
of archstones answer one header. The piers are 10
ft. thick, and the middle arch springs about 3 ft.
above the river’s bed. A steep road over the bridge
diminishes the weight upon the side arches; but
Telford believed that if the spandrils had been
hollowed the road could have been made with an easy
gradient of 1 in 24. The workmanship is very light,
and it appears to be stable, though a shivering
bridge inspires no more confidence than a stammering
man. In 1803, owing to a defect in the foundation
of the western abutment, one of the side arches
fell, yet the others remained uninjured while the
broken one was being rebuilt. So the bridge in the
proportion of all its parts must have been very
well balanced, despite its quivering alertness and
lightness.
[122] Roman examples: the two bridges at Mérida, and the
bridge of Salamanca. Mediæval examples: Tudela,
Tordesillas, Talavera, Zaragoza, Castro Gonzalo, and
El Burgo, near Coruña, the scene of a good fight in
Drake’s expedition of 1589.
[123] “Gothic Architecture in Spain,” 1865, p. 211.
[124] See George Edmund Street, whose valuable book on
Spain ought to be studied side by side with those by
Ford and Edgar Wigram.
[125] I am reading my proof sheets on the 10th September,
1914, so it is necessary to add that the Pont des
Trous at Tournai has renewed its military value,
aiding the Belgians in their heroic efforts against
that avalanche of inhumanity, the German Army.
[126] The religious order of Pontist Brothers came to
France from Italy. It was called the order of
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, and its chief resided at
Lucca. From about the year 1286 the French brothers
had a great hospice in Paris, built on the site now
occupied by the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas
and the deaf and dumb asylum. In the fourteenth
century the order confined its attention to the care
of pilgrims, and at last--in 1459--it was suppressed
by Pope Pius II.
[127] The triumphal arch of Germanicus, dating from the
time of Tiberius. It is extant at Saintes; but when
it was reconstructed after its removal from the
bridge it suffered much from a mixture of new stones
with the old. It is an arch with two passages 38 ft.
high.
[128] There are many old arches with two or three sets of
voussoirs. Over the Loire, at Brives-Charensac, there
is a Roman specimen with two rings, now a ruined
bridge. Some English examples: the Jolly Miller’s
Bridge over the Dee, Chester; Bradford-on-Avon,
Wilts, the round arches; Bideford, Devon, twenty
arches, built in the fourteenth century with help
from indulgences sanctioned by Grandison, Bishop of
Exeter; Lostwithiel, Llangollen, Fountains Abbey,
Bishop’s Bridge at Norwich, West Rasen, Lincolnshire;
Eamont Bridge, Penrith, a triple ring of archstones;
Higherford Bridge, near Colne, reputed to be Roman,
a wrong attribution, I believe; St. Neots, the most
important arch is very interesting; and the Abbot’s
Bridge at Bury St. Edmunds. This one is Early
English, and its three remarkable arches give us a
parallel to the ecclesiastical workmanship in the
arches at Crowland. The piers also and the buttresses
are unsecular.
[129] It may be remarked that in the Persian language the
words _pul-y-sangi_ signify the “stone bridge,”
and it is not improbable that the western people
in the service of the Emperor may have given this
appellation to the place where a bridge of great
celebrity was thrown over the river, which is here
applied to the river itself. It will be found to
occur in Elphinstone’s “Account of Caubul,” p. 429,
and in Ouseley’s “Ibn Haukul,” p. 277.--Colonel Yule.
[130] Ten horsemen could not draw up abreast in a space
less than thirty feet, and might probably require
forty when in motion. The paces here spoken of must
therefore be geometric; and upon this calculation
the bridge would be five hundred yards in
length.--Colonel Yule.
[131] By P. Magalhanes, who particularly notices this
description, our author is understood to speak here
of the perfect level of the surface, and not of the
straightness of the sides: “Aux deux extremités,”
he translates, “il est plus large qu’au haut de la
montée: mais quand on a achevé de monter, on le
trouve plat et de niveau comme s’il avoit esté tiré
à la linge” (“Nouv. Relat.,” p. 14). But the words,
“uguale per longo come se fosse tirato per linea,”
seem rather to refer to the general parallelism of
the sides, although at the ends they diverged, as is
the case with almost all bridges.--Colonel Yule.
[132] The ideas of the symbolic lion and of the tortoise
are borrowed by the Chinese from the _singa_ and the
_Kûrma_ of Hindu mythology.
[133] It is difficult to understand from the words of
the text ... the position of these larger columns
with regard to other parts of the bridge; but it
seems to be meant, that in the line of the parapet
or balustrade, which was formed of alternate slabs
of marble and pillars, there was in the middle (or
over the centre arch or pier) a column of a size
much larger than the rest, having a tortoise for its
base or pedestal; and it may be presumed, although
not so expressed, that there was a similar column
in the balustrade on the opposite side.... One of
the Jesuit missionaries who mentions a bridge which
he had crossed in this part of the province, says,
“Les gardefous en sont de marbre; on conte de chaque
côté cent quarante-huit poteaux avec des lionceaux
au-dessus ... et aux deux bouts du pont quatre
éléphans accroupis.”--Colonel Yule.
[134] Notwithstanding any partial difficulties in
the description, or seeming objections to the
credibility of the account given of this magnificent
bridge, there is unquestionable authority for the
existence of one similar to it in all the essential
circumstances, and as nearly about the situation
mentioned as can be ascertained from the conciseness
of the itinerary, so lately as the seventeenth
century. It may well, however, be supposed that in
the lapse of four hundred years material changes
must have taken place, in consequence of accidents,
repairs, and perhaps removals.--Colonel Yule.
[135] “Ponts en Maçonnerie.”
[Illustration: CANAL BRIDGE IN VENICE]
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
ON THE EVOLUTION OF UNFORTIFIED BRIDGES
I
Brangwyn’s water-colour of the Pont Henri IV at Châtellerault, over
the Vienne, represents a bridge built and fortified by an architect
of the Renaissance, Charles Androuet du Cerceau. Here is a fact to be
remembered, for Androuet du Cerceau was perhaps the latest European
bridge-builder who tried to fit his work into a nation’s policy of
defence. From his time onward to our own no high road conducted over a
river has been made in any respect a military way, safeguarded from the
dangers of war, at least as much as possible.
If Androuet du Cerceau had been asked to foretell the development of
bridge-building, his answer could not have been less militant than the
Pont Henri IV; he would have said that bridges, like battleships and
fortified places, would continue to oppose the science of military
attack, because their safety would be affected by all improvements in
the methods and materials employed by armies. His view of life and
art, as we see it in his work, has been the view of all thoughtful
craftsmen. He believed that the genius of invention, age after age, set
up her home in the ablest minds, and passed through an ordered growth,
till at last she attained her culmination. As long as improvements
could be made in the action of aggressive war, counter improvements
could be made in the reaction of defence, for the art of inventing each
new weapon would suggest a means by which its utility in war might be
thwarted, and perhaps nullified.
But I do not think that Androuet du Cerceau realised to the full
what competent bridges ought to have been to his generation. He was
too mediæval in his attitude to strife, and this defect was perhaps
inevitable. You see, the Pont Henri IV was erected between the years
1564 and 1609; and during these forty-five years the spirit of the
times was dead against an efficient strategy both in defence and in
attack. Soldiers of every rank were passing through a transition,
unaided by much enthusiasm. Indeed, new methods were hated rather than
liked, because they seemed to be less chivalric, or what the French
called less “heroic,” than were the ancient methods, though many of
these had grown obsolescent. Alexandre Dumas wrote several delightful
books on this period in the evolution of fighting, when gunpowder was a
war-god that no brave man was at all eager to worship before an altar
of unwieldy firearms. Soldiers liked a battle to be a duel at very
close quarters, so they were not amused when they fired through a fog
of suffocating smoke, and coughed and sneezed in a chorus, while tears
dripped from their eyes. Here and there, of course, while Androuet du
Cerceau was engaged upon his bastille bridge, “villainous saltpetre”
had some ardent followers. Turn to the military writers of Queen
Elizabeth’s reign, for instance, and read the long dispute that went
on between the old school and the new. Some experts had a firm belief
in the old archery statutes, while others put their trust in ponderous
firearms that went off after much coaxing and never carried straight
for a hundred yards.
[Illustration: PONT HENRI IV OVER THE VIENNE AT CHÂTELLERAULT IN FRANCE
BUILT BY CHARLES ANDROUET DU CERCEAU, 1504-1609. TILL 1624 THE TWO
GREAT TOWERS WERE UNITED BY A PAVILION FORMING A GATEWAY. ONE OF THE
LATEST OF THE BASTILLE BRIDGES]
In those days there were two handguns, both rather old, and their
improvement baffled the ingenuity of gunsmiths. One was the petronel or
arquebuse, which had come into vogue in 1480; the other was the musket,
which in 1521, or thereabouts, was brought into use by the Emperor
Charles V, who believed in it because he had never tried to hold the
“kicking demon” through a battle. For a long time petronels were
discharged by a lighted match, but at the beginning of the sixteenth
century a wheel-lock was invented, to be superseded at last--about the
year 1692--by the flint-lock. Progress was exceedingly halt-footed;
but one day a pious clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Forsythe, happened to be
startled by a very profane idea; it seemed to him that gunpowder in a
musket might be ignited by a percussion cap. Good Forsythe! Being very
practical as well as pious (these two qualities go together like body
and soul, as a rule), he patented his mother-idea, A.D. 1807; and in
less than thirty years the principle of the percussion cap was accepted
by the War Office, though public opinion in England cooed over Peace,
believing that henceforth mankind would be satisfied with continual
wars between Capital and Labour. There is no need to sketch the equally
slow improvements in the manufacture of cannon. Enough to say that
among Wellington’s siege artillery in Spain there were Spanish guns
dating from the Armada period.
Briefly, then, from Androuet du Cerceau’s time onward to the year 1857,
when the old musket _Brown Bess_ was put aside for ever, the dilatory
progress of attack in war gave bridge-builders every opportunity
of keeping pace with it and of making their defence as thorough as
possible. Yet nothing was done. Not even a single effort was made to
evolve the old war-bridge into a modernised protection; and it is very
far from easy to explain this quite sudden departure from a very old
routine of defensive forethought. Several reasons have been given,
of course, but they have no backbone and no brain. It was argued,
for example, that bridges were as advantageous to an attack as to a
defence, so the whole strategy of war would protect them quite enough.
Even in our own time this very queer argument has been advocated, as if
to prove that minds as well as eyes often suffer from astigmatism. What
successful army is not hindered and harassed by guarding many hundreds
of defenceless bridges? And what modern army in retreat has ever failed
to leave behind it an extra rearguard of broken bridges?
Let me give but one example. Sir John Moore could never have made his
terrible march from Sahagun to Coruña, but for his good fortune in the
matter of rivers and bridges. When Napoleon himself got within striking
reach, near Benavente, on the torrent Esla, Moore’s rearguard blew up
three spans of the old bridge of Castro Gonzalo; and when the cavalry
of the Imperial Guard found a deep crossing and forded the river into a
wide poplared plain, Paget and the 10th Hussars galloped through their
broken ranks, destroying half of them, and capturing their general
Lefebvre Desnouettes. Much later, when the narrow and snowbound Pass of
Piedrafita was littered with dead British troops, all killed by hunger
and cold and exhaustion, Moore was befriended by the great Roman bridge
of Constantino, and by the noble viaduct of Corcul between Nogales and
Becerrea. Paget was left behind with the rearguard, and in brilliant
actions at the bridges he checked the pursuit, while Moore marched on
toward Lugo. If a French spy had blown up the bridge of Constantino and
the viaduct, after hearing of Moore’s approach, the British would have
been brought to a standstill, and from a desperate position there would
have been little chance of escape. So the viaduct and the Roman bridge
stood between victory and defeat; they saved the British and baffled
the French. In fact, Moore reached Lugo without much further harrying.
Not only is there a bridge of Constantino in all campaigns, but we may
be sure that as no country will ever wish to be invaded the airmen
scouts of the future will try to destroy all bridges beyond their
own frontiers, so as to cripple the enemy’s prearranged movements.
Defeat in the near future may be nothing more than a paralysis of
communications, caused by bridge-wrecking airships and aeroplanes.
Try to imagine what we should suffer, if we lost in a single night
eight or ten of the bridges that help to unite London to Edinburgh and
Glasgow. To lose the Forth Bridge alone would be a bad defeat; and
yet, as I have said, there are people still who argue that bridges
need no protection because their utility in war is invaluable to both
sides.[136]
This hollow argument was very active during the ferment of the
Renaissance, which became to architecture what a political party
spirit is to an army. In fact, it was the Renaissance that produced
the disintegrating party strife of rival “styles,” and soon the
followers of classic forms and ceremonies were more powerful than
their opponents, who believed in the native genius of Gothic art. The
aim of our classic men was to renew under our Northern sky an alien
inspiration born and bred in the ardent climates of Greece and of Rome.
In other words, they wished to repeat, by plodding and self-conscious
effort, what Rome had done in architecture with the patient and slow
methods of her colonisation. In this way they appealed to everybody
who tried to seem erudite, and their endeavours entered that world
of educated fashion where a false quantity was a greater sin than
intemperance. Just as the chatty, delightful Montaigne wanted to hide
his genius among profuse gleanings from ancient writers, so most
architects believed that they could do no good in life unless they
tried to be Greek or Roman. Progress was no longer an organic growth,
it was a copied fashion, an inconvenient mode. Not even a church could
be built without help from pagan temples. Not an equestrian statue
could be modelled unless a Christian of sorts, either king or warrior,
put on the costume of a Cæsar, and then straddled ill at ease across
the back of a reasonable horse, which alone merited the long life of
bronze. Amid this ferment of comic priggishness and pedantry young
men served their apprenticeship, and became artists and craftsmen.
Inevitably, bridge-builders were affected, and as prigs most of them
did their work as public servants.
One remarkable thing was the fussy interest that their projects
excited. During the eighteenth century, for instance, a ridiculous
ado was made about bridge-building. Voluntary guidance came from
mathematicians, and chatter and hesitation implied that at last, for
the first time in the history of the world, a reputable bridge would
be erected. As for the results of all this flutter and fuss, they were
usually out of joint with the public interests that bridges ought to
have served efficiently. No attention was paid to military defence, and
some famous men blundered like amateurs. Perronet was regarded as the
most expert bridge-builder of his time; his knowledge was prodigious,
and yet he made astounding mistakes, which would have shamed such
mediæval masters as Bénézet and Isembert. As an example I will mention
his Pont de Neuilly-sur-Seine, which was finished in 1772.[137] The
delicate operation of striking the centres, by freeing the arches
from their supports, was begun only eighteen days after the keystones
were put in their places, when the mortar was not yet hard enough to
resist new pressure. In one great arch the crown sank twenty-three
inches--truly a historic mishap, and for several reasons. The upper
part of this arch in Perronet’s plan was an arc of a circle 320 ft. in
diameter; after the mishap it became an arc of a circle whose diameter
would be 518 ft., hence a stone arch of this size--518 ft. on the chord
line--might be constructed! No wonder that writers have been astounded
by the Pont de Neuilly-sur-Seine, for it passed safely through a most
dangerous experience. Perronet was saved, not by his good design, nor
by his mathematical calculations, but by a rare stroke of good luck.
Indeed, there are a good many technical faults in his work at Neuilly.
The piers are only fourteen feet broad, too small to be in scale with
the wide arches, and all lateral pressure travels along the bridge to
the abutments. If one arch were cut the others would be endangered. In
later years Perronet became wise, and told the French Government that
two or three arches in every long bridge should have abutment piers, as
a safeguard against mishaps in war.[138]
Several famous engineers had to learn by experience, like Perronet,
that a self-conscious desire to be “scientific” had dangers of its own
in bridge-building. Smeaton’s bridge over the Tyne at Hexham was a
tragic failure; Labelye produced a very perishable bridge on the Thames
at Westminster; and learned engineering did not save the Tay Bridge
from catastrophe, though science welcomed it with a din of confident
approval.
The Tay Bridge was a railway track to connect the town of Dundee and
the North British Railway System in Fife; it crossed the Firth of Tay
about a mile and a half to the West of Dundee. Its length exceeded two
miles, and journalists with rapture bragged about it as the longest
iron bridge in the world. Even the responsible engineers, Thomas Bouch
and A. D. Stewart, did not keep their heads while their work was being
done, for they published in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” a long
article on their unfinished bridge--a fine example of modern vanity.
Soon afterwards, on February 4th, 1877, the building work was badly
injured by a gale, yet in a few months--on September 25th, in fact--the
over-confident engineers had the bridge tested from end to end, and on
the 31st of May, 1878, it was opened to train service.
Thomas Bouch became Sir Thomas. No one suspected that a “scientific
bridge” might be a trap for railway carriages. The structure was
superlatively modern: huge, ugly, vulgar, meretricious, mechanical, and
charmed also with a small cost of production, which included twenty
human lives and £350,000. At this price, you will understand, the
longest metal bridge in the world seemed very cheap and fascinating.
Newspapers were overjoyed, of course, and declared that the Tay Bridge
was admirably fitted for the rushing enterprise of a commercial time.
Yet every part of it was ill with the cancer of cheapness, and in 1879
the disaster came, on a Sunday evening, three days after Christmas. At
about seven o’clock a terrific gale struck the eighty-four spans of the
bridge, making a gap of about three thousand feet: and a few minutes
later a North British mail-train drew near. Into the gap carriage after
carriage dived: about eighty passengers perished, down below in the
raging waters. It was a lofty bridge, in some places 92 ft. above high
tide, so the falling carriages turned more than one somersault before
they plunged into the Firth of Tay.
The Board of Trade held an enquiry and issued a report, affirming
“that the bridge had been badly designed, badly constructed, and badly
maintained.” True: but the verdict was without pity. Some excuse
should have been made for the engineers’ modernity. The Tay Bridge was
no worse than the popular spirit that liked screaming newspapers,
and fevered excitements, and wild adventures in the quicksands of
jerried workmanship. The Board of Trade published its report on the
3rd of July, 1880; and a few months later, on October 30th, Sir Thomas
Bouch died of a broken heart. Perhaps the most humbling trial in his
adversity was the foolish article written by his second in command,
Mr. A. D. Stewart, who wanted to be quite contemporary with the flying
minutes. The “Encyclopædia Britannica” deleted the article from its
next edition, and printed ... some tame remarks on the disaster....
No public calamity has much effect on the modern mind. Tay Bridges
and Titanics are like strong acts in a tragic play, whose influence
we forget very soon. It is a thousand pities, for the next war may
teach us, by frequent disasters, that machine-worship has been a mad
gambler everywhere. Bridges suffered much from the priggishness of the
Renaissance, but they have suffered infinitely more from the obsessions
that ruined Sir Thomas Bouch. Poor Bouch! Not only did he wish to
astonish the world by constructing an unparalleled bridge, wonderfully
long, curved at both ends, and with a varying gradient. He desired
also to prove to his employers that he could be a pattern of unusual
economy. Worse still, he was so wrapped up in his calculations that he
looked upon Nature with little respect. In other words, he tried to
achieve “a great feat of engineering”--not often a fortunate enterprise.
From the founding of his piers he ought to have learnt that his work
would be endangered partly by the repercussion of railway traffic, and
partly by the varied way in which the piers would feel the scour of
tidal waters during bad weather. Fourteen piers on the southern side
were built on rock, then for six piers the bed was a layer of hard
material resting on silt, and from the twenty-second pier northward
there was sand, with occasional beds of gravel mixed with boulders.
Here was a site to inspire as much awed patience and care as the
Bridge Friars gave untiringly to the Pont Saint-Esprit over the Rhône.
Yet in Mr. Stewart’s description there is but one emotion--a quiet
self-confidence, as if the forces of Nature were as easy to manage as
well-trained poodle dogs.
II
To be brief, it is evident that the bridge-building of modern
times--from the Renaissance to our own day--has been nothing more than
a long series of experiments from which a good many important matters
have been excluded. High artistic qualities were divorced from military
forethought by the earlier pontists of the Renaissance;[139] then came
the delicate swagger of a fidgety dilettantism, like that which built
the Palladian Bridge in Prior Park, about A.D. 1750; afterwards, by
degrees, the industrial spirit began to assert itself; and in 1779
the first metal bridge was built in Europe. How different the history
would have been, how much saner and finer, if bridge-builders had taken
for their guide the all-sufficient principle that their work must be
self-protective, not vulnerable and defenceless. From this principle
the most wonderful varied work could have been evolved, generation
after generation. By this time there would have been as much difference
between an Elizabethan bridge and a modern stone bridge, as between
Drake’s “Golden Hind” and a super-Dreadnought. But the sedulous ape
has been active everywhere; and Europe to this day is proud when she
builds in stone a few bridges that seem to be as good as their classic
foreparents, though they break away from the classic principle of
self-defence.
It is in metal bridges alone that we find a virile growth, a genuine
evolution; not often artistic, and as sensitive to bombs as card
castles are to a touch from your finger; but yet a great evolution
because it represents modern times. If we could summon to earth
the spirits of the greatest bridge-builders--Caius Julius Lacer,
Apollodorus of Damascus, Isembert, Bénézet, Ammanati, and several
others--they would learn nothing much from our stonework, whereas a
metal bridge here and there could not fail to strike awe into these
spiritual beholders. Even Lacer would be awed by the colossal newness
of the Forth Bridge, whose technical inspiration might have come from
Vulcan, the god of furnaces, after his annual festival on the 23rd of
August. And cannot you imagine what Bénézet and Isembert would say to
each other, in swift, excited French, when they gazed up and up at the
airy film of road suspended over the wide Menai Straits? This would be
enough to convince them that a few recent bridge-builders had forsaken
ancient forms in order to give expression to generative ideas.
