THE RIVER OF LONDON
BY HILAIRE BELLOC
_AUTHOR OF ‘THE PATH TO ROME’_
T. N. FOULIS
LONDON & EDINBURGH
[Illustration: ST. PAUL’S FROM BLACKFRIARS]
_Published
December 1912_
_Printed by_ MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
THE LIST OF CHAPTERS
I. INTRODUCTION _page_ 3
II. THE APPROACH UP RIVER 17
III. LONDON, THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES 39
IV. LONDON, THE PORT OF THE THAMES 75
V. LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE 117
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_reproduced from Oil Paintings by_
JOHN MUIRHEAD, R.B.A., R.S.W.
ST. PAUL’S FROM BLACKFRIARS _Frontispiece_
ERITH _page_ 24
RICHMOND BRIDGE 32
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT FROM VAUXHALL 40
LIMEHOUSE 48
GREENWICH 56
GREENHITHE 64
STRAND ON THE GREEN 72
THE THAMES FROM GREENWICH PARK 80
GRAVESEND 88
KINGSTON BRIDGE 96
SUNBURY 104
TWICKENHAM FERRY 112
HAMPTON 120
TEDDINGTON 128
PANGBOURNE 136
INTRODUCTION
Through the flats that bound the North Sea and shelve into it
imperceptibly, merging at last with the shallow flood, and re-emerging
in distant sandbanks and less conspicuous shoals, run facing each other
two waterways far inland, which are funnels and entries, as it were,
scoured by the tide.
Each has at the end of the tideway a narrow, placid, inland stream,
from whence the broader, noisier sea part also takes its name. Each
has been and will always be famous in the arms and in the commerce of
Europe. Each forms a sort of long great street of ships crowded in a
traffic to and fro. For each has its great port. The one Antwerp, the
other London. The Scheldt is the name of the first, which leads to
Antwerp, and makes the opportunity for that great market of the world.
But the second is the River of London, much older in its destinies, and
probably more destined to endure in its functions of commerce.
I know not how to convey that picture in the mind, which the eyes
do not see, and yet by which a man is haunted if he has read enough
of books and seen the maps, when he comes up through the Narrows of
Dover Straits from the wide, empty seas three days behind and knows
that there lies before his owner a choice between the eastern and the
western gate. That choice is in the case of every ship determined long
before. She has the dull duty to do of turning to the right or to the
left, and her orders bind her to the river of the Netherlands or of
England as it may be. But if you will consider many centuries and the
changing adventures of business you will still--as you pass northward
between the two shores of Flanders and of Britain, and as you see their
recession upon either side of the northern way which opens before
you--understand that doubt upon the future and the rivalry of the two
rivers which is soon to be so deeply impressed upon the politics of our
time.
I could think of the Scheldt and of the Thames as two antagonists
facing each other before conflict across a marked arena, which is that
of the shallow, tumbling, and yellow water of the North Sea; or as two
forces pitted one against the other, streams each of which would force
the other back if it could find the strength; or as two Courts in a
perpetual jealousy one of the other, intriguing and making and losing
point after point in a game of polity.
When the statisticians have done their talk--and very brainless it
is--of resources and of metals, two opposing _lives_ are left standing
behind either of the great towns, and either of the great sea rivers.
The one is the experiment of the modern Germanies; the other is the
founded tradition of England; and the more closely a man considers each
of these the greater contrast does he discover between the causes of
either’s energy of come and go.
A third great tidal river is also concerned with these seas, also helps
to determine their commerce, also supports its great inland town. That
river is the Seine, and I shall, in the pages which follow, use the
Seine also for the example it affords in the analogies and contrasts
and parallels which I propose to draw. But it is the Scheldt and the
Thames which still remain the greater opponents. The united political
life of Gaul, which was inherited and transformed by the French
Monarchy, forbade the growth of a great commerce to the north. Paris
became not only the political centre of France but its main market as
well, and to-day the water carriage of Paris--that is, the traffic of
its port--is greater than that of any maritime town in the country.
Only if Normandy had developed as an independent state would Rouen have
become what Antwerp and London have become. Rouen would then have been,
without doubt, the point of transhipment between the inland and the
maritime waterways, and the distance of the town from coal would hardly
have affected it more than does the distance of London. Its situation
as a political junction would have determined its greatness. As it is
the Lower Seine may be set beside the Scheldt and the Thames for an
illustration in their topography and in the origins of their human
settlements, but it does not afford a true commercial parallel to-day,
and Rouen is no third rival to the two great ports which are before our
eyes and in this generation struggling for primacy.
It is the custom of sailors to speak of that water by which they
approach a great town under the name of the town. Men coming up from
Yarmouth Roads inland do not speak of the Yare, but of Norwich River.
