THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES C/^'^-- ^ ^ c^ ^^^^ /fix / THE RIVER OF LONDON ^ I THE RIVER OF LONDON BY HILAIRE BELLOC ^UTHOI^ OF 'THE PATH TO "RQME' T. N. FOULIS LONDON es* EDINBURGH Published December igi2 Printed by Morrison & Ginn Limited, Edinhvg-h THE LIST OF CHAPTERS I. Introduction page 3 II. The Approach Up River 17 III. London, The First Crossing of the Thames 3g IV. London, the Port of the Thames • • • 75 V. London and the Lower Thames in Warfare 00 117 1 7020R LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS reproduced from Oil Paintings by JOHN MUIRHEAD, R.B.A., R.S.W. St. Paul's from Blackfriars .... Frontispiece Erith page 24 Richmond Bridge 32 Houses of Parliament from Vauxhall ... 40 LiMEHOUSE 48 Greenwich 56 Greenhithe 64 Strand on the Green 72 The Thames from Greenwich Park .... 80 Gravesend 88 Kingston Bridge 96 SuNBURY 104 Twickenham Ferry .112 Hampton 120 Teddington 128 Pangbourne 136 INTRODUCTION THE RIVER OF LONDON INTRODUCTION THROUGH THE FLATS THAT BOUND the North Sea and shelve into it impercept- ibly, merging at last with the shallow flood, and re-emerging in distant sandbanks and less conspicuous shoals, run facing each other two waterways far inland, which are funnels and entries, as it were, scoured by the tide. Each has at the end of the tideway a nar- row, placid, inland stream, from whence the broader, noisier sea part also takes its name. Each has been and will always be famous in the arms and in the commerce of Europe. Each forms a sort of long great street of ships crowded in a traflic to and fro. For each has its great port. The one Antwerp, the other London. The Scheldt is the name of the first, which leads to Antwerp, and makes the opportunity for that great market of the world. But the second is the River of Lon- don, much older in its destinies, and prob- ably more destined to endure in its functions of commerce. I know not how to convey that picture in 3 THE RIVER OF LONDON the mind, which the eyes do not see, and yet by which a man is haunted if he has read enough of books and seen the maps, when he comes up through the Narrows of Dover Straits from the wide, empty seas three days behind and knows that there hes before his owner a choice between the eastern and the western gate. That choice is in the case of every ship determined long before. She has the dull duty to do of turning to the right or to the left, and her orders bind her to the river of the Netherlands or of England as it may be. But if you will consider many cen- turies and the changing adventures of busi- ness you will still — as you pass northward between the two shores of Flanders and of Britain, and as you see their recession upon either side of the northern way which opens before you — understand that doubt upon the future and the rivalry of the two rivers which is soon to be so deeply impressed upon the po- litics of our time. I could think of the Scheldt and of the Thames as two antagonists facing each 4 INTRODUCTION other before conflict across a marked arena, which is that of the shallow, tumbling, and yellow water of the North Sea ; or as two forces pitted one against the other, streams each of which would force the other back if it could find the strength ; or as two Courts in a perpetual jealousy one of the other, intrig- uing and making and losingpoint after point in a game of polity. When the statisticians have done their talk — and very brainless it is — of resources and of metals, two opposing lives are left standing behind either of the great towns, and either of the great sea rivers. The one is the experiment of the modern Germanics ; the other is the founded tradition of Eng- land ; and the more closely a man considers each of these the greater contrast does he discover between the causes of cither's en- ergy of come and go. A third great tidal river is also concerned with these seas, also helps to determine their commerce, also supports its great inland town. That river is the Seine, and I shall, in 5 THE RIVER OF LONDON the pages which follow, use the Seine also for the example it affords in the analogies and contrasts and parallels which I propose to draw. But it is the Scheldt and the Thames which still remain the greater opponents. The united political life of Gaul, which was inherited and transformed bv the French Monarchy, forbade the growth of a great commerce to the north. Paris became not only the political centre of France but its main market as well, and to-day the water carriageof Paris — that is, the traffic of its port — is greater than that of any maritime town in the country. Only if Normandy had devel- oped as an independent state would Rouen have become what Antwerp and London have become. Rouen would then have been, without doubt, the point of transhipment between the inland and the maritime water- ways, and the distance of the town from coal would hardly have affected it more than does the distance of London. Its situation as a political junction would have determined its greatness. As it is the Lower Seine may be 6 INTRODUCTION set beside the Scheldt and the Thames for an illustration in their topography and in the origins of their human settlements, but it does not afford a true commercial parallel to- day, and Rouen is no third rival to the two great ports which are before our eyes and in this generation struggling for primacy. It is the custom of sailors to speak of that water by which they approach a great town under the name of the town. Men coming up from Yarmouth Roads inland do not speak of the Yare, but of Norwich River. For, to the sailor the river is but a continua- tion of, or an access to, his port, and the Low- er Thames is thus universally known from the sea as London River. The term is an accidental one, but it contains the true his- tory of the connection between the stream and the town. The Thames made London. London is a function of the Thames, and it is in such a connection that I propose to re- gard it in this essay : London as the great crossing place of the Thames, and as the cus- 7 THE RIVER OF LONDON todian and fruit of what early may have been the chief ferry, but has for nearly two thou- sand years been the chief bridge ; London as the market of which the Thames is the appro- ach and the port ; London as a habitation of which the great street is the Thames, a street for centuries the main highway of its people, lost for a time and now recovering its ancient use; London as the civil and religious head of revenues which were drawn from the Thames Valley ; and London as the determinant, through its position upon the Thames, of English military history. This intimate connection between the city and the river we all instinctively feel, and the two are connected together as no other waterway with its capital can be connected throughout Europe. For the Thames is all that every other river is to every other capi- tal, wherever some great stream is connected with a chief city. But whereas in every other case it is but one or another of the functions of such a stream that history can remark, in the case of London it can remark them all. 8 INTRODUCTION Little sea-borne traffic reaches Paris by the Seine ; the Tiber could never be a street for Rome; Vienna neglects the Danube; Antwerp protects no great crossing, nor has ever been the nucleus of a State ; Rouen — the nearest parallel— was not the strategical pivot of Nor- mandy, nor ever formed, as London forms, a chief fraction in the economic power of its province. The two rivers which are sacred to Lyons never fed that town ; the Rhone wa- tered but did not lead to Aries. The towns of Lombardy depend upon the fertility of the Po Valley , but the stream is nothing to their com- l| merce or to their political eminence, and Mi- lan, and Venice, and Turin are independent of it . Saragossa was the mistress of Arragon,but the Ebro did not make Saragossa, and as for Madrid, the trickle which runsbelowMadrid is best described in the story of the Spanish patriot who was dying of thirst after battle, but upon being offered a cup of water, said, " Give it to the poor Manzanares." Lisbon and Cadiz are maritime, notfiuvial, and look where you will throughout the civilisation of 9 THE RIVER OF LONDON Europe you will not find, save in the case of London, this complete interdependence be- tween a great town and its river. In tracing or establishing this intimate bond between London and the Thames one must guard against an error which the mod- ern reader rightly suspects and is justly ready to criticise or to deny when it appears in any piece of historical writing. That error is the error of materialism. A generation ago it was universal, and there was no phenomenon in the story of Eng- land or of Europe from the emplacement of a city to the growth of the Church which was not traced to inanimate causes superior to, and independent of, any action of the Will. This philosophy narrowed, distorted, and dried up every department of knowledge, and while the area of learning increased with a rapidity hitherto unknown, the spirit in- habiting that conquest was starved. It was as though the time could not contain at once 10 INTRODUCTION the energy to discover and the energy to know, and as though the covering of so vast a field in so short a period was achieved in- evitably at a cost of profundity. That a bias towards the mechanical and the necessary should be present in the physical sciences — in chemistry for instance — is to be expected, that it should have invaded biology was less excusable, but that it should have been per- mitted to affect (as it did) the business na- tive to man — his building, his institutions, his very dreams — was an excessive blunder, and the spirit of all the younger men to-day is running if anything too strongly in reac- tion against that ebb-tide of the soul. They reject the dogmas of their fathers which would bend everything man has done to material circumstance, which would talk of man as the slave rather than the master of his instruments, and which, in an argument absurdly circular, " interpreted history in the terms of Economics " : — and they are right. Even in the sphere of topography, where II THE RIVER OF LONDON the physical limitations of human action are the main subject of the writer, they expect a full admission of the soul of man and even — which is very wise — some recognition of that mysterious genius which inhabits ev- ery place and is perhaps its vital part. They are right. No one can see the mar- riage between London and its river with- out wondering in what degree things oth- er than ponderable and measurable things may enter into the habitationof man. There is nothing man does, of course, which has not in it the soul. But it may be also true that there is nothing done to man wherein some soul is not also. Now the homes of man and the air and the water and the wind and the earth, against which in part and with which in part those homes arise, are so woven in with his fate — which is a spiritual fate — that we must properly lend to these insensate things some controlling motive ; and we may rightly say, though only by the use of metaphor, that all these things have a spirit within them. I cannot get away 12 INTRODUCTION from it that the Thames may be aHve, and London most certainly is. But all these things, though one may put them in the form of statements, are really questions ; and questions to which no sort of answer has yet been discovered. II THE APPROACH UP RIVER THE APPROACH UP RIVER THERE IS PERHAPS NO JOURNEY in the world in which the past and what now is and the hnks between them stand out more clearly stratified than a journey up the Thames upon the tide from the Sea-reach to the Pool. I will describe it ; for it is upon a physical experience of this kind (I mean the seeing of history through the eye to the north and to the south of the narrowing river and the feel of the stream under one) that any his- torical essay upon the River of London must be built. I have heard it said that the experience is a common one, seeing that so many thou- sand men of the articulate, travelled, and ex- perienced class (who can relate their experi- ence to some purpose) have entered London by river. Any one (I am told) who comes in from the East or from Holland to the docks will know what I mean. But I do not think this is so. I do not think that the thing seen rapidly from the decks of a liner, per- haps cut short at Tilbury, perhaps missed 17 B THE RIVER OF LONDON because the voyage is at night, is quite what I intend to emphasise. Nor am I certain that the proportion of those fifty miles is accur- ately seized when they are experienced from the height of some great steamer whence the strength and nature of the stream, its ebb and flow, its local life, are missed. It is so with all other great ports. The myriads that come in nowadays to England by the Mersey have no opportunity for judg- ing the estuary, the meaning of the oppos- ing shores, nor that character of south Lan- cashire which lies before their eyes in the mist and is so singular a factor in the make- up of England. I think that to know the River of Lon- don the journey must be made from the sea upwards, in something not larger than a barge, in a motor boat, or in a fishing vessel, or little half-rater, and taken upon one tide with an easterly wind, as all the men of the past took it, making the great port upstream under the weather they had chosen. In this way, with little freeboard between one's feet i8 THE APPROACH UP RIVER and the changing level of the broad water, and with not too rapid a passage of the sta- tions upon either bank, and with some true measure wherewith to gauge in detail what one sees, one can understand the river. It was in a progress such as this that the painters came to understand the Lower Thames, and nothing has nourished a more national art than this valley, though its interpretershave been rare. You see five successive stages clearly marked in such a voyage. You see, in the first place, that everything up to the very gates of London must have been, at the beginning of our history, as de- solate as any province in Europe. The rare places at which high and firm land comes down to the modern stream are, as it were, isolated, and live a life upon the defensive. Nowhere (as we shall see when we come to examine London as a crossing place) does some good habitable site stretch down to either opposing bank. There is no natural gateway upon the Lower Thames ; no twin 19 THE RIVER OF LONDON villages defending a gap ; nor the projection from the north as from the south of tongues of high land or even good arable land, the proximity of which, one to the other upon either shore, would give humanity to the river. All the miles of it are desolate mar- shes, either to the one side or to the other, most commonly upon both, and the few spots where an exceptional formation has given firm building ground and fertile fields as well close to the river have something about them exceptional and, as it were, be- leaguered. It is a gross and an unhistorical exaggeration to say (as many of our acade- mic people are saying) that all that valley was a flooded lagoon until historic times. It was not that. But it was a long succes- sion of very wide, watery marshes, with knolls of slightly higher land standing up therein. Consider, for instance, the view to the northward, from the height just above and east of Dartford. There you have two good miles of what was marsh and still is largely marsh to the main stream, and be- 20 THE APPROACH UP RIVER yond, upon the farther shore, another three or four miles of the same fiats, with odd, ex- ceptional rises at Rainham, at Aveney, or upon the edge of the fiat of Upminster. It is the same from the Abbey Wood, east of Woolwich. Plumstead Marshes and Bark- ing Level made one morass, four miles wide at least, or nearer five, drowned twice a day into a great level sheet of water, until some civilisation came to dyke up the tidal stream and confine it to the central bed, which it had scoured in its windings through such a desolation. Now of all that primitive effect of waste, abandoned places very much re- mains in such a journeyasi have suggested. It is true that a wall of earth everywhere controls the flood to-day, and that the tra- veller in his boat does not see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks of mud for miles upon either side of hisgoing. But he still sees in so many places as to make them the chief note of the lower reaches, at least, 21 THE RIVER OF LONDON great Flats without a soul upon them, un- broken by tree or house or hedge, and plainly saved by artifice alone from flooding. This run up the Lower Thames is, save for the ex- ceptional approach of highland in one place or another (as at Gravesend or Erith) like a sail through the Fenland,and this character of desertion, silence, and morass, the oldest foundation of all, is still quite plainly the background of what one sees and remembers when one comes up the River of London to London from the sea. So much, then, for the first layer. The second should by right be Roman : but nothing Roman remains ; no, nor any- thing of the Dark Ages. Unless we believe what is probable enough, but not proved in any way, that the great containing walls of earth (notably that round the Isle of Dogs) were Roman work, we can distinguish no- thing in such a journey to mark the first thousand years of Christendom. Far out beyond the Sea-reach, Reculvers was a Ro- man station in the estuary, but the ways 22 THE APPROACH UP RIVER have eaten it away. No great monastic nu- cleus of the Dark Ages could be founded in that inhospitable land. There was no pa- lace of the kings standing near the central stream until the neighbourhood of London was approached. There was not even a for- tress. Indeed it is odd to think how empty all that approach from the sea to the great- est of the western Roman towns was and remained. It was not until the Middle Ages began to flower that the Lower Thames put forth any human signs — at least of such a sort as have come down to us. The remains of them are very few, but they are distinc- tive. Of all that Hfe of the Middle Ages which theEnglish countrysides preserve in so many visible relics — and especially in a host of parish churches surpassing all of the kind in Europe — the Lower Thames has but one clear instance remaining to the eye ; and that is the little isolated church of St. Clem- ent's. Rainham is too far from the water, the legends and associations surrounding 23 THE RIVER OF LONDON the well of St. Chad are also too distant to count in the picture. The endowed founda- tions of religion either stood remote from the river-bank or have disappeared. Lon- don, but for the Great Fire, would have sup- plied in this the emptiness of the lower river. But for that capital accident in the his- tory of the city, which renders London so different in outward aspect from all other great European towns, the Middle Ages would still break upon one in a sheaf of spires showing over the flats from Woolwich Reach, at least, and perhaps from farther down the stream. But that accident — the Great Fire of the seventeenth century — has left London stripped of the Gothic and, a- lone of the great capitals of Europe, no im- press of our four hundred years of Gothic remains with the traveller as he comes up- stream. When we consider the two parallels t oLondon upon the Continent — the parallels I have chosen as ports upon the two great tidal rivers of the north-west — Antwerp and Rouen, the loss will be apparent. 