[Illustration: PONT DE TOURS--A FAMOUS BRIDGE OF THE XVIII CENTURY. IT
IS IN KEEPING WITH THE SPIRIT OF WATTEAU]
The concept of metal bridges may have come to Europe from China. In
the seventeenth century Kircher saw and described a Chinese bridge
which seems to have been a genuine suspension bridge of metal, a true
forerunner of the Pont de la Caille, over the Pass of Usses, and of
the immense Pont de Beaucaire, which in four spans unites Beaucaire
to Tarascon, covering a distance of more than 438 metres.[140] Who can
explain why backward China has hit upon many fertile ideas before the
more enterprising nations? Why has she not learnt to rule the world?
Perhaps her body has been too numerous for her brain. On my table lies
the photograph of a bridge which may be similar to the one admired by
Athanase Kircher. It is an iron swing bridge in Western China, near
Auhsien. There are three piers, two of stone, and the other a makeshift
of two timber piles joined together at top by a log upon which the
footway rests. The carpentry of the footway is primitive: across the
long bearing beams, which are not at all thick or heavy, a great many
slim laths lie unevenly; and up the middle of the bridge, from end to
end, is a narrow path made with long and flat planks which rest upon
the transverse timbering. As for the iron suspension, it is a chain
of thick and short rods which are linked firmly together. These rods,
thus looped at each end and interlocked, run in two lines from abutment
to abutment, making a sort of parapet at each side of the bridge.
Bamboo rods suspend the footway to the iron chains, which pass over the
abutments to be fastened securely on the ground.
There are four abutments, but my photograph shows only one; and it
omits also the main thing of all--the means by which the metal chains
are anchored. Still, the abutment is entertaining. It is a stone
pillar about five feet high, perhaps a little more or less; it seems
to be old, and from two holes pierced through it we learn that several
experiments were made before the right leverage was obtained. The first
hole was too low down, so another was drilled about 12 inches above it,
and through this second hole the chain was passed, then tugged down to
its anchorage. Even then the suspension was not effective, the hole
or “saddle” being still not high enough above the footway, and the
builders knew not what to do. Not only was there insufficient space
for a third hole, but very few makers of suspension bridges have been
reasonable enough to pass their metal chains _over the summits_ of
stone pillars and towers. The Chinese workmen at Auhsien were not more
foolish than many European engineers have been, for their perforated
pillars are not a bit worse than the perforated towers through which
suspension chains pass at Clifton and at Budapest, not to mention many
other familiar examples. So determined were the Chinese to overcome
their difficulties without using the summit of their pillar, that they
cut away the stone until they came to the second hole or saddle, and
then they thrust a lump of iron under the taut chain. Next, to increase
the tension still more, they put up a smaller pillar perhaps a yard
from the first one, forcing it under the iron rods, which at this
point strain downward to their anchorage. Curiously enough, the lesser
pillar--a sort of understudy--is used as an architect would employ it:
along the top a groove is hollowed, and the chain rests in the groove
and then dips down at a sharp angle. Perhaps, then, the smaller pillar
is fairly new, while the larger one is old.
The Rev. O. M. Jackson[141] knows this bridge very well; he lived for
five years at Auhsien, and on one occasion the whole bridge was washed
away by a spate. For months the iron chains lay here and there on the
river-bed; and as floods are frequent, and the bridge is not a high
one, very little of the workmanship has had a chance of growing hoar.
The pillars have the best chance; and I suppose the iron chains are
worth saving from the river whenever the bridge is reconstructed.
I have lingered over Auhsien Suspension Bridge not because of its
craftsmanship, but because it marks a primitive phase in the evolution
of metal bridges. Perhaps the example seen by Kircher was less rude;
and perhaps the principle of its construction may have been precisely
like that in the bamboo swing bridges of Western China. In these there
are four huge cables of twisted bamboo[142]: two of them carry the
footway, while the upper ones serve a double purpose: a strong netting
on each side braces them to the lower cables, giving another support
to the footway, and forming a sort of hammock a good deal taller than
an average man. It is within this deep hammock that everybody walks
across a bamboo swing bridge, which in a high wind is as enjoyable as
a rowing-boat. At each abutment there is a gabled entrance gate, where
the four cables are screwed up.[143] Displace the bamboo cables for
iron chains, and we get at once, perhaps, an idea of the bridge that
Kircher regarded as “merveilleux.”
As Kircher’s book was published in 1670, an iron bridge ought to have
been built in Europe before the middle of the eighteenth century. An
attempt to build one was made in 1755 at Lyons, but it failed. An arch
was put together in a builder’s yard and then the project was abandoned
as too costly! But the idea was handed on somehow to an English
ironmaster, Abraham Darby, of Coalbrookdale, who in 1779 won a great
success by bridging the Severn with a very useful arch of cast-iron,
having a rise of 50 feet, and a span of 100 ft. 6 ins. The cost of it
is not known, but the weight of metal employed was 378½ tons. The
design is bold, and the arch handsome. Every pontist should get a
photograph of Coalbrookdale Bridge. Already it is out of date, and its
value as history will not save it from destruction.
A few years later, in 1796, Rowland Burdon followed the example set by
Abraham Darby, but not as a mere copyist, his Wearmouth Bridge being
an arch of open cast-iron panels, which act as voussoirs. The span is
236 feet, with a rise of 34 feet; the springings are 95 feet above the
river-bed; at first the footway was rather narrow, but in 1858 it was
widened by Robert Stephenson. Rowland Burdon used 260 tons of iron, and
his work cost only £27,000.
Soon afterwards, in a great cast-iron arch thrown over the Spey,
Telford made new experiments, and, as Professor Fleeming Jenkin has
said, his bridge at Craigellachie marked “a great advance in the
conception of what was the safest form in which to apply cast-iron to
an arch.” But more than this was expected from an engineer of Telford’s
reputation, and nothing more came from him, unfortunately. In fact,
Telford divorced his work from the good sense of good design, which
Darby and Burdon had endeavoured to respect. At each abutment he put
up a silly tower pierced with arrow-slits and armed with battlements,
advertising a farce of warlike make-believe which scores of foolish
engineers would copy and adapt, while leaving their bridges entirely
unfortified.
A bridge here and there is supposed to be all right. Take, for
instance, the Forth Bridge, with his 51,000 tons of steel, and his
amazing cost, about £3,000,000; he is looked upon as a “safe” bridge,
and safe he is if we forget what bombs and shells can do in a few
seconds. At each end of this bridge the railway is carried by trivial
columns forming the approach viaducts, and these a naval gun would blow
to smithereens. A bomb falling upon them from an airship might put the
whole bridge out of action. Further, the columns are comically out of
scale with those gigantic pyramids of steel bars which counterbalance
the centre girders, and yet seem to play at leapfrog in two bounds of
1710 ft. each, and in two lesser jumps of 680 ft. each. Yes, the Forth
Bridge looks formidably alive and active; he is to modern engineering
what the Ichthyosaurus became to our knowledge of prehistoric animals:
a semi-marine colossus, fit to be kept for ever as a tremendous danger
happily extinct.
Several years ago, in the “Builder,” I drew attention to the
defenceless character of this huge viaduct over a strategic waterway,
and now I return to this topic at the beginning of a war that may well
be the most terrible in all history. To-day is the 3rd of August, 1914;
and the world knows that Germany has occupied Luxemburg, a neutral
State, has poured her troops into Belgium, the naval key of Great
Britain, and has violated the French frontier without declaring war.
Here is the swift “morality” of lightning. In the strategy of war,
non-moral Powers may gain over us a horrible advantage. England talks
so much about peace and honour that felon Germany is able to plan at
her ease great military movements of surprise as fateful as victories
on stricken fields. Before this little book is published “the black
bullets of Destiny” will have been cast in several countries; and not
a battle will be won, nor a skirmish fought, without either help or
hindrance from those soldiers unprepared that we call viaducts and
bridges. Already many have been blown up in Belgium and in Servia; and
by night and day, throughout Europe, men are trying to guard every
bridge of vital importance to the concentration of troops. Here in
England this protection is not always as alert and thorough as it ought
to be. I am writing in Hampshire, near by the main line from Aldershot;
within a walk of three minutes there is a high railway bridge over a
road, and a few hours ago it was unguarded from the road. Yesterday
evening, after dark, a German spy could have destroyed it, for I passed
under its vault and found no one keeping watch and ward.[144] Instead,
I encountered that supine national folly which has withheld our young
men from national service, because of the rich liberty which we are
supposed to get somehow from cooing claptrap, and Norman Angells, and
the future pacification of mankind.
Whatever this fateful war may bring to us and to others, the
defenceless bridge will have to be reconsidered; and for this reason
its evolution attracts me even now, despite the darkling uncertainty
that encompasses every hour of the day. The Forth Bridge, all
shatterable bulk and no beauty and grace, does full justice to our
industrialism, but yet he belongs, not to the public spirit of Great
Britain, but to the spirit of the age everywhere; for in other lands
he has a great many rivals not a whit less huge and vulnerable. As an
example, we will take the Illinois and St. Louis Bridge, really a fine
work of his kind, dating from 1873. He crosses the Mississippi, which
at St. Louis flows in a single channel 534 yards wide and 8 feet deep
at extreme low water. The greatest range between high and low water is
41 feet. There are three ribbed arches of cast steel, the middle one
with a span of 520 feet, while the others are 18 feet narrower. If it
was worth while for the sake of public convenience to erect this great
highway above a wide and dangerous river, it was also worth while for
the sake of public convenience that the width of the arches should
be determined by the probable dangers to which the bridge would be
exposed in commercial strikes and in other wars. Human gunpowder is
not a rare thing in the United States of America. The black race there
has a population that increases rapidly, and some day it may breed a
great soldier, a dark Napoleon, who will find it no difficult task to
organise a widespread society of bridge-wreckers. No truisms are more
common than unexpected events. Let us then ask whether it would be
possible swiftly to repair a metal arch having a span of 520 feet. If
not, why build a huge and costly structure with steel-ribbed arches
which are much too wide? What if one of them was destroyed at a time
when the double railway track over the river, and the wide roadway
above for other traffic, were necessary to bring reinforcements to a
stricken army?
[Illustration: ON THE TARN AT MILLAU IN SOUTHERN FRANCE. THIS DRAWING,
A COMPANION PICTURE TO GIRTIN’S “BRIDGNORTH,” REPRESENTS THE BROKEN END
OF AN OLD BRIDGE WITH A MILL BUILT ON IT; BEHIND IS AN ARCH OF THE NEW
BRIDGE]
These questions were too unmercantile to be considered by the chief
engineer, Captain James B. Eads, a very scientific person, who was
entirely of a piece with our European pontists. Not a scrap of
attention did he pay to military matters. Every account of Captain Eads
and his bridge bombards us with technical details. We are expected to
gape with admiration because £60 per ton of 2000 lbs. was the price
paid for 2500 tons of cast-steel. Wrought-iron in a ton of 2000 lbs.
cost £40, and 500 tons at this price were used. Rolled-iron in a ton of
2000 lbs. cost £28, and 1000 tons at this price were employed, together
with 200 tons of cast-iron at £16 per ton, the ton in this case being
2240 lbs. Here indeed is a golden target for bombs and for modern
artillery!
Every bridge in the United States of America is a target of this sort
in one form or another. There are bonfire timber bridges, for example,
exceedingly deft and excessively high; sometimes their piers are
nothing more than large wooden frames piled one on top of another, up
and up and up, till at last they are tall enough to be known as great
sky-ticklers. One example is 234 feet high. It is the great Portage
Bridge spanning the Genesee River, in the State of New York, on a
railroad between New York and Buffalo. It looks like a miracle of
carpentry, this wonderful bridge of frames; its length is 240 metres,
and the piers--sixteen romantic scaffoldings--form immense triangles
with flattened summits upon which a double gallery rests as a firm
support for the railway. Each scaffolding rises from a pile of masonry
nine metres higher than water-level, so that floods do not break
their force against the timber frames. Good heavens above, how this
bridge would burn! But it has a quite modern fascination: its cost of
production was _cheap_!--cheap in comparison with the estimated price
of a stone bridge with the same length and aviated height. This wooden
structure cost about £36,000, for the pride of trade likes to pay as
little as possible for the largest amount of very perishable insecurity.
Then, of course, there are sky-tickling metal bridges, and these
spindle-shanked devotees of peace are popular also in Canada. All this
work is nothing but industrial engineering, like the mighty bridges
at New York, though these do try to look somewhat architectural. One
specimen, indeed, a vast structure called the New Manhattan Bridge,
has marvellously long suspension cables which do _not_ go _through_ a
tower or gateway; they actually pass _over_ their supports in a logical
manner. What a blessing! On the other hand, Brooklyn Bridge at New York
has the same mistake as our suspension bridge at Clifton (p. 346); and
the pierced towers, each with two lancet-shaped openings, are affected
and trivial. Brooklyn Bridge has a total length of nearly 1141 yards,
and between the two towers there is a span of 1595 feet. The roadway is
upheld by four galvanised steel cables not less than sixteen inches in
diameter. Think of that! Try to imagine a span 1595 feet wide! Suppose
an airship crippled it with some large bombs, how in the world could
repairs be made?
Briefly, then, modern bridges everywhere are anti-social. When war is
afoot, they imperil the best-made plans of strategists; and even in
strikes they have to be guarded by soldiers, as if they were convents
where dethroned queens lived unhappily with suffragette princesses.
Though we have lived for many years on the brink of war, every highway
in Europe as in America is at the mercy of bridge-wreckers. Is it not
dumbfounding that no respect has been paid anywhere to the social
guardianship that bridges and roads ought to perform? Why has this
all-important matter been forgotten? It has been made memorable a
great many times in history, ever since Horatius Cocles and his two
companions held the Pons Sublicius against the whole Etruscan Army
under Porsena,--a lesson never forgotten by Roman citizens.
When Lord Surrey, before the battle of Flodden Field, outwitted the
Scotch by throwing his army across the Till by the beautiful old
Twizel Bridge; or when Charles the Second, routed at Worcester, fled
by Old Pershore Bridge into the Bredon Hills, England received one of
many warnings that a secure passage over rivers might be to her at
any moment as valuable as an army corps. Why has she failed to take
this lesson to heart? No railway is protected by two or three branch
lines over an important river, so that two or three bridges--not near
together, but separated by a mile or two--would have to be destroyed
before the river would be closed to the passage of troops and of food
supplies. Understudy lines and bridges would be invaluable to defensive
strategy.
More than a century has gone over since Perronet warned France
that bridges across great rivers ought to be of a kind which would
facilitate makeshift repairs after mishaps in war. He spoke earnestly,
but in vain; for the conception of trade as war had not yet been forced
upon the world by modernised industrialism, with its civil strikes and
its international competitions. If Perronet had been able to add his
foresight to the great traditions of the _Ponts et Chaussées_, his
countrymen, probably, would have been loyal to his excellent advice,
because the French have a Roman logic and they love their roads and
bridges. But in France, as in other countries, a craze for engineering
feats took possession of the public mind, excluding many other
considerations. I know not how many perishable bridges exist at this
moment in France, but I can give the figures for 1873. In that year
there were one thousand nine hundred and eighty-two. Their total length
was 106 kilometres, and their total cost was 286,507,761 francs. Here
are some of the more expensive examples:--
(1) Pont de Bordeaux, 501 metres; 6,850,000 francs.
(2) Pont de Roanne, 232 metres; 6,438,561 francs.
(3) Paris, Pont d’Jéna, 6,135,105 francs.
(4) Pont Saint-Esprit, on the Rhône, 4,500,000 francs.
(5) Pont de Libourne, on the Dordogne, 4,236,248 francs.
(6) Tours, on the Loire, 434 metres; 4,224,639 francs.
(7) Paris, Pont Neuf, 231 metres; 4,000,000 francs.
Compare these figures with those of some British bridges:--
(1) The hideous Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits, 1511 feet
long, cost £601,865.
(2) Westminister Bridge, London, 1160 feet; £235,000, or £202 per
foot run.
(3) Boyne, 550 feet; £140,000, about £254 per foot run.
(4) Southwark Bridge, London, built in 1819, £800,000; it contains
5780 tons of iron.
(5) Vauxhall Bridge, London, built in 1816, £300,000.
(6) New London Bridge, 1005 feet long, £1,458,311.
(7) Forth Bridge, about £3,000,000.
We see, then, that the bridges of civilization, when viewed
merely as financial investments, are valuable enough to be made
self-defensive.[145] Yet it happens that I am the only writer who has
tried to draw public attention to the ease with which any bridge in
England could be crippled. And the trouble is that engineers hold the
field, because the man of business finds in their work a hard routine
that looks practical and mercantile. What we need is the influence of
architects. For capable architects have the genius of artists, and
when artists give their minds to practical affairs they show a range
of common sense that men of trade rarely equal. It is in their nature
to look at a question from all sides till they see it amply and as a
whole, while men of trade isolate two or three things from many, and
accept them tenaciously as the only things that merit attention.
But in our social life and strife there are certain newcomers that will
compel the world to reconsider its wrong attitude to bridge-building.
I refer to airships and to aviation, with their threatened wars
from overhead. A good many bridges over strategical waterways can
be displaced by tunnels, but many others must be armoured with
cone-shaped roofs. Art and science have done wonderful things for the
modern battleship, and now--now they must invent and perfect a new
battle-bridge, fit to protect arterial highways from “progress.”
* * * * *
It is the morning of the 4th of August, and I have just read the
latest war news. The whole life of Europe is a note of interrogation,
infinitely sinister and tragic. What is destined to happen? Which
nations are doomed to perish? What navy will go down into the deep?
Which airmen will make the most successful attacks on those bridges
that govern the distribution of food supplies? Will the equity of
Europe triumph, or will German felony succeed?
* * * * *
Three months have passed, and I add a few lines to my page proofs.
Many events have illustrated and confirmed the main arguments of this
monograph. Everywhere defenceless bridges have been the cause of much
anxiety, and dozens have been destroyed because they could not be
turned into rearguard defences. Wellington said that his sappers in
five minutes could blow up a modern bridge. In the present campaign
sappers have done this work under fire, mining strategic highways
being a simple job. How ludicrously tragic is the contrast between the
building of a modern bridge and its easy demolition! A little common
sense would have flanked each entrance with a Brialmont fort, and
would have given to the bridge itself an armoured efficiency. Every
bridge between the French frontiers and Paris ought to have been as
effective as a super-Dreadnought. So the use of battleship steel in
bridge-building is one thing that engineers must consider with the
utmost care after Germany has been overthrown. If they do no more than
follow their foolish old routine, then their work will be a crime
against patriotism.
In other respects the Great War has been a wondrous varied surprise,
bringing weakness to the strong and power to the weak. Germany has been
humbled both by little Belgium and by the little British army; her
prestige has dwindled so much that fighting mechanisms are regarded
no longer as superior to fighting men. In true discipline there is an
art of humane pride, and Germany has crushed it out of her automatic
battalions, preferring an organised cruelty as insensitive as a railway
accident, and a system of lying that rivals Munchausen’s. Even her
learned professors fill current history with explosive lies, just as
her seamen before the declaration of hostilities dropped mines in the
North Sea from trawlers that flew the British flag. If victory could
be won by vile misdeeds, Germany would be unconquerable. Never before
has a powerful nation been so corrupted by forty years of unscrupulous
vainglory. Her ambition is to Europe what cancer is to a human body--a
ravaging disease which may break out again after the best surgeons have
finished their work. Already she has tried to postpone the operation
by making overtures to stop the necessary bloodshed. Germany wants
to give in before the British Empire can put a million troops in the
field, because she knows not only that Allies often quarrel during the
negotiations that rearrange maps, but that such quarrels occur most
often when a great country has a little army in absolute antagonism
with widespread interests of a vital sort. And this, moreover, is not
the only peril. In the British Isles many thousands of peace-fanatics
bide their time; some of them are active already as pro-Germans;
many others declare that they have no wish to humble the German
people, who now approve every act of a Hunnish despotism elaborated
by their Government; and when our British sentimentalists, aided by
several Radical newspapers, begin a campaign of shrieking claptrap,
a just resentment will be felt by France and Russia. So the warfare
of diplomacy may be more dangerous to the Allies than the warfare
of stricken fields. We must wait and see. But the present position
confirms another argument in this monograph: namely, that those who
decline to see the perpetual strife that reigns in all human affairs,
and who babble in a routine of fixed ideas about the illusion called
peace, are quite as perilous to a country as were the creeds of
bloodshed which many German writers advertised, taking liberties with
the ingenuous pacifism coddled by British Governments.
Let us delete from every dictionary the lying word peace; and let
us believe firmly in the simple truth that strife everywhere is the
historian of life. The strife in all its phases ought to be well
trained and chivalric, of course; and it needs vast improvements in the
campaigns of business warfare. Every slum, for example, is very much
worse than the longest battle with firearms, because it endures for
ages; and what chivalry in the wars of trade is as noble as that which
grants to young men the privilege of defending the old age of their
country from danger and dishonour?
FOOTNOTES:
[136] It is worth noting, as an example of British apathy
in home defence, that the railway from Aldershot
toward Southampton is for many miles a single
line only, and that it passes over a good many
gimcrack bridges and between some narrow and steep
embankments, as in the neighbourhood of Medstead. The
line is an open trap; it could be shut up in a dozen
places by a few intelligent spies, if spying did not
generate an excessive caution as futile as cowardice.
[137] This bridge is 250 metres long, and the five arches
have equal spans of 40 metres. Perronet died in
1791, at the age of eighty-three, and we study his
best work at Mantes, Orléans, Nogent-sur-Seine,
Pont-Saint-Maxence, Château-Thierry, and
Neuilly-sur-Seine.