For, to the sailor the river is but a continuation of, or an access
to, his port, and the Lower Thames is thus universally known from the
sea as London River. The term is an accidental one, but it contains
the true history of the connection between the stream and the town.
The Thames made London. London is a function of the Thames, and it is
in such a connection that I propose to regard it in this essay: London
as the great crossing place of the Thames, and as the custodian and
fruit of what early may have been the chief ferry, but has for nearly
two thousand years been the chief bridge; London as the market of which
the Thames is the approach and the port; London as a habitation of
which the great street is the Thames, a street for centuries the main
highway of its people, lost for a time and now recovering its ancient
use; London as the civil and religious head of revenues which were
drawn from the Thames Valley; and London as the determinant, through
its position upon the Thames, of English military history.
[Illustration: ERITH]
This intimate connection between the city and the river we all
instinctively feel, and the two are connected together as no other
waterway with its capital can be connected throughout Europe. For
the Thames is all that every other river is to every other capital,
wherever some great stream is connected with a chief city. But whereas
in every other case it is but one or another of the functions of such
a stream that history can remark, in the case of London it can remark
them all. Little sea-borne traffic reaches Paris by the Seine; the
Tiber could never be a street for Rome; Vienna neglects the Danube;
Antwerp protects no great crossing, nor has ever been the nucleus of a
State; Rouen--the nearest parallel--was not the strategical pivot of
Normandy, nor ever formed, as London forms, a chief fraction in the
economic power of its province. The two rivers which are sacred to
Lyons never fed that town; the Rhone watered but did not lead to Arles.
The towns of Lombardy depend upon the fertility of the Po Valley, but
the stream is nothing to their commerce or to their political eminence,
and Milan, and Venice, and Turin are independent of it. Saragossa was
the mistress of Arragon, but the Ebro did not make Saragossa, and as
for Madrid, the trickle which runs below Madrid is best described in
the story of the Spanish patriot who was dying of thirst after battle,
but upon being offered a cup of water, said, “Give it to the poor
Manzanares.” Lisbon and Cadiz are maritime, not fluvial, and look where
you will throughout the civilisation of Europe you will not find, save
in the case of London, this complete interdependence between a great
town and its river.
In tracing or establishing this intimate bond between London and the
Thames one must guard against an error which the modern reader rightly
suspects and is justly ready to criticise or to deny when it appears in
any piece of historical writing. That error is the error of materialism.
A generation ago it was universal, and there was no phenomenon in the
story of England or of Europe from the emplacement of a city to the
growth of the Church which was not traced to inanimate causes superior
to, and independent of, any action of the Will. This philosophy
narrowed, distorted, and dried up every department of knowledge, and
while the area of learning increased with a rapidity hitherto unknown,
the spirit inhabiting that conquest was starved. It was as though
the time could not contain at once the energy to discover and the
energy to know, and as though the covering of so vast a field in so
short a period was achieved inevitably at a cost of profundity. That
a bias towards the mechanical and the necessary should be present in
the physical sciences--in chemistry for instance--is to be expected,
that it should have invaded biology was less excusable, but that it
should have been permitted to affect (as it did) the business native to
man--his building, his institutions, his very dreams--was an excessive
blunder, and the spirit of all the younger men to-day is running if
anything too strongly in reaction against that ebb-tide of the soul.
They reject the dogmas of their fathers which would bend everything
man has done to material circumstance, which would talk of man as
the slave rather than the master of his instruments, and which, in
an argument absurdly circular, “interpreted history in the terms of
Economics”:--and they are right.
Even in the sphere of topography, where the physical limitations
of human action are the main subject of the writer, they expect a
full admission of the soul of man and even--which is very wise--some
recognition of that mysterious genius which inhabits every place and is
perhaps its vital part.
They are right. No one can see the marriage between London and its
river without wondering in what degree things other than ponderable
and measurable things may enter into the habitation of man. There is
nothing man does, of course, which has not in it the soul. But it may
be also true that there is nothing done to man wherein some soul is not
also. Now the homes of man and the air and the water and the wind and
the earth, against which in part and with which in part those homes
arise, are so woven in with his fate--which is a spiritual fate--that
we must properly lend to these insensate things some controlling
motive; and we may rightly say, though only by the use of metaphor,
that all these things have a spirit within them. I cannot get away
from it that the Thames may be alive, and London most certainly is.
But all these things, though one may put them in the form of
statements, are really questions; and questions to which no sort of
answer has yet been discovered.
II
THE APPROACH UP RIVER
There is perhaps no journey in the world in which the past and what now
is and the links between them stand out more clearly stratified than a
journey up the Thames upon the tide from the Sea-reach to the Pool.
I will describe it; for it is upon a physical experience of this kind
(I mean the seeing of history through the eye to the north and to the
south of the narrowing river and the feel of the stream under one) that
any historical essay upon the River of London must be built.
