Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the middle period
of their growth; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish
themselves. The River of London to-day is the capital example of this
truth out of all Europe. A basin far too small for modern commerce,
lying much too distantly up a river too narrow for modern commercial
needs, dangerous of entry for ships of modern draft, and needing
perpetual and enormous labour to keep it properly open, none the less
preserves its place at the head of the ports of the world. As a depôt
for commerce its wharves and docks extend to Tilbury, and that system
of clearing which grew up naturally on the low gravel height above
London Bridge, when the pool held all the shipping of the place and was
a large and secure harbour, is still established on that same hill in
the shape of the banks and the exchanges of the City of London, which
cancel the exchanges, not of the pool below, but of I know not what
fraction of the shipping of the whole world.
There is one last point to be considered in connection with London
river as a port. It has been well made by Mr. Lyde in one of his short
but remarkable geographical studies. The estuary of the Thames exactly
faces that great and permanent frontier line between two parts of our
European culture, upon either side of which lie contrasting speeches,
traditions, and even religions.
That frontier roughly divides such areas of Western Europe as have
continuously preserved the traditions of the Roman Empire from outer
regions to the east and to the north, which only received the Christian
religion and the Roman civilisation after the breakdown of central
authority exercised from the Imperial city.
The estuary of the Thames opens like a funnel just opposite the point
where this frontier between what some would call the “Teutonic” and
“Latin” areas, reaches the sea.
It may not be at first sight apparent why a position of this kind is
of capital commercial importance. The reason is rather moral than
material, though it has its material element in the cheapness and
expedition of carriage by sea.
Areas which differ in the type of their culture tend to become
polarised one towards the other for the purposes of exchange. Each
will tend to produce something that the other lacks. Now the exchange
between two such areas will, of course, proceed actively enough across
innumerable points lying upon the frontier between them, but it will
not penetrate very far inland, if there is in competition with the
inland routes a water route. Thus Arras will exchange easily enough
with, say, Aix-la-Chapelle, Metz with Trèves or Frankfort, but what
of Rouen and the Baltic, Bordeaux and the Frisian Lowlands, Brittany
and Vendée and the German Plain? It is evident that if no friction
existed a direct sea-borne commerce along the north-western coasts of
Europe would effect these exchanges; but there does exist a friction,
especially in early times, consisting in the ignorance and, as it were,
the credulity, separating places so far distant in mileage and, what
is more important, in culture. If, then, a half-way house is found
sufficiently familiar to either party, that half-way house will tend
to become in this new aspect out of so many, a centre of exchange--and
this is precisely what happened to London. The North Sea and the
Baltic were familiar with London--but then so was the Channel and the
Bay of Biscay. London river attracted in this fashion a sheaf of trade
routes, drawn from the north and east, another from the south and
west. And so true is this that to the present day, and in one curious
slight but emphatic modern instance, you can see the process at work.
Travellers intent upon no purpose of commerce but merely upon an
excursion will leave London river for Boulogne and Calais, sometimes
for Dieppe and Havre; other travellers will leave the same facility
of egress for the Scheldt and the Rhine and the Dutch ports and the
Elbe. But, unless I am mistaken, the more obvious track of a passenger
steamer route between the French ports and the Belgian, Dutch, and
German ones does not exist save in the case of the great liners which
touch at Cherbourg. A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by
sea or from some lower French port to, say, Amsterdam, would very
probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames
and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present
position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one:
but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at
the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this
‘facing’ of London River towards the great political frontier line of
Europe, was of capital importance. Scandinavia, the Baltic, Frisia, and
the Dutch ports had all known their way to London for centuries when
the Norman Conquest, and still more the succeeding Angevin monarchy,
brought round into London River a new wealth of trade from the Seine,
the Loire, and the Garonne.
[Illustration: TWICKENHAM FERRY]
In all that has preceded we have been considering London as the
creation of the river in its civil aspect alone; it remains to consider
the town and the stream in their effect upon the military history of
the country, and to that I shall now turn.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] The reader may see quoted in full in Sir Laurence Gomme’s _The
Governance of London_ (p. 346) the precedents upon which Coke founded
his opinion in 1597, including the verdict of 29 Ed. I., concerning in
particular the portage of salt upon the Thames.
“Quod nullus mensuarius sit de London usque Lachenlade nisi dicti
mensuarii et bushelli de Ripa Reginae.”
V
LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE
The last historical aspect in which we must consider the River of
London is the military aspect; and this aspect has three clearly marked
divisions. We have first to consider the Lower Thames as an avenue of
invasion; next as an obstacle to invasion of the northern part of the
island, or to the passage of the troops from the north to the south.
Thirdly, we must estimate what effect upon the military history of
the country London itself has had, commanding as it does the lowest
crossing of the Thames, always forming a vast base of supply, and for
centuries by its stores and munitions forming an ally or an enemy of
capital importance to whichever party it supported so long as warfare
was waged in England.