[138] His words run as follows: “I think that it may be
prudent, when designing bridges for rivers of great
width, to introduce some strong piers, which in case
of need may serve as abutments, putting them at
distances of three or four arches apart. Moreover,
this arrangement will enable us to construct long
bridges in different parts successively, and each
part may be considered as a complete bridge, having
its own independent abutments; but strict care
should be taken not to contract the beds of rivers
by using too many thick piers.” One of Perronet’s
immediate predecessors, the engineer Gabriel, built
a bridge of this sort, over the Loire at Blois. He
spaced his plan into eleven fine arches, and erected
two abutment piers, placing them at four bays from
each bankside, and leaving three bays between them.
By this means his bridge was divided into three
independent parts.
[139] Examples: See the index under the headings “Trezzo,”
“Ticino,” “Pavia,” and “Ammanati’s Trinità at
Florence.”
[140] See Degrand’s “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” Tom. 2, p.
24, note 3. See also Dalquié’s translation of
Kircher’s book, published at Amsterdam in 1670.
There is a reference to iron in a bridge on p.
288, but Degrand’s information must be taken from
the following passage: “L’on voit un pont dans la
Province de Junnan, qu’on a basti sur un torrent,
lequel roule ses flots impetueux dans le panchant
d’une profonde vallée. C’est un commun sentiment
qu’il fût basti en l’an 65 après la naissance de
Jesus Christ par l’ordre de l’Empereur Mingus, sorti
de la famille Hame; il n’est pas fait de brique ny
de pierre; mais on a attaché de grosses chaisnes
[chaînes] à ces deux montagnes qui vont d’une
extremité à l’autre, au-dessus desquelles on a mis
des ais pour faciliter le passage des voyageurs. Ce
pont, qui a vingt chaisnes, a 20 perches de long
qui font 140 pieds: l’on dit que quand beaucoup de
personnes passent dessus, ou qu’il y a quelque grand
fardeau, il branle si fort qu’il fait peur à ceux
qui y sont” (p. 289). This description is vivid, and
M. Degrand regards the chains as chains of iron. He
says: “Kircher mentionne l’existence ... d’un pont
composé de chaînes de fer supportant, en travers
d’une vallée profonde, un tablier en charpente d’une
grande longueur, c’est-à-dire un véritable pont
suspendu, ayant précédé sans doute de plusieurs
siècles les ponts du même genre construits à l’époque
moderne en Europe et aux États-Unis.”
[141] See Index for other references to Mr. Jackson.
[142] Marco Polo describes very well how the bamboo in
China is twisted or plaited into cordage. He says:
“They have canes of the length of fifteen paces,
which they split, in their whole length, into very
thin pieces, and these, by twisting them together,
they form into ropes three hundred paces long. So
skilfully are they manufactured, that they are equal
in strength to cordage made of hemp.”
[143] I take this description from two photographs
belonging to the Church Missionary Society.
[144] On the 4th of August this important bridge was
guarded by Territorials.
[145] Not _all_ bridges should be military, of course,
since those near a frontier may have to be destroyed
at a moment’s notice in order to check the advance of
a surprise attack.
[Illustration: RAIN]
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
CHINESE GABLED BRIDGES
Marco Polo found them in several places, particularly in Hang-cheu,
the ancient capital of Southern China. This noble city has on one
side the Si-hu, or western lake, and on the other is the vast river
Tsien-tang-kiang, which at high tide is nearly four miles in width.
Its waters are distributed by canals through every quarter of
Hang-cheu, so that many bridges are necessary. Towards the end of the
thirteenth century, when Marco Polo made visits to Hang-cheu (which
he described as Kin-sai, or the “celestial city”), bridges over the
canals were so frequent that popular opinion, glad to show off an
Oriental exaggeration, declared their number to be twelve thousand,
though a census had not been taken. “Those which are thrown over the
principal canals,” says Polo, “and are connected with the main streets,
have arches so high, and built with so much skill, that vessels with
their masts can pass under them, whilst, at the same time, carts
and horses are passing over their heads,--so well is the slope from
the streets adapted to the height of the arch.” And another early
traveller, P. Le Comte, with graphic brevity, writes as follows of
the grand canal: “Outre ces digues, on a basti une infinité de ponts
pour la communication des terres: ils sont de trois, de cinq, et
de sept arches; celle du milieu est extraordinairement haute, afin
que les barques en passant ne soient pas obligées d’abaisser leurs
masts” (“Nouv. Mém. de la Chine,” Tom. 1, p. 161). There is also a
description written by Barrow, who visited Hang-cheu before 1830,
and whose testimony confirms that of much earlier travellers. Barrow
was impressed by “a great variety of bridges” that spanned most of
the canals. Some had “piers of such an extraordinary height, that
the largest vessels, of two hundred tons, sailed under them without
striking their masts.” Last of all, in recent photographs the stone
bridges of China are steep whenever they are built with arches, so
we can follow the Chinese gabled bridge from our own time to the
thirteenth century. They came into use partly because they were
convenient to shipping, and partly because they could be erected from
low embankments.
APPENDIX II
STEEP ROMAN BRIDGES
Young pontists are always eager to know whether the Romans built gabled
bridges, setting an example both to the East and to the West. On this
topic there is little evidence, for most of the Roman bridges were
built of timber. At Rimini, in the famous bridge of Augustus, there
is an ascent at each end over the abutment, and at Alcantarilla, near
Utrera, in Andalusia, the Roman bridge may be described as hog-backed.
It crosses the Salado, a tributary of the Guadalquivir. Recently Mr.
Edgar Wigram visited Alcantarilla, and he writes to me as follows:--
“The Roman bridge there is most interesting, almost untouched by
restoration, yet it remains serviceable. It is a hog-backed structure
of two arches, each about thirty-five feet in span; the width between
the parapets may be fifteen feet, but a swarm of bees happened to be
merry on the bridge, so I did not try to take accurate measurements.
The voussoirs and spandrils are of stone with hammer-dressed faces,
while the soffits are formed with wedge-shaped blocks of concrete, and
a certain amount of brick is found in the piers. Along the river on
one side are remains of an embankment. A tower stands at one end of
the bridge, placed centrally to it, so the road has to make a double
turn to pass. One wall of the tower is destroyed, but the other three
are still about half their original height. The lower courses are of
big stone blocks, while the upper part of the faces are filled in
with ‘tapia’ concrete; the angles (or at least the two which still
remain intact) are grooved with a queer circular recess some twelve
inches in diameter. What purpose these grooves can have served I do
not know. They look as if they may have been intended to accommodate
the hinge-posts of gates; but a gate hung in them would hardly
swing through ninety degrees. If a second tower ever existed, its
foundations do not appear above ground-level. At Córdova there is only
one tower, and it stands in a very similar position. By analogy, then,
we may suppose that a second tower was not built at Alcantarilla;
yet the grooved angles seem to require a corresponding tower with
corresponding grooves, if gates were ever swung from them. Perhaps the
grooves formed pivots for some sort of defensive engine, such as the
‘iron hand’ of Archimedes, which seems to have been some sort of great
grappling crane. The angles of a tower would be fit places to plant a
weapon of this description; but we need help from an expert in ancient
military engineering.”
INDEX AND GLOSSARY
INDEX AND GLOSSARY
ABBAS II, Shah of Persia, 1641-66;
the Pul-i-Khaju at Isfahan dates from his time, 215.
ABBOT’S BRIDGE, Bury St. Edmunds, its ecclesiastical workmanship and
its double ring of voussoirs, 305 _footnote_.
ABERYSTWYTH, South Wales, the Devil’s Bridge at, over the Afon
Mynach, its old legend, 66, 67, 68.
ABINGDON BRIDGE, Ballad of, by Richard Fannande Iremonger, dated
1458, its value to pontists, 208, 251-2.
ABUTMENT PIERS, these are so strong that they act as abutments,
and hence the loss of one arch does not overthrow another by
withdrawing a counterbalancing thrust from one side of a
pier. Perronet says: “The piers of bridges ought to be
considered either as performing the duty of abutments, or as
relieved of this duty by the counteraction of the collateral
arches, through which the thrust is carried from abutment to
abutment of the bridge. In the first case, piers should
resist lateral pressure as capably as the abutments
themselves, that they may withstand the side thrust of the
arch-stones which tends to overturn them, and which increases
by so much the more as the arches are flatter and the piers
loftier. In the second case, the piers must have substance
enough to carry the weight of the two half arches raised upon
the two sides of each pier respectively,” together with those
parts of the upper works that lie over each pier. Roman piers
are abutments also, as a rule, their thickness ranging from a
half to a third of the spaces between them; the effect of
this great bulk both on the current of rivers and on Roman
bridge-building is described on page 284. A great many
bridges of the Middle Ages had abutment piers, but in many
cases they were dams rather than bridges; the piers occupied
far too much space in the waterways and caused terrible
floods like those that happened at Lyons in the winter of
1839-40. Old London Bridge was a perforated dam (p. 220); and
after her removal in 1831-2, an improvement was noted in the
drainage, and consequently in the healthiness, of all the
lower parts of London above bridge. So abutment piers, when
they are either too thick or too numerous, are social evils.
This fact was recognised by bridgemen at the beginning of the
sixteenth century, when some diminution took place in the
relative proportion of the piers of bridges to the spans of
arches; and little by little a new routine came into vogue
and displaced the abutment pier from all service. Here was
another social evil, for long arched bridges with no abutment
piers were unmilitary, and therefore at odds with the
strategy of national defence. Not an arch could be cut
without endangering its neighbouring arches. Gabriel and
Perronet, after considering this fact, wished abutment piers
to be revived in a discreetly effective manner (_footnote_ p.
338), but their excellent advice was not followed.
Defenceless bridges became fashionable everywhere, though
they added innumerable anxieties to the perils of military
war. The Valentré Bridge at Cahors should be studied as the
best example of a mediæval battle-bridge, but the abutment
piers might have been improved, 283-4. To-day a new era in
bridge-building is heralded by rapid improvements in airships
and aeroplanes; there should be a congress of architects and
engineers to discuss the urgent questions of national defence
that the piers and footways of bridges bring before our
common sense, 335, 358.
ABUTMENTS, the end supports of a bridge.
ABYDOS, one of the most ancient cities of Upper Egypt;
an early arch there in the temple of Rameses II, 155.
ACARNANIA, the most westerly province of ancient Greece;
early examples of the semicircular arch, 160.
ACCIDENTS, THE, OF CIVILIZATION, they claim as many lives in a
century as do the casualties on stricken fields, 34 _footnote_.
ACCIDENTS TO OLD LONDON BRIDGE, 218.
ADAM OF EVOLUTION, THE, had sense enough probably to lay a flat
stone from bank to bank of a deep rivulet, 60;
his personal appearance, 115-16;
his character, 116, 117;
his attitude to tree-bridges, 116;
and to several other bridges made by Nature, 118-19.
ADDY, SIDNEY O., his book on “The Evolution of the English House,”
139 _footnote_.
ADRIAN IV, Pope, sanctioned in 1156 the building of a chapel on the
Roman bridge over the Vidourle at Pont Ambroise in France, 82.
ÆLIUS, PONS, built by Hadrian in A.D. 13, 194, 324.
AEROPLANES, in their relation to bridge-building and national
defence, vii, viii, 59, 335, 358.
AFRICAN NATIVES, their tree-bridges and their want of initiative,
123, 148.
AFON MYNACH, the cataract in South Wales, 67.
AGOWE DISTRICT, Equatorial Central Africa, a primitive suspension
bridge partly made with very thick vines, 148.
AGRIPPA, son-in-law of Augustus Cæsar, the reputed founder of the
Pont du Gard, about 19 years B.C., 174.
AIRMEN SCOUTS, their relations to future wars, 335, 358.
AIRSHIPS, their influence on bridge-building and on national defence,
vii, viii, 59, 335, 358.
AIRVAULT, DEUX-SÈVRES, Le Pont de Vernay, a famous bridge with ribbed
arches, French Romanesque Period, Twelfth Century;
See the colour plate facing page 96;
and the remarks on ribbed arches, 93-100.
ALAMERI, HALAF, a famous bridge-builder in Spain, 286-7.
ALBARRACIN, in Aragon, its timber bridge with stone piers, 275.
ALBI BRIDGE over the Tarn, famous in the history of pointed arches,
84, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92;
See also the illustrations facing pages 72 and 92.
ALBI, Railway Bridge at, see the colour plate facing page 8.
ALCÁNTARA, in Spain, and the Puente Trajan over the Tagus;
a wonderful Roman bridge, 6, 16, 153, 183 _et seq._, 212, 321.
ALCÁNTARA at Toledo, a famous old war-bridge, 285-7;
and see the two colour prints facing pages 32 and 284.
ALCANTARILLA, in Spain, its most interesting Roman war-bridge, 30,
182, and 367-8.
ALDEGUELA, JOSÉ MARTIN, a great Spanish bridge-builder of the 18th
century, 280 _footnote_.
ALDERSHOT, its vulnerable bridges on a single-line railway that runs
toward Southampton, 336 _footnote_.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT, his possible influence on bridge-building in
India, 272.
ALEXANDRINE AQUEDUCT, the decoration of its wall surfaces with
coloured tufa arranged in geometrical patterns, 190.
ALGERIA, Pont Sidi Rached at Constantine, built between 1908 and
1912, 53.
ALI VERDI KHAN, the Bridge of, at Isfahan in Persia, over the
Zendeh Rud, 212, 268-70.
ALLBUTT, SIR CLIFFORD, on the immaturity of modern science, 7.
ALLEN’S “History of the County of York,” 243 _footnote_.
ALONSO OF SPAIN, in 1258, repaired the Alcántara at Toledo, 287.
ALTAMIRA CAVERN, near Santander, its prehistoric art relics, 62.
AMBROISE, PONT, over the Vidourle, a Roman bridge, now a ruin, 82,
177.
AMERICA, SOUTH, primitive bridges there, as described by Don Antonio
de Ulloa, 135, 146-7.
AMERICA, UNITED STATES OF, their timber bridges, 142-3;
their defenceless modern bridges, 352-4.
AMMANATI, BARTOLOMEO, Florentine architect of the 16th century, his
great bridge over the Arno, 222, 316-17.
AMSTERDAM, the Hoogesluis at, a strumpet of a bridge, 323.
ANGERS, a suspension bridge at, how it gave way when soldiers were
passing across it, 144 _footnote_.
ANCHORAGE OF CHAIN BRIDGES, at Auhsien in China, 346-7.
ANCUS MARCIUS, and the Pons Sublicius, 64, 140.
ANGELL, NORMAN, a firm believer in the illusion called peace, 351.
ANGELO, PONTE SANT’, at Rome, anciently the Pons Ælius, 194, 324.
ANIO VETUS, Roman Aqueduct, its great height, 190.
ANTIQUARIES, their aloofness from public interests, 9, 11;
very often they mistake facts for truths, 9-11;
their pedantry and its results, 11;
their attitude to the Clapper Bridges over Dartmoor rivers, 100,
102, 103.
ANTIQUARY, an old, his bad advice to young pontists, 8-10.
ANTONIO DA PONTE, in 1588, began to erect the Rialto, 212.
ANTS, their intelligence, 110;
they bore tunnels under water and make bridges over running
streams, 122;
the fertility of their minute cerebral ganglia contrasted with the
dullness of the average human brain, 239-40.
APATHY, BRITISH, in matters of national defence, 15, 16, 33
_footnote_, 336 _footnote_, 350, 351, 355, 359, 360.
APOLLODORUS OF DAMASCUS, great Roman bridge-builder, 129-30, 131, 344.
APPENZELL, Canton of, the birthplace of Ulric and Jean Grubenmann,
141.
AQUEDUCTS, ROMAN, the Pont du Gard, 83, 167-75, 321;
at Lyon, 176, 213;
at Luynes and Fréjus, 176;
the Marcian Aqueduct, 189 _footnote_;
Nero’s Aqueduct, 189;
the Alexandrine, 190;
Anio Vetus, 190;
at Minturnæ, 190;
Tarragona, 189;
Segóvia, 183-4, 189, 190;
see also the illustration facing page 184;
Smyrna, 165;
number of aqueducts at Rome in the sixth century A.D., 189
_footnote_;
Sextus Julius Frontinus, Superintendent of the Aqueducts at Rome,
wrote, in the first century of our Era, a treatise on Roman
aqueducts, 189 _footnote_.
AQUITAINE, DUKE OF, William the Great, his attitude to the collection
of tolls on bridges, 240.
ARABIAN ARCHES, their shapes are of three sorts, the horseshoe, the
semicircular, and the pointed. Often they are enriched by a
sort of feathering or foliation around the arch, and this
ornament is closely akin to Gothic work, which it preceded by
a considerable time. The Arabian style, known also as
Saracenic and Moorish, is a fanciful composition in which
details from Egypt and Greece and Rome are alembicated with
“the light fantastic lattice-work of the Persians.” To-day we
find its graceful influence in the greatest bridges at
Isfahan, 213, and also in much Spanish work, 28-9, 285-6,
288. Some writers believe that pointed arches were invented
by the Arabs, yet they were built in Egypt during the Fourth
Dynasty, 155-6, and also by the Babylonians, 275 _footnote_.
The Saracenic pointed arch was a forerunner of the Gothic
pointed style, and it became familiar to the Crusaders,
86-93; but we must draw a wide distinction between the
pointed arch and the pointed Gothic style. Arabian architects
did not achieve an upward flight and rhythm akin to the
vertical principle of inspired Gothic; their buildings
preserved the horizontal line which gave and gives character
to classical traditions, 152, 153, 336. If, then, the pointed
arch in Europe was borrowed from Arabian architects, as many
antiquaries believe, 88, it passed through a great
transformation in technical sentiment, and became an original
inspiration.
ARAGON, 275.
ARCADES cut transversely through the piers of the ruined Roman
aqueduct at Lyon, 213;
and also in the two greatest bridges at Isfahan, 214, 215, 270.
ARCADES, COVERED, in the best bridges at Isfahan, pierced through the
outer walls from one end to the other, 214, 215, 269.
ARC DE ST. BÉNÉZET, in the Bridge of Avignon, 81;
its elliptical shape had a forerunner in the vault of Chosroes’
great hall at Selucia-Ctesiphon, which may have been derived
from Babylonian tradition, 275 _footnote_;
there is even a Roman starting-point for Bénézet’s arch, 196.
ARC DE TRIOMPHE, Chinese, 315;
Roman, 176-7, 183.
ARCHÆOLOGY, PREHISTORIC, why it is tiresome to most people, 119-20.
ARCHERY, EARLY ENGLISH, the Conscription of, how its legal statutes
were imperilled by trade “rings,” 49;
some Elizabethans wanted to see a revival of the archery statutes,
333.
ARCHES made by Nature, the Pont d’Arc at Ardèche, 6, 88, 150;
the Rock Bridge in Virginia, 6;
the Durdle Door at Lulworth, 151;
La Roche Percée at Biarritz, 151;
La Roche Trouée, near Saint-Gilles Croix-de-Vie, 151;
at Icononzo, in New Grenada, 151;
Lydstep Arch on the coast of Pembroke, 150 _footnote_;
on the formation of natural arches, 151-2;
how these arches were copied by mankind, 6, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157;
their significance, 152-4.
ARCHES made by Man, those copied or adapted from Nature’s models, 6,
153-7;
their significance, 152-4;
the symbolism of arches, 154;
arches in art are more suggestive than circles, 154-5;
in some arches the vaults are built with parallel bands of stone,
Roman examples, 82, 83, 174;
mediæval example, 81, 82, 83;
arches made with criss-cross piers of timber, Gaulish, 70, 71;
in Kashmír, 71, 72, 73;
in North Russia, 73;
cycloid arches, in Ammanati’s bridge, 222, 316-17;
elliptical arches, St. Bénézet’s, 81;
in Chosroes’ great hall at Selucia-Ctesiphon, 275 _footnote_;
extra-dossed arches, Roman and mediæval, 282-3;
pointed arches, early Egyptian, 155-6;
Babylonian, 275 _footnote_;
early European, 86-93;
semicircular arches, Babylonian, 275 _footnote_;
in Asia Minor, 160;
in Acarnania, 160;
among the Etruscans, 160;
in Ancient Rome, 161-4;
transverse arches cut through the piers of bridges, 213, 214, 270.
ARCHITECTS, great need of their influence in to-day’s
bridge-building, 357;
and also in the work of British highway boards, 43.
ARCHITECTURE, ARABIAN, see “Arabian Arches.”
ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS, 112;
the use of mud in the building of walls probably copied from birds,
111.
ARCHITECTURE, GREEK, 152, 157-9; lovers of Greek architecture are
overapt to undervalue the Roman genius, 167-8.
ARCHITECTURE, ROMAN, see Chapter III.
ARCHSTONES, or voussoirs, they form the compressed arc of materials
called the ring; in some bridges they are laid in two or three
sets, forming either a double or a triple ring, 305 _footnote_.
The earliest archstones were arranged in horizontal courses, 6;
as in the temple of Rameses II at Abydos, 155;
in the Porta dell’ Arco at Arpino, 156-7;
and the Lion Gate at Mycenae; but at Gizeh, in the great pyramid of
Menkaura, there is a variation from this horizontal method, 156;
Some Chinese bridges have arches built without keystones, 313-14;
the rings being constructed with a few segmental stones from five
to ten feet long, 314;
The Romans extradosed their archstones, as in their bridge at
Narni, 24;
and this excellent practice was followed often in the Middle Ages,
282-3;
The Romans, again, more often than not, bedded their archstones
dry, without mortar or cement, as in most of the arches in the
Pont du Gard, 175 _footnote_;
but feebler masons have failed to copy with success this Roman
method, notably in the restoration of the vast Roman aqueduct
at Segóvia, 184;
and recently Spanish workmen, after rebuilding an arch of the
Puente Trajan at Alcántara, pointed the joints of the whole
bridge in order to bring the masterpiece into keeping with
their own weakness, 186-7. In a few English bridges the
archstones are moulded like church windows and doorways;
examples, Crowland, 304-5;
and the Abbot’s Bridge at Bury St. Edmunds, 305 _footnote_.