I have heard it said that the experience is a common one, seeing that
so many thousand men of the articulate, travelled, and experienced
class (who can relate their experience to some purpose) have entered
London by river. Any one (I am told) who comes in from the East or from
Holland to the docks will know what I mean. But I do not think this
is so. I do not think that the thing seen rapidly from the decks of a
liner, perhaps cut short at Tilbury, perhaps missed because the voyage
is at night, is quite what I intend to emphasise. Nor am I certain that
the proportion of those fifty miles is accurately seized when they are
experienced from the height of some great steamer whence the strength
and nature of the stream, its ebb and flow, its local life, are missed.
It is so with all other great ports. The myriads that come in nowadays
to England by the Mersey have no opportunity for judging the estuary,
the meaning of the opposing shores, nor that character of south
Lancashire which lies before their eyes in the mist and is so singular
a factor in the makeup of England.
I think that to know the River of London the journey must be made from
the sea upwards, in something not larger than a barge, in a motor boat,
or in a fishing vessel, or little half-rater, and taken upon one tide
with an easterly wind, as all the men of the past took it, making the
great port upstream under the weather they had chosen. In this way,
with little freeboard between one’s feet and the changing level of
the broad water, and with not too rapid a passage of the stations upon
either bank, and with some true measure wherewith to gauge in detail
what one sees, one can understand the river. It was in a progress such
as this that the painters came to understand the Lower Thames, and
nothing has nourished a more national art than this valley, though its
interpreters have been rare.
You see five successive stages clearly marked in such a voyage.
You see, in the first place, that everything up to the very gates of
London must have been, at the beginning of our history, as desolate
as any province in Europe. The rare places at which high and firm
land comes down to the modern stream are, as it were, isolated, and
live a life upon the defensive. Nowhere (as we shall see when we come
to examine London as a crossing place) does some good habitable site
stretch down to either opposing bank. There is no natural gateway
upon the Lower Thames; no twin villages defending a gap; nor the
projection from the north as from the south of tongues of high land or
even good arable land, the proximity of which, one to the other upon
either shore, would give humanity to the river. All the miles of it are
desolate marshes, either to the one side or to the other, most commonly
upon both, and the few spots where an exceptional formation has given
firm building ground and fertile fields as well close to the river
have something about them exceptional and, as it were, beleaguered.
It is a gross and an unhistorical exaggeration to say (as many of our
academic people are saying) that all that valley was a flooded lagoon
until historic times. It was not that. But it was a long succession of
very wide, watery marshes, with knolls of slightly higher land standing
up therein. Consider, for instance, the view to the northward, from
the height just above and east of Dartford. There you have two good
miles of what was marsh and still is largely marsh to the main stream,
and beyond, upon the farther shore, another three or four miles of
the same flats, with odd, exceptional rises at Rainham, at Aveney, or
upon the edge of the flat of Upminster. It is the same from the Abbey
Wood, east of Woolwich. Plumstead Marshes and Barking Level made one
morass, four miles wide at least, or nearer five, drowned twice a day
into a great level sheet of water, until some civilisation came to
dyke up the tidal stream and confine it to the central bed, which it
had scoured in its windings through such a desolation. Now of all that
primitive effect of waste, abandoned places very much remains in such a
journey as I have suggested. It is true that a wall of earth everywhere
controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not
see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water
to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks
of mud for miles upon either side of his going. But he still sees in
so many places as to make them the chief note of the lower reaches, at
least, great Flats without a soul upon them, unbroken by tree or house
or hedge, and plainly saved by artifice alone from flooding. This run
up the Lower Thames is, save for the exceptional approach of high land
in one place or another (as at Gravesend or Erith) like a sail through
the Fenland, and this character of desertion, silence, and morass, the
oldest foundation of all, is still quite plainly the background of what
one sees and remembers when one comes up the River of London to London
from the sea.
So much, then, for the first layer.
The second should by right be Roman: but nothing Roman remains; no,
nor anything of the Dark Ages. Unless we believe what is probable
enough, but not proved in any way, that the great containing walls of
earth (notably that round the Isle of Dogs) were Roman work, we can
distinguish nothing in such a journey to mark the first thousand years
of Christendom. Far out beyond the Sea-reach, Reculvers was a Roman
station in the estuary, but the ways have eaten it away. No great
monastic nucleus of the Dark Ages could be founded in that inhospitable
land. There was no palace of the kings standing near the central stream
until the neighbourhood of London was approached. There was not even a
fortress. Indeed it is odd to think how empty all that approach from
the sea to the greatest of the western Roman towns was and remained. It
was not until the Middle Ages began to flower that the Lower Thames put
forth any human signs--at least of such a sort as have come down to us.
The remains of them are very few, but they are distinctive.
