Britain, it escapes any material analysis. We must postulate it as
a constant fact running through the known and recorded centuries of
our history, and we may ascribe it according as we more love ease or
veracity to whatever cause we feel most flattering or most true. No
proof is possible. We can only say in this respect that certain areas
of Europe have shown these characters for greater or less periods of
time, and that others equally well endowed have not shown them, but
have shown other characters perhaps as valuable.
The main fact in this connection is that whether the productive areas
of Great Britain were exporting raw material (as during the most
active centuries of the Middle Ages, when wool was our chief export),
or whether (as later became the case) manufactured articles and coal
were the stand-by of our oversea trade; whether we consider the period
before or after the development of our carrying trade; whether we are
concerned with an industrial or an agricultural England; whether we
are observing late centuries in which the English showed a passionate
interest in novelty and foreign adventure, or far more numerous early
centuries in which they were indifferent to distant voyages--throughout
the whole story with all its changes the productive area of the island
has always maintained a high standard of wealth in comparison with its
neighbours and its aptitude for exchange has always been equally high.
It is a point often neglected that the Norman Conquest, though of
course it introduced a new and much more developed culture than Saxon
England had possessed, did not find an impoverished land which the
newcomers might “develop.” It found an exceedingly wealthy country
according to the standards of the time; and the extent and variety of
that wealth stands out very clearly in the narrative of contemporaries.
Four centuries later, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, foreign
observers make precisely the same comment. It is the packed wealth of
South England filling its comparatively small area which the foreign
envoy notes. We have a striking piece of evidence surviving before our
eyes in the number, decoration and amplitude of our churches to which I
have already alluded.
To continue the proof after the Tudors would be superfluous. There
was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found in the
seventeenth century, the close of which we have unhappily seen in our
own generation, when the wealth of England was so superior to that
of any other rival that the material circumstances of life among the
wealthier classes of the country seemed to belong to a different world
from that of neighbouring nations, and when the economic supremacy of
England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost
contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend.
London, then, for all these centuries has enjoyed the two political
conditions necessary to the establishment of a chief market, security
and a productive area in the hands of a race by its genius inclined to
exchange.
There remain the two natural conditions: ease of approach from without
and “draining power” from within.
Now when we turn to these natural conditions we find that in the matter
of ease of approach the Thames was unrivalled. London was, of course,
far from the sea--a point with which I will deal in a moment--but
there was no haven north of the Mediterranean which called so readily
for commerce upon a large scale. Given the political conditions for
a market--security and active powers of production and exchange--the
Thames was as good a highway to that market as any that could be found.
No vessels until quite modern times had to consider their draught or
fear the entry of the river (at least, through channels which the
pilots commanded), and once within the inland water a swinging tide was
at the service of the ships. There were, within that inland stretch, no
obstacles, no high intervening hills to becalm, no narrows or islands.
In this ease of access, again, must be reckoned the position of the
Thames relatively to opposing ports. The wide funnel opened at a few
hours’ sail from all that line of ports which begins with the mouth
of the Seine and ends with the northernmost mouths of the Rhine. What
we now call the coasts of Normandy, Picardy, Flanders, Belgium, and
Holland lay, even at their extremes, within one double tide of the
Thames.
It is true that they also lay equally convenient to any one of the
lesser havens upon the Sussex, the Kent, the Essex, or the Norfolk
coasts, but the ample space afforded by the river, the opportunity for
a crowd of shipping, coupled with opportunities for inland trading,
were to be found nowhere else in the south and east of the island as
they were to be found up London River.
[Illustration: GRAVESEND]
In this connection the use of the tide should be noted. By a
peculiarity which has not been without its effect upon the history of
the river the flood carries a man past the Kentish coast long past
high water and indeed until a moment very close to that in which
_another_ tide, that from the North Sea, carries its sweep of water up
the river. Thus, though the tide reach high water shortly after noon
in Dover Harbour, a man outside will carry the stream with him all up
past the Kentish coast until close upon five o’clock. He has but to get
round Longnose and he finds this other tide serving him--a tide that
has been making from three o’clock or thereabouts, coming in from the
North Sea, and that will carry him right up river as long as the wind
or daylight permits him to follow it; a tide that does not reach its
height at Gravesend until eight that evening, or in the Pool of London
until nine. In other words, the River of London afforded to the vessel
coming in from the south a double tide which, clever picked up, gave a
continuous voyage from the Channel right down into the sheltered water
inland.
At this point it is interesting to consider why the principal harbours
of the Middle Ages, in the north and west of Europe, at least, and upon
tidal seas, so constantly developed not upon the coast itself, but at
some distance up a stream or creek and inland.