ARDASHIR, of Persian history, 202.
ARDÈCHE, in France, the Pont d’Arc at, a natural arched bridge, 6, 89.
ARGUMENTS, concerning the origin of Dartmoor Clapper Bridges, 100-5;
concerning the introduction of pointed arches into French bridges,
84-93;
concerning the introduction of ribbed arches into English bridges,
93-100;
to excuse the evolution from military bridges into defenceless
bridges, 334;
to prove that every sort of strife is a phase of war, vii, and
section ii, Chapter I, pp. 14-52.
ARMADA PERIOD, THE, Spanish cannon belonging to it used in the
Peninsular War, 334.
ARPINO, in Campania, its Porta dell’ Arco, an ancient gate with a
pointed arch belonging to the so-called Cyclopean style, 156-7.
ARQUEBUSE, and the slow development of hand-guns, 333.
ART CRITICISM, ENGLISH, its defects, 168.
ARTIFICIAL LIGHT AND HEAT, the first missionaries, 58.
ARTISTS, we need their help in bridge-building, 357-8.
ASCOLI-PICENO, and her bridges, 200, 201.
ASHFORD BRIDGE, Derbyshire, the stump of its mediæval cross destroyed
by parapet repairs, 230.
ASIA MINOR, early semicircular arches have been discovered there,
160.
ASKEATON BRIDGE, its military character illustrated in the “Pacata
Hibernia,” 260.
ATREUS, THE TREASURY OF, at Mycenae, its domed and circular chamber,
158-9.
AUGUSTUS, BRIDGE OF, at Rimini, 82, 199, 220.
AUGUSTUS CÆSAR, the bridge at Narni belongs to his time, 23.
AUHSIEN, in Western China, an iron swing bridge is found there, 345-6.
AURELIUS, PONS, another name for the Janiculine bridge in ancient
Rome, 197.
AVIATION, see “Airships” and “Aeroplanes.”
AVIGNON, her famous bridge built by St. Bénézet. See “Bénézet.”
BABYLON, some of her ancient bridges, 127;
the great bridge built by Semiramis, 273-4;
Babylonian arches, semicircular, pointed, and even elliptical, 275
_footnote_.
BABYLONIAN BRIDGES AND ARCHES, 127, 273-4, 275.
BAD DECORATION IN BRIDGES, 320-8;
M. De Dartein, his books and views, 319-20;
see also under “Engineers, Modern.”
BAKEWELL BRIDGE, its ribbed arches, 94.
BÂLE, the old bridge at, over the Rhine, 306-7.
BALLAD OF ABINGDON BRIDGE, its value to pontists, 208, 251-2.
BANBERY, a superintendent of the workmen when Abingdon Bridge was
built by charity, 252.
BAMBOO BRIDGES in Western China, 348;
and in Sumatra, 291.
BAMBOO ROPE, how it has long been made in China, 348 _footnote_.
BAND-I-MIZAN, THE, a famous Dike at Shushter in Persia, 202, 204.
BANDITS, in mediæval England, 207, 208.
BARACCONI, quoting from Sextus Pompeius Festus, proves that in very
early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber, 64.
BARAMULA, in Kashmír, its fine bridge with criss-cross piers, 73.
BARBER, GEOFFREY, contributed a thousand marks to the building of
Abingdon Bridge, 252.
BARDEN BRIDGE, in Wharfedale, its angular pier-shelters for
foot-passengers, 258 _footnote_.
BARING-GOULD, S., on the Devil’s Bridge, twelve miles from
Aberystwyth, 66-9;
on sacrifices anciently offered to the Spirits of Evil, 68;
on Dartmoor bridges, 103;
mentions some of the arched entrances to caves on the coast of
Pembroke, 150 _footnote_.
BARKING, ABBESS OF, the trustee of Queen Mathilda’s endowment of Old
Bow Bridge, twelfth century, 98.
BARNARD CASTLE BRIDGE, a chapel used to grace it, 231;
see also the colour plate facing page 232.
BARONS, LAWLESS, in Mediæval England, 207 _footnote_.
BARROW, English traveller in China, his remarks on some Chinese
arches, 313-14;
and on the bridges of Hang-Cheu, 365-6.
BARROWS, LONG, Prehistoric, 139.
BARRY, E. M., R.A., protested energetically against the bad taste
shown by modern engineers in bridge-building, 77-8.
BARTHELASSE ISLAND, and the Bridge of Avignon, 237.
BARTOLOMMEO, PONTE S., another name for the Pons Cestius, according
to Palladio, 196.
BASLOW BRIDGE, its ribbed arches, 93;
and its shelter-places for passengers, 258 _footnote_.
BATH, William Pulteney’s Bridge at, 221.
BATTLE BRIDGES, see “War-Bridges.”
BATTLE, LAW OF, vii, 4;
its relation to roads and bridges, see sections i and ii of
Chapter I;
permanent among the lower animals, 17, 18;
perhaps it may become less troublesome among men, 18, 19;
its action in the rise and fall of civilizations, 22, 23;
its rule in civil life is inferior to Nature’s beautiful order in
her cellular commonwealths, 19, 25, 40-3;
yet sentimentalists believe in the illusion called peace and do
infinite harm by their canting hostility to national defence,
33, 34, 35, 351, 360-1;
see also the last chapter on the evolution of unfortified bridges.
BAUDOUIN, the Elector, in 1344, built the Moselle Bridge at Coblentz,
260.
BAVARIA, bridge over the Main at Würzburg, 259-60.
BEAUCAIRE, PONT DE, a great suspension bridge, 344-5.
BEAVERS, their great intelligence, 110;
much human work in bridge-building has shown less intelligence than
that which we find in the beaver’s contests against running
water, 131.
BECKER, his views on the bridges in ancient Rome, 193.
BECKET, ST. THOMAS À, the Gothic chapel on Old London Bridge was
dedicated to him, 216.
BEDDOES, MR. THOMAS, traveller and trader in Equatorial Central
Africa, his remarks on tree-bridges made by the natives, 123;
and on other primitive bridges, 148-9.
BEDFORD BRIDGE, her old chapel, now destroyed, 231.
BEEHIVE TOMBS at Mycenae, 158-9.
BEES, their intelligence, 110.
BEFFARA, a French architect, in 1752 builds a very remarkable bridge
near Ardres, in the Pas-de-Calais, 305-6.
BELGIUM, the Jeanne d’Arc of nations, 34 _footnote_;
her old bastille bridges, 289-91.
BELLE CROIX, THE, formerly on the old bridge at Orléans, 246-7.
BENEDICT XIII, expelled from Avignon, 239.
BÉNÉZET, SAINT, his bridge at Avignon. Frontispiece, 81, 82, 83,
236-9;
parallel bands of stone in the vaults of the arches, 81, 82, 83;
perhaps Bénézet had some correspondence with Peter Colechurch, who
began Old London Bridge, 217;
the line of his bridge made an elbow pointing upstream, 237, 297;
in a bird’s-eye view the design looks like a bridge of boats, 262,
297;
Bénézet died before his work was finished, and was buried in the
chapel on his bridge, 236;
see also the footnote on 280.
BÉRANGER, CHARLES, French publisher, his excellent books on bridges,
318-19.
BERMUDEZ, CEAN, quoted by George Edmund Street, 286.
BERNINI, GIOVANNI L. (1598-1680), his sculpture for the Ponte Sant’
Angelo in Rome, 195;
this sculpture is a burden to the bridge rather than a beauty to
it, 324.
BERWICK-ON-TWEED, its mediæval bridge fell many times, 49.
BESILLIS, SIR PERIS, helps to build the bridge at Abingdon, 252.
BÉZIERS, its twelfth-century bridge, 92.
BHUTAN, India, its primitive timber bridges with defensive gateways,
73, 272-3.
BIDEFORD BRIDGE, formerly it was graced with a chapel, 231;
its twenty arches were built in the 14th century with help from
indulgences sanctioned by Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, 305
_footnote_.
BISHOP’S BRIDGE, Norwich, has a double arch ring, 305.
BLASPHEMERS were ducked in the Tarn from the Pont des Consuls at
Montauban, 256.
BLUDGET, an American engineer, takes hints from the brothers
Grubenmann, 142.
BOARD OF TRADE, London, its report on the Tay Bridge Disaster, 340.
BOATS ought to be added to the remarks on page 58, or to the first
section of the second chapter (pp. 109-12), for primitive man
got his first boats from Nature. The earliest were floating
branches and trees on which men sat astride, drifting with
the current of rivers; the later were trees hollowed out by
decay, which became models for dug-outs. “Between the
primitive dug-out and a modern man-of-war there is, apparently,
an impassable gulf; but yet the two are connected by an
unbroken chain of successive improvements all registering
greater efficiency in mechanical skill. Each of those
intermediate increments constitutes a numbered milestone in
the history and development of navigation.”--Dr. Robert
Munro.
BOATS, BRIDGE OF, at Cologne, 1. It will be remembered that Julius
Cæsar frequently made use of boat-bridges, and that Xerxes,
four hundred and eighty years before the Birth of Christ,
made a bridge of boats across the narrowest part of the
Hellespont, between the ancient cities of Sestus and Abydus.
So the boat-bridge at Cologne, like the wooden pontoon, has
an old and fascinating lineage, yet a modern bridge was going
to displace it when the present Great War began. “Kultur”
cancels history.
BOFFIY, GUILLERMO, architect of the immense nave in Gerona Cathedral,
28.
BOISSERON, on the little river Bénovie, its disfigured Roman bridge,
179.
BOKYNS, JOHN, in 1483, bequeathed three and fourpence to a chapel to
be built on Rotherham Bridge, 233.
BOOKS ON BRIDGES, 318, 319, 320;
William Hosking, 317;
Emiland Gauthey’s “Traité de la Construction des Ponts,” 127;
Colonel Emy’s “Traité de l’Art de la Charpenterie,” 143 _footnote_;
Professor Fleeming Jenkin’s “Bridges,” see “Jenkin”;
E. Degrand’s “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” 88.
BOOTHS OR SHOPS on Chinese bridges, 210 _footnote_;
on European bridges, 210.
BORDEAUX, PONT DE, its length and its cost, 356.
BOUGHS, FORKED, in primitive bridge-building, 135, 148.
BOWER BIRDS, Australian, their architecture is a model to all
primitive men, 112.
BRACKETS, below the parapet of the Pont Neuf at Paris, 321.
Brackets are ornamental projections from the face of a wall,
to support statues and other objects. Some are adorned only
with mouldings, while many are carved into angels, or
foliage, or heads, or animals. Parker says: “It is not always
easy to distinguish a bracket from a corbel; in some cases,
indeed, one name is as correct as the other.” See Brangwyn’s
drawing of the Pont Neuf facing page 320.
BRADFORD-ON-AVON, Wiltshire, the bridge there has a tiny oratory,
231-2, which was profaned after the Reformation, becoming a
“lock-up,” and then a powder magazine, 232. The bridge has
nine arches; the two pointed ones uniting the oratory to the
bankside have ribbed vaults, and the others are round-headed
arches with double rings of voussoirs, 305 _footnote_.
Originally the bridge was a narrow one for packhorses, but it
was widened in 1645, or thereabouts. A hospital used to stand
at one end of the bridge, and doles of charity for it may
have been collected in the little place of prayer. Leland
admired this bridge, and noted its nine fair arches of stone,
and a fair large parish church standing beneath the bridge on
Avon ripe.
BRAIN, THE HUMAN, its large size and its infrequent greatness, 110,
111, 112, 239-40;
see also the second chapter.
BRANCH RAILWAY LINES over strategic rivers, they are necessary in
national defence now that bridges may be damaged seriously with
bombs falling from airships and aeroplanes, 355-6.
BRANDRYTH OR BRANDERETH, a mediæval name for a cofferdam, 253, and
_footnote_.
BRANGWYN, FRANK, vi, 6, 15, 23, 29, 34, 78, 79, 92, 160, 162, 179,
194, 201, 202, 208, 209, 212, 223, 224, 236, 247, 254, 258,
272, 279, 291, 299, 307, 331;
see also the Lists of Illustrations.
BRECON, its bridge has safety recesses built into the piers from the
parapet, 258 _footnote_.
BRICK AQUEDUCTS, Roman, 189-90.
BRICK BRIDGES, Persian, 265-6, 270;
European, the Pont des Consuls at Montauban, fourteenth century,
255;
and the covered bridge over the Ticino at Pavia, 308.
BRIDGE-BUILDING, Roman, 26-30;
see also Chapter III;
mediæval, 26-30, 33-6, 85-106, 264;
see also “Ballad of Abingdon Bridge”;
Chinese, see “Marco Polo”;
Persian, see “Kâredj,” “Khaju,” and “Ali Verdi Khan”;
Primitive, see “America, South,” “Beddoes,” “Bhutan,” “Criss-Cross
Piers,” “Kashmír,” “Kurdistan,” and Chapter II.
BRIDGE BUILT WITH ARCHES, its anatomy. Professor Fleeming Jenkin
says: “An arch may be of stone, brick, wood, or metal. The
oldest arches are of stone or brick. They differ from metal
and from wooden arches, inasmuch as the compressed arc of
materials called the _ring_ is built of a number of separate
pieces having little or no cohesion. Each separate stone used
in building the _ring_ has received the name of _voussoir_,
or archstone. The lower surface of the ring is called the
_soffit_ of the arch. The _joints_, or bed-joints, are the
surfaces separating the voussoirs, and are normal to the
soffit. A brick arch is usually built in numerous rings, so
that it cannot be conceived as built of voussoirs with plane
joints passing straight through the ring. The bed-joints of a
brick arch may be considered as stepped and interlocked. This
interlocking will affect the stability of the arch only in
those cases where one voussoir tends to slip along its
neighbour. The _ring_ springs from a course of stones in the
abutments, called _quoins_. The plane of demarcation between
the ring and the abutment is called the _springing_ of the
arch. The _crown_ of an arch is the summit of the ring. The
voussoirs at the crown are called _keystones_. The _haunches_
of an arch are the parts midway between the springing and the
crown. The upper surface of the ring is sometimes improperly
called the extrados, and the lower surface is more properly
called the intrados. These terms, when properly employed,
have reference to a mathematical theory of the arch little
used by engineers. The walls which rest upon the ring along
the arch, and rise either to the parapet or to the roadway,
are called _spandrils_. There are necessarily two outer
spandrils forming the faces of a bridge; there may be one or
more inner spandrils. The _backing_ of an arch is the masonry
above the haunches of the ring; it is carried back between
the spandrils to the pier or to the abutment. If the backing
is not carried up to the roadway, as is seldom the case, the
rough material employed between the backing and the roadway
is called the _filling_. The _parapet_ rests on the outer
_spandrils_.”
BRIDGE CHAPELS AND ORATORIES, 82, 208, 209, 216-17, 218-19, 225-39,
241-6, 256.
BRIDGE CROSSES AND CRUCIFIXES, 96, 230, 246-7.
BRIDGE DECORATION, 193-4, 195-6, 201, 215, 227, 286, 304, 305, 311,
312, 316, 318-28.
BRIDGE FRIARS, or Pontist Brothers, the _Frères Pontifes_, 93, 236,
296, and _footnote_.
BRIDGENORTH, formerly the bridge there had a chapel, 231;
it has shelter-places for foot-passengers, 258 _footnote_.
BRIDGES WITH WIDE ARCHED SPANS, 309-10.
BRIDGE-WRECKERS, 352, 355. It is worth noting that the King of
the Belgians in the present Great War has used a cyclist
corps of bridge-wreckers, whose work is described in the
_Daily Mail_, December 14, 1914, page 4. “The cyclists led
the way. The explosives followed in a car. The charge was
fixed to the girders under the bridges, an electric wire
affixed, you touched a button and the near span of the bridge
was in a moment no more than a gap. Their greatest
achievement ... was a railway bridge between Courtrai and
Audenarde. It needed two charges.” The cyclists regarded
their work as “fun,” because no bridge was at all difficult
to destroy.
BRIG OF AYR, 94.
BRIG O’ DOON, 45, 94.
BRISTOL BRIDGE, OLD, a copy of Old London Bridge, had a chapel, 231.
BRITANNIA BRIDGE over the Menai Straits, its great defects, 77-8;
its length and its cost, 357.
BRITISH AND FRENCH BRIDGES contrasted, 256-8, 281, 294-5;
the French genius in architecture often superior to the British,
294-5.
BRITISH APATHY, see “Apathy, British.”
BRIVES-CHARENSAC, on the Loire, its ruined Roman bridge, 179, 180;
the arch has a double ring of voussoirs, 305 _footnote_.
BRONZE PERIOD, MEN OF THE, 21;
approximate date of this period, 21;
pastoral life of the Bronze Age on Dartmoor, 100, 101;
this life rendered bridges necessary, 101, 103.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE, at New York, described and criticised, 354.
“BROWN BESS,” the Old Musket, displaced for a better weapon in 1857,
334.
BUCHAN, DR. WILLIAM, one of Lister’s little-known forerunners, 58
_footnote_.
BUCKLER, J. C. AND C., their “Remarks on Wayside Chapels,” 228
_footnote_.
BUDAPEST, the chains of its great suspension bridge pass _through_
the towers instead of _over_ the summits, 346.
BUJUCO BRIDGES in South America, described by the Spanish Admiral Don
Antonio de Ulloa, 146, 147.
BULLEID, A., a writer on the Glastonbury Lake Village, 139 _footnote_.
BUNSEN, on the bridges of ancient Rome, 193, 197.
BURDON, ROWLAND, in 1796, designed Wearmouth Bridge, 349.
BURNSALL BRIDGE in Wharfedale, its shelter-places for
foot-passengers, 258 _footnote_.
BUSH-ROPE, in Equatorial Central Africa, its use in bridge-building,
123.
CABLE BRIDGES OF BAMBOO in China, 145;
of ox-hide thongs in Peru, 146;
and also in the Andes, 147.
CÆSAR AND THE BRITISH TRIBES, 22;
he speaks of the Gaulish bridges, 70, 71.
CAHORS, THE PONT VALENTRÉ AT, a fortified bridge of the thirteenth
century, 27, 92, 263-4, 282-5;
See also the illustrations facing pages 16 and 264;
There was another great old bridge at Cahors, but it perished in a
storm of local party politics, 44.
CAILLE, PONT DE LA, famous modern suspension bridge, 344.
CALAHORRA, the big tower guarding an entrance to the bridge at
Córdova, 188.
CANADA, devoted to very vulnerable bridges, 354.
CANAL BRIDGE in Venice, 329.
CANALS, their construction has been a phase of war claiming a great
many lives, 17, and _footnote_.
CANE VINES used in Africa in the making of bush-rope, 123.
CÁNGAS DE ONIS, the gabled bridge at, 27.
CANINA, his attempt to reconstruct the Pons Sublicius differs from
Colonel Emy’s, 140.
CANNON, the slow improvement in their manufacture, 333.
CANNON STREET RAILWAY BRIDGE, the colour plate facing p. 48.
CANOES, they often take the place of bridges in Africa, 123.
CANTERBURY, THE ARCHBISHOP OF, in 1318, owned the land adjoining Old
Shoreham Bridge, 41;
His name was Walter Reynolds.
CAPAC YUPANQUI, the fifth Ynca, and his bridge of rushes, 146-7.
CAPPUCINA, PONTE DI PORTA, a Roman bridge at Ascoli-Piceno, 201.
CARACALLA, 129.
CARCASSONNE, OLD BRIDGE AT, dating from the 12th century, 92;
see also the plate facing page 104.
CARMAGNOLA destroyed the great old bridge spanning the Adda at
Trezzo, 309.
CARTARO, PONTE, a mediæval bridge at Ascoli-Piceno, 201.
CASTRO GONZALO, THE OLD BRIDGE OF, blown up by Moore’s rearguard,
334-5.
CATHERINE, ST., the chapel on the Pont des Consuls at Montauban was
dedicated to her, 256.
CATTERICK BRIDGE had a chapel, 231;
the Contract Deed for the building of this bridge, 253.
CAVE-DWELLINGS, the earliest were stolen from cave-lions and
cave-bears, 111.
CAVES, with arched entrances, 150 _footnote_.
CELLS, COMMUNITIES OF, in the human body;
the beautiful harmony of their competitive life, how it differs
from the social rule in the civilizations bungled by mankind,
18, 19, 25.
CENTRES OR CENTRING, the curved scaffolding upon which arches are
built. The voussoirs rest on the centres while the ring is in
process of being constructed. When the centres are not rigid
enough, arches sink a good deal while the masons are at work
and after the scaffolding is carefully struck. In Perronet’s
bridge at Neuilly-sur-Seine, for example, the sinking
amounted to twenty-three inches, 338; thirteen inches while
the centre was in its place, and ten inches after the centre
was removed. On the other hand, when the centres of Waterloo
Bridge were taken down, no arch sank more than 1½ inches.
There is reason to believe that modern centres are more
complicated than were the mediæval. See page 264 and page
286.
CERCEAU, DU, ANDROUET, French architect and builder of the fortified
bridge at Châtellerault, 331-4;
see also the colour plate facing page 332.
CESTIUS, PONS, at Rome, 196-7.
CHÂLON-SUR-SAÔNE, the quaint citizenship of its mediæval bridge, 224.
CHAMAS, SAINT, in France, and its famous Roman bridge, 176-7.
CHAMBERS OR ROOMS built in bridges, Paris examples, 225;
a Persian example, 267-8.
CHAPEL OF ST. CATHERINE on the Pont des Consuls at Montauban, 256.
CHAPEL OF ST. NICHOLAS on the Pont St. Bénézet at Avignon, 237.
CHAPEL OF ST. THOMAS À BECKET on Old London Bridge, 216-17.
CHAPELS ON BRIDGES, 82, 208, 209, 216-17, 218-19, 225-39, 241-6, 256.