Of all that life of the Middle Ages which the English countrysides
preserve in so many visible relics--and especially in a host of parish
churches surpassing all of the kind in Europe--the Lower Thames has
but one clear instance remaining to the eye; and that is the little
isolated church of St. Clement’s. Rainham is too far from the water,
the legends and associations surrounding the well of St. Chad are
also too distant to count in the picture. The endowed foundations of
religion either stood remote from the river-bank or have disappeared.
London, but for the Great Fire, would have supplied in this the
emptiness of the lower river.
But for that capital accident in the history of the city, which renders
London so different in outward aspect from all other great European
towns, the Middle Ages would still break upon one in a sheaf of spires
showing over the flats from Woolwich Reach, at least, and perhaps
from farther down the stream. But that accident--the Great Fire of
the seventeenth century--has left London stripped of the Gothic and,
alone of the great capitals of Europe, no impress of our four hundred
years of Gothic remains with the traveller as he comes upstream.
When we consider the two parallels to London upon the Continent--the
parallels I have chosen as ports upon the two great tidal rivers of the
north-west--Antwerp and Rouen, the loss will be apparent.
For miles and miles over the flats of the Scheldt the sailor making for
Antwerp sees the high steeple upon his horizon fixed against the sky,
and, late as was its building, this watch-tower of Antwerp is of the
true Middle Ages; Europe was still Europe and one when its last stone
was laid.
Still more does the sailor making for Rouen have the Middle Ages before
him as he rounds the Ferry Reach and comes up northward into the
sweep of the river before the town. In spite of the extraordinary and
meaningless gate which the new travelling bridge makes for the city,
its cathedral still dominates the whole view; surrounding it, the high
pitch of St. Vincent, the belfry of St. Maclou, the rebuilt towers of
St. Ouen, give their character to all the smoky basin of houses between
the Seine and the hills.
A far more splendid sight was the Gothic group of London as one came
upon it up river before the Great Fire. A score of spires stood
in varying height and perspective before the master spire of the
cathedral. Old St. Paul’s upon its hill carried the loftiest cross in
Christendom--far higher in the air than Strasburg; and old St. Paul’s
had been built, as had nearly every great monument of the Middle Ages,
with a special eye to the landscape whence it should be seen and which,
in a sense, it should control. The huge and somewhat ill-proportioned
pyramid of St. Dunstan’s by the very excess of its bulk made a landmark
which is the first thing to strike us when we look at a sketch of
the river made at any time before 1665. We are fortunate, moreover,
in our retention of such memorials. No other northern town, I think,
possesses a complete panorama of its appearance in the first half of
the sixteenth century such as London possesses in the great work of
Wyngaerde in the Bodleian. And though the seventeenth century, with
its triumph of engraving, produced a great number of such documents
throughout Europe, Visscher’s drawing is unique in its importance,
while we have at the end of the series Hollar’s careful delineation of
the square mile of ruins after the Great Fire.
This is perhaps the most remarkable piece of pictorial evidence open
to English history, and any one who will look at that long string of
churches burnt out to shells, and of private houses reduced to a few
feet of black and crumbling wall, will see what a revolution in the
outward aspect of the river and of its port, and what a breach in the
outward continuity of London the Great Fire means. The Conservative
temper into which the English fell (with regard to their externals,
at least), after the sixteenth century, would have preserved the
architectural past of London (and that to our own day) much more
perfectly than the past of any great city of the Continent has been
preserved. It seems due to the national spirit that a view more ancient
even than that of Rouen should greet the traveller coming in by Thames;
but the accident of the Great Fire has forbidden it.
On the contrary, the note of the approach to London nowadays from
the Lower Thames is a note peculiarly and strongly modern. It is as
though the abnormal expansion of our perilous Industrialism in the last
hundred and fifty years had not only conquered but obliterated the
eighteen centuries from which it suddenly arose. Here and there an odd
survival left remaining of deliberate purpose serves but to emphasise
the capture of the Lower Thames by that crazy mechanical giant so
recently born and already so blind and old. You have the noble front
of Greenwich, you have the charming little “mail” opposite, you have,
most distinctive, perhaps, of all the survivals upon the river, the
Fort of Tilbury. Save for these a huge and hardly national commerce,
plainly suffering the domination of a few, has eaten up the scene
of Thames-side and marks it more and more as one comes in through
the outlying miles until one is relieved by older, dingier, and more
gracious things near the heart of the whole business in the Pool.
It seems unjust to pass, with no more than a mention, that lovely
little isolated relic at Tilbury. Here was for centuries the natural
gate, the military defence of the port. When the range of ordnance
was not much more than hailing distance, no defences could be thought
of upon the broadening water of the Hope, still less in the funnel of
the Sea-reach. But Tilbury, standing over against Gravesend, defended
the first point at which the river had narrowed sufficiently to be
commanded by batteries from the shore.