24 THE APPROACH UP RIVER For miles and miles over the flats of the Scheldt the sailor making for Antwerp sees the high steeple upon his horizon fixed a- gainst the sky, and, late as was its building, this watch-tower of Antwerp is of the true Middle Ages ; Europe was still Europe and one when its last stone was laid. Still more does the sailor making for Rou- en have the Middle Ages before him as he rounds the Ferry Reach and comes up north- ward into the sweep of the river before the town. In spite of the extraordinary and meaningless gate which the new travelling bridge makes for the city, its cathedral still dominates the whole view ; surrounding it, the high pitch of St. Vincent, the belfry of St. Maclou, the rebuilt towers of St. Ouen, give their character to all the smoky basin of houses between the Seine and the hills. A far more splendid sight was the Gothic group of London as one came upon it up river before the Great Fire. A score of spires stood in varying height and perspective before the master spire of the cathedral. 25 THE RIVER OF LONDON Old St. Paul's upon its hill carried the lofti- est cross in Christendom — far higher in the air than Strasburg ; and old St. Paul's had been built, as had nearly every great monu- ment of the Middle Ages, with a special eye to the landscape whence it should be seen and which, in a sense, it should control. The huge and somewhat ill-proportioned pyramidof St. Dunstan's by the very excess of its bulk made a landmark which is the first thing to strike us when we look at a sketch of the river made at any time before 1665. We are fortunate, moreover, in our retention of such memorials. No other nor- thern town, I think, possesses a complete panorama of its appearance in the first half of the sixteenth century such as London possesses in the great work of Wyngaerde in the Bodleian. And though the seven- teenth century, with its triumph of engrav- ing, produced a great number of such docu- ments throughout Europe, Visscher's draw- ing is unique in its importance, while we have at the end of the series Hollar's care- 26 THE APPROACH UP RIVER ful delineation of the square mile of ruins after the Great Fire. This isperhaps the most remarkable piece of pictorial evidence open to English his- tory, and any one who will look at that long string of churches burnt out to shells, and of private houses reduced to a few feet of black and crumbling wall, will see what a re- volution in the outward aspect of the river and of its port, and what a breach in the outward continuity of London the Great Fire means. The Conservative temper into which the English fell (with regard to their externals, at least), after the sixteenth cen- tury, would have preserved the architec- tural past of London (and that to our own day) much more perfectly than the past of any great city of the Continent has been pre- served. It seems due to the national spirit that a view more ancient even than that of Rouen should greet the traveller coming in by Thames ; but the accident of the Great Fire has forbidden it. On the contrary, the note of the approach 27 THE RIVER OF LONDON to London nowadays from theLowerThames is a note peculiarly and strongly modern. It is as though the abnormal expansion of our perilous Industrialism in the last hun- dred and fifty years had not only conquered but obliterated the eighteen centuries from which it suddenly arose. Here and there an odd survival left remaining of deliberate purpose serves but to emphasise the cap- ture of the Lower Thames by that crazy me- chanical giant so recently born and already so blind and old. You have the noble front of Greenwich, you have the charming little "mail" opposite, you have, most distinc- tive, perhaps, of all the survivals upon the river, the Fort of Tilbury. Save for these a huge and hardly national commerce, plainly suffering the domination of a few, has eat- en up the scene of Thames-side and marks it more and more as one comes in thro- ugh the outlying miles until one is relieved by older, dingier, and more gracious things near the heart of the whole business in the Pool. 28 THE APPROACH UP RIVER It seems unj ust to pass, with no more than a mention, that lovely little isolated relic at Tilbury. Here was for centuries the natural gate, the military defence of the port. When the range of ordnance was not much more than hailing distance, no defences could be thought of upon the broadening water of the Hope, still less in the funnel of the Sea- reach. But Tilbury, standing over against Gravesend, defended the first point at which the river had narrowed sufficiently to be commanded by batteries from the shore. In the earliest map of this point (which is preserved in the Admiralty) one may trace the way in which the river was closed. There ran out from the northern bank, pointing somewhat downstream, a sort of barrier. We have no indication of its structure. A few piles would have been sufficient to pre- vent a passage and to canalise traffic into the open space that was left in the midst of the stream ; for this space was not left free, as we might have supposed, just under the guns of the fort, but at a range which seems 29 THE RIVER OF LONDON upon the drawing to be about 250 yards. Whether a corresponding permanent work existed upon the Gravesend shore I am ig- norant, but it was obviously easy to em- place guns there when they might be need- ed. Meanwhile Tilbury, with its continual preparation for arms and as continual in- nocence of them, with its one chief historic memory of the Armada, remains the most perfect relic of the past upon all the stretch of the river. The swamped land round about has defended it and isolated it, and that great regard for the old things of the nation which is a virtue to be proud of has saved it from decay. For the rest, as I say, and with the ex- ception of those rare survivals of which Til- bury is the most striking, modern industri- alism, down to its last manifestations, has captured the Lower Thames and stands in a bleak contrast against the windy empti- ness of the flats. Nowhere is one more odd- ly struck by this than opposite the great tanks which have been put up for the stor- 30 THE APPROACH UP RIVER age of petrol — the last of our necessities. From Tilbury upwards, wherever there is available space or good ground, it is the haste, the necessity, and the carelessness of modern exchange directed for the immedi- ate profit of men who perpetually change their methods of acquirement (and even their homes) that marks the river. It is a new sort of desolation, the obverse (and not a pleasant one) of that more natural desola- tion which Nature made by stretching out her marshes and lagoons upon either side of the tideway. And I say " exchange," not production. Thames-side used to do many things, but in particular to tan leather and to build ships. The tanneries have nearly gone ; the ship- yards are in process of death. In the last journey which I made up the tide some months ago to see London once more from the river I passed what may be the last of the men-of-war built upon Thames-side. It lay completing upon the northern shore. It was the ship round which had turned the 31 THE RIVER OF LONDON discussion whether or no the Thames could still successfully build against the north, and if the official answer is to be that it cannot, then this decision will mark the end of the oldest trade of the river and that most na- tive to its life. But we live in a time when most things are dying. For all this lamentable cloak of purpose- less industrialism, chaotic and already mur- muring with the sounds of its own dissolu- tion, the gradual envelopment of a man who comes up river, his reception by the huge- ness of modern London is a thing which no one who has experienced it can forget. Indeed, the utter ruin of order and of plan, which is but the outward manifesta- tion of the ruin of religion, has destroyed the sense of approach everywhere around that great helpless, apathetic nation which we call London, save w^here it could not be wholly destroyed, and that is along the wa- ter which was its most ancient highway. Come in from what direction you will, save by the Thames, and the approach to 32 o •Ik; ^- * THE APPROACH UP RIVER London is a waste of eyesight. No one has imagined for two hundred years such a thing as a gate or a hmit. There is no kind of sal- utation offered or of barrier presented or of definition laid down. Draggle-tail finan- cial experiments of no interest or purpose to those responsible for them, save abstract wealth, stand isolated in fields as often as not given up to weeds and rubbish, and new roads half made end everywhere in dust- heaps or in mud. Then for one mile after another you pass the thousands of little houses all shamelessly similar, for in none does a man intend to make his being, to possess his soul, or to live and die there. There is not even a city wall remaining from the past, nor so much as a broad outer street, delimiting what may still be noble and per- manent from these hopeless suburbs. Little scraps of what were once happy and united villages still stand like islands in this flood of mean brick. For the most part they are to be distinguished no longer save by the narrowness and crookedness of their streets, 33 c THE RIVER OF LONDON and when at last one comes to the inner part, where there is something of history and of meaning and of an inherited culture, one comes upon it without introduction and without grace. Of all cities that ever were, modern London least deserves a wall, gates, and a senate. But the entry by the river cannot be wholly destroyed. The river is too strong. And therefore a man does here receive a physical impression almost worthy of the magnitude of the things he seeks. He does get some idea of London and some introduc- tion to it. The houses and the places of change, and the great stores and the abrupt street-ends with their water steps, cluster in groups with narrower and narrower gaps between them, until at last they come up all together in rank and enclose one avenue of flood, banked everywhere by brick and crowded with the interlacing of vessels. It is a thing which, if a man could draw it pro- perly, would make the best record of our time for the curiosity of those who are to 34 THE APPROACH UP RIVER come after us. Accustomed as we are to an eternal noise drowning thought and human life wherever the haphazard and violent ac- tivity of our time is at work, there is an odd broken silence in this waterway of sails and chains and alarms, guarded and hemmed in by the leagues of houses. The mainspring of the moving road is silent, the power of that one thing in the view which is not made by man, the rushing upward of the water ; between all these new and artificial things the strength of the Thames survives with no more sound in its going than when it went through other silences before men found it. Ill LONDON THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES LONDON THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES IT IS A COMMONPLACE WHICH MUST be repeated whenever the connection of the Thames with London is referred to, that the capital matter in that connection is Lon- don's position as the lowest crossing point up- on the Thames. That affirmation, standing alone, is of no use to history unless one also explains why it was so important to find a crossing place as low as possible down the river, and the many causes which combine to make that lowest crossing place the neigh- bourhood of London Bridge. These last especially require a full explanation because, of the many converging reasons for selecting that site, the chief were, until quite recently, imperfectly studied. Why was it of such great importance for man, from the beginnings of a settled occu- pation in this island, to discover a conveni- ent crossing place as low down as possible upon the course of the Thames ? And why, when once this crossing place had been established, would it become the principal meeting-place in the country ? 39 THE RIVER OF LONDON The answer to these questions is to be found, not only in the shape of the island, but in the position of its best soil and in its relation to the Continent. It is obvious that the main connection be- tween Great Britain and the Continent must be by the Straits of Dover. It is not only the shortness of the trajectory from the mainland to the island which makes the Straits of Dover the necessary and perman- ent entry into this country, it is a number of other things as well : as, that communi- cation is very easy from the opposing shore inland ; that that opposing shore was pro- vided for ages with a harbour peculiarly suitable to early traffic — the Portus Itius (now the silted-up plain between the hills behind Boulogne) ; the conformation of the high land upon either side at Grinez and at Dover Cliffs which, in the centuries when the thing was important, gave an uninter- rupted sight of land during the crossing; and the choice of entry which the various inlets (now filled up) afford from the Portus Le- 40 < X X p > o f- 2 w < O t/i O a: CROSSING OF THE THAMES manis behind Folkstone, the old inlet at Do- ver, and the old Mouth of the Stour to what was once the sheltered channel between Thanet and the mainland behind the island of Richborough. So powerful has been the topographical effect of the Straits that no revolution in travel has dispossessed them of their original importance. The great ex- pansion in our means of communication has only emphasised the bond which is estab- lished by the Straits between this island and the Continent of Europe, and so through- out the whole of the old world. When, a few years hence, a man sets out to travel by land to India or to China, he will cross from Do- ver and will take his train at Calais. Were communication inland as uninterrupted throughout this island as it is throughout the opposing portion of the Continent, a system of roads would naturally have established itself, radiating from some depot common to the various ports of Kent, just as a sys- tem of roads grew up upon the Continent, radiating from Calais and from Boulogne, 41 THE RIVER OF LONDON and forming a network inland with such cen- tral points as Bavai, Amiens, Cassel, etc., to form pivots for the whole. But communication within the island of Britain was not thus uninterrupted in all directions. One great obstacle lay across it from east to west, and that obstacle was the Thames. How complete an interruption the Thames formed, especially in its lower course, I will describe in a moment ; it must suffice to notice here that for one who would reach all the fertile land of East Anglia and of what is now Hertfordshire, for one who would reach from the landing-place in Kent the wheat lands of what is now Essex, and the centres of population in what is now Norfolk (both of them originally capital sites of population before the growth of modern industry), the profound wedge