CHARACTER, THE DRAMA OF, among the progenitors of Man, 115-19.
CHARACTER OF A GREAT BRIDGE, its principal traits, 15-16, 256-7,
320-8.
CHARING CROSS, THE RAILWAY VIADUCT FROM, disgraces the Thames, 256.
CHARITY, a Builder of Bridges in the Middle Ages, 251-2.
CHARLEMAGNE, his friendly attitude to roads and bridges, 26, 86-7.
CHARLES THE FIFTH, Emperor, in 1521, armed his troops with the
musket, 333.
CHARLES THE SECOND, routed at Worcester, fled by Old Pershore Bridge
into the Bredon Hills, 355.
CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, BRIDGE AT, built by Perronet, 338 _footnote_.
CHÂTELLERAULT, PONT HENRI IV AT, built by Androuet du Cerceau,
perhaps the latest fortified bridge in Europe, 331-2;
see also the colour plate facing page 332.
CHATSWORTH, A FINE BRIDGE AT, is troubled by pretence in decoration,
322.
CHAUCER, and Old Bow Bridge, 98, 99.
CHEESE AND CHICKENS, eaten by mediæval workmen who allowed their
bridge at Abingdon to be built by charity, 252 _footnote_.
CHENONCEAUX, THE NOBLE CASTLE OF, erected on bridges, 300.
CHESTER, the Old Dee Bridge, 258 _footnote_, and 305 _footnote_.
CHINA, STAIRCASE BRIDGE IN, 248.
CHINESE BRIDGES, 126, 145, 210, 211, 247-9, 291, 310-16, 344-8.
CHIPIEZ, his fine restoration of the doorway into the Treasury of
Atreus, 158.
CHO-GAN, THE BRIDGE OF, in China, 313.
CHOLLERFORD, near Hexham, its ruins of a Roman bridge, 173.
CHURCH, MEDIÆVAL, protected bridges, 40, 51, 96, 207;
see also “Bridge Chapels and Oratories,” “Bridge Crosses and
Crucifixes,” and “Indulgences.”
CHURCH, MEDIÆVAL, what England owed to her, 233.
CIRCLES AND CURVES AND ANGLES, their varied symbolism, 153-5.
CISTERCIANS, they introduced ribbed vaulting into the English
churches, 94-5;
so why not into bridges also as a development therefrom? 96;
Their bridges at Fountains Abbey, 96.
CITIZENSHIP, ENGLISH, in the Middle Ages, was often slack and
dishonest, 49-51;
the citizenship of mediæval bridges, which were connected in a
self-evident manner with all the principal motive-powers of
social life, 208, 209, 210 _et seq._
CIVILIZATIONS, their rival ideals tested and proved on stricken
fields, vii;
the five phases of their evolution, 22-3;
their social rule has differed deplorably from Nature’s social
order in her communities of living competitive cells, 18, 19,
25.
CLAIN, RIVER, AND ITS BRIDGE, see the illustration facing page 56.
CLAMPS, IRON, said to have been used in the bridge at Babylon, 274;
in Roman bridges, 172-3;
Perronet used them sometimes, 283.
CLAPPER BRIDGES, DARTMOOR, 100-4;
rather similar bridges in Lancashire, 60-4;
in Spain at Fuentes de Oñoro, 104-5;
in ancient Egypt, 126, and Babylon, 127;
and in China, 126-7.
CLAPTRAP, the drum of controversy, 89;
British claptrap and its dangers, 33 _et seq._, 360.
CLASSIC AND GOTHIC, their rivalry, 336-7.
CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE, 346.
CLUNY, ABBEY OF, commissioned the Pontist Brothers to build the Pont
St. Esprit, 297.
COALBROOKDALE BRIDGE, the earliest European bridge of cast iron,
348-9.
COBHAM, SIR JOHN, in 1387, helped to build Rochester Bridge, 244.
COBLENTZ, the Moselle Bridge, dating from 1344, 260.
COCLES, HORATIUS, and the Pons Sublicius, 64, 355.
COFFERDAMS, 251, 253;
their structure described, 253 _footnote_.
COLECHURCH, PETER, priest and chaplain, the first architect of Old
London Bridge, 217, 280 _footnote_.
COLNE, near, a Roman bridge, 162.
COLOGNE, BRIDGE OF BOATS AT, 1;
an absurd railway bridge there, 323.
COMYN, JOHN, his fight on the Ouse Bridge at York, 241.
CONSERVATISM, when carried to excess, turns most people into other
people, see section iii, Chapter I, 53-84.
CONSTANTINE, Algeria, Pont Sidi Rached at, 53.
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT, the Pons Sublicius was still extant in his
time, 140.
CONSTANTINO, THE ROMAN BRIDGE OF, in Spain, 285 _footnote_, 335.
CONSTANTINOPLE, a bridge there in the fourth century A.D. was named
after the Pons Sublicius, 140.
CONSULS, PONT DES, AT MONTAUBAN, 254-7;
and the illustration facing page 256.
CONTROVERSIES, section iv, Chapter I, 85-106.
CONVENTIONS among men are often inferior to the instincts of animals,
76;
Acts of Parliament might force them to progress, 76-7;
see also section iii, Chapter I, 53-84.
CONWAY CASTLE, and its bad Suspension Bridge, 323.
COOKE, JOHN, in 1379, bequeathed twenty marks to the fortified bridge
at Warkworth, 10.
CÓRDOVA, its famous bridge, 188, and the illustration.
CORSICA, a very curious military bridge, 238.
COURTRAI, THE PONT DE BROEL AT, a fortified bridge, 290, and
_footnote_.
COVERED BRIDGES, 195, 211, 291-2, 308, 358.
COX, THE REV. DR., 232.
CRAIGELLACHIE, TELFORD’S BRIDGE AT, 349.
CRAWFORD, FRANCIS M., 64.
CREEPING PLANTS used in the Making of Primitive Bridges, 123.
CREEPING PROGRESS OF MANKIND, 110;
see also section iii, Chapter I, 53-84.
CRISS-CROSS PIERS, 70, 71, 72, 73, 135.
CRITICISM OF ART, ENGLISH, its pretty defects, 167-8.
CROC, THE ROOK, King of the Alemans, may have regarded the Pont du
Gard as a work of the devil, 170.
CROCKETT, S. R., his book on Spain and his remarks on bridges, 180-1.
CROFTON, H. T., a student of bridges, vi, also _footnote_.
CROMFORD BRIDGE had a chapel, 231.
CROMLECHS, 100;
the clapper bridges over Dartmoor rivers are flat cromlechs built
over water, 104;
see also “Iberians.”
CROSSES AND CRUCIFIXES ON BRIDGES, 96, 230, 246-7.
CROSSING, WILLIAM, his remarks on Dartmoor bridges, 102-3.
CROWLAND BRIDGE, 302-5.
CRUSADES, their presumed effect on bridge-building, 88 _et seq._
CURZON, LORD, his excellent remarks on Persian bridges, 214, 268-70.
CUSTOM sends reason to sleep, 16, 39, 40;
see also section iii, Chapter I, 53-84.
CUTWATERS, 262, 316. The French words for cutwaters, _avant-bec_
and _arrière-bec_, would be very useful to us if we translated
them as “forebeak” and “aftbeak.” British pontists need a good
many technical terms.
CYCLOID ARCHES, in Ammanati’s great bridge over the Arno, 316.
CYCLOPEAN STYLE, so called, in the Porta dell’ Arco at Arpino, 157.
DALQUIÉ, his translation of Kircher’s book on China, 314, 345
_footnote_.
DAM, ARCADED, Old London Bridge was an, 220.
DANBY, JOHN, in 1444, left six and eightpence to Warleby Bridge, 10.
DARBY, ABRAHAM, in 1779, bridged the Severn with an arch of
cast-iron, the earliest in Europe, 348-9.
DARTEIN, F. DE, French architect and engineer, his books on bridges,
319, 320.
DARTMOOR, and its Clapper Bridges, 60, 100-4.
DARWIN, references to his teaching, 32, 69, 70, 106, 109, 111-12,
118.
DATES IN HISTORY, the Bronze Age, 21;
Iron Age, 21;
Palæolithic Art, 62;
the inestimable value of dates to students, 119;
approximate date of the Pliocene tools unearthed on the East
Anglian coast, 120;
approximate date for the Neolithic Period, 136;
age of the Pont du Gard, 174;
of the bridge at Saint-Chamas, 177;
dates of some Lancashire bridges, 250 _footnote_.
DEATH, NATURE’S ATTITUDE TO, 3, 4, 36, 37.
DECORATION OF BRIDGES, 193-4, 195-6, 201, 215, 227, 286, 304, 305,
311, 312, 316, 318-28.
DEE BRIDGE, Chester, the Jolly Miller’s Bridge, 258 _footnote_, 305
_footnote_.
DEFENCE, NATIONAL, in its relation to Bridges, vii, 14-16, 331-61;
see also “War-Bridges.”
DEFENCELESS BRIDGES, their Evolution, 331-61;
their frequent make-believe of defence shown in trumpery imitations
of mediæval towers and machicolations, 275, 323, 349.
DEGRAND, E., his book “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” 88;
on the bridge at Espalion, 88-9;
on Albi Bridge, 89, 90, 91;
refers to primitive arches in Mexico, 157 _footnote_;
on the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, 159 _footnote_;
other references to his views, 199 _footnote_, 212 _footnote_;
and on Chinese bridges, 314-15.
DERBY, a chapelled bridge is extant there, 258.
DERWENT PACKHORSE BRIDGE, Derbyshire, on its parapet, a few years
ago, the stump of a mediæval cross remained, 230-1.
DESCENT OF MAN, in its relation to nature-made bridges, 3, 4, and
Chapter II.
DESECRATION OF OLD BRIDGES, 225 _et seq._, 230-6;
see also “Highway Boards.”
DEVIL’S BRIDGES, 66, 67, 70, 170, 184, 296. Many other bridges
have been attributed to the devil. In plate 58 of the treatise
by Hann and Hosking, you will find the Devil’s Bridge over the
Serchio near Lucca; there is also a very interesting account of
it, p. cxxxv. It is a gabled bridge with one big arch and four
smaller ones. The span of the big arch is 120 feet, and its
height above low-water level is more than 60 feet. The roadway
is very narrow, being only 9 feet wide, and it turns abruptly at
the wings, as if to close the entrances against wheeled traffic.
The quoins of the smaller arches and all the voussoirs of the
wide arch are of dressed stone. Every other part of the bridge
is rubble masonry bound together with most excellent mortar. The
courses of stone in the wide arch vary from 8 inches to 21
inches deep, but only a few have the latter depth. Yet this
slight bridge, which is nothing more than a broad arcaded wall,
has withstood many centuries of floods. On October 2nd, 1836,
for example, a head of water more than 30 feet deep swept
roaring through the five round arches and against the four piers
at the rate of 8 miles an hour; yet no harm was done. If this
bridge was built about the year 1000 A.D., as Hann and Hosking
say, it is somewhat older than the controversial date of Albi
Bridge.
DEVORGILLA’S BRIDGE at Dumfries, 94.
DIABLE, PONT DU, St. Gotthard Pass, 67.
DIARBEKR, on the Tigris, a Roman bridge at, 202.
DION CASSIUS, on Trajan’s bridge over the Danube, built before A.D.
106 by Apollodorus of Damascus, 129, 130.
DISMANTLING OLD LONDON BRIDGE, 219, 220.
DIVERTING THE THAMES from his bed when the old bridge was built, 253,
254.
DOGS, offered as sacrifices to the evil spirits of rivers, 69.
DON ANTONIO DE ULLOA (1716-95), on the tree-bridges of South
America, 135;
on a Peruvian suspension bridge called the Tarabita, 146;
on Capac Yupanqui’s bridge of rushes, 146-7;
on large bujuco bridges, 147.
DONCASTER BRIDGE had a chapel on it, 231.
DOUBLE AND TRIPLE RINGS OF VOUSSOIRS, 305 _footnote_.
DRAGON, its use in the decorative art of Chinese bridges, 126.
DRAWBRIDGE, one arch of mediæval bridges was often a drawbridge, 260.
DROITWICH, and its very curious chapelled bridge, now destroyed, 231.
DRYOPITHECUS, 113-14.
DUNSTAN, SAINT, Archbishop of Canterbury, _b._ 924--_d._ 988, from
his time the Mediæval Church regarded the building and upkeep
of bridges as a work of pious charity, 207.
DURDLE DOOR, on the coast at Lulworth, a natural archway, 151.
DURHAM BRIDGES, 96, 97, 205, 231.
DUTCH, THE, of the seventeenth century wished to bury a living child
under the foundations of a dam, 69.
EADS, CAPTAIN JAMES B., engineer of the Illinois and St. Louis
Bridge, 352-3.
EAGLE-BEAKED TOOLS of the Pliocene Period, 119-22.
EAMONT BRIDGE, 94, 305 _footnote_.
EARLIEST LONDON BRIDGE, a timber structure destroyed by fire in 1136,
220, and _footnote_.
EARTHQUAKE AT ASCOLI in 1878, 201.
EARTHQUAKES AND VOLCANOES, the first armourers of the Stone Age, 110;
they made some slab-bridges, 123-4;
earthquakes in their relation to natural arches, 152, and to
bridges of stepping-stones, 114.
ECCLESIASTICAL WORKMANSHIP in a few English bridges, 303, 305;
see also “Abbot’s Bridge, Bury St. Edmunds.”
EDWARD I came to the relief of Old London Bridge, 50.
EGOTISM, or the Creed of Self, a motive-power behind the strife that
bridges and roads circulate, 19 _et seq._, 22-6, 39-52.
EGYPTIAN BRIDGES, 126, 155, 166.
ELEPHANTS, in Decorative Sculpture, on Chinese bridges, 312
_footnote_.
ELIZABETH, QUEEN, 332.
ELLIPTICAL ARCHES, in Babylonian work, 275 _footnote_;
in ancient Mexico, 157 _footnote_;
in St. Bénézet’s great bridge, 81;
in the vault of Chosroes’ great hall at Selucia-Ctesiphon, 275,
and to some extent in the Pons Fabricius at Rome, 196.
We know not whether Bénézet was acquainted with the Pons
Fabricius, or with the great hall at Selucia-Ctesiphon, two
forerunners of his elliptical arch. At Florence, in every arch
of the Trinità, Ammanati achieved a cycloid rather than an
ellipse, 316.
EMIGRATION, its influence on old types of society, 275.
EMY, COLONEL, a writer on timber bridges, 140, 143 _footnote_.
ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, on the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, 80;
on Framwellgate Bridge at Durham, 96-7;
on the Porta dell’ Arco at Arpino, 156;
on the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, 158;
on Roman aqueducts and bridges, 167;
on the Pul-i-Kaisar at Shushter, 202-4;
on the Ouse Bridge at York, 243 _footnote_;
on New London Bridge, 257;
on the Tay Bridge Disaster, 339, 341.
ENGINEERS, MODERN, their scorn for national defence, 15, 77-8, 79 _et
seq._, 144 _footnote_, 221, 258, 295, 320, 323, 325, 339, 340,
346, 349.
ENGLISH BRIDGES, their inferiority, 9, 44;
contrasted with French bridges, 281-2, 294-5;
desecration of old English bridges, 225 _et seq._, 230-6.
ERASMUS, 52, 236.
ERNULPH, BISHOP, and Rochester Bridge, 243.
ESPAGNE, PONT D’, famous modern bridge, beyond Cauterets, 278.
ESPALION, THE BRIDGE AT, the controversy concerning it, 84, 86, 87,
88, 92, 93;
see also the colour plate facing page 88.
ETRUSCAN ROUND ARCHES, 160-1.
EUDES, COUNT OF CHARTRES, built an early communal bridge, 240.
“EUPHUES AND HIS ENGLAND,” 220, 221.
EVANS, SIR JOHN, on the date of the Bronze Period, 21.
EVE OF EVOLUTION, 117 _et seq._
EVOLUTION, in its relation to the strife that bridges and roads
circulate, 1, 32, 39;
see also Chapter II.
EVOLUTION OF DEFENCELESS BRIDGES, see Chapter V.
EXCEPTIONAL BRIDGES, 302, 305-6, 307, 308-10, 316.
EXTRA-DOSSED ARCHES, Roman and Mediæval, 282-3.
FABRICIUS, PONS, at Rome, 195, 196.
FACT DIFFERS FROM TRUTH, 10, 11.
FEATS OF ENGINEERING, 323, 327, 341, 356.
FERNWORTHY BRIDGE, Dartmoor, 60.
FINANCE, as a phase of permanent war, 35, 36, 361.
“FINDS” IN RESEARCH, 6.
FIRE, its discovery, 58.
FIREARMS, 332-3.
FIRES ON OLD LONDON BRIDGE, 218-19.
FLAMBARD, BISHOP, before the year 1128, is said to have built
Framwellgate Bridge at Durham, using ribbed arches. If so, then
the ribbed arches in this bridge are about as old as those of
the Pont de Vernay at Airvault: see the illustration facing
page 96.
FLAMINIAN WAY and the Pons Milvius, 197, and the bridge at Narni, 23.
FLAVIEN, PONT, a Roman bridge with two triumphal arches at
Saint-Chamas, 176-7.
FLEMISH TOWNS and their defensive bridges, 289-91.
FLINT TOOLS AND WEAPONS prove the terrible slowness of human
progress, 57;
the earliest bridges of handicraft considered in their relation to
the earliest hand-made tools and weapons, 56-7, 109, 110, 119,
120, 121, 122.
FLODDEN FIELD and Twizel Bridge, 94, 355.
FLOOD-WATER BAYS cut through the piers of bridges, 284, as in the
great military Roman bridge at Mérida, 181-2;
the Pons Fabricius another Roman example, 196;
later specimens, the Three-arched Bridge at Venice, colour plate
facing page 224, the Pont des Consuls at Montauban, colour
plate facing page 256, and the Pont St. Esprit over the Rhône,
293.
FLORENCE, the Ponte Vecchio, 211, 222;
the Ponte della Trinità, Ammanati’s masterpiece, 316.
FO-CHEU, PONT DE, a Chinese bridge described by Gauthey, 314-15.
FOOTPATHS, the earliest were made by quadrupeds, 3;
human footpaths, their number, and what it has cost to make them,
17;
they belong not to the illusion called peace but to the reality
named strife, 17.
FOOTWAYS OVER MEDIÆVAL BRIDGES, usually they were narrow, very often
they were steep, and sometimes, as in the Pont St. Esprit and
the Pont St. Bénézet, they formed an elbow with the angle
pointing up-stream. The Coa Bridge in Portugal, near Almeida,
the scene of Crawfurd’s action in the Peninsular War, is also
angular on plan; but its elbow points down-stream, and its line
seems to have been dictated by the position of the rocks on
which the piers are built. For other bridges of this angular
sort see page 238.
Narrow footways over bridges suggested the safety recesses for
foot-passengers, which modern engineers have copied in many of
their wide bridges, 258.
Steep footways are dealt with under “Gabled Bridges,” and in
Appendices I and II.
FOOTWAYS OVER ROMAN BRIDGES, 82, 183, 199, 367-8.
FORDS, 207-8, 250-1.
FORESTS, in their relation to Roman bridges, 139, to English bridges,
207, 208.
FORTH BRIDGE, 336, 344, 350-1.
Add to the text the fact that in one of our naval manœuvres the
Forth Bridge was “destroyed” by the small attacking fleet.
FORTIFIED TOWERS AND GATEWAYS ON BRIDGES, Roman, at Mérida, 182;
at Alcantarilla, 367;
at Saint-Chamas, 176-7;
mediæval, 254-5, 261, 276-301;
See also the Lists of Illustrations;
Nearly all the old attributes of defensive bridge-building
have been copied by modern engineers in their defenceless
bridges--an absurd affectation of learned research introduced
by Telford in his cast-iron bridge at Craigellachie, 349;
Even dummy machicolations have been used on make-believe towers
guarding industrial bridges from the fresh air, 275;
Every civilized country has bridges of this foolish sort. Surely
medals ought to be granted to fools, and their public display
ought to be enforced by law; then engineers and others would
become ashamed of their bad public work.
FOUNDING PIERS, 99, 197, 251-2, 341-2;
See also “Cofferdams,” 253 _footnote_.
FOUNTAINS ABBEY, YORKSHIRE, BRIDGES AT, 96, 305.
FRAMWELLGATE BRIDGE, Durham, 96-7.
FRANCE, her administration of roads and bridges, 43, 44, 356;
rich in remains of Roman bridges and aqueducts, 168-75, 176-81;
her bridges are superior to the British examples, 9, 256-8, 294-5.
FRANCIS STONE, his book of “Norfolk Bridges,” 135.
FRASER, G. M., on Scotch bridges, 94.
FREAKISH BRIDGES, over the Tavignano in Corsica, 238;
at Laroque, 300;
at Bâle, 306.
FRÉJUS, REMAINS OF A ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT, 176.
FRENCH AND ENGLISH BRIDGES contrasted, 256, 281, 294-5.
FRENCH ANGULAR BRIDGES, 237-8, 297.
FRENCH GENIUS, often more masculine than the English genius, 294-5.
FRENCH MILL BRIDGES, 223-4;
see also the colour plate facing page 352.
FRÈRES PONTIFES, or Pontist Brothers, 296, and _footnote_.
St. Bénézet was one of the leaders of this order. It is worth
noting that some lay brotherhoods in England, animated by the
religious spirit, repaired roads and bridges, like the Gild of
the Holy Cross in Birmingham, which was founded under Richard
the Second. There were similar gilds at Rochester and Bristol
and Ludlow, etc.
For information on “English Gilds,” see Toulmin Smith.
FROGGALL BRIDGE, its angular recesses for the safety of
foot-passengers, 258 _footnote_.