In the earliest map of this point (which is preserved in the Admiralty)
one may trace the way in which the river was closed. There ran out from
the northern bank, pointing somewhat downstream, a sort of barrier.
We have no indication of its structure. A few piles would have been
sufficient to prevent a passage and to canalise traffic into the open
space that was left in the midst of the stream; for this space was not
left free, as we might have supposed, just under the guns of the fort,
but at a range which seems upon the drawing to be about 250 yards.
Whether a corresponding permanent work existed upon the Gravesend shore
I am ignorant, but it was obviously easy to emplace guns there when
they might be needed. Meanwhile Tilbury, with its continual preparation
for arms and as continual innocence of them, with its one chief
historic memory of the Armada, remains the most perfect relic of the
past upon all the stretch of the river. The swamped land round about
has defended it and isolated it, and that great regard for the old
things of the nation which is a virtue to be proud of has saved it from
decay.
For the rest, as I say, and with the exception of those rare survivals
of which Tilbury is the most striking, modern industrialism, down to
its last manifestations, has captured the Lower Thames and stands in a
bleak contrast against the windy emptiness of the flats. Nowhere is one
more oddly struck by this than opposite the great tanks which have been
put up for the storage of petrol--the last of our necessities. From
Tilbury upwards, wherever there is available space or good ground, it
is the haste, the necessity, and the carelessness of modern exchange
directed for the immediate profit of men who perpetually change their
methods of acquirement (and even their homes) that marks the river. It
is a new sort of desolation, the obverse (and not a pleasant one) of
that more natural desolation which Nature made by stretching out her
marshes and lagoons upon either side of the tideway.
And I say “exchange,” not production. Thames-side used to do many
things, but in particular to tan leather and to build ships. The
tanneries have nearly gone; the shipyards are in process of death.
In the last journey which I made up the tide some months ago to see
London once more from the river I passed what may be the last of the
men-of-war built upon Thames-side. It lay completing upon the northern
shore. It was the ship round which had turned the discussion whether
or no the Thames could still successfully build against the north, and
if the official answer is to be that it cannot, then this decision will
mark the end of the oldest trade of the river and that most native to
its life. But we live in a time when most things are dying.
For all this lamentable cloak of purposeless industrialism, chaotic and
already murmuring with the sounds of its own dissolution, the gradual
envelopment of a man who comes up river, his reception by the hugeness
of modern London is a thing which no one who has experienced it can
forget.
Indeed, the utter ruin of order and of plan, which is but the outward
manifestation of the ruin of religion, has destroyed the sense of
approach everywhere around that great helpless, apathetic nation which
we call London, save where it could not be wholly destroyed, and that
is along the water which was its most ancient highway.
[Illustration: RICHMOND BRIDGE]
Come in from what direction you will, save by the Thames, and the
approach to London is a waste of eyesight. No one has imagined for two
hundred years such a thing as a gate or a limit. There is no kind of
salutation offered or of barrier presented or of definition laid down.
Draggle-tail financial experiments of no interest or purpose to those
responsible for them, save abstract wealth, stand isolated in fields
as often as not given up to weeds and rubbish, and new roads half made
end everywhere in dust-heaps or in mud. Then for one mile after another
you pass the thousands of little houses all shamelessly similar, for in
none does a man intend to make his being, to possess his soul, or to
live and die there. There is not even a city wall remaining from the
past, nor so much as a broad outer street, delimiting what may still be
noble and permanent from these hopeless suburbs. Little scraps of what
were once happy and united villages still stand like islands in this
flood of mean brick. For the most part they are to be distinguished no
longer save by the narrowness and crookedness of their streets, and
when at last one comes to the inner part, where there is something of
history and of meaning and of an inherited culture, one comes upon it
without introduction and without grace. Of all cities that ever were,
modern London least deserves a wall, gates, and a senate.
But the entry by the river cannot be wholly destroyed. The river is too
strong. And therefore a man does here receive a physical impression
almost worthy of the magnitude of the things he seeks. He does get some
idea of London and some introduction to it. The houses and the places
of change, and the great stores and the abrupt street-ends with their
water steps, cluster in groups with narrower and narrower gaps between
them, until at last they come up all together in rank and enclose
one avenue of flood, banked everywhere by brick and crowded with the
interlacing of vessels. It is a thing which, if a man could draw it
properly, would make the best record of our time for the curiosity of
those who are to come after us. Accustomed as we are to an eternal
noise drowning thought and human life wherever the haphazard and
violent activity of our time is at work, there is an odd broken silence
in this waterway of sails and chains and alarms, guarded and hemmed in
by the leagues of houses. The mainspring of the moving road is silent,
the power of that one thing in the view which is not made by man, the
rushing upward of the water; between all these new and artificial
things the strength of the Thames survives with no more sound in its
going than when it went through other silences before men found it.