driven into the land by the estuary of the Thames and its continuation in the tidal river formed an almost insurmountable obstacle. There was no straight line from say Canterbury to the Midlands and to the central east of the is- 42 CROSSING OF THE THAMES land with its great mass of arable soil. More than this : if one looks at a map of England on which moorland and waste country is distin- guished from the arable soil, it will be appar- ent that north of the Wash the latter takes the form of a long and somewhat narrow strip corresponding at first to the lower val- ley of the Trent and farther north again to the Vale of York. A direct line to this arable northern strip from any principal Kentish centre (and Canterbury was such) would take one across the Thames estuary and was therefore impossible. The farther up river a practicable crossing was found the longer the detour it involved. The only considerable population in Britain that was early access- ible to a road-system proceeding directly from Kent was the population of what later came to be called Wessex, that is, the central southern districts of which Winchester was the capital. As a matter of fact we find a road of immemorial antiquity proceeding directly east and west from Canterbury to Winches- ter along the ridge of the Chalk, but a similar 43 THE RIVER OF LONDON road northward was blocked by the obstacle of the Thames. We shall see in a moment that the discovery of a good crossing place fairly low down in the course of the river not only saved a long detour by the upper valley for travel proceeding from the Straits of Dover to the eastern Midlands, and ultimately to the plain of York, but also afforded a fairly direct line in another direction which was essential to travel, namely, the direction of the north-west and the main ports which establish communication with Ireland. We may take it, then, as established, that there existed from the earliest times a neces- sity, or a necessary tendency, to found and keep up a permanent crossing place at the lowest practicable point in the Thames valley. Once that crossing was founded and con- tinuously maintained it was equally neces- sary that it should grow into the chief meet- ing place of the island ; that is, the chief market and therefore the chief town. In- deed the various advantages such a crossing 44 CROSSING OF THE THAMES would have form so rare a combination that we should be perfectly justified, even if we had not the evidence we have, in making certain of the existence of a great and im- portant London early in history. All the causes which we have seen to feed the commercial growth of the site from the sea were reinforced by the inland communi- cations which met at this crossing place. The bridge (as I have shown elsewhere) made a terminal not only to sea-borne tra- ffic, but to all the inland trafiic from down the upper valley. It became the place of tran- shipment. It was further the terminal, and the necessary terminal, of the three great roads from north-west, from the north, and from the east, which combined at this point toseek the Straits of Dover to the south ; and once this nexus was woven, once the market and place of meeting was fixed, it must fur- ther become the goal of other roads against which the Thames did not originally provide an obstacle. Thus it was that a road would necessarily be established from this cross- 45 THE RIVER OF LONDON ing place to the west and to the south-west. Though the mai n traffic from the fertile Low- er Severn valley would more naturally make for the Straits by way of the Chalk ridges, yet, when once London with its market sup- plies and depots was established, a main road would necessarily aim at the Straits through London rather than south of the Thames. And though the secondary entries into the island from the Continent by Southamp- ton Water, and by the ports to the west of it, would naturally send out arteries of communication northward and westward, yet their communication north-eastward through London would soon acquire the chief place. That London would have be- come what it did through no more than these domestic causes may well be denied. The main factor in its growth was through- out the centuries what it remains to-day — the commerce of the tidal Thames. But stan- ding at the head of that commerce London also gathered to itself, as the main crossing point of the Thames, the communications of the whole island. 46 CROSSING OF THE THAMES The peculiar and determining effect this had upon the mihtary history of England I have mentioned in another study,* and shall expand in this. Parallel effects could be found in every other department of activity, not only in commerce but in the political machinery of England, of English feudal- ism, and of the English monarchy, and later of English aristocratic government. London once so formed upon its river was the centre or support of each in turn supreme in the island. Having established this, let us consider why the crossing place came just here upon the line of the river, and to solve that prob- lem we must recollect what it is that acts as a barrier to communication, especially in early times. This barrier is certainly not to be found in hills of such a gentle sort as diversify south England. The breadth of a stream, up to half a mile or so, and apart from broken water, though of considerable importance in the problem, is again not the * Warfare in England, Williams & Norgate. 47 THE RIVER OF LONDON chief difficulty, for man has always been able to cross water if his approach to it was un- impeded. The true obstacle was marsh — bad going. It is still the chief impediment to modern engineering, and the difficulty which men found during earlier centuries in negoti- ating any considerable breadth of marsh translates itself to-day into the expense which a similar undertaking now involves. Belts of marsh impeding or actually forbid- ding travel across themhavebeen formed up- on one,theother,or both banks in so unbrok- en a chain down the Lower Thames valley as to make that valley the obstacle it was and is to transverse travel. The first factor in the formation of such marsh is the tide . If you have a considerable difference between high and low water, and if that difference is fur- ther complicated by great variations be- tween the neap and the spring tides, the diffi- culty of the barrier of marsh affected by such a tide will be correspondingly increased. This consideration is often missed, and it will therefore be worth while to explain it. 48 CROSSING OF THE THAMES A fairly regular height of tide covering daily the same expanse lends itself to the estab- lishment of a regular crossing place, and though that crossing place may not be in continuous use from the difficulty of using it at low tide, it can be regularly counted upon to serve twice in the twenty-four hours. But if there is any very considerable difference in the state of the tides throughout each fortnight, then the opportunities for using the crossing are very much reduced, unless, indeed, one has a steep shore to deal with. Under such conditions one might find a spot where crossing was easy enough at the springs, and yet impossible at the neaps; and instead of a ferry regularly in use twice in the twenty-four hours, you would have one which could only be depended upon a few times in a month. Now the Thames is a river in which this difference is considerable, and it has greatly strengthened the power of the waterway to act as an obstacle to travel from north to south. 49 ^ THE RIVER OF LONDON This, then, is the first of the factors which have combined to make the Lower Thames the obstacle it was and is to travel. If we compare the Thames in this respect with the other great rivers which we have seen to be its parallels upon the Continent, we shall be struck by the greater effect of the tide in its waters. The second factor in the establishment of such an obstacle is the type of soil over which the water works. It is evident that a tidal river and estuary in which sand and gravel or even chalk form the riparian soils will less produce marsh than clays will. A river which washes the silt of clays up and down with its tides will be defended by worse belts of bad land than one which runs through the other types of rock. Now in this respect also the Thames has a bad pre-eminence over its rivals. Chalk only comes near the stream once or twice, and for a very short distance, in its lower course, and though gravel and sand, as we shall see, approach 50 CROSSING OF THE THAMES the banks in more than one place (and ulti- mately determine the site of London), this kind of soil is nowhere that which the mass of the stream churns up or carries down in its course. The Thamesdeals for many miles of its upper tidal waters with clays, bring- ing them down towards the mouth, and has settled them for centuries upon either side of its channel in the shape of deep alluvial marshes. But there is more than this. The third factor in the problem depends upon the contours of the land upon either side of the river. A river with steep banks, fairly narrow, bounded by hills, even though it be a highly varying tidal stream, and even though it scour through a great part of its tidal course a soil of clays, cannot form wide belts of marsh upon either bank. It so happens that the Lower Thames — until the site of London is reached — nowhere enjoys even a short stretch of steep-on shore upon both banks at once. The few spots 51 THE RIVER OF LONDON where higher land comes down to the water' s edge upon the southern or right bank are faced in every case by great level stretches opposite which, until modern works were un- dertaken, were regularly flooded with every return of the tide and were impassable ; while the lower and smaller patches of land on the north bank (as at Purfleet or Grays) have marsh opposite them also to the south. In this respect the Scheldt appears under primitive conditions even worse off than the Thames; but the Seine continually enjoys steep banks after the first twenty miles or so up from its estuary, and in at least half a dozen places from Caudebec (which rough- ly corresponds to Gravesend) and Rouen, the first bridge (whichwe have seen tocorrespond to London) , there are opportunities for cross- ing the tidal Seine, even under primitive conditions, with no considerable obstacle of marsh upon either bank. Now if we combine all this and consider the total effect of all three factors in the Lo- 52 CROSSING OF THE THAMES wer Thames valley we shall understand why no great road ever attemptedto cross it, and why no line of travel runs transverse to it to-day. A mere examination of the con- tours wouldbe almost sufficient, presenting, as they do, great fiats in most places, stretch- ing for miles from the main stream of the river. But beyond this you have the great variation of the tide and the type of surface soil with which the stream deals. Civilisation has so considerably changed the aspect of all our streams, it has so em- banked them and drained their neighbour- hood, that in order to appreciate the original conditions which made it impossible to find a crossing place below London one must con- sult the new sheets of the Ordnance Geologi- cal Survey. They give us the drift or top- soil — which alone of course concerns travel. In this new survey the area covered by al- luvium and the line where that alluvium im- pinges upon the older and harder soils to the north and the south are very clearly marked. That area with its boundary line gives one 53 THE RIVER OF LONDON the original area and the original boundary- line of the Thames' marshes, and it is very instructive. The problem is one of approach from the south. From the north there is no firm soil at all within the neighbourhood of the river- bed from the sea upwards until one reaches the slight eminence of the City, unless one counts the isolated patches at Purfleet and Grays, the approach to which from the north was not only originally difficult but connect- ed with no reasonable line of travel. One has but to look at the map to see that Pur- fleet could have been approached from the north by no considerable road. It might have formed some sort of terminal for an eastern road but only that at the expense of a long detour such as is made by the main road to- da}' through Ockendon or by the railway, for immediately behind lies a belt of what was originally marsh. Moreover, even if primi- tive travel had drifted by this somewhat cir- cuitous route to the hard patch at Purfleet, it 54 CROSSING OF THE THAMES would have f oundno crossing there; immedi- ately opposite lay the very wide belt of mar- shy land which flanks either side of the Dar- ent. That river comes in almost exactly op- posite the small belt of natural hard on which Purfleet stands. Primitive travel, then (and for that mat- ter modern travel too, unless it is at a great expense of engineering), could not approach the northern bank of the Thames between the sea reaches and the City of London save, and that with difficulty, by the very small exceptional patches of Purfleet and Grays, and at Purfleet would have discovered no opportunities for a crossing : the bank oppo- site being a particularly wide and imposs- ible stretch of marsh at this point. Now as to Grays : That very pleasant place does give some approach both in soil and con- tour to the water from the north. It is just on the edge of the chalk, just above the old limit of high water, and its original nucleus, though not actually on the stream, would require but a short causeway to reach it. 55 THE RIVER OF LONDON But Grays is in the same bad topographical case as Purfleet, only rather worse. It is still less of a terminal for any road from the north . It connects with the east only through Stan- ford and the Horndon roads. To the north of it lay, completely cutting it off from any communication, the belt of marsh of which Mordyke is now the drainage line, and of which Orsett Fenn is the principal survival. We have, then, on the north, only Purfleet and Grays; and both must be rejected. On the south, however, there is a series of isolated natural wharves which approach the main tidal stream, and not only stand fairly steep-on to its rise and fall, but are further of a soil upon their surface which permitted travel and an easy approach to the river in early times. These are,counting from the sea-reaches upward : Gravesend, where the chalk comes right down to the Thames ; Greenhithe, where a tongue of the chalk j uts out and touches the water ; Erith, the point where the gravels, which some 56 r. 1 CH CROSSING OF THE THAMES mighty stream laid down when the rivers of Northern Europe were discharging ten, twenty, or a hundred times the flood they have to-day, first approach the existing stream. At Woolwich sand and gravel close- ly approach the river and line it for so con- siderable a distance as to afford the platform for a fairly large town. Next up-river the same formation of gravels gives at Green- wich a hard along the stream, and immedi- atel}^ above another spit of the same actual- ly touches the river at the point where used to stand the isolated village of Deptford. Now any one of these natural hards along the south bank of the Thames between Lon- don and the sea would have afforded an ex- cellent platform for the crossing of the river. It is true that the Thames is somewhat wid- er in its lower reaches than at the pool, but the difference was not so considerable as to balk those who first instituted the ferry and later the bridge of London . If one could cross the half-mile of water which lay before one at extreme high tides under the earliest con- 57 THE RIVER OF LONDON ditionsat Southwark, or bridge (as was done so long ago) the four hundred yards of the mainstream, there would have been no diffi- culty in dealing with the quarter of a mile at Deptf ord or at Greenhithe, nor even with the rather broader stream opposite Woolwich. Save perhaps by a bridge of boats, a per- manent crossing could not have been at- tempted at Erith or at Greenhithe, though the narrowing of the stream at Gravesend might well have allowed a more stable struc- ture to be estabhshed. At any rate, a crossing even so broad as that opposite Erith has no- where in Europe interfered with the passage of commerce, or of arms where both sides of a great stream lent themselves to such a pas- sage. But it is here that each one of the points I have mentioned is at fault. Oppo- site Gravesend as opposite Greenhithe, op- posite Erith as opposite Woolwich, Green- wich, and Deptf ord, there lies upon the nor- thern bank a belt of marsh which forbids traffic. Tilbury Fort, opposite Gravesend, stands upon a tiny circle of harder land, but 58 CROSSING OF THE THAMES all around it are the Chadwell and the Til- bury marshes. Greenhithe has right against it the projecting expanse of West Thurrock Marsh, Erith the whole breadth of Welling- ton and Rainham marshes ; and, as one ap- proaches London, and the river narrows, matters seem only to get worse. Woolwich faces the expanse of originally flooded soil between the Lea and the Roding, with the most of which even the economic forces making for the expansion of London have been able to do nothing, and of which so unpleasant