FUENTES DE OÑORO, its slab-bridges akin to our Dartmoor “Clappers,”
104-5.
GABLED BRIDGES, 27, 28, and _footnote_;
Chinese, 248, 312, 365-6.
GABRIEL, a French engineer, tried to revive the Roman and mediæval
use of abutment piers, 339 _footnote_.
GADDI, TADDEO, the reputed designer of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence,
222.
GALLERIES, COVERED, in Persian Bridges, 214, 215, 270.
GAOL, the chapel on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon became a gaol, 232;
also the one on Bedford Bridge, 231;
a gaol stood at the east side of the Ouse Bridge at York, 243,
and _footnote_.
GARD, PONT DU, the famous Roman aqueduct, 83, 167-75, 321.
GARDENS, SOME, on Old London Bridge, 219.
GARIBALDI, when he marched to Rome the Ponte Salaro was blown up, 192.
GARSTANG BRIDGE, a steep Lancashire bridge built in 1490, 250
_footnote_.
GATEHOUSE, on the defensive bridge at Sospel, 276;
on the thirteenth-century bridge at Narni, 277.
GATEWAYS, DEFENSIVE, 208, 315.
GATEWAY TOWERS, 97, 272, 278, 280, 286, 289, 323;
see also the Lists of Illustrations.
GAULISH BRIDGES, 70, 71.
GAUTHEY, EMILAND, historian of bridges, 126-7, 191, 197, 199, 314,
322.
GEBEL BARKEL, TWO PYRAMIDS AT, have arched porticoes built with
voussoirs, 160.
GENIUS, the motive-power of progress, 56, 59;
her work usually weakened by the opposition of custom and
convention, 59;
she is a single creative agent with a double sex, 58;
ordinary men have been of but little worth until genius has taken
control of them, 239;
her warfare against the stupidity of mankind, 110 _et seq._;
see also “Mother-Ideas.”
GENIUS, THE ENGLISH, is often inferior to the French genius in
architecture, 294-5.
GENIUS, THE ROMAN, 167-204.
GERMANY, some of her old bridges, 259, 260;
her creed of aggressive war, 33 _footnote_, 350, 359, 360, 361.
GERONA, FAMOUS GABLED BRIDGE AT, 28, 29.
GHENT, THE RABOT AT, a fortified bridge and lock, 289, 290, 291.
GIGNAC, PONT DE, famous bridge of the 18th century, 310.
GIPSY’S CARAVAN, how it stuck fast under the low tower at the
entrance of Warkworth Bridge, 261, 262.
GIRDERS, there are three types or classes of bridge: the girder,
the arched, and the suspended. Girders may be of various
materials; wrought iron, cast iron, and wood are chiefly used.
Professor Fleeming Jenkin describes with apt brevity the
essential difference between the three classes of bridge. “In
all forms of the suspension bridge the supporting structure is
_extended_ by the stress due to the load; in all forms of the
arch the supporting structure (i.e. the ring of voussoirs) is
_compressed_ by the stress due to the load; and in all forms of
the beam or girder the material is partly extended and partly
compressed by the flexure which it undergoes as it bends under
the load. Thus when a beam of wood carrying a load bends, the
upper side of the beam is thereby shortened and the fibres
compressed, while the lower side of the beam is lengthened and
the fibres extended.” So, too, in a girder of metal. In some
bridges, as in the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, the girder
principle is united to bowstring arches of metal, but a true
girder is less expensive and lighter, 80.
GIZEH, AT, in the Great Pyramid of Menkaura, there is a very early
pointed arch, 155-6.
GLACIERS, in their relation to rock-basins and rock-bridges, 152.
GLANVILLE, GILBERT DE, Bishop of Rochester, 1185-1215, built a small
chapel at the Strood end of Rochester Bridge, 245.
GLASTONBURY, its lake-village a good example of prehistoric
bridge-building, 21, 137 _et seq._
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE, her genius described, 152-3.
GRANDISON, Bishop of Exeter, granted indulgences to those who helped
in the building of Bideford Bridge, Devon, 305 _footnote_;
See also “Indulgences.”
GRATIANUS, PONS, another name for the Pons Cestius, 196.
GRAY, WALTER DE, Archbishop of York, between 1215 and 1256, rebuilt
the Ouse Bridge, preserving some portions of the Norman Chapel,
242.
HADRIAN, destroyed Trajan’s Bridge over the Danube, 129;
and built the Pons Ælius at Rome, 194.
HALL, LADY JANE, in 1566, contributed a hundred pounds to repair the
Ouse Bridge at York, 242.
HAMBURG MERCHANTS, THE YORK SOCIETY OF, after the Reformation, used
the chapel on the Ouse Bridge as an exchange, 242.
HAND-GUNS, 333.
HANDICRAFT, the first public school, 118;
has never had a standard of uniform merit, 121;
its indebtedness to Nature’s models, 3, 4, 6, and Chapter II.
HAND-MADE WEAPONS preceded hand-made bridges, probably, 110.
HAROLD’S BRIDGE at Waltham Abbey, 162.
HAUNCHES OF A BRIDGE, 265 _footnote_.
HENRI IV, PONT, at Châtellerault, 331-2;
see also the illustration facing page 332.
HENRY III, of England, and his wife, rob Old London Bridge of her
revenues, 49-51.
HENRY V, of England, in the fourth year of his reign Abingdon Bridge
was built, 251.
HENRY VIII, during and after his reign bridge chapels were
desecrated, 225-6, 230-3.
HERALDS OF MAN, 113 _et seq._
HERODOTUS, on the canal begun by Necho II, 17 _footnote_;
mentions the bridge at Babylon over the Euphrates, 274.
HEXHAM, SMEATON’S BRIDGE AT, 339.
HIGH BRIDGE, Lincoln, 221-2.
HIGHERFORD BRIDGE, near Colne, attributed to the Romans, 305
_footnote_.
HIGH LEVEL BRIDGE at Newcastle, a “scientific” adventure with an
amusing history, 79-80.
HIGHWAY BOARDS, their inefficiency in England, 43, 230.
HINDRANCES TO BRIDGE-BUILDING, 250-1, 254-5, 264.
HOEN-HO, THE RIVER, and the bridge at Pulisangan, 310-13.
HOOGESLUIS, THE, at Amsterdam, a strumpet of a bridge, 323.
HORACE mentions the Pons Fabricius as attractive to suicides, 195-6.
HOSKING, writer on bridges, 143 _footnote_, 309, 317, 325-6.
HOUSED BRIDGES, 208, 213-15, 216-24, 225.
HOUTUM-SCHINDLER, SIR A., on the Pul-i-Kaisar at Shushter in Persia,
202-4.
HOWELL’S “LONDINOPOLIS,” 216-17.
HUMAN BEINGS offered as sacrifices to rivers, 64, 65 _et seq._
HUMAN GUNPOWDER, 23, 352.
HUMAN INITIATIVE, nothing else in Nature is less uncommon, 123.
HUMBOLDT used the pendulous bridges in Peru, 148.
IBERIANS, their stonecraft, 100, 102, 104;
their cult of ancestors, 104;
the world-wide influence of their genius, 125 _et seq._
ICONONZO, ROCK-BRIDGES OF, 151.
IGUANODON, asleep on a Nature-made bridge, 3.
ILLINOIS AND ST. LOUIS BRIDGE, 352-3.
IMITATION among men in societies, 55;
stimulated by Nature-made bridges, 55;
its dead routine, 110;
see Chapter II.
INDULGENCES granted by the mediæval Church to aid the upkeep of roads
and bridges, 40, 305 _footnote_.
INDUSTRIAL BRIDGES, 46.
INDUSTRIALISM, TO-DAY’S, is a very complex phase of war, 35, 36, 46,
48, 333, 352.
INDUSTRIAL WARFARE, 33, 34, 35, 36, 46, 48, 333, 352.
INFERIORITY OF OLD ENGLISH BRIDGES, 9, 44, 256-8, 281, 294-5.
INIGO JONES, his bridge at Llanrwst, 282, and _footnote_.
INVASIONS OF ENGLAND, 20;
the influence of invasions in the rise and fall of nations, 22.
IREMONGER, RICHARD FANNANDE, writer of the Ballad of Abingdon Bridge,
251.
IRISH BRIDGES, 45.
IRON AGE, its approximate date in England, 21.
IRON BARS in Chinese bridges, 314.
IRON BRIDGES, Chinese, 344-5;
European, 144 footnote, 348 _et seq._;
American, 352 _et seq._
Iron Cramps used in bridges, Roman, 172-3;
Babylonian, 274-5;
modern, 283.
Hosking has many good remarks on the subject of cramps and
joggles. He says (p. 208): “It is very desirable that all the
archstones of a large and flat arch should be dowel-joggled in
the beds; but as the usual dowel-joggle cannot be introduced
with the key-course, plugs of proportionate size must be used
instead, and the stones may, besides, be cramped together. In
arches of small size, or in large ones of quick sweep, joggling
may not be so desirable as in those of large size and flat
sweep; though it is to be understood that in any case both
joggles and cramps should be considered as surplusage, and as
precautions merely, to counteract the effect of any
imperfections in the work from want of fulness in any of the
stones in an arch, or otherwise. In building London Bridge iron
bars were let into the back ends or tails of the archstones, and
run with lead as cramps or transverse ties in several courses,
and they do not appear to have produced any injurious effect,
though it may be questioned how far they are of any use. They
ought not to be of any use.” Viollet-le-Duc went further than
this; he regarded iron cramps in a stone bridge as likely to be
injurious.
ISEMBERT, the French bridge-builder who undertook the finishing of
London Bridge after the death of Peter Colechurch, 218.
ISFAHAN, PERSIA, THE BRIDGES OF, 44, 187, 212, 213, 214, 215, 268-70.
“ITHE,” suggested pronoun for any bridge which is not masculine
enough to be called “he,” nor neutral enough to be described as
“it,” 294.
“ITSHE,” suggested pronoun for any bridge which is not feminine
enough to be called “she,” nor neutral enough to be described
as “it.” Criticism of art would be aided greatly by these
pronouns. For instance, our poets of to-day give us a great
deal of inspiration that belongs to the “itshe” class, 294.
JACKSON, O. M., THE REV., on Chinese bridges, 126-7, 145, 248, 315,
347.
JANICULINE BRIDGE, Rome, 197.
JEBB’S “By Desert Ways to Baghdad,” 202.
JENKIN, PROFESSOR FLEEMING, on the elliptical arches in the Bridge of
Avignon, 81;
on Trajan’s bridge over the Danube, 130;
on American timber bridges, 143;
on the defects of metal suspension bridges, 144 _footnote_;
on Colechurch and Bénézet, 217;
on cofferdams, 253 _footnote_;
on the insufficient width of New London Bridge, 257;
on the covered bridge at Pavia, 308;
on Telford’s bridge at Craigellachie, 349.
JHELUM, RIVER, in Kashmír, and its primitive bridges, 71, 72, 73.
JOLLY MILLER’S BRIDGE over the Dee, 305 _footnote_.
JONES, INIGO, his bridge at Llanrwst, 282, and _footnote_.
JUSSERAND, J. J., his book on “English Wayfaring Life in the Middle
Ages,” 40, 49, 50, 98, 99, 100.
KAPELLBRUCKE, Lucerne, 292.
KÂREDJ BRIDGE, Persia, 265-6.
KASHMÍR BRIDGES, 71, 72, 73, 160, 161.
KERSHAW, S. WAYLAND, the late, on bridge chapels, 243 _et seq._
KETTLETHORPE PARK, 226.
KHAJU, THE PUL-I-, at Isfahan, 213, 214, 215, 216.
KIEN-NING-FU, in the province of Fo-Kien, China, its three handsome
bridges mentioned by Marco Polo, 128.
KILBURNE, RICHARD, and his “Survey of Kent,” 244.
KINGSLEY, CHARLES, his visit to the Pont du Gard, 170-2.
KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS, German traveller and philosopher, _b._
1602--_d._ 1680, his book on China, translated into French by
Dalquié, 314, 345, and _footnote_.
KIRKBY LONSDALE BRIDGE, attributed to the Devil, 93.
KNOLLES, SIR R., in 1387, helped to build Rochester Bridge, 244.
KREUZNACH, on the Nahe, Prussia, its old bridge with quaint houses,
208, and the illustration facing p. 208.
KURDISTAN, primitive bridges, 73, 74, 75, 76, 272.
LABELYE’S WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, see “Westminster Bridge.”
LACER, CAIUS JULIUS, Roman architect, and builder of Trajan’s
Bridge over the Tagus at Alcántara, 121, 184, 190, 344. He was
buried on the left bank quite close to his bridge, 184, a
romantic circumstance, like the burial of Bénézet and Colechurch
in their bridge chapels.
LAELLENKOENIG, a grotesque head that used to decorate the tower on
Bâle Bridge, 306, 307.
LAKE DWELLINGS AND VILLAGES, the highest form of prehistoric
bridge-building, 21;
how evolved from Nature’s object-lessons, 111;
primitive shop-bridges probably descended from them, as in Kashmír,
72, 73;
the Glastonbury Lake Village, 136 _et seq._
LAMBÈSE, in Algeria, famous aqueduct, 176.
LANCASHIRE BRIDGES, primitive, 55, 60, 61;
Roman or of Roman origin, 162-3, 263;
mediæval, 250 _footnote_.
LANCASTER BRIDGE, built in the reign of King John, 250 _footnote_.
LANDLORDS, MEDIÆVAL, in their relation to the _trinoda necessitas_,
40 _et seq._
LANKESTER, SIR RAY, on the approximate date of Palæolithic art, 62;
on the eagle-beaked flint tools unearthed from Pliocene deposits
on the East Anglian Coast, 120 _et seq._;
on the approximate date of the Neolithic Period, 136.
LAROQUE, THE BRIDGES OF, near Cahors, 300;
see also the colour plate facing page 300.
“LATE CELTI” ART was practised in the Glastonbury Lake Village as in
the Hunsbury Camp, near Northampton, 137.
LAVA, from volcanoes, has made slab-bridges, 124.
LAVAUR, PONT DE, famous French bridge of the eighteenth century, 310.
LAW, MEDIÆVAL, and its attitude to roads and bridges, 40 _et seq._
LAW, MODERN, in Great Britain law prescribes minimum dimensions for
the over and under bridges of railways; but it takes no notice
at all of the military considerations which can never be wisely
disconnected from the circulation of traffic along roads and
over bridges. An _over bridge_ is one in which a road goes over
a railway; an _under bridge_ is one in which a road goes under a
railway. Both are exceedingly vulnerable, yet the law centres
all its attention on details that concern their size, not on
details that concern their protection from violence. _Over
Bridges._--Width: turnpike road, 35 feet; other public carriage
road, 25 feet; private road, 12 feet. Span over two lines
(narrow gauge), generally about 26 feet; head room, 14 feet 6
inches above outer rail. _Under Bridges._--Spans: turnpike road,
35 feet; other public road, 25 feet; private road, 12 feet. Head
room: turnpike road, 12 feet at springing of arch, and 16 feet
throughout a breadth of 12 feet in the middle; for public road,
12 feet, 15 feet, and 10 feet in the same places; private road,
14 feet for 9 feet in the middle; for exceptions the Acts must
be studied.
LAW OF BATTLE, THE UNIVERSAL, vii, 3, 4, 14-52. See “Battle, Law
of.”
LAWS should get rid of stereotyped customs and conventions in order
to enforce progress on dilatory mankind, 76, 77.
LEEDS BRIDGE had a chapel, 231.
LEGENDS ON DEVIL’S BRIDGES, 65-70.
LIBOURNE, PONT DE, on the Dordogne, its cost, 356.
LIFE everywhere has fed on lives, 3, 4, 37, 38;
how lives are sacrificed in the enterprises of “peace,” so-called,
vii, 17, 34 _footnote_.
LIMOUSIN, FRENCH BRIDGES OF THE, their cutwaters, 262.
LINCOLN, HIGH BRIDGE AT, an old housed bridge restored thirteen years
ago, 221-2.
LINCOLN, NEW PORT AT, a Roman arch, 162.
LINTEL-STONE BRIDGES OF LANCASHIRE, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64.
LION GATE AT MYCENAE, belonging to the Heroic Age, 157, 158.
LIONS, DECORATIVE, at Mycenae, 158;
on a Roman bridge, 177;
on Chinese bridges, 127, 311, 313, 315.
LISTER, LORD, his genius came so very late in the history of man that
it mocked all the dead generations of perhaps a million years,
31.
LITERARY PROJECTS, their division into two classes, v.
“LIU SOH,” a Chinese suspension bridge, 145.
LLANGOLLEN BRIDGE, 258 _footnote_, and 305 _footnote_.
LLANRWST, INIGO JONES’S BRIDGE AT, 282, and _footnote_.
LOCKYER, SIR NORMAN, on the date of Stonehenge, 126.
LONDON BRIDGE, OLD, robbed of her revenues by Henry III and his “dear
wife,” 49-51;
her history, 216-21;
often ravaged by fire, 218-19;
size of the arches and piers, 220-1;
she was an arcaded dam to deepen the water for shipping on the
eastern side, 220;
her chapel, 216-17;
diverting the course of the Thames while she was being built, 253-4;
her drawbridge, 260-1;
her gradual destruction, 219-20.
LONDON BRIDGE, NEW, begun on March 15th, 1824, 219-20;
her scale is too small to be in accord with a tremendous city and a
vast old river, 256-7;
the span of her finest arch, 309;
much money wasted in hammer-dressing the masonry, 325-6;
her length and her total cost, 357.
“LONDINOPOLIS,” HOWELL’S, 216.
LONDON’S ATTITUDE TO BRIDGES, past and present, 49-51, 256, 325, 326,
327.
LOSTWITHIEL BRIDGE, 305 _footnote_.
LOYANG BRIDGE, China, 126-7.
LUDGATE HILL, London, its detestable railway bridge, 326.
LUDLOW BRIDGE had a chapel, 231.
LUYNES, REMAINS OF A ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT, 176.
LYDSTEP ARCH on the coast of Pembroke, a Nature-made archway that
resembles a bridge, 150 _footnote_.
LYON, ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT, 176, 213;
at Lyon, in 1755, an attempt was made to build an iron bridge, but
it failed, 348.
MACHICOLATIONS, openings between the corbels that support a
projecting parapet, or in the floor of a gallery or the roof of
a portal, for shooting or dropping missiles and boiling liquids
upon assailants attacking the base of the walls. They were used
in the defence of old bastille bridges, and silly modern
engineers have copied them as dummy ornaments with which to
decorate trumpery defenceless gateways and towers, 275, 323.
MACHINE-WORSHIP, or the worship of machines, 78, 79, 341.
MAGALHANES, P., on the Chinese bridge of Pulisangan, 311 _footnote_.
MARCIAN AQUEDUCT, 189, and _footnote_.
MARCO POLO, on Chinese bridges in the thirteenth century, 128, 210,
310, 313.
MARNUN, PUL-I, at Isfahan, 212.
MARTINEAU, JAMES, on the law of battle, 36.
MARTORELL BRIDGE in Spain, 27 _footnote_.
MASONS’ MARKS, Roman, 171.
MATHEMATICIANS, how they interfered in bridge-building of the 18th
century, 337.
MATHILDA, QUEEN, twelfth century, builds and endows Bow Bridge, 98.
MEAUX, THE MILLER’S BRIDGE AT, 209, 223.
MEDIÆVAL CHURCH, she protected bridges, 40, 51, 96, 207;
see also “Bridge Chapels.”
MEN OF TRADE in their relation to bridges, 77, 78 _et seq._, 326
_et seq._, 349 _et seq._, 357-8.
MEN, ORDINARY, are the mimics and mechanics of genius, 58.
MENAI BRIDGE, 344.
MÉNARD, M., historian of Nîmes, 174.
MENKAURA, PYRAMID OF, at Gizeh, has a pointed arch, 156.
MÉRIDA, in Spain, her Roman aqueducts and bridges, 181, 182, 200, 285
_footnote_.
MEROE, IN A PYRAMID AT, there is a semicircular arch composed of
voussoirs, 160.
METAL BRIDGES, Chinese, 344-5;
European, 144 _footnote_, 348 _et seq._;
American, 352 _et seq._
METHODS, NEW, IN MILITARY WAR, their effects on bridge-building, vii,
viii, 15, 358, 359.
MICHELANGELO, wrongly reputed to be the author of the Rialto, 211.
MIDDLE AGES, 26, 49, 50, 83;
see also “Bridge Chapels,” “War-Bridges,” “Mediæval Church,” and
the Gothic bridges drawn by Frank Brangwyn.
MILITARY BRIDGES, see “War-Bridges.”
MILITARY FORETHOUGHT, the need of it in bridges, vii, viii, 15,
238-9, 244, 259, 260, 261, 272, 328, 331, 334, 337, 350, 352,
355-9.
MILL, JOHN STUART, on the law of battle in Nature, 37.
MILLAU, 209, and illustration facing page 352.
MILL BRIDGES, 209, 223, 224;
see also the picture of Millau Bridge facing page 352.
MILVIUS, PONS, ancient name of the Ponte Molle, 197.
MIMICRY, or imitation, frees the large human mind from the labour
pains of thinking, 105.
MIMICS, NATURE’S SCHOOL FOR, see Chapter II.
MIOCENE AGE and Nature-made bridges, 113-14.
MODERN BRIDGES, see the last chapter;
also “Metal Bridges,” “London Bridge, New,” “Railway Bridges,” etc.
MODERN SPIRIT, its intemperate vulgarity, 13, 48, 270.
MOLLE, PONTE, modern name for the Pons Milvius, 197.
MONEY bequeathed to bridges, 227, 233.
MONKS OF STRATA FLORIDA built the Devil’s Bridge at Aberystwyth, 67.
MONMOUTH, MONNOW BRIDGE AT, a fortified work, 93, 280, 281.