III
LONDON THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES
It is a commonplace which must be repeated whenever the connection of
the Thames with London is referred to, that the capital matter in that
connection is London’s position as _the lowest crossing point upon the
Thames_. That affirmation, standing alone, is of no use to history
unless one also explains why it was so important to find a crossing
place as low as possible down the river, and the many causes which
combine to make that lowest crossing place the neighbourhood of London
Bridge. These last especially require a full explanation because, of
the many converging reasons for selecting that site, the chief were,
until quite recently, imperfectly studied.
Why was it of such great importance for man, from the beginnings of a
settled occupation in this island, to discover a convenient crossing
place as low down as possible upon the course of the Thames? And why,
when once this crossing place had been established, would it become the
principal meeting-place in the country?
The answer to these questions is to be found, not only in the shape of
the island, but in the position of its best soil and in its relation to
the Continent.
[Illustration: HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT FROM VAUXHALL]
It is obvious that the main connection between Great Britain and the
Continent must be by the Straits of Dover. It is not only the shortness
of the trajectory from the mainland to the island which makes the
Straits of Dover the necessary and permanent entry into this country,
it is a number of other things as well: as, that communication is
very easy from the opposing shore inland; that that opposing shore
was provided for ages with a harbour peculiarly suitable to early
traffic--the Portus Itius (now the silted-up plain between the hills
behind Boulogne); the conformation of the high land upon either side
at Grinez and at Dover Cliffs which, in the centuries when the thing
was important, gave an uninterrupted sight of land during the crossing;
and the choice of entry which the various inlets (now filled up) afford
from the Portus Lemanis behind Folkstone, the old inlet at Dover,
and the old Mouth of the Stour to what was once the sheltered channel
between Thanet and the mainland behind the island of Richborough.
So powerful has been the topographical effect of the Straits that
no revolution in travel has dispossessed them of their original
importance. The great expansion in our means of communication has only
emphasised the bond which is established by the Straits between this
island and the Continent of Europe, and so throughout the whole of the
old world. When, a few years hence, a man sets out to travel by land
to India or to China, he will cross from Dover and will take his train
at Calais. Were communication inland as uninterrupted throughout this
island as it is throughout the opposing portion of the Continent, a
system of roads would naturally have established itself, radiating
from some depôt common to the various ports of Kent, just as a system
of roads grew up upon the Continent, radiating from Calais and from
Boulogne, and forming a network inland with such central points as
Bavai, Amiens, Cassel, etc., to form pivots for the whole.
But communication within the island of Britain was not thus
uninterrupted in all directions. One great obstacle lay across it
from east to west, and that obstacle was the Thames. How complete an
interruption the Thames formed, especially in its lower course, I will
describe in a moment; it must suffice to notice here that for one who
would reach all the fertile land of East Anglia and of what is now
Hertfordshire, for one who would reach from the landing-place in Kent
the wheat lands of what is now Essex, and the centres of population
in what is now Norfolk (both of them originally capital sites of
population before the growth of modern industry), the profound wedge
driven into the land by the estuary of the Thames and its continuation
in the tidal river formed an almost insurmountable obstacle. There was
no straight line from say Canterbury to the Midlands and to the central
east of the island with its great mass of arable soil. More than this:
if one looks at a map of England on which moorland and waste country is
distinguished from the arable soil, it will be apparent that north of
the Wash the latter takes the form of a long and somewhat narrow strip
corresponding at first to the lower valley of the Trent and farther
north again to the Vale of York. A direct line to this arable northern
strip from any principal Kentish centre (and Canterbury was such) would
take one across the Thames estuary and was therefore impossible. The
farther up river a practicable crossing was found the longer the detour
it involved. The only considerable population in Britain that was early
accessible to a road-system proceeding directly from Kent was the
population of what later came to be called Wessex, that is, the central
southern districts of which Winchester was the capital. As a matter
of fact we find a road of immemorial antiquity proceeding directly
east and west from Canterbury to Winchester along the ridge of the
Chalk, but a similar road northward was blocked by the obstacle of the
Thames. We shall see in a moment that the discovery of a good crossing
place fairly low down in the course of the river not only saved a long
detour by the upper valley for travel proceeding from the Straits of
Dover to the eastern Midlands, and ultimately to the plain of York,
but also afforded a fairly direct line in another direction which was
essential to travel, namely, the direction of the north-west and the
main ports which establish communication with Ireland.
We may take it, then, as established, that there existed from the
earliest times a necessity, or a necessary tendency, to found and keep
up a permanent crossing place at the lowest practicable point in the
Thames valley.
Once that crossing was founded and continuously maintained it was
equally necessary that it should grow into the chief meeting place of
the island; that is, the chief market and therefore the chief town.
Indeed the various advantages such a crossing would have form so rare
a combination that we should be perfectly justified, even if we had not
the evidence we have, in making certain of the existence of a great and
important London early in history.