a relic of its original condition is left in Plaistow Marshes to-day ; while opposite Greenwich and Deptford lay that perfectly impossible morass, which, though turned into water meadows by a river wall many centuries ago, is still perhaps the worst building ground within the London area. We call it the Isle of Dogs. The reader must not imagine this lack of any two opposing hards upon London River below the City to be due to some coincid- ence. It has a fairly obvious geographical 59 THE RIVER OF LONDON cause. Those points where the gravels and the chalk were touched by the scouring of the stream were naturally the outer cusp of its curves. The river having first deter- mined a bend to the south or to the north, would eat away more and more on the outer edge of those bends (which the stream al- ways follows both in flood and in ebb), and scour away the bank until it struck harder soils and was there checked. Deptford and Greenwich lie on the outer edge of the first great southern bend ; Woolwich on that of the second ; Erith on that of the third ; Greenhithe the fourth ; Gravesend the fifth ; while both Grays and Purfleet represent sim- ilar checks to the bends towards the north. Now it is evident that the same process which makes a river extend its curves out- ward more and more by the scouring the stream along the exterior edge leaves on the inside of the curve an increasing tongue or wedge of alluvial deposit. What we have, therefore, on the Lower Thames, the con- tinual opposition of marsh to the rare hards, 60 CROSSING OF THE THAMES is only what we should expect from the geo- logical history of the river, and the crossing place which was at last found is much more of a coincidence and accident than the ab- sence of a crossing place below. That crossing place was, of course, finally discovered opposite the steep gravel bank upon which the oldest part of the City of London is built. The land has been so often turned and re- turned in at least twenty centuries of build- ing that it is not easy to-day to reconstruct the original conditions of that crossing ; and, unless we look at all the evidence, slight as it is, it is easy to fall into errors upon it. Thus several writers upon this subject have often spoken as though the gravel-topped knoll upon which the original London stood was the sole factor in establishing the crossing, and I have myself fallen into the error of believing that the approach from the south could only be made over a long artificial causeway. A further consideration of the evidence, 6i THE RIVER OF LONDON and especially of that concerning surface soils to the south of the crossing, has con- vinced me (subject to yet further evidence which may appear) that the opportunity for a crossing near the site of London Bridge was almost as tempting from the south side as it was from the north. It is true that no considerable rise of land is to be discovered on the Southwark side until we have gone some distance from the river, and the con- tour lines do not, therefore, suggest an easy crossing at this spot. But much more im- portant than the lie of the land was the na- ture of the surface over which travel must proceed. The rocks across which a road is driven are not of the first importance in pri- mitive times, though they become import- ant, of course, when the road is expected to bear very great loads, or when it is so thor- oughly metalled that the presence of good stone in its neighbourhood has to be consi- dered. What is important to a primitive track is the immediate soil under foot, and if that be fairly hard and dry it can be quite 62 CROSSING OF THE THAMES shallow and yet sufficient for the purposes of travel. Thus, one can point out to many a path across the clay of the weald which picks its way from one shallow patch of sand, gravel, or stone to another, over country the main base of which is clay, and there is a similar example (with which I have dealt in another volume) *in the upper valleyof the riverWey . There, once the primitive track has left the chalk and come to the marshy alluvials of the lower levels, it picks its way in this fashion from one long strip of gravel to another ; and though these strips of gravel are shallow — mere casual drifts in many cases — they are sufficient for the purposes of the road. Now in the case of the crossing of the Thames at London, the new Geological Ordnance Sur- vey, as it gives the drift as well as the rocks, shows us that a spit of sandy gravel project- ed into the alluvial mud of the Thames val- ley j ust opposite the * * bluff "upon which the oldest part of London stands, and indeed * The Old Road, Constable & Co. 63 THE RIVER OF LONDON projected so far towards the stream that the last traces of it are not lost until beyond Guy's Hospital — that is, until within little more than a furlong of the present high-wa- termark. The causeway which might there- f orebe necessary to approachthe streamf rom the south in all states of the tide need only have been such a hardening of the track over the mud as is necessary between the high- and low-water mark of any tidal river whe- re a ferry is to be established, and we must believe that the river at high water washed the gravel spit. Upon the farther or northern bank traces of artificial embankment (indicating the ori- ginal limit of alluvial mud upon that side) have been found upon the line of Thames Street, and the Roman wall ran just to the north of it. The total width, then, which had to be negotiated at this point was one at the very most of seven hundred yards, and per- hapsmuchless than that, anditwasonewhich at high water was flanked to the south, as to the north , by a hard surface across which the river could be approached. 64 CROSSING OF THE THAMES No such conditions were to be discovered between this point and the sea, and, far in- land as this point was, it was therefore the lowest practicable crossing of the Thames. Thus it was that the Thames established London. It has alsobeen maintained that this cross- ing formed not only the first practicable way toonecomingupfromtheseaandseekingthe /oze^es/ passage of the Thames,but also that no practicable passage could be found for some considerable way up the river ei ther ; in other words, that the opportunity for going over the Thames near the site of London Bridge was an isolated and all the more valuable one from the absence of similar opportunities a- hove as well as helow it. We must be very careful before we accept such an argument. It is as certain as infer- ence can make it that an original crossing, perhaps older than that of London, passed the Thames in the neighbourhood of Lam- beth Bridge. The road which the Romans made or straightened from the south-east, 65 E THE RIVER OF LONDON that is, the first great main road from the Straits of Dover to the north, the WatUng Street, points directly to this spot, and the presence of good going on the south bank at least strengthens the conjecture, coupled as it is with the antiquity of Westminster as an inhabited site, and the long-established ferry which plied for centuries from the neighbourhood of Lambeth Palace to the opposing " Horseferry " Road. The formation of the surface-soil in this neighbourhood is well worthy of study. Immediately in the bounds of Lambeth Church and Palace the superficial hard gravels (which have been approaching the river for two miles and leaving a belt of marsh to their right or north) touch the stream. Not quite opposite, but nearly so — quite nearly enough for the establish- ment of a ferry — the large isolated patch of gravel which lay between the two mouths of the old brooks and which sup- ported the nucleus of Westminster affords a good landing-place. It is true that there 66 CROSSING OF THE THAMES is (or was) a patch of bad ground immedi- ately to the north of this gravel, but very- soon the rising ground which is now marked by Constitution Hill and Grosvenor Gar- dens gave good going and led the track up, nearly coincident with Park Lane, to " Ty- burn," whence the Watling Street makes straight for the north and west along the line of the modern Edgware Road. For a mile or two farther up, until the gravel in Chelsea was reached, opposite the steep land of Battersea crossing may have been difficult, but between Battersea and Chelsea it was certainly as easy in early times, or easier than at London Bridge, and after that, of course, as one goes westward the pas- sage of the river becomes easier and easier until on the present western limits of London, at Brentford, you have what is almost cer- tai nly an original ford across the river, at low tide at least, and one which some authorities have regarded as the crossing place of Julius Caesar. It is not, therefore, because the crossing 67 THE RIVER OF LONDON at London is unique — it is, on the contrary, but the last of a long series of crossings — it is because it is the lowest crossing of the Thames that it came to be of such capital importance in the history of this island. Up- on it converge the great military road from Chichester and the Great Port, the still more important road from the Kentish ports, and in particular from the Straits of Dover, the road from Shoreham going directly north- ward, of which such slight but such conclus- ive evidence has been discovered. These from the south — while from the north the great eastern road from Colchester and the corn-lands of Essex, the northern road with its branches to the ports and to the corn- lands of East Anglia , the north-western road from the garrison at Chester with its branch to the arable lands of Lancashire, past the fortress of Manchester, andeventhe western road from Bath and from the mines of the Mendip and from the garrison of Caerleon, all converge. Once this scheme of ways had been estab- 68 CROSSING OF THE THAMES lished (and they were certainly all complete before the end of the fourth century), once London had thus become the hub of awheel of such spokes and the centre of such a web, the Thames which had made it, making also its commerce from the sea and its value as a point of transhipment between inland and sea-borne traffic, assured its eminence over all the other towns of the island. I will not here repeat the arguments which I have dealt with in other studies, and which are advanced in defence of various hypoth- etical dates for the first building of the bridge. Its establishment across the river marked, of course, the completion of the process whereby London was produced. For once the bridge was there it was a necessary terminal to sea-borne traffic, and a conveni- ent one to inland traffic ; it was the military communication between north and south, and the commercial one as well. I will close by distinguishing between the very few pieces of actual evidence and the presump- tion built upon them. 69 THE RIVER OF LONDON We have a line of Roman remains point- ing to a place upon the northern bank, some- what to the east of London Bridge and al- most coincident with the opening of the sub- way. Opposite it we have the old landing place near * * S toney Lane ' ' which is supposed to indicate a southern causeway meeting this identical causeway from the north. Be- tween the two there may have been in early Roman times a ferry. On the other hand, we have the Stane Street pointing directly at the southern terminal of old London Bridge (a trifle to the east of the modern bridge)and we have the undoubted presence of that bridge through the Dark Ages, which did not, as a rule, possess any considerable monument which they had not inherited from Rome. We have, further, the fact that the earliest line traceable for the Roman town puts Lon- don Bridge nearly at its centre ; and again the fact that on the line of the bridge certain Roman relics have been unearthed or fished up. In the absence of more positive evidence 70 CROSSING OF THE THAMES we may take it as sufficient for history that in the natural course of things a ferry pro- bably preceded the bridge, yet the bridge existed, if not when the Romans came, at any rate shortly after their occupation.* Thus it was, then, that the River of Lon- don seems to have made London. The Thames was so situated in the is- land that a crossing place of a permanent sort had to be established as far down the stream as possible. This place was found where the stream was still broad, tidal, and a port. Once bridged the same spot would mark the terminal of sea-borne traffic and the place of exchange between foreign and domestic produce, while the roads radiat- ing north and south from such a crossing would further establish its pre-eminence. But that pre-eminence was, from some very early period, commercial. The first mentionof London in recorded history, the *The arguments with regard to the age of the bridge and the earliest position of the crossing will be found set out in their most recent form and most fully by Mr. R. A. Smith, F.S.A,, in the first volume of London in the Victoria County Histories. 71 THE RIVER OF LONDON phrase of Tacitus, speaks of the town par- ticularly as a market. As a market London hasgrown, and as a market it is still chiefly eminent. But London is a market only be- cause it is a port, and it is the port of the Thames. In that aspect I will next con- sider the connection between the town and its river. IV LONDON THE PORT OF THE THAMES LONDON THE PORT OF THE THAMES THAT A TOWN WOULD GROW UP on the lowest crossing of the Thames, once that crossing with its bridge or ferry was definitely established, is obvious enough. That this town would be important and large if there were a sufficient development of po- pulation and culture in the island is equally obvious. Both consequences would natur- ally follow from the topography of Britain. But that this town should become of such high importance in the European scheme and of such overwhelming importance in the national scheme ; further, that this town should soon grow to be the second town in size of Western Europe, and at last by far the first, is not so immediate a conclusion from the known topographical conditions which brought it into being. That moral and mate- rial growth of London is due, of course, to the supremacy which London enjoyed and enj oys as a place of commerce. It is Londonas a market, and as a market the port of which was the Thames, which we must next con- 75 THE RIVER OF LONDON sider, and we must ask ourselves upon what so considerable and historical a phenomenon has been based. The matter is usually dis- missed by an affirmation lacking analysis and still more lacking proof. Our text-books are too often satisfied with telling us that **the exceptionally favourable position of London as a commercial centre" was at the root of the town's greatness. The affirma- tion is perfectly true, but it does not provide its own explanation nor satisfy our curiosity as to why this position should have meant so much. I think, indeed, that most observant peo- ple in reading this or similar phrases must, if they had any knowledge of the map, have been struck with the apparent disadvan- tages under which a site such as that of London suffers. It has not behind it a vast hinterland from which it should be able to gather raw material for export, nor is it a natural outlet for the various products of several different regions as is, for instance, the region surrounding the mouths of the 76 THE PORT OF THE THAMES Rhine. It is not central to the European scheme as Lyons was for so many centuries, and Paris for so many centuries more. It lies a long way up its stream from the sea. No system of converging waterways uni- tes in its neighbourhood. There seems at first sight, therefore, no reason why London should have obtained more than a local im- portance. When we consider its advantages as a gen- eral meeting-place for varied foreign com- mercial interests, a first view will profit us little. London is on no general European highway but lies ex-centric to Europe far upon the north and west of the general area which European culture covers ; nor does its more central position since the discovery of the New World avail the argument, for the greatness of London was planted and its future continuance assured long before Europeans had known and developed the Western Continent. London, again, does not seem to invite commerce by lying upon the frontier common to two civilisations ; it does 77 THE RIVER OF LONDON not lie upon any economic boundary line as do the cities of the Levant and notably the cities of Palestine. It is, if we consider the economics of commerce during at any rate the first 1500 years of our era, almost at the edge of the world. To explain the supremacy of London as a market more than one thesis is put forward for general acceptance which must, I think, be condemned. Thus we have the thesis that London occupies the position it does because it is almost in the centre of the land hemisphere. As a matter of fact the actual centre of that hemisphere is not far from the neighbourhood of Falmouth, and is at any rate within the limits of Britain. If we trace upon a globe a great circle or " equator " so as to include the greatest mass of land sur- face possible, we find our south ern ports, and London amongst them, to he near the Pole of such an Equator, and this argument has