MONNOW BRIDGE at Monmouth, 93, 280, 281.
MONTAUBAN, THE PONT DES CONSULS AT, 27, 254-7.
MONZIE, near Crieff, in Perthshire, a bridge there similar to
Harold’s Bridge at Waltham Abbey, 163.
MOORE, SIR JOHN, his relation to Spanish bridges, 29 _footnote_,
334-5.
MOORS in Spain, their influence on architecture, 28, 29.
MORE, SIR THOMAS, his decapitated head was displayed on Old London
Bridge, 261.
MORSTON, HAMO DE, in the story of Old Shoreham Bridge, 43 _et seq._
MOSELLE BRIDGE at Coblentz, 260.
MOTHER-IDEAS in human history, 56, 57, 58;
the earliest in the evolution of bridges, 56, 57;
they are phases of strife, 59, 60;
see also “Genius.”
MUD, its use in humble architecture probably borrowed from birds,
111, and _footnote_.
MUNRO, ROBERT, M.A., M.D., etc., his valuable book on “Archaeology
and False Antiquities,” 21.
MURCHISON, SIR RODERICK, famous geologist, his remarks on
rock-basins, 152 _footnote_.
MUTE HISTORIANS, silent works of art, such as great bridges and
churches, 25.
MYCENAE, some of her ancient relics considered in their relation to
the history of vaults and arches, 157 _et seq._
NANTES, her mediæval bridge, now gone, 224-5.
NAPOLÉON, PONT, near Saint-Sauveur, 278, 280.
NARNI, a broken war-bridge of the thirteenth century, 277-8.
NARNI BRIDGE, remains of a Roman masterpiece, 23, 24, 25.
NARROW ARCHES in the first Roman aqueducts and bridges, 191-2.
NARSES, general and statesman, in the reign of Justinian, rebuilt the
Pons Salarus, 191.
NATIONAL DEFENCE, in its relation to bridges, vii, viii, 15, 238-9,
244, 259, 260, 261, 272, 328, 331, 334, 337, 350, 352, 355-9.
NATURAL ARCHES, 6, and _footnote_, 150-6.
NATURAL BRIDGES, 3, 4, 6, and _footnote_;
see also Chapter II.
NATURE, her social rule in her cellular commonwealths is far superior
to the social rule in human societies, 19.
NATURE, her School for Mimics, see Chapter II.
NATURE-MADE BRIDGES, 3, 4, 6, and _footnote_;
see also Chapter II.
NATURE’S STRIFE, 3, 4, 37;
see also “Strife and Historic Bridges,” 14-52.
NAVILLY, PONT DE, by Gauthey, its imperfect decoration, 322.
NERONIANUS, PONS, 197.
NERO’S AQUEDUCT, 189.
NESTS, BIRDS’, their influence on handicraft, 111, 112.
NEUILLY-SUR-SEINE, PONT DE, by Perronet, 338.
NEVILLE, COUNT, in 1440, bequeathed twenty pounds to “Ulshawe
Bridge,” 10.
NEW BRIDGE on Thames, near Kingston, its Early English arches, 96.
NEWCASTLE BRIDGE possessed a chapel, 231.
NEWCASTLE HIGH LEVEL BRIDGE, 79-80.
NEWMAN, CARDINAL, on the terrible strife in human history, 38, 39.
NEW MANHATTAN BRIDGE at New York, 354.
NEW PORT at Lincoln, a Roman arch, 162.
NEY, MARSHAL, his celebrated criticism of the aqueduct of Segovia,
184.
NOBLEMEN, RIVAL, in the Middle Ages, often opposed the building of
bridges, 250-1.
NOMENTANO, PONTE, 298-9;
also the picture facing page 296.
NONE-SUCH HOUSE on Old London Bridge, 216.
NORFOLK BRIDGES, 135.
NORFOLK SHRINES in the Middle Ages, 236.
NORMAN BRIDGES, 96, 97, 98.
NOTRE-DAME, PONT, Paris, 225.
OBELISKS on the Hoogesluis at Amsterdam, 323.
OGIVALE ARCHES, see “Pointed Arches.”
OLD LONDON BRIDGE, see “London Bridge, Old.”
ORENSE, in Gallicia, her famous gabled bridge, 28, 29, and _footnote_.
ORLÉANS, PONT D’, in the fifteenth century, 239;
her Belle Croix, 246-7.
ORNAMENT ON BRIDGES, see “Bridge Decoration” or “Decoration of
Bridges.”
ORTHEZ, VIEUX PONT, mediæval war-bridge, 278-9. There are two
conflicting accounts of the part played by this bridge in the
battle of Orthez, February 27th, 1814. One of them says that the
bridge was neutralised by agreement in order to spare it from
destruction; the other account declares that the solidity of the
stonework baffled the French attempts to break it down. Anyhow,
the bridge was not used in the action. Hill crossed well above
it, and Picton and Beresford below. Napier says: “Hill, who had
remained with 12,000 combatants, cavalry and infantry, before
the bridge of Orthez, received orders, when Wellington changed
his plan of attack, to force the passage of the Gave, partly in
the view of preventing Harispe from falling upon the flank of
the sixth division, partly in the hope of a successful issue to
the attempt: and so it happened. Hill, though unable to force
the bridge, forded the river above at Souars, and driving back
the troops posted there, seized the heights above, cut off the
French from the road to Pau, and turned the town of Orthez.”
OUSE BRIDGE at York, 241-3, and _footnote_.
OUTLAWS, MEDIÆVAL, in their relation to fords and bridges, 207, 208.
PACIFISTS, their false and weakening ideas considered in relation to
the varied strife circulated by roads and bridges, vii, 3, 4,
14-52, 360-1.
PAGET AND THE 10TH HUSSARS, how they protected Moore’s retreat at the
bridges of Castro Gonzalo and Constantino, 335.
PALÆOLITHIC AGE, 62, 110, 131.
PALÆOLITHIC ART, and its approximate date, 131.
PALLADIAN BRIDGE in Prior Park, 343.
PALLADIO, ANDREA, Italian architect, _b._ 1518--_d._ 1580, his
evidence on the Roman bridges in Italy, 193-4, 195-7, 198-9;
his design for the Rialto rejected, though it was better than
Antonio da Ponte’s, 212, and _footnote_.
PANDY OLD BRIDGE at Bettws-y-Coed, 163.
PARADISO, MATHEO, a military architect, in 1217, built a gate-tower
to defend the Alcántara at Toledo, 287.
PARAPETS, low walls or railings serving to protect the edge of
a bridge; they rest on the outer spandrils; sometimes they
project beyond and need brackets or corbels, like the Pont Neuf
at Paris, 321-2, and plate facing page 320. Often in the Middle
Ages some parts of the parapets were crenellated, as they are
above the angular piers of the Valentré at Cahors, see the
colour plate facing page 264; even some modern defenceless
bridges have battlemented parapets, for the imitative silliness
of industrial engineers delights in foolish make-believe.
Parapets cannot be studied with too much care, so there are
frequent references to them throughout this monograph. Some
Roman bridges were built without parapets; there is an example
near Colne, 162, 164; and many of the gabled bridges in Spain
repeat in a giddy manner this dangerous defect, 27.
PARIS AND HER BRIDGES, 225, 321-2. Here is a fine subject for a
book. There is a good reference to the Paris bridges of the year
1517-18 in the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” xlvii., Sep., 1908, p.
467. Five bridges existed then, three stone structures, and two
of wood; and all of them had houses from one end to the other.
Tolls were charged and they belonged to the King. Several
illustrations of Paris bridges will be found in Lacroix,
“Manners, Customs and Dress during the Middle Ages.” On page 321
there is one of the year 1500; see also in the same book pp.
302, 316, and 471.
PARLIAMENT OF TASTE, A, necessary in all large towns for the
discussion of art in all matters that concern the public
intimately, 324-5.
PARTHENAY BRIDGE, a Bastille bridge of the Middle Ages, 34, 35, 281,
and the
plate facing page 36.
PAUL’S BRIDGE, ST., 327.
PAVIA, her famous covered bridge of the 14th century, 308-9.
PAVILIONS in the Pul-i-Khaju at Isfahan, 214, 215, and the line block
on page 213.
PEACE, considered in her relation to the varied strife circulated
by roads and bridges. She is an illusion of the mind and belongs
to a routine of idle sentiment, vii, because every phase of
human enterprise claims a battle-toll of killed and wounded and
maimed, vii, 3, 4, 33-6; see also section ii, Chapter I, 14-52,
and 333, 351, 360-1.
PEACE FANATICS, their dangerous influence on foreign politics, 33
_footnote_, 351, 360-1.
PENINSULAR WAR, the Roman bridge at Alcántara, 16, 186;
the Roman bridge at Constantino, 335;
Orense Bridge, 29 _footnote_.
PERFORATED TOWERS on bridges; modern engineers have passed
suspension cables through towers instead of passing them over
the summits, 346, 354.
PERRONET, JEAN RODOLPHE, 1708-94, French engineer-architect, 282-3,
337-8, also _footnote_ 338.
PERSHORE BRIDGE, 355.
PERSIAN BRIDGES, 202-4, 211, 212-16, 265-70.
PERUVIAN BRIDGES, 146 _et seq._
PHALLUS, a symbol of prosperity, carved twice in low-relief on the
Pont du Gard, 174.
PIERS OF BRIDGES, 114, 200, 264, 316, 338, 341, 342, 353, 354.
There are other references also, but the reader will be able to
follow the history of piers from the natural bridge of
stepping-stones through the many changes and defects mentioned
in the text. To-day, with the rapid improvements in airships and
aeroplanes, new armoured piers will have to be designed, strong
enough to bear the great weight of a roofed superstructure of
armour-plate steel, yet not thick enough to obstruct rivers. Now
that bridges are as vulnerable as Zeppelin sheds, engineers have
an excellent chance to serve their countries well by inventing
new and powerful bridges. How to protect piers--at least as much
as possible--from direct artillery fire is one very difficult
problem; how to protect them from falling shells and bombs is
another. When London is fitted adequately with new defensive
bridges her river will be as impressive as a fleet of
super-Dreadnoughts. See also “Abutment Piers.”
PIERS, CRISS-CROSS, Gaulish, 70;
in Kashmír, 71-3;
in North Russia, 73.
PIERS, FOUNDING, 99, 197, 251-2, 341-2.
PIGS, in China, sacrificed to rivers when bridges are in danger from
floods, 69 _footnote_, 248.
PINGERON, M., his remarks on Loyang Bridge, 127.
PIRANESI, GIAMBATTISTA, 1720-78, 193, 197.
PISA, her chapelled bridge, 209. The late Mr. S. Wayland Kershaw
wrote as follows in 1882: “The most remarkable bridge chapel
abroad is the one dedicated to Santa Maria del’ Epina on the
side of the bridge over the Arno at Pisa, erected about 1230.
Built of the rich stone and marble of the district, it is
ornamented with niches and figures, and, though renovated and
repaired, still presents a graceful appearance.”
POINTED ARCHES AND VAULTS, in Nature, 6 _footnote_;
in Egypt of the Fourth Dynasty, 155-6;
in Babylonian work, 275 _footnote_;
at Arpino, 156;
in early French bridges, 6 _footnote_, 86-93.
POITOU, in its relation to ribbed arches in bridges, 95.
POLO, MARCO, 128, 210, 310, 313.
PONS ÆLIUS, 194-5.
PONS ÆMILIUS, 193 _footnote_.
PONS AURELIUS, 197.
PONS CESTIUS, 196-7.
PONS FABRICIUS, 195-6.
PONS GRATIANUS, 196.
PONS LAPIDEUS, 140.
PONS MILVIUS, 197.
PONS NERONIANUS, 197.
PONS PALATINUS or Senatorius, 192-3.
PONS SALARUS, 191.
PONS SELMIS, 178.
PONS SUBLICIUS, 41, 64, 136, 140.
PONS TRIUMPHALIS, 197.
PONS VATICANUS, 197.
PONT AU CHANGE, a Paris bridge, 224.
PONT AUX MEUNIERS, a Paris bridge, 224.
PONT D’ARC, a Nature-made bridge, 6.
PONT D’AMBROISE, a Roman bridge, 82.
PONT DE BROEL, a Flemish war-bridge, 290.
PONT D’ESPAGNE, a modern French bridge, 278.
PONT DES CONSULS, a mediæval bridge at Montauban, 27, 254-6.
PONT DE VERNAY at Airvault, see the plate facing page 96.
PONT DU GARD, Roman bridge-aqueduct, 83, 167-75.
PONT FLAVIEN at Saint-Chamas, Roman bridge, 176-7.
PONT NAPOLÉON, a great modern bridge, 278.
PONT NEUF, Paris, 321-2, and the illustration.
PONT NOTRE DAME, Paris, 225.
PONT ST. BÉNÉZET at Avignon, frontispiece, 81-4, 217, 236-9, 262,
297.
PONT ST. CLOUD, 296.
PONT ST. ESPRIT, 92, 126, 296 _et seq._
PONT ST. MICHEL at Paris, 225.
PONT VALENTRÉ at Cahors, 263-4, 282-5.
PONT-Y-MYNACH, the Devil’s Bridge near Aberystwyth, 67 _et seq._
PONT-Y-PANT, 131.
PONT-Y-PRYDD, 28 _footnote_.
PONTE AUGUSTUS at Rimini, 199.
PONTE CARTARO at Ascoli-Piceno, 201.
PONTE CECCO at Ascoli-Piceno, 201.
PONTE DELLA TRINITÀ at Florence, 222, 316.
PONTE DI PORTA CAPPUCINA at Ascoli-Piceno, 201.
PONTE MAGGIORE at Ascoli-Piceno, 200.
PONTE MOLLE, 197.
PONTE NOMENTANO, 298-9;
also the picture facing page 296.
PONTE QUATTRO CAPI, 196.
PONTE ROTTO, 23, 192.
PONTE S. BARTOLOMMEO, 196.
PONTE SALARO, 191.
PONTE SANT’ ANGELO, 194-5, 324.
PONTE SISTO, 197, 265.
PONTE VECCHIO, 210, 222.
PONTISM, the historical study of bridges.
PONTIST, a devotee of bridges and their history.
PONTIST Brothers or Friars, or Frères Pontifes, 83, 90, 91, 92,
296, 297, 342.
St. Bénézet was one of the leaders in this religious brotherhood
of good craftsmen.
PORTA DELL’ ARCO at Arpino, celebrated in the history of pointed
arches, 156-7.
PORTAGE BRIDGE, GREAT, on the Genesee River, 353-4.
PORTER, SIMON, bailiff at Old Shoreham in the year 1318;
his official defence of the neglected timber bridge, 41-2.
POSTBRIDGE, Dartmoor, its famous clapper bridge, 104.
PRATT, GODFREY, nefarious guardian of Old Bow Bridge, 98-9.
PREHISTORIC BRIDGES, and their descent from Nature’s models, see
Chapters I and II.
PRESTON BRIDGE, 250 _footnote_.
PRIOR PARK, Palladian Bridge, 343.
PROGRESS IN HUMAN SOCIETIES, its terrible slowness, 39, and section
iii, Chapter I, “Custom and Convention,” 53-84;
see also 110, 333.
PUENTE DE SAN MARTIN at Toledo, 287-8.
PUENTE LA REINA, 27 _footnote_.
PUENTE NUEVO at Ronda, 280, and _footnote_.
PUENTE TRAJAN over the Tagus at Alcántara, 6, 153, 183, 186, 212, 321.
PUL-I-KAISAR at Shushter in Persia, 202-4.
PUL-I-KÂREDJ in Persia, 265-6.
PUL-I-KHAJU at Isfahan, 212-16.
PUL-I-MARNUN at Isfahan, 212;
see also “Persian Bridges” and “Ali Verdi Khan.”
PULISANGAN, China, 310-12.
PULTENEY, WILLIAM, his bridge at Bath, 221.
PURITANS, their enmity to chapelled bridges and to wayside shrines,
230, 233 _et seq._
PYRENEES, FRENCH, great bridges there, 278-80.
QUAKERS, their attitude to the strife that bridges and roads
circulate, 35-6.
QUALITIES OF A GREAT BRIDGE, 320.
QUICKSANDS OF CHEAPNESS, 48.
RABOT, THE, at Ghent, a fortified bridge and lock, 289, 291.
RAILWAY BRIDGES, often detestable, 5, 77, 78;
conventional arguments which have governed their structure, 77;
the High Level Bridge at Newcastle, 79-81;
the Tay Bridge and its disaster, 339-42;
the Forth Bridge, 350;
the Illinois and St. Louis Bridge over the Mississippi, 352-3;
the Great Portage Bridge over the Genesee River, 353-4.
Many railway bridges over strategical rivers can be displaced by
tunnels, but many others must be armoured with cone-shaped roofs
as a protection against overhead wars from airships and
aeroplanes, 358. See Albi Railway Bridge, the plate facing page
8, and Cannon Street Railway Bridge, the plate facing page 48.
RAMESES II, TEMPLE OF, at Abydos, has a primitive vault built with
horizontal courses of stone, showing its descent from the
rock archways made by Nature, 155.
REFINEMENT, a quality often overdone in British art, 168.
REICHENAU, JOHN GRUBENMANN’S BRIDGE AT, 142.
RELIEF BAYS FOR FLOOD WATER, they were introduced by the Romans,
284, and were copied by mediæval bridgemen; witness the Pont des
Consuls at Montauban, 255, 256, and the Pont St. Esprit, 293,
297. Pontists should note both the difference of shape in
flood-water bays and the variation of their position in the
architecture. At Mérida, for example, in the great squat Roman
bridge, they are long and round-headed, and rise from the low
and bold cutwaters, which are overgrown with grey-green mosses
and grass. On the other hand, a Moorish bridge of four arches
near Tangier has much smaller relief bays with round heads, and
they are pierced high up through the spandrils. They look like
three little windows that give light and air to a work of
sun-bleached antiquity. Moreover, their shape is repeated in
about a dozen little holes cut through the base of the parapet,
perhaps to help in the drainage of the roadway, perhaps to be
useful in military defence. This Moorish bridge has semicircular
arches, and the road is inclined over each abutment, just like
the Roman bridge at Rimini. But the technical sentiment is less
virile than the Roman.
RELIGIOUS EMBLEMS OR SYMBOLS on Historic Bridges, such as the
Phallus on the Pont du Gard, 174; the Janus heads on the Pons
Fabricius, 196; the idol or image on the Chinese bridge at
Shih-Chuan, 247; and the cross and crucifix on Gothic bridges of
the Middle Ages, 96, 230, 246. The symbolic lion and tortoise on
the Chinese bridge of Pulisangan were borrowed from the _singa_
and _Kûrma_ of Hindu mythology, 311 _footnote_. I should like
the cross to be raised again on all bridges in unfortified
towns, as a protest against a Teutonic misuse of flying warfare.
RENAISSANCE, THE, and its Genius, in the war-bridge at Würzburg,
Bavaria, 259;
in Venetian bridges, 211-12, 307, 315-16;
in the bastille bridge at Châtellerault, 331-4;
in the gradual decline of bridges from military forethought into a
complete disregard for national defence, 336-44;
in wasteful artistry such as redundant ornament and too elaborate
parapets, 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 326.
RENNIE, GEORGE, his design for London New Bridge has defects of
scale, 256, 257.
RENNIE, JOHN, _b._ 1761--d. 1821, his poor bridge over the Thames
at Southwark was financed by a Company, not by the City, as if
London were a trivial village with some new industries that
needed encouragement, 326-7.
RENNIE, SIR JOHN, son of John Rennie and brother of George Rennie,
was the acting engineer during the building of New London
Bridge, according to Professor Fleeming Jenkin.
RESEARCH, its illimitable scope in the study of bridges, 3-13.
RHÔNE, THE RIVER, his two famous old bridges, the Pont St. Bénézet
and the Pont St. Esprit, both constructed by the _Frères
Pontifes_, or Pontist Brothers. See Brangwyn’s pictures and the
text.
RIALTO, Venice, 209, 211-12.
RIBBED ARCHES, like those in the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth, 281,
and the Pont de Vernay at Airvault, Deux-Sèvres, plate facing
page 96. The introduction of ribbed vaulting into English
churches and bridges, 93-100. Professor Moseley’s remarks on
groined or ribbed arches may be quoted here from Hann and
Hosking’s profuse volumes. “The groin ... is nothing more than
an arch whose voussoirs vary as well in breadth as in depth. The
centres of gravity of the different elementary voussoirs of this
mass lie all in its plane of symmetry. Its line of resistance is
therefore in that plane.... Four groins commonly spring from one
abutment; each _opposite_ pair being addossed, and each
_adjacent_ pair uniting their margins. Thus they lend one
another mutual support, partake in the properties of a dome, and
form a continued covering. The groined arch is of all arches the
most stable; and could materials be found of sufficient strength
to form its abutments and the parts about its springing, I am
inclined to think that it might be built safely of any required
degree of flatness, and that spaces of enormous dimensions might
readily be covered by it.” Yet “modern builders, whilst they
have erected the common arch on a scale of magnitude nearly
approaching perhaps the limits to which it can be safely
carried, have been remarkably timid in the use of the groin.”
Progress may be compared to a dilatory army that ever fails to
march forward with all its needed units.
RICHMOND BRIDGE, Yorkshire, had a chapel, 231.
RIMINI, her Roman bridges, 82, 199, 200, 220.
RING OF AN ARCH, the compressed arc of voussoirs, 264; the lower
surface of a ring is called the soffit of an arch. In some
bridges the voussoirs form a double or a triple ring, 305, and
_footnote_. Two very fine bridges of this sort, in my collection
of photographs, are the Pont de Vernay at Airvault, 12th
century, and the Pont Saint-Généroux over the Thouët, also in
Deux-Sèvres, 13th and 14th centuries. Another monument to be
studied is the reputed Roman bridge at Viviers over the Rhône,
built mainly with small materials. Whether Roman or Romanesque,
the structure of the arches has great interest, and a large
photograph is sold by Neurdein, 52 Avenue de Breteuil, Paris.