All the causes which we have seen to feed the commercial growth of the
site from the sea were reinforced by the inland communications which
met at this crossing place. The bridge (as I have shown elsewhere) made
a terminal not only to sea-borne traffic, but to all the inland traffic
from down the upper valley. It became the place of transhipment. It
was further the terminal, and the necessary terminal, of the three
great roads from north-west, from the north, and from the east, which
combined at this point to seek the Straits of Dover to the south; and
once this nexus was woven, once the market and place of meeting was
fixed, it must further become the goal of other roads against which
the Thames did not originally provide an obstacle. Thus it was that
a road would necessarily be established from this crossing place
to the west and to the south-west. Though the main traffic from the
fertile Lower Severn valley would more naturally make for the Straits
by way of the Chalk ridges, yet, when once London with its market
supplies and depôts was established, a main road would necessarily aim
at the Straits _through_ London rather than south of the Thames. And
though the secondary entries into the island from the Continent by
Southampton Water, and by the ports to the west of it, would naturally
send out arteries of communication northward and westward, yet their
communication north-eastward through London would soon acquire the
chief place. That London would have become what it did through no more
than these domestic causes may well be denied. The main factor in
its growth was throughout the centuries what it remains to-day--the
commerce of the tidal Thames. But standing at the head of that commerce
London also gathered to itself, as the main crossing point of the
Thames, the communications of the whole island.
The peculiar and determining effect this had upon the military history
of England I have mentioned in another study,[1] and shall expand
in this. Parallel effects could be found in every other department
of activity, not only in commerce but in the political machinery of
England, of English feudalism, and of the English monarchy, and later
of English aristocratic government. London once so formed upon its
river was the centre or support of each in turn supreme in the island.
Having established this, let us consider why the crossing place came
just here upon the line of the river, and to solve that problem we
must recollect what it is that acts as a barrier to communication,
especially in early times. This barrier is certainly not to be found
in hills of such a gentle sort as diversify south England. The breadth
of a stream, up to half a mile or so, and apart from broken water,
though of considerable importance in the problem, is again not the
chief difficulty, for man has always been able to cross water if
his approach to it was unimpeded. The true obstacle was marsh--bad
going. It is still the chief impediment to modern engineering, and the
difficulty which men found during earlier centuries in negotiating any
considerable breadth of marsh translates itself to-day into the expense
which a similar undertaking now involves. Belts of marsh impeding or
actually forbidding travel across them have been formed upon one, the
other, or both banks in so unbroken a chain down the Lower Thames
valley as to make that valley the obstacle it was and is to transverse
travel. The first factor in the formation of such marsh is the tide.
If you have a considerable difference between high and low water, and
if that difference is further complicated by great variations between
the neap and the spring tides, the difficulty of the barrier of marsh
affected by such a tide will be correspondingly increased.
[Illustration: LIMEHOUSE]
This consideration is often missed, and it will therefore be worth
while to explain it. A fairly regular height of tide covering daily
the same expanse lends itself to the establishment of a regular
crossing place, and though that crossing place may not be in continuous
use from the difficulty of using it at low tide, it can be regularly
counted upon to serve twice in the twenty-four hours. But if there is
any very considerable difference in the state of the tides throughout
each fortnight, then the opportunities for using the crossing are very
much reduced, unless, indeed, one has a steep shore to deal with. Under
such conditions one might find a spot where crossing was easy enough at
the springs, and yet impossible at the neaps; and instead of a ferry
regularly in use twice in the twenty-four hours, you would have one
which could only be depended upon a few times in a month.
Now the Thames is a river in which this difference is considerable,
and it has greatly strengthened the power of the waterway to act as an
obstacle to travel from north to south.
This, then, is the first of the factors which have combined to make
the Lower Thames the obstacle it was and is to travel. If we compare
the Thames in this respect with the other great rivers which we have
seen to be its parallels upon the Continent, we shall be struck by the
greater effect of the tide in its waters.
The second factor in the establishment of such an obstacle is the type
of soil over which the water works. It is evident that a tidal river
and estuary in which sand and gravel or even chalk form the riparian
soils will less produce marsh than clays will. A river which washes
the silt of clays up and down with its tides will be defended by
worse belts of bad land than one which runs through the other types
of rock. Now in this respect also the Thames has a bad pre-eminence
over its rivals. Chalk only comes near the stream once or twice, and
for a very short distance, in its lower course, and though gravel and
sand, as we shall see, approach the banks in more than one place (and
ultimately determine the site of London), this kind of soil is nowhere
that which the mass of the stream churns up or carries down in its
course. The Thames deals for many miles of its upper tidal waters with
clays, bringing them down towards the mouth, and has settled them for
centuries upon either side of its channel in the shape of deep alluvial
marshes.
But there is more than this.