Consider the examples: Havre comes late in the development of the
Seine--the original port is Harfleur; Bristol stands up a tortuous
and narrow channel well inland, and not upon the estuary of the
Severn at all; Liverpool had its first nucleus four miles from the
open sea; Preston quite twelve; Chester more than twenty, of which
the last five or six were a narrow river above the estuary; Nantes is
another striking example--something like one day’s sail from the sea;
Antwerp, Rotterdam--Bruges itself lying those few miles inland upon
its canal--follow the general rule; and so does Norwich, and so does
Colchester, and so does Boston, and so does Glasgow; Bordeaux tells the
same story, and so does the Royal Harbour of Montreuil. And in general,
while a great number of smaller ports rose upon the very coast of the
Atlantic, the North Sea, or the Channel, there seemed to be, until
modern times at least, a tendency for the main depôts of sea-borne
commerce to lie thus inland. Why was it?
We can only guess, but I would suggest that three factors combined to
establish such a state of things: First, the little boats used for
inland transport and the vehicles dependent upon roads and therefore
upon bridges would seek a place of trans-shipment at some point upon
the river where it had not yet become too broad or too rough, and so
long as this place was accessible from the sea, the higher up river it
was the better for them.
Next must be counted the security of a perfectly land-locked harbour
for the smaller craft, which formed so much the largest part of
maritime transport. A perfectly land-locked natural harbour upon the
coast was a very rare thing. Let the stretch of water be only of the
size of Southampton Water at its mouth, or of the Solent, and they
would be wrecked in a high wind, but rivers everywhere afforded a
secure protection when once one had entered their narrow channel.
Thirdly, we must consider the advantage which such sites presented
against the attacks of pirates, and the better opportunities for
defence which a considerable inland town possessed, with its resources
in the surrounding fields and population over the smaller seaports.
In considering the first of these points we must remember that there
was always a tendency for the central depôt or main commercial town
to arise somewhat inland and to be served by subsidiary ports, if
there were no direct access to it by water--and even if there were.
Canterbury is an example of this, so is Winchester, so is Amiens, and
so is Arras, and so is Caen, and so is Rennes, and a host of others.
In balancing the various advantages offered by various sites for the
establishment of a market, a preponderating advantage must always be
a position lying in the midst of several centres of production, and,
since man is a land animal, these sites would normally lie inland. When
they were served by a river so much the better; when they were served
by a great and secure river, they could not fail to grow as London has
grown.
As part of this ease of access must be reckoned, the peculiar character
of the Thames, much more open to the wind than the Seine, not blocked
by any island, affording once within the estuary a constant depth amply
sufficient for all vessels until quite recent times.
But all this would not have given London its place had not a city
established at the lowest crossing of the Thames exercised in a
peculiar degree that “draining power” of which I have spoken.
We have seen how the system of British roads necessarily converged
upon London, and if we consider one or two other features in English
topography, we shall see why London provides a common depôt for nearly
the whole of English exports in a fashion which no other city could
show for any other equally large area of production.
Before the north of England was industrialised, three things were
mainly required to establish what I have called the “draining” power
of any market in the island. First, that it should be fairly central
to all the south and Midlands; secondly, that it should afford a
convenient centre of demand for various foreign products; thirdly,
that it should be as close as possible to such continental markets as
principally received our export.
Given those three conditions combined in any one place, and so far as
the great mass of Britain was concerned, a point would be established
to which would flow the main part of the produce which the Continent
desired to purchase by exchange.
Observe how all these three conditions coincide in the case of London
and of that Lower Thames which was its port.
When I say with regard to the first condition that the point we are
seeking must be “central” to the south and east of the Island and to
the Midlands, I am using a word which needs expansion. I mean that we
must have a point to which the communications of commerce already lead,
and one not too ex-centric to the area tapped.
Now at the first glance at the map London does give an impression of
ex-centricity, of lying upon one side: and that towards the east and
the south.
But when we begin to consider certain qualifying conditions, we shall
find that London is fairly central, even geometrically, to the area in
question, and that, when we are considering the economic “weight” of
the various parts of this area, London may by a metaphor be said to be
near the “centre of gravity” of such an area.
Cut off, in the first place, the Dumnonian Peninsula--that is, Devon
and Cornwall,--the Welsh Highlands, and the Pennines. Consider (that
is) South England, East Anglia, and the Midlands. You have an area
roughly square, and about two hundred miles every way.