RIVERS, how their violence has given lessons to bridge-builders, 181.
ROADS, ANCIENT BRITISH, 22; Roman, 139, and _footnote_; they and
bridges circulate all the strife in the overland enterprise of
mankind, 4, 14-52; types of society are as old as their systems
of circulation, just as women and men are as old as their
arteries, 13; mediæval roads in England, 51, 52. Many of them
were a survival of the Roman empire, in which the construction
of highways was a military and political necessity. The
genuinely mediæval roads connected new towns with the main or
ancient thoroughfares, which had traversed Roman Britain from
her principal colonies, London and York, to the other
settlements. “The roads of England,” says Thorold Rogers, “are
roughly exhibited in a fourteenth century map still preserved in
the Bodleian Library, and are identical with many of the
highways which we know familiarly. In time these highways fell
out of repair, and were put in the eighteenth century under the
Turnpike Acts, when they were repaired. But comparatively little
of the mileage of English roads is modern. What has been
constructed has generally been some shorter and easier routes,
for in the days of the stage-coaches it was highly expedient to
equalize the stages.”
ROANNE, PONT DE, its length and its cost, 356.
ROBIN HOOD BALLADS, their rustic charm is repeated in some old
English bridges, 9, 44.
ROCHE PERCÉE, LA, at Biarritz, natural arched opening, 151.
ROCHE TROUÉE, LA, near Saint-Gilles Croix-de-Vie, 151.
ROCHESTER BRIDGE and her Chapel, 243-6.
ROCK-BASINS, their formation by the erosive power of glaciers, 152,
and _footnote_.
ROCK-BRIDGES, or bridges made by Nature, 6, and _footnote_, 150-3.
ROGERS, THOROLD, PROFESSOR, on mediævalism and industrialism, 47;
on mediæval roads, 52;
see also “Roads.”
ROMAN GATEWAYS to defend bridges, 176-7, 272.
ROMAN GENIUS, 23-5, 26-7, 30, and Chapter III.
ROMAN CASTLES OR TOWERS to defend bridges, at Mérida, 182, at
Alcantarilla, 367-8.
ROME, ANCIENT, her bridges, 193 _et seq._
RONDA AND HER BRIDGES, 183, 280, and _footnote_.
RONDELET’S “Essai Historique sur le Pont de Rialto,” 212.
ROOFED BRIDGES, the Pons Ælius is said to have had a bronze cover
upheld by forty-two pillars, 195;
Chinese examples, at Ching-tu-fu, 211 _footnote_, in Western China,
291;
Grubenmann’s timber bridge at Schaffhausen, 141;
Italian, at Pavia, 308, at Venice, 211;
Sumatra, 291;
Swiss, 291-2;
steel-clad roofs to protect bridges from airships and aeroplanes,
358, 359.
ROPE, its first model was the twisted stem of a vine-like creeping
plant, 145;
bamboo ropes, 145, 348, and _footnote_;
ropes of Peruvian grass, 146-7.
ROSS-ON-WYE, Wilton Bridge, an Elizabethan structure with ribbed
arches and angular recesses for pedestrians, 94, 182, and
_footnote_. Recently, I regret to say, this beautiful old bridge
has been attacked by the highwaymen called road officials; and
now she is horribly scarred all over with “pointing,” just like
the mishandled Roman bridge at Alcántara. A new bridge of
ferro-concrete, suitable for motor lorries and the like, would
have cost the county less than this uneducated trifling with a
genuine masterpiece.
ROSTRO-CARINATE, flint tools shaped like an eagle’s beak, 120.
ROTHERHAM BRIDGE AND HER CHAPEL, 93, 209, 219, 232-3.
ROTHENBURG on the Tauber, her two-storeyed bridge, 271.
ROTTO, PONTE, at Rome, 23, 192, 193.
ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES, French philosopher and writer, born in
Geneva, 1712, _d._ 1778;
his visit to the Pont du Gard, 168.
RULES OF WAR in the Middle Ages, curious French examples, 237, 241-2.
RUNCORN BRIDGE, dating from 1868, 275.
SAINT ANGELO’S BRIDGE at Rome, 194-5, 324.
SAINT BÉNÉZET’S BRIDGE at Avignon, frontispiece, 81, 82, 83, 217,
236-8, 262, 280 _footnote_.
SAINT-CHAMAS and the Pont Flavien, 176-7.
SAINT-CLOUD, PONT, 296.
SAINT-ESPRIT, PONT, 92, 293-8.
ST. IVES in Huntingdonshire, her chapelled bridge, 232.
ST. MARTIN’S BRIDGE at Toledo, 285, 287-8.
ST. MICHEL, PONT, Paris, 225.
ST. NEOT’S BRIDGE, 305 _footnote_.
SAINT-NICOLAS, PONT, on the road to Nîmes, 295.
SAINT-THIBÉRY, a Roman bridge near, 178.
SAINTES, BRIDGE AT, in France, and its tremendous fortifications,
300-1.
SALAMANCA, Roman bridge at, 182, 285 _footnote_.
SALARO, PONTE, 191.
SALFORD BRIDGE, its date, 250 _footnote_.
“SANS-PAREIL, LE,” Beffara’s bridge near Ardres, 305-6.
SARGISSON, C. S., pontist, vi, 61 _footnote_, 163.
SAVOY, hills of, survival there of Gaulish timber bridges, 70-1.
SCALE in the Proportion of Bridges, 256;
defective in many English bridges, 256-7.
SCATCHERD, N., his writing on Wakefield Bridge Chapel, 228
_footnote_, 230.
SCHAFFHAUSEN, Ulric Grubenmann’s bridge at, 141-2.
SCHLOSS BRÜCKE at Berlin, a feeble copy of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo in
Rome, 324.
SCIENTIFIC BRIDGES, Modern, 337-42, 349-53.
SCOTCH BRIDGES, 44.
SCOTCH, their neglect of ribbed arches, 94.
SEGÓVIA, the Roman Aqueduct, visited by Marshal Ney, 183-4;
its technique, 189.
SEMIRAMIS, her reputed bridge over the Euphrates at Babylon, 273-4.
SENTIMENTALISTS, BRITISH, 33 _et seq._, 294, 360-1.
SEWERS, Roman, 161.
SEX IN BRIDGES, 194, 284-5, 293-4.
SEXTUS IV and the Ponte Sisto, 197, 265.
SHAKESPEARE, his debt to the Mediæval Church, 233.
SHAPUR I of Persia, 202.
SHIH-CHUAN, in Western China, its important bridge, 247.
SHOREHAM BRIDGE, OLD, in Sussex, 41-3.
SHREWSBURY, WELSH BRIDGE AT, used to be a fortified work, 261.
SHRINES, WAYSIDE, 207, 230, 236, 246-7.
SHRINED BRIDGE at Elche in Spain, picture facing page 236;
at Trier over the Moselle, 247.
SHUSHTER, in Persia, the Pul-i-Kaisar, 202-4.
SICHUAN, China, bridges in this province, 126, 145, 210 _footnote_,
248, 315, 347.
SIGHS, BRIDGE OF, 307.
SIN-DIN-FU, now called Ching-tu-fu, this city’s bridges as seen by
Marco Polo, 210 _footnote_.
SISTO, PONTE, 197, 265.
SLAB-BRIDGES with Stone Piers, 125-8; see also 61-3, 100-5.
SLEEP is united by bad dreams to the law of battle, vii.
SMEATON, JOHN, English civil engineer, _b._ 1724--_d._ 1792, his
big “scientific” bridge over the Tyne at Hexham was a tragic
failure, 339.
SMILES, SAMUEL, Scottish author and pontist, 104.
SMITH, SIR WILLIAM, English classical scholar, the Pons Sublicius,
140;
the Porta dell’ Arco at Arpino, 157;
the stones employed in the Pont du Gard, 171 _footnote_;
the masonry of the Pont du Gard, 175 _footnote_;
Roman aqueducts, 189 _footnote_;
the Pons Salarus, 191;
Pons Cestius, 196;
Pons Neronianus, 197.
SMYRNA, Roman Bridge and Aqueduct, 164.
SOMMIÈRES, on the Vidourle, Roman bridge at, 179.
SOSPEL, GATEWAY BRIDGE AT, 276.
SOUTHWARK BRIDGE, London, its queer history, 326-7, 357.
SPAIN AND HER BRIDGES, 13, 27-9, 104-5, 179-88, 238, 285-9.
SPANS, WIDE, IN STONE BRIDGES, the Puente de San Martin, Toledo, 140
feet, 288;
at Trezzo, 251 feet, 309;
Grosvenor Bridge, Chester, 200 feet, 309;
Trajan’s Bridge over the Tagus, 309
New London Bridge, and Waterloo Bridge, 309-10;
Pont de Gignac and Pont de Lavaur, 160 feet each, 310;
Bridge of Cho-Gan, China, 313-14.
SPEED-WORSHIP, and its effects on the strife that bridges and roads
circulate, 48.
SPIDERS gave lessons to primitive men in the building of suspension
bridges, 145.
SPIERS, R. PHENÉ, architect and writer on architecture, 190, 199.
SPRINGERS, the voussoirs at the springing of an arch.
SPRINGING OF AN ARCH, the plane of demarcation between the ring
and the abutment is called the springing. In other words, the
springing marks the place where a ring of voussoirs starts out
on its upward curve from a pier or from an abutment.
SRÍNAGAR, capital of Kashmír, her bridges with criss-cross piers of
deodar logs or trunks, 71-2.
STAIRCASE BRIDGE in China, 248.
TAHMASP, SHAH, of Persia, who reigned from 1523 to 1575, built the
Pul-i-Marnun at Isfahan, 212.
TALAVERA BRIDGE, Spain, 285 _footnote_.
TARABITA, a Peruvian suspension bridge, 146.
TARRAGONA, ROMAN AQUEDUCT AT, 189.
TAVIGNANO, RIVER, in Corsica, and its old military bridge shaped like
a Z, 238.
TAXES to help the building and repair of bridges, in London, 50;
at Montauban, 255.
TELFORD, THOMAS, Scottish engineer, _b._ 1757--_d._ 1834;
his views on Grubenmann’s bridge at Schaffhausen, 141-2;
on Inigo Jones’s bridge at Llanrwst, 282 _footnote_;
his foolish bridge at Craigellachie, 349.
TENNYSON, on Nature’s strife, 37;
his talk with a jerry-builder, 78.
TENORIO, PEDRO, ARCHBISHOP, renewed the bridges of Toledo, fourteenth
century, 287, 288-9.
TERRACE-WALK on the Pul-i-Khaju at Isfahan, 215, and on the Ali Verdi
Khan, 270.
TERROR inspired by the slowness of human progress, 55-6.
TERTIARY TIMES, their handicraft, 120-1.
TESSANGES, JEAN DE, Abbot of Cluny, who commissioned the building of
the Pont St. Esprit, 297.
TEWKESBURY, KING JOHN’S BRIDGE AT, 258 _footnote_.
THAMES BRIDGES, 96, 256;
see also “London Bridge” and “Westminster Bridge.”
THEBES, THE TEMPLE OF AMMON-RĒ, an early arch, 155.
THEORY, defined, 11;
misuse of this great word, 12.
THEORY, THE, OF PONTINE DEFENCE, 14-17, and of the universality of
strife, 17-52.
THIRLMERE, a primitive structure at, which is partly a dam, partly a
bridge, 131.
THORNTON, ROGER, of Newcastle, in 1429, bequeathed a hundred marks to
the Tyne Bridge, 10.
THOUARS, in Deux-Sèvres, Gothic bridge at, 275.
THRIFT IN BRIDGE-BUILDING, 264-5, 325-6.
TIBER, THE, and the sacrifice of human beings, 64.
TIBERIUS, he finished the beautiful Roman bridge at Rimini, which
Augustus had begun, 201.
TICINO, THE RIVER, and the covered bridge at Pavia, 308.
TILES, they have been used in some Chinese bridges, 211 _footnote_;
Persian bricks resemble Roman tiles, 267;
the spandrils of the Pul-i-Khaju at Isfahan are mostly filled in
with modern tiles, 215.
TIMBER BRIDGES, the earliest, 3, 58, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122,
123;
tree-bridges with stone piers, 129-32;
tree-bridges with timber piles, 133-5;
some typical timber bridges, 136-43;
in the United States of America, 142-3, 353;
see also “Criss-cross Piers.”
TIRYNS, early vaults at, 157.
TODENTANZBRUCKE AT LUCERNE, 292.
TOLEDO AND HER BRIDGES, 285-9.
TORDESILLAS BRIDGE, Spain, 285 _footnote_.
TORTOISE, SYMBOLIC, used in the decoration of some Chinese bridges,
311.
TOURNAI, PONT DES TROUS AT, 290.
TOURS, PONT DE, on the Loire, her cost and her length, 357;
see the picture facing p. 344.
TOWER BRIDGE, London, 78, 327;
see the two illustrations facing pages 80 and 328.
TRAJAN’S BRIDGE over the Danube, 129-30.
TRAJAN’S BRIDGE over the Tagus, 183-7, 309.
TREASURY OF ATREUS at Mycenae, 158-9.
TREE-BRIDGES, 3, 4, 58, 114, 115-19, 122, 123;
tree-bridges with stone piers, 129-32;
tree-bridges with timber piles, 133-5.
TREZZO BRIDGE, destroyed by Carmagnola, 309-10.
TRIANGULAR ARCHES, 157, 160-1.
TRIANGULAR BRIDGE at Crowland, see “Crowland”; in Spain, 181.
TRIER BRIDGE over the Moselle, with her shrines, 247.
TRINITÀ at Florence, 316-17.
_TRINODA NECESSITAS_, and its relation to bridges and roads, 40 _et
seq._
TRIUMPHAL ARCHES, Roman, on the Pont Flavien at Saint-Chamas, 176;
on the bridge at Saintes, 301, and _footnote_;
on a Chinese bridge described by Gauthey, 315.
TRIUMPHALIS, PONS, 197.
TRUTH differs from fact, 11.
TRUTHS, TECHNICAL, in Bridge-building, 13.
TUDELA BRIDGE, Spain, 285 _footnote_.
TUNNELS bored under water by ants, 122;
tunnels to displace many of those strategical bridges which
airships and aeroplanes could wreck with bombs, 59, 358.
TURNER, J. M. W., his “Walton Bridges,” 6.
TURNPIKE ACT OF 1773, 59.
TURKISH BRIDGE at Zakho, 65-6.
TWIZEL BRIDGE and Flodden Field, 94.
ULLOA, ANTONIO DE, Spanish Admiral and traveller, _b._ 1716--_d._
1795, his book on South America;
primitive timber bridges, 135;
the tarabita, a Peruvian suspension bridge, 146;
the fifth Ynca’s bridge of rushes, 146-7;
bujuco bridges, 147-8.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 142-3, 352-4.
UZÈS, on the road to Nîmes, the Pont Saint-Nicolas, XIII century,
295-6.
VAISON, in Vaucluse, an important Roman bridge at, 176.
VALENTRÉ, PONT, at Cahors, famous war-bridge, 27, 263-4, 282-5, and
two illustrations.
VATICANUS, PONS, 197.
VAUXHALL BRIDGE, London, date and cost, 357.
VECCHIO, PONTE, Florence, 210, 222.
VENICE, the Rialto, 209, 211-12, and the picture facing page 212;
Ponte della Paglia, the picture facing page 152;
a canal bridge, 329.
VERONA. The fine Veronese bridges are not mentioned in this
monograph; they passed from the text in a revision; but pontists
know them well, and set great store by the charming Ponte di
Pietra, and by the old sloping bridge with forked battlements
that swaggers picturesquely across the Adige from the Castel
Vecchio. The Ponte di Pietra rises from ancient foundations and
she still retains two Roman arches, certainly often restored;
the other spans are gracefully architectural. A circular bay for
the relief of floods tunnels the spandrils above the cutwater of
the middle pier.
VICENZA, two bridges of Roman origin, 199.
VIOLLET-LE-DUC, EUGÈNE EMMANUEL, French architect and historian of
architecture, _b._ 1814--_d._ 1879. Gaulish bridges, 70, 71;
_arcs doubleaux_, or ribbed arches, 94, 95;
the millers’ bridge at Meaux, 223;
some other mill bridges, 224;
on the shape of cutwaters, 262;
on the martial bridge at Saintes, 300, 301.
VISCONTI, BERNABÒ, founder of the bridge at Trezzo, 309.
VISCONTI, GIAN GALEAZZO, founder of the covered bridge at Pavia, 308.
VITRUVIUS, 190.
VOLCANOES, their lava hardened into a thick crust over many gaps in
the land forming slab-bridges, 124.
VOUSSOIRS, or archstones; they form the compressed arc called the
ring.
WAKEFIELD BRIDGE and her Chapel, 209, 226-30.
WALES, her bridges, 45, 46;
see also “Brecon,” “Llangollen,” “Pont-y-Pant,” and “Pont-y-Prydd.”
WALLA BROOK, Dartmoor, 60, 100.
WALLINGFORD BRIDGE had a Chapel, 231.
WALTHAM ABBEY AND HAROLD’S BRIDGE, 163.
WAR, every sort of human enterprise must be a phase of war, for it
claims a battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed;
strife everywhere is the historian of life, vii;
examples of this truth chosen from the illusion named Peace, 17,
33-6;
see also “Strife and Historic Bridges,” 14-52.
WAR, THE PRESENT GREAT, against Germany and Austria, vii, 33
_footnote_, 350, 358-61.
WAR-BRIDGES, vii;
a broken one of the XIII century at Narni in Italy, 14, 277-8;
a fine one of the XIV century at Orthez in France, 18, 278-9;
how war-bridges originated, 118-19;
Roman examples at Mérida, 182, and Alcantarilla, 367;
the Pont des Consuls at Montauban, 254-6;
Würzburg Bridge in Bavaria, 259;
the drawbridge of Old London Bridge, 260-1;
Warkworth Bridge, 261-2;
Pont Valentré at Cahors, 263-4, 282-5;
in Bhutan, India, 272 _et seq._;
at Sospel, 276;
Monnow Bridge at Monmouth, 281-2;
the Alcántara at Toledo, 285 _et seq._;
Puente de San Martin at Toledo, 287-9;
defensive bridges in Flemish towns, 289-91;
covered defensive bridges of timber, 291-3;
Pont St. Esprit over the Rhône, 293-8;
Ponte Nomentano in the Campagna, 298-300;
at Laroque, near Cahors, 300;
the bridge at Saintes in France, destroyed in 1843, 300-1;
the evolution from fortified bridges into defenceless viaducts,
Chapter V;
new battle-bridges essential, 355-61.
WARKWORTH BRIDGE, 93, 258, 261-2.
WARRINGTON BRIDGE, its date, 250 _footnote_.
WATERLOO BRIDGE, London, 325-6.
WATERMILLS ON BRIDGES, 209, 223-4;
see also the picture of Millau Bridge facing page 352.
WAYSIDE SHRINES, 207, 230, 236, 246-7.
WEAVERS’ BRIDGE, Wycollar, Lancashire, 60-3.
WELLINGTON, DUKE OF, how he repaired the broken arch of the Puente
Trajan over the Tagus, 16, 186;
at Toulouse, 280;
on blowing up modern bridges, 359.
WELSH BRIDGES, 45, 46; see also “Brecon,” “Llangollen,”
“Pont-y-Pant,” and “Pont-y-Prydd.”
WEST RASEN, Lincolnshire, a bridge with a double ring of voussoirs,
305.
WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, London, 327, 357.
WHEELED TRAFFIC always postulates some good roads and bridges, 22.
WHEELS, their wonderful importance in mankind’s history, 58, 154.
WIGRAM, EDGAR, artist and writer on Spain, vi, 27, 73 _et seq._, 104,
183, 185, 280, 285, 367.
WIGRAM, THE REV. W. A., D.D., his notes on Kurdistan bridges, 74-6.
WILTON BRIDGE, Ross-on-Wye, Elizabethan; see “Ross-on-Wye.”
WILLIAM, SAINT, and the Ouse Bridge at York, 241.
WINCHESTER, THE STATUTE OF, 207.
WINDMILLS AND BRIDGES, 208, 219, 224-5.
WITTENGEN BRIDGE, 142.
WORCESTER, BATTLE OF, and Old Pershore Bridge, 355.
WÜRZBURG BRIDGE, 259.
WYATT, SIR THOMAS, in the revolt of 1553, tried to cross the Thames,
but was thwarted by the drawbridge on Old London Bridge, 261.
WYCOLLAR VALLEY, Lancashire, its primitive bridges, 60 _et seq._
XERXES, his bridge over the Hellespont, see “Bridge of Boats.”
YORK, Ouse Bridge at, 241 _et seq._
Y-SHAPED BRANCHES IN PRIMITIVE BRIDGES, 148.
ZAKHO, in Asiatic Turkey, the legend of its bridge, 65-6.
ZAMORA, Spain, her fortified old bridge, 285.
ZARAGOZA, her famous bridge, partly Roman, 187, 188.
ZENDEH RUD, Isfahan, 212-15, 268-70.
Transcriber’s Note:
Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent
hyphenation in the text. These were left unchanged, as were obsolete
and alternative spellings. Misspelled words were corrected. The
captions to several images are not identical to the descriptions of
them in the List of Colour Plates.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Those in bold are surrounded by equal signs, =like this=.
Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of
the chapter. Footnotes [109] and [115] have two anchors. Obvious
printing errors, such as partially printed letters and punctuation,
were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and
abbreviations were added. Mid-paragraph illustrations were moved to
the nearest paragraph break.
“Lællenkœnig” was replaced with “Laellenkoenig” for consistency with
other entries.
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