The third factor in the problem depends upon the contours of the land
upon either side of the river. A river with steep banks, fairly narrow,
bounded by hills, even though it be a highly varying tidal stream, and
even though it scour through a great part of its tidal course a soil of
clays, cannot form wide belts of marsh upon either bank.
It so happens that the Lower Thames--until the site of London is
reached--nowhere enjoys even a short stretch of steep-on shore upon
both banks at once. The few spots where higher land comes down to
the water’s edge upon the southern or right bank are faced in every
case by great level stretches opposite which, until modern works were
undertaken, were regularly flooded with every return of the tide and
were impassable; while the lower and smaller patches of land on the
north bank (as at Purfleet or Grays) have marsh opposite them also to
the south.
In this respect the Scheldt appears under primitive conditions even
worse off than the Thames; but the Seine continually enjoys steep
banks after the first twenty miles or so up from its estuary, and in
at least half a dozen places from Caudebec (which roughly corresponds
to Gravesend) and Rouen, the first bridge (which we have seen to
correspond to London), there are opportunities for crossing the tidal
Seine, even under primitive conditions, with no considerable obstacle
of marsh upon either bank.
Now if we combine all this and consider the total effect of all three
factors in the Lower Thames valley we shall understand why no great
road ever attempted to cross it, and why no line of travel runs
transverse to it to-day. A mere examination of the contours would be
almost sufficient, presenting, as they do, great flats in most places,
stretching for miles from the main stream of the river. But beyond this
you have the great variation of the tide and the type of _surface_ soil
with which the stream deals.
Civilisation has so considerably changed the aspect of all our streams,
it has so embanked them and drained their neighbourhood, that in order
to appreciate the original conditions which made it impossible to find
a crossing place below London one must consult the new sheets of the
Ordnance Geological Survey. They give us the drift or top-soil--which
alone of course concerns travel. In this new survey the area covered
by alluvium and the line where that alluvium impinges upon the older
and harder soils to the north and the south are very clearly marked.
That area with its boundary line gives one the original area and
the original boundary line of the Thames’ marshes, and it is very
instructive.
The problem is one of approach from the south. From the north there is
no firm soil at all within the neighbourhood of the riverbed from the
sea upwards until one reaches the slight eminence of the City, unless
one counts the isolated patches at Purfleet and Grays, the approach to
which from the north was not only originally difficult but connected
with no reasonable line of travel. One has but to look at the map to
see that Purfleet could have been approached from the north by no
considerable road. It might have formed some sort of terminal for an
eastern road but only that at the expense of a long detour such as is
made by the main road to-day through Ockendon or by the railway, for
immediately behind lies a belt of what was originally marsh. Moreover,
even if primitive travel had drifted by this somewhat circuitous route
to the hard patch at Purfleet, it would have found no crossing there;
immediately opposite lay the very wide belt of marshy land which flanks
either side of the Darent. That river comes in almost exactly opposite
the small belt of natural hard on which Purfleet stands.
Primitive travel, then (and for that matter modern travel too, unless
it is at a great expense of engineering), could not approach the
northern bank of the Thames between the sea reaches and the City of
London save, and that with difficulty, by the very small exceptional
patches of Purfleet and Grays, and at Purfleet would have discovered no
opportunities for a crossing: the bank opposite being a particularly
wide and impossible stretch of marsh at this point.
Now as to Grays: That very pleasant place does give some approach both
in soil and contour to the water from the north. It is just on the edge
of the chalk, just above the old limit of high water, and its original
nucleus, though not actually on the stream, would require but a short
causeway to reach it.
But Grays is in the same bad topographical case as Purfleet, only
rather worse. It is still less of a terminal for any road from the
north. It connects with the east only through Stanford and the Horndon
roads. To the north of it lay, completely cutting it off from any
communication, the belt of marsh of which Mordyke is now the drainage
line, and of which Orsett Fenn is the principal survival.
We have, then, on the north, only Purfleet and Grays; and both must
be rejected. On the south, however, there is a series of isolated
natural wharves which approach the main tidal stream, and not only
stand fairly steep-on to its rise and fall, but are further of a soil
upon their surface which permitted travel and an easy approach to the
river in early times. These are, counting from the sea-reaches upward:
Gravesend, where the chalk comes right down to the Thames; Greenhithe,
where a tongue of the chalk juts out and touches the water; Erith, the
point where the gravels, which some mighty stream laid down when the
rivers of Northern Europe were discharging ten, twenty, or a hundred
times the flood they have to-day, first approach the existing stream.
At Woolwich sand and gravel closely approach the river and line it for
so considerable a distance as to afford the platform for a fairly large
town. Next up-river the same formation of gravels gives at Greenwich
a hard along the stream, and immediately above another spit of the
same actually touches the river at the point where used to stand the
isolated village of Deptford.
[Illustration: GREENWICH]