been of some weight with those who have not paused to consider what that " land hemisphere " means. If the climate of the 78 THE PORT OF THE THAMES world were everywhere equal and most of its soil equally productive, then the fact that the great estuary of the Thames lay almost central to the greatest mass of land would have its importance — though the mouths both of the Seine and of the Scheldt, of the Rhine, and for that matter of the Elbe, would not be so far distant as to explain the pecu- liar supremacy of London. But in the first place the most part of that mass of land did not enter into the commercial scheme until quite modern times, and secondly, the variations of its climate and of its produc- tivity destroy the theory. Not far to the north of our port (relatively to so great a thing as the planet) lies that vast circle of uninhabited or hardly habitable frozen land which is not only almost useless for the pur- poses of exchange, but which also bars any passage of commerce across it. Not so very far to the south, again, runs the belt of des- ert east and west across Africa and Asia, the worst part of which, the widest, is also the nearest to us and is called the Sahara, It is of 79 THE RIVER OF LONDON little use to have a central position between, say, J apan upon the one side and Cape Town upon the other, if the Greek Circle which connects us with Japan passes, as it does, through the Polar Ice. There are certain central positions which explain the supre- macy of some particular site, but these posi- tions are nearly always central to limited areas over which travel is uninterrupted. The great market of Nijni Novgorod in Rus- sia is an example of this sort. Chicago in the United States of America is another. But London is no parallel to such cases as these, so far as the world or even Europe is concerned. It is fairly centra"" (as we shall see) to what was once the chief wealth of England : it is ex-centric to all else. Still less will the many arguments based upon fairly modern conditions solve the pro- blem which confronts us. Thus the great export trade of modern England is mainly based upon coal. But the estuary of the Thames is not a natural place of export for coal. The political relations which necessar- 80 THE PORT OF THE THAMES ily bind this country to-day to other coun- tries of the same speech throughout the New World have a vast effect in continuing and expanding our oversea exchanges, but all the ports natural to such ties lie upon our south or west. London does not face the New World. It looks away from it. The truth is that the singular position of the Lower Thames as a terminal for interna- tional commerce, and of its port as an inter- national market, must be sought in a med- ley of causes, the chief of which fall into two clear categories. We have first the causes which made London what it was before the transformation of commerce through the dis- coveries of the Renaissance and the later gigantic expansion which reposes upon mo- dern facilities of communication . Once Lon- don is thus established as the second great city of the West, we have the later causes which permit it to continue in the enjoy- ment of that position, and to nourish it un- til the city whose port was the Thames be- came not the second but by far the first of 8i F THE RIVER OF LONDON all the great markets in wealth, population, and shipping. I will take these two sets of causes separ- ately. As to the first, what made the greatness of the Thames as a port for London, and of London, therefore, as a market before the modern era of geographical discovery ? A natural market exists only where two natural conditions are present : ease of ap- proach from without, and what may be cal- led draining power from within. I mean by ease of approach from without a natural facility for the arrival of goods from areas of production foreign to those of the market. And I mean by ' ' draining power from within " some topographical or other condition which makes domestic produce run naturally towards the one centre of this market. To these two natural conditions must be added two further political ones : first, one must have such a society connected with that market as gives it security, and, second- 82 THE PORT OF THE THAMES ly, such a society as is organised by its activ- ity and adventure for production or for ex- change, or for both. Now all these four conditions London enjoyed from a very early time. I have pointed out elsewhere, and shall point out again in these pages, the nature of the poli- tical security which London has enjoyed for so many centuries. It did not lie in any particularly peaceful character peculiar to the country as a whole, for while London was grov/ing to greatness England was a continu- al theatre of domestic war . It lay in the great size which the city had attained, coupled with the breadth of its stream, and in its numerical proportion to the general popula- tion of which it was the capital. The fact that London was never besieged or sacked depended upon these characters, and they in turn, therefore, guaranteed that local se- curity which is the first political necessity of a great and continuous market. As to the commercial and productive character of the inhabitants of Britain, it es- 83 THE RIVER OF LONDON capes any material analysis. We must pos- tulate it as a constant fact running through the known and recorded centuries of our history, and we may ascribe it according as we more love ease or veracity to whatever cause we feel most flattering or most true. No proof is possible. We can only say in this respect that certain areas of Europe have shown these characters for greater or less periods of time, and that others equally well endowed have not shown them, but have shown other characters perhaps as valuable. The main fact in this connection is that whether the productive areas of Great Bri- tain were exporting raw material (as dur- ing the most active centuries of the Middle Ages, when wool was our chief export), or whether (as later became the case) manu- factured articles and coal were the stand-by of our oversea trade ; whether we consider the period before or after the development of our carrying trade ; whether we are con- cerned with an industrial or an agricultural England ; whether we are observing late 84 THE PORT OF THE THAMES centuries in which the Enghsh showed a pas- sionate interest in novelty and foreign ad- venture, or far more numerous early cen- turies in which they were indifferent to dis- tant voyages — throughout the whole story with all its changes the productive area of the island has always maintained a high stand- ard of wealth in comparison with its neigh- bours and its aptitude for exchange has al- ways been equally high. It is a point often neglected that the Nor- man Conquest, though of course it intro- duced a new and much more developed cul- ture than Saxon England had possessed, did not find an impoverished land which the newcomers might " develop." It found an exceedingly wealthy country according to the standards of the time; and the extent and variety of that wealth stands out very clearly in the narrative of contemporaries. Four centuries later, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, foreign observers make pre- cisely the same comment. It is the packed wealth of South England filling its com- 85 THE RIVER OF LONDON paratively small area which the foreign en- voy notes. We have a striking piece of evid- ence surviving before our eyes in the number, decoration and amplitude of our churches to which I have already alluded. To continue the proof after the Tudors would be superfluous. There was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found inthe seventeenth century,the close of which we have unhappily seen in our own genera- tion, when the wealth of England was so su- perior to that of any other rival that the ma- terial circumstances of life among the weal- thier classes of the country seemed to be- long to a different world from that of neigh- bouring nations, and when the economic su- premacy of England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend. London, then, for all these centuries has enjoyed the two political conditions neces- sary to the establishment of a chief market, security and a productive area in the hands of a race by its genius inclined to exchange. 86 THE PORT OF THE THAMES There remain the two natural conditions : ease of approach from without and "drain- ing power" from within. Now when we turn to these natural condi- tions we find that in the matter of ease of approach the Thames was unrivalled. Lon- don was, of course, far from the sea — a point with which I will deal in a moment — but there was no haven north of the Mediter- ranean which called so readily for commerce upon a large scale. Given the political con- ditions for a market — security and active powers of production and exchange — the Thames was as good a highway to that mar- ket as any that could be found. No vessels until quite modern times had to consider their draught or fear the entry of the river (at least, through channels which the pilots commanded), and once within the inland water a swinging tide was at the service of the ships. There were, within that inland stretch, no obstacles, no high intervening hills to becalm, no narrows or islands. In this ease of access, again, must be reck- 87 THE RIVER OF LONDON oned the position of the Thames relatively to opposing ports. The wide funnel opened at a few hours' sail from all that lineof ports which begins with the mouth of the Seine and ends with the northernmost mouths of the Rhine. What we now call the coasts of Normandy, Picardy, Flanders, Belgium, and Holland lay, even at their extremes, within one double tide of the Thames. It is true that they also lay equally con- venient to anyone of the lesser havens upon the Sussex, the Kent, the Essex, or the Nor- folk coasts, but the ample space afforded by the river, the opportunity for a crowd of shipping, coupled with opportunities for inland trading, were to be found nowhere else in the south and east of the island as they were to be found up London River. In this connection the use of the tide should be noted. By a peculiarity which has not been without its effect upon the history of the river the flood carries a man past the Kentish coast long past high water and indeed until a moment verv close to that 88 In '-^f- i i ■^ 3 Q 2 ^ M ^ m ^ W 4 > '^ a! a O im THE PORT OF THE THAMES in which another tide, that from the North Sea, carries its sweep of water up the river. Thus, though the tide reach high water shortly after noon in Dover Harbour, a man outside will carry the stream with him all up past the Kentish coast until close upon five o'clock. He has but to get round Longnoseandhe finds this other tide serving him — a tide that hasbeenmakingfrom three o'clock or thereabouts, coming in from the North Sea, and that will carry him right up river as long as the wind or daylight per- mits him to follow it ; a tide that does not reach its height at Gravesend until eight that evening, or in the Poolof London until nine. In other words, the River of London afford- ed to the vessel coming in from the south a double tide which, clever picked up, gave a continuous voyage from the Channel right down into the sheltered water inland. At this point it is interesting to consider why the principal harbours of the Middle Ages, in the north and west of Europe, at least, and upon tidal seas, so constantly de- 89 THE RIVER OF LONDON veloped not upon the coast itself, but at some distance up a stream or creek and inland. Consider the examples: Havre comes late in the development of the Seine — the original port is Harfleur ; Bristol stands up a tortuous and narrow channel well inland, and not upon the estuary of the Severn at all; Liverpool had its first nucleus four miles from the open sea; Preston quite twelve; Chester more than twenty, of which the last five or six were a narrow river above the estuary; Nantes is another striking exam- ple — something like one day's sail from the sea ; Antwerp, Rotterdam — Bruges itself lying those few miles inland upon its canal — follow the general rule ; and so does Nor- wich, and so does Colchester, and so does Boston, and so does Glasgow ; Bordeaux tells the same story, and so does the Royal Harbour of Montreuil. And in general, while a great number of smaller ports rose upon the very coast of the Atlantic, the North Sea, or the Channel, there seemed to be, until 90 THE PORT OF THE THAMES modern times at least, a tendency for the main depots of sea-borne commerce to lie thus inland. Why was it ? We can only guess, but I would suggest that three factors combined to establish such a state of things : First, the little boats used for inland transport and the vehicles dependent upon roads and therefore upon bridges would seek a place of trans-ship- ment at some point upon the river where it had not yet become too broad or too rough, and so long as this place was accessible from the sea, the higher up river it was the better for them. Next must be counted the security of a perfectly land-locked harbour for the small- er craft, which formed so much the largest part of maritime transport. A perfectly land-locked natural harbour upon the coast was a very rare thing. Let the stretch of water be only of the size of Southampton Water at its mouth, or of the Solent, and they would be wrecked in a high wind, but rivers everywhere afforded a secure protec- 91 THE RIVER OF LONDON tion when once one had entered their nar- row channel. Thirdly, we must consider the advantage which such sites presented against the at- tacks of pirates, and the better opportuni- ties for defence which a considerable in- land town possessed, with its resources in the surrounding fields and population over the smaller seaports. In considering the first of these points we must remember that there was always a tendency for the central depot or main com- mercial town to arise somewhat inland and to be served by subsidiary ports, if there were no direct access to it by water — and even if there were. Canterbury is an exam- ple of this, so is Winchester, so is Amiens, and so is Arras, and so is Caen, and so is Rennes, and a host of others. In balancing the various advantages of- fered by various sites for the establishment of a market, a preponderating advantage must always be a position lying in the midst 92 THE PORT OF THE THAMES of several centres of production, and, since man is a land animal, these sites would nor- mally lie inland. When they were served by a river so much the better; when they were served by a great and secure river, they could not fail to grow as London has grown. As part of this ease of access must be reck- oned, the peculiar character of the Thames, much more open to the wind than the Seine, not blocked by any island, affording once within the estuary a constant depth amply sufficient for all vessels until quite recent times. But all this would not have given London its place had not a city established at the lowest crossing of the Thames exercised in a peculiar degree that '* draining power " of which I have spoken. We have seen how the system of British roads necessarily converged upon London, and if we consider one or two other fea- tures in English topography, we shall see why London provides a common depot for nearly the whole of English exports in a fa- 93 THE RIVER OF LONDON shion which no other city could show for any other equally large area of production. Before the north of England was indus- trialised, three things were mainly required to establish what I have called the "drain- ing " power of any market in the island. First, that it should be fairly central to all the south and Midlands ; secondly, that it should afford a convenient centre of de- mand for various foreign products; thirdly, that it should be as close as possible to such continental markets as principally re- ceived our export. Given those three conditionscombined in any one place, and so far as the great mass of Britain was concerned, a point would be established to which would flow the main part of the produce which the Continent de- sired to purchase by exchange. Observe how all these three conditions coincide in the case of London and of that Lower Thames which was its port. When I say with regard to the first con- dition that the point we are seeking must be 94 THE PORT OF THE THAMES "central" to the south and east of the Is- land and to the Midlands, I am using a word which needs expansion. I mean that we must have a point to which the communica- tions of commerce already lead, and one not too ex-centric to the area tapped. Now at the first glance at the map Lon- don does give an impression of ex-centric- ity, of lying upon one side : and that to- wards the east and the south. But when we begin to consider certain qualifying conditions, we shall find that London is fairly central, even geometrically, to the area in question, and that, when we are considering the economic " weight " of the various parts of this area, London may by a metaphor be said to be near the " cen- tre of gravity " of such an area. Cut off, in the first place, the Dumnonian Peninsula — that is, Devon and Cornwall, — the Welsh