In drawing such a square, take for your extreme points Chester on
the north-west, a point midway between Portland and Exmouth on the
south-west; upon the north-east a point a little north of Cromer, and
upon the south-east a point in the Straits of Dover, a trifle west of
the line between Dungeness and Boulogne. Such a square includes a good
deal that is outside our area, much of the estuary of the Severn, a
strip of the Channel, a wedge of the North Sea and of the Wash, and
a wedge of Pennine land to the north; but it also excludes a certain
amount properly within our area as some of the richest parts of Kent
and of Norfolk and Suffolk. We may therefore take this square for a
fair average, and we shall see that even upon the test of distance
London is not so ex-centric as might be imagined. Draw the two
diagonals of this square, and you will find that London lies upon one
of them at a distance of less than forty miles from the centre.
[Illustration: KINGSTON BRIDGE]
When we consider something more than distance and think of London as
the “centre of gravity” of the Midlands, the east and the south, we
find it still more central for the centuries immediately preceding our
own. Their staple export was wool. The pasturage of the chalk ranges
runs right round London in the Chilterns and their extension into East
Anglia, in the north and south Downs and the Uplands of Wiltshire,
Hampshire, and Dorset. London is the obvious centre of all that
triangle of chalk. It is again nearly equi-distant from the principal
markets of Norfolk, of the Upper Trent valley, of Dorset, and of the
Cotswolds. If we treat as exceptions the Lancashire and Yorkshire
Plains (each with their local ports), the Vale Royal and the Lower
Severn (each with its local port at Chester and at Bristol), London is
very near the commercial centre of gravity of what remains. We must not
forget that the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain are but a few
miles more distant from London Bridge than is the extremity of Kent.
From the town of Pewsey to London Bridge as the crow flies is almost
exactly eighty-eight miles. From the South Foreland the distance is
not ten miles less. It needs but a slightly longer radius to include
all the Warwickshire Midlands and very nearly all the county of
Norfolk: all, of course, of Suffolk, of Essex, of Kent, Sussex, Surrey,
and Hampshire.
London is geographically and commercially central at any rate to the
older England--which was all that was needed for its establishment.
It was even more central when regarded as a nexus of communications.
How all the main roads centred there we have already seen. The roads
alone would have given London a pre-eminence as a market above all
other towns in Britain even if the Thames had dried up after their
establishment. But the position was meanwhile further strengthened by
the conditions of water carriage; and it is here that the meaning of
the Thames as a whole appears, and the way in which the upper as well
as the lower river has built up the greatness of London.
I have no space to show why and how water carriage was of supreme
importance both in primitive times (that is, before the Roman
civilisation came) and during the Dark Ages through which, in spite of
decline, it survived. It should be sufficient to point out that in the
decline of a civilisation, or in its absence, water carriage--suited
to heavy burdens, requiring no repair of ways, and providing a mode of
traction ready-made--is, wherever it is available, the chief economic
factor of commerce.
Now when we recognise that the bulk of English wealth lay for centuries
south and east of a line drawn from Exmouth to the Wash, and when we
appreciate what the Thames valley is in that triangle, we shall see
how necessarily the main market of the Thames was also the main market
of England. The natural water communications of the south consist in
a number of small streams, only one of which, the Salisbury Avon, may
have been navigable for more than a dozen miles or so inland. East
Anglia was better served, and particularly the northern area, which
was drained by the three rivers converging upon Breydon Water. The
northern part of that area was also fairly well served by the three
parallel rivers of the Ouse, the Nen, and the Welland, but their
service as a means of communication was handicapped by the nature of
their entry into the sea through the Fens, and after that through the
perils, sandbanks, and shallows of the Wash; while the good service of
rivers along all the East Anglian coast had this drawback: that, as we
there have nothing but a series of short systems, there was no water
connection between one group of short valleys and another, not even
one thought-out road. A dozen streams will carry produce from the sea
to Worstead, to Norwich, to Beccles, to what was once the considerable
port of Orford, to Ipswich, to Colchester, etc. But each avenue is a
separate avenue. There is no “trunk” connecting the system.
With the Thames it is otherwise. Glance down the valley and see how
one point after another, each the natural market of a whole district
of its own, drains the produce from the north and the south of the
river, to discharge it upon the main stream. From Lechlade (up to which
point ran the “measure and the bushel of London”)[4] through Oxford,
Abingdon, Wallingford, Reading, Marlow, the Middle Hythe (which we now
call Maidenhead), and Windsor, you have a whole string of such centres,
each gathering its own section’s produce from its scheme of roads,
or of subsidiary streams, and turning the mass down seaward upon the
“trunk” afforded by the Thames.
The Thames, therefore, with London as its port of transhipment between
the inland communications and the sea, tapped the very heart of all
that was wealthiest in England for fifteen hundred years, and all that
commerce by river as by road drained upon London because London was
“central” to exchange in the rich south and east of the island.