Highlands, and the Pennines. Consider (that is) South England, East An- glia, and the Midlands. You have an area roughly square, and about two hundred miles every way. 95 THE RIVER OF LONDON In drawing such a square, take for your extreme points Chester on the north-west, a point midway between Portland and Ex- mouth on the south-west ; upon the north- east a point a httle north of Cromer, and up- on the south-east a point in the Straits of Dover, a trifle west of the hne between Dun- geness and Boulogne, Such a square includes a good deal that is outside our area, much of the estuary of the Severn, a strip of the Channel, a wedge of the North Sea and of the Wash, and a wedge of Pennine land to the north ; but it also excludes a certain amount properly within our area as some of the rich- est parts of Kent and of Norfolk and Suffolk. We may therefore take this square for a fair average, and we shall see that even upon the test of distance London is not so ex-centric as might be imagined. Draw the two dia- gonals of this square, and you will find that London lies upon one of them at a distance of less than forty miles from the centre. When we consider something more than distance and think of London as the ' ' centre 96 aKiSBiffiaca^'y^'css'.iia,:,: 3i THE PORT OF THE THAMES of gravity" of the Midlands, the east and the south, we find it still more central for the centuries immediately preceding our own. Their staple export was wool. The pasturage of the chalk ranges runs right round London in the Chilterns and their extension into East Anglia, in the north and south Downs and the Uplands of Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Dorset. London is the obvious centre of all that triangle of chalk. It is again nearly equi-distant from the principal markets of Norfolk, of the Upper Trent valley, of Dor- set, and of the Cotswolds. If we treat as exceptions the Lancashire and Yorkshire Plains (each with their local ports), the Vale Royal and the Lower Severn (each with its local port at Chester and at Bristol) , London is very near the commercial centre of gravity of what remains. We must not forget that the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain are but a few miles more distant from Lon- don Bridge than is the extremity of Kent. From the town of Pewsey to London Bridge as the crow flies is almost exactly eighty- 97 G THE RIVER OF LONDON eight miles. From the South Foreland the distance is not ten miles less. It needs but a slightly longer radius to include all the War- wickshire Midlands and very nearly all the county of Norfolk : all, of course, of Suffolk, ofEssex,ofKent,Sussex,Surrey,andHamp- shire. London is geographically and commerci- ally central at any rate to the older Eng- land — which was all that was needed for its establishment. It was even more central when regarded as a nexus of communications. How all the main roads centred there we have already seen. The roads alone would have given London a pre-eminence as a market above all other towns in Britain even if the Thames had dried up after their establishment. But the position was mean- while further strengthened by the condi- tions of water carriage ; and it is here that the meaning of the Thames as a whole ap- pears, and the way in which the upper as well as the lower river has built up the great- ness of London. 98 THE PORT OF THE THAMES I have no space to show why and how water carriage was of supreme importance both in primitive times (that is, before the Roman civihsation came) and during the Dark Ages through which, in spite of de- chne, it survived. It should be sufficient to point out that in the dechne of a civihsation, or in its absence, water carriage — suited to heavy burdens, requiring no repair of ways, and providing a mode of traction ready- made — is, wherever it is available, the chief economic factor of commerce. Now when we recognise that the bulk of English wealth lay for centuries south and east of a line drawn from Exmouth to the Wash, and when we appreciate what the Thames valley is in that triangle, we shall see how necessarily the main market of the Thames was also the main market of Eng- land. The natural water communications of the south consist in a number of small streams, only one of which, the Salisbury Avon, may have been navigable for more than a dozen miles or so inland. East An- 99 THE RIVER OF LONDON glia was better served, and particularly the northern area, which was drained by the three rivers converging upon Breydon Water. The northern part of that area was also fairly well served by the three parallel rivers of the Ouse, the Nen, and the Wel- land, but their service as a means of com- munication was handicapped by the nature of their entry into the sea through the Fens, and after that through the perils,sandbanks, and shallows of the Wash ; while the good service of rivers along all the East Anglian coast had this drawback : that, as we there have nothing but a series of short systems, there was no water connection between one group of short valleys and another, not even one thought-out road. A dozen streams will carry produce from the sea to Worstead, to Norwich, to Beccles, to what was once the considerable port of Orford, to Ipswich, to Colchester, etc. But each avenue is a separ- ate avenue. There is no "trunk" connect- ing the system. With the Thames it is otherwise. Glance 100 THE PORT OF THE THAMES down the valley and see how one point after another, each the natural market of a whole district of its own, drains the produce from the north and the south of the river, to discharge it upon the main stream. From Lechlade (up to which point ran the ** mea- sure and the bushel of London")* through Oxford, Abindgon, Wallingford, Reading, Marlow, the Middle Hythe (which we now call Maidenhead), and Windsor, you have a whole string of such centres, each gathering its own section's produce from its scheme of roads, or of subsidiary streams, and turning the mass down seaward upon the " trunk " afforded by the Thames. The Thames, therefore, with London as its port of transhipment between the inland communications and the sea, tapped the very heart of all that was wealthiest in Eng- * The reader may see quoted in full in Sir Laurence Gomme's The Governance of London (p. 346) the pre- cedents upon which Coke founded his opinion in 1597, including the verdict of 29 Ed. I., concerning in particu- lar the portage of salt upon the Thames. "Quod nullus mensuarius sit de London usque Lach- enlade nisi dicti mensuarii et bushelli de Ripa Reginae." lOI THE RIVER OF LONDON land for fifteen hundred years, and all that commerce by river as by road drained upon London because London was "central" to exchange in the rich south and east of the island. But, as we have seen, two further charac- ters were attached to "draining" power. We must not only seek a point central for communications, we must also seek a point where there was a ready demand for import and a ready access to the best foreign mar- kets. Let us consider these two characters in their order : A ready demand for import must exist either in a port itself or behind it, if that port is to develop into a great town and to acquire political importance. You have many instances, especially in contemporary commerce, of ports which do little more than export, and of other ports in which there is no demand for import, but which merely serve to pass the import inland. In the first case the international exchange is effected 102 THE PORT OF THE THAMES through imports at some other point The clearing between export and import is a paper clearing, and the ships at the export point arrive in ballast — a drawback. In the second place, though a town may grow to some importance as a mere place of tran- shipment, it will never acquire the import- ance of a capital nor even of a great city- it will never have a great political place un- less, round the handling of its imports des- tined for the interior, there grows up a con- siderable local power of demand for values. In other words, something of the imports transmitted through the town must " stick on the way." Modern Liverpool is a good ex- ample of this. The primary economic func- tion of modern Liverpool is still the tran- shipment of cotton to Lancashire just be- yond its boundaries, but in the pursuit of this function Liverpool has claimed its tri- bute for now three generations, and so vast an accumulation of other activitities con- nected with the port has grown up that even the digging of the Manchester Ship Canal, 103 THE RIVER OF LONDON the effect of which was so much feared in Liverpool, seems to have been, if anything, a benefit to that town. What proportion the power of demand exercised for imported goods in Liverpoolitself may bear to the total of values entering the port cannot be exactly calculated, but it is safe to say that the toll levied is not much less than one-fifth. Now when to this power of demand creat- ed by the " sticking " at the point of tran- shipment or port of import, of goods coming from abroad, there is added the power of de- mand caused by the residence of govern- ment, of a court and of wealthy men apart from those who are wealthy through com- merce, you get, of course, a very highly in- creased power of demand which makes of the port of import a speciall}/ great econom- ic centre. A ship coming to such a port in order to take on board there the export in which it deals, can enter loaded with im- ports which are sure of a ready market. It so happens that London during all the centuries of its growth, and especially dur- 104 :l THE PORT OF THE THAMES ing those four hundred years of the Middle Ages which chiefly established itsgreat posi- tion, was in exactly this position. Not only was it, as modern Liverpool is, a point of transhipment round which a vast quantity of subsidiary activities had grown, it was also close to the more or less permanent resi- dence of the court, to what became the per- manent seat of legislature, and to what was very early the permanent seat of the central courts of justice. Theprocesscontinued un- interruptedly. After the loot of the church land of the endowments of the poor under the Tudors, the great palaces of the new ar- istocracy lined the Strand, and from the ear- ly seventeenth century — when this process was completed — onwards, the power of de- mand exercised by London alone and its loc- al call for imports, has never ceased to grow, until to-day the position of London as an importing centre is due almost entirely to this character, next to its value as a clear- ing house : It is now only in a much less de- gree a point of transhipment. 105 THE RIVER OF LONDON The type of goods for which this local power of demand existed had also a very- great effect in helping the growth of London through the traffic of the Thames. Perhaps the principal import of the Mid- dle Ages in value was that of wine. It was a luxurious import for which there was a local demand, especially where you had the residence of the wealthier people, and, what was exceedingly important, it was an im- port large in bulk. It meant that ships would come either in great numbers or in heavy tonnage, and this in itself suggested Lon- don as a place of export for their return, made a speculative voyage to London worth taking, and developed the warehousing space and the wharf space of the port. Later came coal, later still the tropical products, and last of all the great passenger traffic. But in every stage of the development Lon- don has exercised a local power of demand for that kind of import which demanded bulk in storage. As to the second point, the easy access io6 THE PORT OF THE THAMES to the foreign port whither export was to be made, London was again especially favour- ed, in its point of growth. To-day it is no longer so, as we shall see in a moment. Lon- don is going forward with the momentum of its past. But until quite modern times London looked more favourably at the points to which England exported than did the other island ports, its rivals. It lay in the full focus of that long curve of the Norman, the Picard, the Flemish and Dutch coasts, which were the principal markets of the Middle Ages. Right opposite were the Flemish cities that bought English wool — the staple export — right opposite, also, the mouths of the Rhine for communication with the interior Germanics and, though a little more distant than the northern ports, agreeable to all that Baltic and North Sea trade which grew up with the close of the Middle Ages. The league of mercantile towns called Hanseatic had its depot in London from the middle of the thirteenth century. The northern ports of England that lie a 107 THE RIVER OF LONDON little nearer had no hinterland to feed their commerce, and London was, moreover, the best clearing-house and centre of general exchange for them in all the north and west. In this character it surpassed even Bruges. When all these conditions changed — when the discovery of the New World, and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country industries and one hun- dred other factors had taken away from the site of London its old topographical sup- remacy, the port was so fii mly established that it provided its own sources of vitality. It is always so in the economic affairs of a town or of a nation. Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the mid- dle period of their growth ; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish themselves. The River of London to-day is the capital example of this truth out of all Europe. A basin far too small for modern commerce, ly- ing much too distantly up a river too narrow for modern commercial needs, dangerous of entry for ships of modern draft, and needing io8 THE PORT OF THE THAMES perpetual and enormous labour to keep it properly open, none the less preserves its place at the head of the ports of the world. As a depot for commerce its wharves and docks extend to Tilbury, and that system of clear- ing which grew up naturally on the low gravel height above London Bridge, when the pool held all the shipping of the place and was a large and secure harbour, is still established on that same hill in the shape of the banks and the exchanges of the City of London, which cancel the exchanges, not of the pool below, but of I know not what fraction of the shipping of the whole world. There is one last point to be considered in connection with London river as a port. It has been well made by Mr. Lyde in one of his short but remarkable geographical studies. The estuary of the Thames exact- ly faces that great and permanent frontier line between two parts of our European culture, upon either side of which lie con- trasting speeches, traditions, and even re- ligions. 109 THE RIVER OF LONDON That frontier roughly divides such areas of Western Europe as have continuously preserved the traditions of the Roman Em- pire from outer regions to the east and to the north, which only received the Christian religion and the Roman civilisation after the breakdown of central authority exer- cised from the Imperial city. The estuary of the Thames opens like a funnel just opposite the point where this frontier between what some would call the " Teutonic " and " Latin " areas, reaches the sea. It may not be at first sight apparent why a position of this kind is of capital com- mercial importance. The reason is rather moral than material, though it has its ma- terialelement in the cheapness andexpedi- tion of carriage by sea. Areas which differ in the type of their cul- ture tend to become polarised one towards the other for the purposes of exchange. Each will tend to produce something that the other lacks. Now the exchange be- ne THE PORT OF THE THAMES tween two such areas will, of course, pro- ceed actively enough across innumerable points lying upon the frontier between them, but it will not penetrate very far in- land, if there is in competition with the in- land routes a water route. Thus Arras will exchange easily enough with, say, Aix-la- Chapelle, Metz with Treves or Frankfort, but what of Rouen and the Baltic, Bor- deaux and the Frisian Lowlands, Brittany and Vendee and the German Plain ? It is evident that if no friction existed a direct sea-borne commerce along the north-west- ern coasts of Europe would effect these exchanges; but there does exist a friction, especially in early times, consisting in the ignorance and, as it were, the credulity, separating places so far distant in mileage and, what is more important, in culture. If, then, a half-way house is found suffici- ently familiar to either party, that half- way house will tend to become in this new aspect out of so many, a centre of ex- change — and this is precisely what hap- III THE RIVER OF LONDON pened to London. The North Sea and the Baltic were familiar with London — but then so was the Channel and the Bay of Biscay. London river attracted in this fa- shion a sheaf of trade routes, drawn from the north and east, another from the south and west. And so true is this that to the present day, and in one curious slight but emphatic modern instance, you can see the process at work. Travellers intent upon no purpose of commerce but merely upon an excursion will leave London river for Bou- logne and Calais, sometimes for Dieppe and Havre ; other travellers will leave the same facility of egress for the Scheldt and the Rhine and the Dutch ports and the Elbe. But, unless I am mistaken, the more obvi- ous track of a passenger steamer route be- tween the French ports and the Belgian, Dutch, and German ones does not exist save in the case of the great liners which touch at Cherbourg. A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by sea or from some lower French port to, say, Amster- 112 TWICKENHAM FERRY THE PORT OF THE THAMES dam, would very probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one : but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this 'facing' of London River towards the great political frontier line of Europe, wasofcapital importance. Scandinavia, the Baltic, Frisia, and the Dutch ports had all known their way to London for centuries when the Norman Conquest, and still more the succeeding Angevin monarchy, brought round into London River a new wealth of trade from the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne. In all that has preceded we have been considering London as the creation of the river in its civil aspect alone ; it remains to consider the town and the stream in their effect upon the military history of the country, and to that I shall now turn. 113 H V LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE THE LAST HISTORICAL ASPECT IN which we must consider the River of Lon- don is the military aspect ; and this aspect has three clearly marked divisions. We have first to consider the Lower Thames as an avenue of invasion; next as an obstacle to invasion of the northern part of the is- land, or to the passage of the troops from the north to the south. Thirdly, we must estimate what effect upon the military his- tory of the country London itself has had, commanding as it does the lowest crossing of the Thames, always forming a vast base of supply, and for centuries by its stores and munitions forming an ally or an enemy of capital importance to whichever party it supported so long as warfare was waged in England. Thefirst two of these considerations are very sharply defined not only in their nat- ure, but also in the historical periods over which each one predominated. TheThames as an avenue of ingress or invasion belongs 117 THE RIVER OF LONDON to the earlier part of English history. The importance of the lower river in this cate- gory ends very nearly with the close of the Dark Ages. Its second character, that of an obstacle to the invader who would go northward or to troops marching from the north southward, in the main is discover- able of course throughout history, but chiefly belongs to the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. I will take these three points, therefore, in their order and deal first with the invasions of England which the Lower Thames has served. These in- vasions from the first recorded case of the almost to the last maybe grouped together under one description. They were the raids of the pirates. It is true that these raids became, as the Dark Ages developed and the true Middle Ages approached, better and better organised, more definitely pol- itical and dynastic in plan, until at last they took on the character of regular war- fare. But from the beginning to the end of the process we have little or no use of the ii8 THE THAMES IN WARFARE Thames on the part of regular forces pro- ceeding from the ancient civiHsation of the Continent, from Gaul, or from the mouths of the Rhine. The whole story is a story of invasion from the outer and barbarian lim- its of Europe, that is, from the North Sea and the confines of the Baltic. The early pirate raids upon this island, which were first called Saxon, hundreds of years later Dane, but which had through the whole of the Dark Ages much of one char- acter of purposeless devastation, used the Thames for one of their chief entries. The earlier and less powerful raids seem to have made nothing of London. It was too much for them. But the later and worse tempest of the eighth and ninth and tenth centuries had London for their main object when they forced the river, and since it is a piece of his- tory very little explored, it is worth a mo- ment's digression here. What were the conditions under which the pirates conducted their raids upon the waterway ? 119 THE RIVER OF LONDON First let us establish a little list of what was certainly known with regard to these attempts. Of the first Saxon raids in connection with the Thames we know nothing. Even the dis- torted legends set down hundreds of Jyears afterwards only preserve a recollection of a landing in Kent, in Thames, and the fight- ing that follows them is upon land and south of the river. Of what raids were made up- on the Essex shore, or whether anv were made, or whether (which is improbable) any attempt were made by these sparse destroy- ers against the walls and bridge of London, all the part, small or null or whatever it was, which the Thames played in the first pirate raids of the fifth and sixth centuries escapes us. This is not the place in which to insist upon the unreliable character of that vast mass of popular history erected upon sheer guess-work and describing the early raids of the Saxon pirates as effecting in some way a reconstruction of England. The wil- 120 2 O i < X THE THAMES IN WARFARE der sort of fiction dealing with that remote and almost unknown period talks of these first pirate raids as " the coming of the English." We must, of course, neglect rhe- toric of that kind. But it is worth while ad- mitting a moment's digression to impress on the reader upon what an absence of any thing approaching evidence all this aca- demic guess-work has been raised. The one definite fact and the only one connected with the pirate raids which descended up- on the eastern and southern river mouths and beaches of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is the fact that these raids cut off southern and eastern Britnn from the rest of civilisation. Of contemporary evid- ence there is nothing for more than 150 years, save one very vague denunciatory or apocalyptical document more in the nature of a sermon than a record, which testifies to the violent impression produced upon the civilised inhabitants of the island by these raids, and a couple of fragment- ary sentences written perhaps by contem- 121 THE RIVER OF LONDON poraries, certainly not by eye-witnesses, and probably at a great distance from the scene of the trouble. We do not know when the raids of the pirates began, nor whether they were al- ready severe before Britain was cut off. We do not know whether Southern and Eastern Britain was already occupied by kinsmen of the pirates serving as Auxil- iary Troops within the Empire or no. We do not know whether the maritime belts of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and Sussex spoke aTeutonic language before the pirate raids or no. We do not know whether a Christian Churchwassuflficientlyestablished in those belts for the raids to have had an oppor- tunity of *' destroying " such a Church. We do not know in what numbers the pirates came nor with what object nor what the towns (which were the nucleus of that society) suffered or did not suffer from the invasions. We have, as almost the sole instrument 122 THE THAMES IN WARFARE of historical analysis for a full 150 years, nothing but inference and the considera- tion of what is physically possible and physically impossible in the various the- ories that have been put forward. Thus it is physically impossible that any very considerable number of men can have come over seas at any one moment in the small and shallow boats of the time, but for all the rest we have nothing but legend and our varying estimate of how the society attacked would probably have behaved and what the internal reactions within it under the strain of such an anxiety would probably have been. We can be fairly cer- tain that an attack of this sort could not deal with a defended Roman town, though here and there a garrison on the coast may have been overwhelmed. We can be mor- ally certain from all that we know of that society that men coming for loot would not kill slaves. On the other hand, we do not know how far the anarchy may have been increased by the presence of numerous es- 123 THE RIVER OF LONDON caped slaves in the welter. We have a right to exclude the fantastic — such as the aston- ishing idea that a great Roman town like London could be wiped out and then reset- tled by a totally new population, and we have a right to exclude as very nearly worthless odd stories cropping up hundreds of years later in the A nglo-Saxon Chronicle. On the other hand, we are bound to pay more re- spect to such a remark as that of the Vener- able Bede when he testifies to the migration of a whole body of pirate population from the capital of Schleswig to that of Britain. If we could discover what happened be- tween the first generation of the fifth cent- ury and the first generation of the seventh, the discovery would be the most important and interesting that could be made in con- nection with our history. For in Britain as in every other province of Europe the process by which civilisation entered into the Dark Ages is the explanation of all that followed. But the discovery has not yet been granted to us, and in all human prob- ability never will be. 124 THE THAMES IN WARFARE We know that the avenue of approach from the Continent to Britain, that is, the coasts of the south and east, were so far ruined or occupied or degraded, the com- munication with the rest of the island was cut off ; we know that when civiHsation came back with St. Augustine it had to work through the medium of little courts scattered up and down these shores, and we can presume that writing and record and government thus filtering through the south and east to the rest of the island gradually spread the speech and certain of the customs of that south and east east- ward throughout the succeeding centuries. Of more than that we are ignorant. The Lower Thames, therefore, and the part that it played in that first capital piece of fighting lies, unfortunately, outside the field of positive history. We do not begin to get any true record of the Thames as an avenue of invasion until the second raids begin, three centuries after the first : those second raids which are collectively known in this country under the title of * * Danish." 125 THE RIVER OF LONDON At the end of the eighth century the pirate raids from the north struck England again. A few boats' crews would land, especially in the north, and raid a monastery or loot the outer barns of a steading, only to be beaten off. But a lifetime later, in the middle of the ninth century, the raids increased in pres- sure. As early as 832 you get them in the mouth of the Thames. It is a small matter. They land in Sheppey and raid that sparsely inhabited, isolated island, but their raid was successful and it taught them the way back. The next year they meet Egbert down in the south-west in some considerable con- flict, killing two of his leaders and holding the battlefield. Two years later again they were in the Irish Sea and were caught and beaten in an island raid in the west. In 837 they were beaten off Southampton, to which they had come with thirty-three ships — and perhaps at the most five thousand fighting men. But again that same year a raid of theirs in Dorsetshire succeeded, and the next 126 THE THAMES IN WARFARE year between Kent and Sussex they struck again, and before winter in the hollow land of the Fens and in the Broads and in Kent. It is with the year 839 that you get the first hint at an attack upon London. It is not certain that that attack was Danish, but it is almost certain that the mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to a great sim- ultaneous series of raids upon the French and the English coasts which struck Picar- dy and Rochester in Kent as well as London. Something we shall never know is what was pushing them. They had some more adven- turous man with his companions to rouse them in the Baltic and off the Norwegian in- lets,or there was passing over that unknown pagan society of the north one of those spi- rits which pass over human societies and lead them out to peril. They would risk the Bay of Biscay, but their ships were caught by the Christians in the Asturias. They even dared for the first time to winter without go- ing home, and to pass the time between one fighting season and the next upon an island 127 THE RIVER OF LONDON in the mouth of the Noir Moutier. They pushed as far as Seville and the Moors ate them up. They ran up the Elbe to Hamburg in a force far larger than anything that has been seen in the west. They ran up the Seine to Rouen and further. They pushed through a gate of Paris and were turned out. They first charged at and then carried Bordeaux, and all this while they raided Ire- land. It was in the year 851 that there came at last a great fleet of these purposeless de- stroyers to the Thames mouth, three hundred and fifty ships so came, and Canterbury and London were stormed. But their host, which so considerable a fleet must have brought for the first time in numbers really threat- ening, was beaten as it marched down the Stane Street to the raiding of the south. They were met at Ockley* by the host of the English King Ethelwulf and were cut to ♦The reader should be warned that this famous action has been ascribed by modern pedantry to all manner of other places and sites. For my part I will trust our ances- tors, the tradition of the place, and the obvious strategies of the Roman Road. 128 TfHAMES IN WARFARE pieces. He had probably come up by that old way from Winchester which leads thro- ugh Alton into the Dorking Gap, and so had come up with the raiders. Four years later these pirates, who had already learnt to win- ter upon Christian land in Gaul, wintered in Sheppey. That they went up the river next year we have no record, but ten years later, in 865, they had been wintering in Eng- land, this time in Thanet . The Kentish men paid them ransom, but the pagan kept no faith. He took the ransom and harried the land. Thenceforward it is perpetual raiding up and down England north of Thames. In '71 they are in Reading, but not, it would seem, by river, and Alfred beat them on Ash- down, but they were in no way driven off. They held London all that winter, and year after year they still marched up and down England. The pirates, keeping more or less together in one horde, marched and ravaged without strategical purpose and with no power of 129 I THE RIVER OF LONDON conquest, organisation, or government, ru- ining as they went, and you have in the An- glo-Saxon Chronicle such phrases as : "Here the host travelled over the mouth of Hum- ber to York." " Here the host went to Mer- cia and to Nottingham." "Here the host went again to York." "Here the army rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up their winter quarters in Thetford." " Here the host went into Northumbria, and took up their winter quarters at Torksey ." * 'Here the host went to Repton" — and so forth, to Cambridge, to Wareham, to Exeter — a per- petual raid until in 878 Alfred came out from behind Selwood and his hiding in the crisis of his kingdom, and beat them for good on the bare chalk Down above Eddington. Thence- forward the pressure is against the pirates. More than twenty years later they raided from Boulogne into Kent, and it was in that same raid in 893 that again the Thames was violated. Haesten, whom we call Hasting, came up so far as Milton, that is the first good landing-place upon the southern shore 130 THAMES IN WARFARE of the inland Thames just opposite Tilbury.