But, as we have seen, two further characters were attached to
“draining” power. We must not only seek a point central for
communications, we must also seek a point where there was a ready
demand for import and a ready access to the best foreign markets.
Let us consider these two characters in their order:
A ready demand for import must exist either in a port itself or
behind it, if that port is to develop into a great town and to
acquire political importance. You have many instances, especially in
contemporary commerce, of ports which do little more than export, and
of other ports in which there is no demand for import, but which merely
serve to pass the import inland. In the first case the international
exchange is effected through imports at some other point. The clearing
between export and import is a paper clearing, and the ships at the
export point arrive in ballast--a drawback. In the second place, though
a town may grow to some importance as a mere place of transhipment,
it will never acquire the importance of a capital nor even of a great
city--it will never have a great _political_ place unless, round
the handling of its imports destined for the interior, there grows
up a considerable local power of demand for values. In other words,
something of the imports transmitted through the town must “stick on
the way.” Modern Liverpool is a good example of this. The primary
economic function of modern Liverpool is still the transhipment of
cotton to Lancashire just beyond its boundaries, but in the pursuit
of this function Liverpool has claimed its tribute for now three
generations, and so vast an accumulation of other activities connected
with the port has grown up that even the digging of the Manchester Ship
Canal, the effect of which was so much feared in Liverpool, seems
to have been, if anything, a benefit to that town. What proportion
the power of demand exercised for imported goods in Liverpool itself
may bear to the total of values entering the port cannot be exactly
calculated, but it is safe to say that the toll levied is not much less
than one-fifth.
Now when to this power of demand created by the “sticking” at the point
of transhipment or port of import, of goods coming from abroad, there
is added the power of demand caused by the residence of government, of
a court and of wealthy men apart from those who are wealthy through
commerce, you get, of course, a very highly increased power of demand
which makes of the port of import a specially great economic centre. A
ship coming to such a port in order to take on board there the export
in which it deals, can enter loaded with imports which are sure of a
ready market.
[Illustration: SUNBURY]
It so happens that London during all the centuries of its growth, and
especially during those four hundred years of the Middle Ages which
chiefly established its great position, was in exactly this position.
Not only was it, as modern Liverpool is, a point of transhipment
round which a vast quantity of subsidiary activities had grown, it
was also close to the more or less permanent residence of the court,
to what became the permanent seat of legislature, and to what was
very early the permanent seat of the central courts of justice. The
process continued uninterruptedly. After the loot of the church land
of the endowments of the poor under the Tudors, the great palaces of
the new aristocracy lined the Strand, and from the early seventeenth
century--when this process was completed--onwards, the power of demand
exercised by London alone and its local call for imports, has never
ceased to grow, until to-day the position of London as an importing
centre is due almost entirely to this character, next to its value
as a clearing house: It is now only in a much less degree a point of
transhipment.
The type of goods for which this local power of demand existed had also
a very great effect in helping the growth of London through the traffic
of the Thames.
Perhaps the principal import of the Middle Ages in value was that of
wine. It was a luxurious import for which there was a local demand,
especially where you had the residence of the wealthier people, and,
what was exceedingly important, it was _an import large in bulk_.
It meant that ships would come either in great numbers or in heavy
tonnage, and this in itself suggested London as a place of export for
their return, made a speculative voyage to London worth taking, and
developed the warehousing space and the wharf space of the port. Later
came coal, later still the tropical products, and last of all the
great passenger traffic. But in every stage of the development London
has exercised a local power of demand for that kind of import which
demanded bulk in storage.
As to the second point, the easy access to the foreign port whither
export was to be made, London was again especially favoured, in its
point of growth. To-day it is no longer so, as we shall see in a
moment. London is going forward with the momentum of its past. But
until quite modern times London looked more favourably at the points
to which England exported than did the other island ports, its rivals.
It lay in the full focus of that long curve of the Norman, the Picard,
the Flemish and Dutch coasts, which were the principal markets of the
Middle Ages. Right opposite were the Flemish cities that bought English
wool--the staple export--right opposite, also, the mouths of the Rhine
for communication with the interior Germanies and, though a little more
distant than the northern ports, agreeable to all that Baltic and North
Sea trade which grew up with the close of the Middle Ages. The league
of mercantile towns called Hanseatic had its depôt in London from the
middle of the thirteenth century. The northern ports of England that
lie a little nearer had no hinterland to feed their commerce, and
London was, moreover, the best clearing-house and centre of general
exchange for them in all the north and west. In this character it
surpassed even Bruges.
When all these conditions changed--when the discovery of the New World,
and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country
industries and one hundred other factors had taken away from the site
of London its old topographical supremacy, the port was so firmly
established that it provided its own sources of vitality.