* He was working with another force to the south in the Rother, but nothing came of this double attack. There was no sailing up river. The station at Milton was broken up and Hasting went down river, crossed to the northern shore, and established himself at Benfleet. The men of London, with a rein- forcement of the national army, took his fort and broke all that part of the Danish force, and his ships were either destroyed or bro- ught up river to London, or some up the Medway to Rochester, but Hasting himself who had been raiding was not captured. He came back with that part of his force which had been with him, summoned sundry par- ties of the raiding Danes from other parts of England, made a new base not far from the old one, and started upon a new raid right across England to the Western Sea. When he had returned he brought such ships as re- * Or Milton Creek out of the Swale. So Professor Oman will have it in his book upon England Before the Conquest. But he gives no proof. Milton on the Thames itself would have seemed a much safer and more accessible base. THE RIVER OF LONDON mained to him up river into the Lea, built yet another fort upon that stream twenty miles from London. Once more that base was destroyed. The river Lea was blocked below their settling place, such ships as they had, destroyed or taken to London again. And meanwhile the astonishing Danish host survived, raiding out again across England in a final effort. But their sea power was gone. They wintered at Bridgenorth in the west. Theirfew remaining ships, six in num- ber, attempted the Isle of Wight and Dev- on. Alfred beat themoff, also catching three aground, but of the remaining three two were left upon the Sussex coast and their crews hanged in Winchester. The last one left, full of wounded men, made East Anglia. In 901 Alfred died, but though he had prevented the raiding of the Danes from destroying Christian England, the plundering went on year after year, but for many years the Thames was free . Seventeen years later they fell upon Severn mouth and were beaten off, and the story goes on with a gradual 132 THAMES IN WARFARE reconquest of the posts which the pagans had estabUshed in the Midlands. It was not until 980 that they touched again at Thames mouth in Thanet, harrying it, and two years later they seem to have come up river and attacked London once more, but there is a bare mention of it, and nothing further. But with that end of the century you come to a very different set of wars — a political attempt of the northern raiders, now organ- ised in regular fashion, and almost a king- dom by themselves, upon the verge of ac- cepting Christianity and of entering into the European Commonwealth. These new fights were fought not for plunder but for conquest. They ended in success, and the critical moment of the campaign was decid- ed in the Thames. All the fighting of the thirty odd years which established the Danish dynasty in England and led up to the great reign of Canute, has for its pivot or centre the estuary of the Thames and in successive attacks upon the defence of, or in the alliance of London. 133 THE RIVER OF LONDON Ethelred the Unready, when he forms his first plans against Olaf, gathers his fleet in the Pool of London — though he does nothing with that fleet (992) . When, two years later (994), Olaf makes his alliance with Sweyn, it is again up the estuary of the Thames that he sails to make his great attack upon the City— but London beat him off. Though London is attacked again from the land in loogandwith very great vigour in 1013, Ed- mund Ironside, a boy who all but saved his house, fought alternately north and south of the estuary against the armies landed from the invading fleet. That campaign (the campaign of 1016) is as excellent an example of the part the Low- er Thames played in the warfare of this is- land before the Norman Conquest as one could choose. In the month of May Canute makes his attempt to reduce the capital. He cut a canal through the alluvium of Suffolk to get his ships round the Bridge head, so that he held London from the River sideboth above bridgeandbelow,andhedughis trench all round the north, east, and west over a- 134 THAMES IN WARFARE gainst the walls. But he did not reduce the town. Edmund Ironside coming up from the west, re-entered it. The invader retired to an entrenched camp at Greenwich. When later the whole invading fleet had dropped down the Thames and sailed out of the es- tuary, you get a strategical playing north and south of that obstacle which is most illuminating. Canute attacks the Suffolk shore. Edmund marches thither, having the estuary to the south of him. Canute then sails across the mouth of the Thames and attacks Kent shore. Edmund counter-mar- ches, is compelled to take the long rotite cross- ing the Thames at London, and finds the Da- nish advance at Otford to the south of the estuary. He defeats it. Canute thereupon once more crosses the mouth of the Thames and attacks the Essex shore, and once more Edmund goes back by the long land route, crosses at London, gets to the north of the estuary, and fights and loses (by treachery) his great action on the Crouch at Ashington, near Rochford. You could not have within a shorterspace 135 THE RIVER OF LONDON of time a clearer view both of what the Low- er Thames meant as an avenue of approach to invasion during the Dark Ages that were coming to a close, and what it was to mean as an obstacle to a passage of armies during the centuries of the Middle Ages which were about to open. The Lower Thames played no great part between this date, 1016, and the invasion of William the Conqueror. A fleet seems to have stood on it perpetually for the defence of the kingdom under Can- ute, but did not serve as an avenue of in- vasion, nor was that fleet brought to ac- tion. The Lower Thames last appears before the Conquest asan element in warfare whenGod- win and his sons enter the mouth of the Ri- ver in 1052, the fifty ships of the King not daring to offer battle . London f a voured this particular advance, allowed Godwin to pass under the Bridge without obstacle (which showshow the masts were stepped) , and with that successful but hardly challenged ex- pedition ends the first chapter of the Lower 136 THAMES IN WARFARE Thames in English warfare : the chapter of its use in the Dark Ages as an avenue of in- vasion into the heart of the country and against London and, already by the early eleventh century, its strategical value as an obstacle to the movement of troops from north to south. The Lower Thames in the warfare of the Middle Ages, and indeed up to that of the seventeenth century and the Civil Wars — that is, throughout a space of six hundred years (from 1066 to 1644), appears in Eng- lish warfare only in the character of the main obstacle of crossing South England. It is impossible to develop a negative as- pect of this kind at any great length, nor is it even possible to affirm it as an universal negative. I can indeed call to mind no case of the transport of troops in any consider- able numbers from the north to the south of the Lower Thames, or vice versa, during the period in question. But even if some considerable exception be discovered, it does not affect the general thesis that the great 137 THE RIVER OF LONDON groups of civil war which marked the his- tory of England in the Middle Ages and dur- ing the seventeenth century were powerful- ly affected in their strategy by the interrup- tion to eastern communications to north and south, which was caused by the Lower Thames and its estuary. Thus the whole plan of the Wars of the Ro- ses, infinitely confused though it is in detail, involves a striking up from or down to Lon- don with perpetual action west of London, but there is never any attempt to turn a southern or a northern position by the cross- ing of the Lower Thames in force — at least that I can call to mind. You have the same thing earlier in the Barons' Wars. When Henry iii. wishes to make a base for himself in South England and begins by advancing on Rochester, Simon makes no attempt to cut across anywhere below London. On the contrary, he marches south from that low- est crossing, making sure of intercepting the King on his march round parallel with the coast. In the succeeding campaign the line 138 THAMES IN WARFARE of the Severn determines everything, and here again the Upper Thames is crossed and recrossed as well, the Lower Thames not at all ; and when we come to the great Civil Wars of the seventeenth century or, as our forefathers called them, ''the Great Rebel- lion,' ' you have perhaps the clearest instance since the campaign of Edmund Ironside of how the estuary of the Lower Thames deter- mined by its obstacle the strategy of the east of England. Speaking in very general terms and from the point of view of strategy alone as distinct from the great moral and social forces at work, the Parliament won because it continuously held not only London but a great triangle of the Eastern English land ; Kent in the main, and all East Anglia, and after the second year of the war Lincoln- shire as well. Now imagine in the place of the estuary of the Thames continuous land communica- tion and you will see what a difference that change would have made. Charles at the very beginning of the campaign, though he 139 THE RIVER OF LONDON could not have besieged a town as large as London, could very probably have marched past it and chastised East Anglia, broken up its recruiting centres, etc., confident that there was open to him an alternative retreat to the west upon either side of London. Nay, he could, had he been successful in this early part of the war, in an East Anglian raid have continued that success in the south-east. He might, I imagine, have isolated London, though he could not have besieged it. As it was, the two halves of his enemy's country divided for Jiis purposes by the Lower Tha- mes were for their purposes united by com- mon radii converging at London and by the control of all the Lower River as a continuous avenue of transport and supply. What was still heartily Royalist in Sussex (and I believe I may count here many of the castles) was, through the action of that same obstacle, a hopelessly isolated patch which Parliament had later little difficulty in re- ducing. But suppress the Lower Thames and it would have given Charles a sohd base for advance. 140 THAMES IN WARFARE We must not exaggerate the point, for the strategy of the time was very confused, and sometimes at first almost purposeless ; but none the less in any campaign, however mud- dled, the main natural strategy imposed by topography invariably appears , and for what it is worth I cite it in this case of the Lower Thames and of the Civil Wars. The third point, of course, in this connec- tion of the Lower Thames with the Civil Wars waged in this island is the position of London: and that position is twofold. Lon- don has one great strategical character as the lowest crossing place of the Thames ; it has another great strategical character as the chief natural base in the island. The first of these two characters is obvious, andasobviouslyrecursthroughout the whole history of battle between the Norman Con- quest and the Parliamentary Wars. Who- ever has possession of London has possession of the secure crossing place nearest the sea which gives immediate interior communica- tion between one section of the east of the 141 THE RIVER OF LONDON island and the other, and as a rule to have possession of London is to have command sooner or later of the whole of the south and east upon that account. But the second character, London as a base, is of even more importance. You had here a town so great that after the Dark Ages it need never stand a siege. It is further a town the supplies of which under primitive conditions lay almost always uncut. Unless a man had so considerable a fleet that he could cut off supplies by River, so well or- ganised a transport that he could keep both banks of that broad stream perpetually in touch, and finally so very large a command that he could hold the whole circuit of the walls securely and the Bridge end on the Southwark side as well, London could not be, strictly speaking, besieged, and, from the Danish Wars onwards, London never was. Not only was this great centre of supply nourished by the Thames immune from such isolation, but it could also furnish stores of provision, remounts, and all that was neces- 142 THAMES IN WARFARE sary for a medieval army in quantities more than sufficient for the restoration or recruit- ment of such a force; hence we find London perpetually turning the scale during six cen- turies of fighting, and it is almost true to say that he who has London ultimately wins the war. It was the size of London, and in particular its value as a recruiting centre, which checked Charles i. after Edgehill. Lon- don made the fortune of Simon de Montf ort ; London appears to have remounted the Ba- rons in the most critical moment of the cam- paign of Magna Charta ; and London was the necessarypivot upon which William the Con- queror was compelled to hinge all his work of pacification after Hastings. Indeed, the position of London could not be better illus- trated than in this early example, where the Norman found it impossible or inadvis- able to attempt a direct attack upon it, was compelled to isolate it temporarily by sweep- ing a line of devastation aroundit, and made it his first care to recognise its customs and pre-eminence in the kingdom. 143 THE RIVER OF LONDON With the conclusion of this brief survey of the part which the Lower Thames and Lon- don as the creation of the Lower Thames has played in the history of warfare I must close this Essay. I would close it, as I began it, by the quali- fication that all those material causes which are the dehght of one who traces out the ef- fects of historical geography are but half the story. Of the spirit of place and of the hu- man motive without which such mere topo- graphy would be meaningless, I have said little or nothing in this consideration of the River of London building up London thro- ugh two thousand years ; but that is be- cause this business of the soul in any histori- cal matter must be separately treated, and that in a spirit always alien, and sometimes antagonistic, to the chain of material cause and effect. Nevertheless, it is the soul of London and of London River which has driven forward the story of both of them together, much more than any material limits within which 144 THE THAMES IN WARFARE that soul was compelled to act. And that is why to-day overlying the vestiges — often now completely hidden — of the original material framework, London and the River rather control that framework and what were once the necessary condition of port and market and crossing place than are con- trolled by them. K RECENT BOOKS PUBLISHED BY T. N. FOULIS THE LIFE ^ CHARACTER SERIES THE ENGLISH CHARACTER By Spencer Leigh Hughes, M.P., ••Suh-Rosa." of ihe Dai/y News and Leader. With i6 Illustrations in Colour, depicting types of Eng- lish Character by Frederick Gardner. Extra crown 8vo, 280 pp., buckram, 5s. net ; leather, 7s. 6cl. net ; vellum, 10s. 6cl. net. THE LIGHTER SIDE OF IRISH LIFE By George A. Birmingham, Author of "Spanish Gold," etc. With 16 Illustrations in Colour by Henry W. Kerr, R.S.A. New Edition. Extra crown Bvo, 288 pp., buckram, 5s. net ; velvet Persian, 7s. 6cl. net ; vellum, lOs. 6cl. net. 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PUBLISHER, 91 GREAT RUSSELL STREET LONDON, W.C. ; 15 FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH SONGS & POEMS OF BURNS With 36 fine Illustrations in Colour by eminent artists. Quarto, 600 pp., buckram, 10s. 6d. net ; printed in fine rag paper, and bound in fine vellum, 2l8. net. A handsome presentation edition i^The Songs and Poems of Burns, containing an appreciation of the poet by Lord Rosebery. While many eminent artists have painted some of their finest pictures in depicting scenes from Burns, no attempt has previously beeti made to collect these within the boutids of an edition of his works. This new edition, contains most of the finest of these pictures reproduced in colour, and forms a most admirable gift-book. The text is p7-inied in black arid red, with ample margins, and no expense has been spared to make the work a fitiite pre- sentation edition. It may be added that everything in co?inection %uith the production of the work is of purely Scottish manufacture. 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FOULIS, PUBLISHER, 91 GREAT RUSSELL STREET LONDON, W.C. ; 15 FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH THE CITIES SERIES A brilliant series of Drawings by Eminent Artists In Decorative Covers, 8^ x 5 inches, 1/- net With the Illustrations in Photogravure or Half-tone mounted on hand-made paper. Bound in Parchment Boards, with mounted Illustrations, 2/6 net I. A LITTLE BOOK OF LONDON 25 DRAWINGS IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY JOSEPH PENNELI, IL THE GREAT NEW YORK 24 DRAWINGS IN HALF-TONE BY JOSEPH PENNELL in. THE CITY OF THE WEST 24 DRAWINGS IN PHOTOGRAVURE BY JESSIE M. KING IV. THE GREY CITY OF THE NORTH 24 DRAWINGS BY JESSIE M. KING V. R. L. STEVENSON : MEMORIES Being twenty-five illustrations, reproduced from photo- graphs, of Robert Louis Stevenson, his homes and his haunts. Many of these reproduced for the first time. A booklet for every Stevenson lover. Uniform Volume MANNERS & CUSTOMS OF YE ENGLYSHE Forty-nine Drawings bv Richard Doyi.k, to which are added MR. 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SAPPHO, QUEEN OF SONG A Selection from her love poems by J. R. Totin, 6. AUCASSIN y NICOLETTE With introduction by F. W. Bourdillon. 7. THE CHARM OF LIFE Witli illustrations by Fredkrjck Gardner. 8. THE BOOK OF GOOD FRIENDSHIP lUus. by H. C. PkesTon Macgoun, R.S.W. 132 pp. THE GARDEN LOVER'S BOOKS 1. A BOOK OF GARDENS Illustrated by Margaret H. Waterfield. 140 pp. 2. A BOOK OF OLD-WORLD GARDENS Eight illus. in colour by Beatrice Parsons. 122 pp. 3. GARDEN MEMORIES With illustrations by Mary G. W. Wjlson. T. N. FOITLIS, Publisher, 91 Great Russell Street London, W.C, and 15 Frederick Street, Edinburgh PR JOHN BROWN SERIES This series consists of Doctor John Brown's Essays, and others intimately connected with his name, grouped to- gether into volumes according to the subject, and fully illustrated in colour and in black and white. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, 2/6 net ; VeUet Persian Yapp, 3/6 net. I. A LITTLE BOOK OF CHILDREN By Dr John Brovt\. 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CO N0V1419b| tot ^eco lo-uRC nrn 2 61984 Form L9-Series4939 f^ 3 1158 00 89 4574 i UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 404 445