The first two of these considerations are very sharply defined not
only in their nature, but also in the historical periods over which
each one predominated. The Thames as an avenue of ingress or invasion
belongs to the earlier part of English history. The importance of the
lower river in this category ends very nearly with the close of the
Dark Ages. Its second character, that of an obstacle to the invader
who would go northward or to troops marching from the north southward,
in the main is discoverable of course throughout history, but chiefly
belongs to the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. I will take
these three points, therefore, in their order and deal first with the
invasions of England which the Lower Thames has served. These invasions
from the first recorded case of the almost to the last may be grouped
together under one description. They were the raids of the pirates.
It is true that these raids became, as the Dark Ages developed and
the true Middle Ages approached, better and better organised, more
definitely political and dynastic in plan, until at last they took on
the character of regular warfare. But from the beginning to the end
of the process we have little or no use of the Thames on the part
of regular forces proceeding from the ancient civilisation of the
Continent, from Gaul, or from the mouths of the Rhine. The whole story
is a story of invasion from the outer and barbarian limits of Europe,
that is, from the North Sea and the confines of the Baltic.
The early pirate raids upon this island, which were first called Saxon,
hundreds of years later Dane, but which had through the whole of the
Dark Ages much of one character of purposeless devastation, used the
Thames for one of their chief entries. The earlier and less powerful
raids seem to have made nothing of London. It was too much for them.
But the later and worse tempest of the eighth and ninth and tenth
centuries had London for their main object when they forced the river,
and since it is a piece of history very little explored, it is worth a
moment’s digression here.
What were the conditions under which the pirates conducted their raids
upon the waterway?
First let us establish a little list of what was certainly known with
regard to these attempts.
Of the first Saxon raids in connection with the Thames we know nothing.
Even the distorted legends set down hundreds of years afterwards only
preserve a recollection of a landing in Kent, in Thames, and the
fighting that follows them is upon land and south of the river. Of
what raids were made upon the Essex shore, or whether any were made,
or whether (which is improbable) any attempt were made by these sparse
destroyers against the walls and bridge of London, all the part, small
or null or whatever it was, which the Thames played in the first pirate
raids of the fifth and sixth centuries escapes us.
[Illustration: HAMPTON]
This is not the place in which to insist upon the unreliable character
of that vast mass of popular history erected upon sheer guess-work and
describing the early raids of the Saxon pirates as effecting in some
way a reconstruction of England. The wilder sort of fiction dealing
with that remote and almost unknown period talks of these first pirate
raids as “the coming of the English.” We must, of course, neglect
rhetoric of that kind. But it is worth while admitting a moment’s
digression to impress on the reader upon what an absence of any thing
approaching evidence all this academic guess-work has been raised.
The one definite fact and the only one connected with the pirate
raids which descended upon the eastern and southern river mouths and
beaches of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is the fact that
these raids cut off southern and eastern Britain from the rest of
civilisation. Of contemporary evidence there is nothing for more than
150 years, save one very vague denunciatory or apocalyptical document
more in the nature of a sermon than a record, which testifies to the
violent impression produced upon the civilised inhabitants of the
island by these raids, and a couple of fragmentary sentences written
perhaps by contemporaries, certainly not by eye-witnesses, and
probably at a great distance from the scene of the trouble.
We do not know when the raids of the pirates began, nor whether they
were already severe before Britain was cut off.
We do not know whether Southern and Eastern Britain was already
occupied by kinsmen of the pirates serving as Auxiliary Troops within
the Empire or no.
We do not know whether the maritime belts of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and
Sussex spoke a Teutonic language before the pirate raids or no.
We do not know whether a Christian Church was sufficiently established
in those belts for the raids to have had an opportunity of “destroying”
such a Church.
We do not know in what numbers the pirates came nor with what object
nor what the towns (which were the nucleus of that society) suffered or
did not suffer from the invasions.
We have, as almost the sole instrument of historical analysis for a
full 150 years, nothing but inference and the consideration of what is
physically possible and physically impossible in the various theories
that have been put forward.
Thus it is physically impossible that any very considerable number of
men can have come over seas at any one moment in the small and shallow
boats of the time, but for all the rest we have nothing but legend
and our varying estimate of how the society attacked would probably
have behaved and what the internal reactions within it under the
strain of such an anxiety would probably have been. We can be fairly
certain that an attack of this sort could not deal with a defended
Roman town, though here and there a garrison on the coast may have
been overwhelmed. We can be morally certain from all that we know of
that society that men coming for loot would not kill slaves. On the
other hand, we do not know how far the anarchy may have been increased
by the presence of numerous escaped slaves in the welter. We have a
right to exclude the fantastic--such as the astonishing idea that a
great Roman town like London could be wiped out _and then resettled
by a totally new population_, and we have a right to exclude as very
nearly worthless odd stories cropping up hundreds of years later in
the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. On the other hand, we are bound to pay
more respect to such a remark as that of the Venerable Bede when he
testifies to the migration of a whole body of pirate population from
the capital of Schleswig to that of Britain.
If we could discover what happened between the first generation of the
fifth century and the first generation of the seventh, the discovery
would be the most important and interesting that could be made in
connection with our history. For in Britain as in every other province
of Europe the process by which civilisation entered into the Dark Ages
is the explanation of all that followed. But the discovery has not yet
been granted to us, and in all human probability never will be.
We know that the avenue of approach from the Continent to Britain, that
is, the coasts of the south and east, were so far ruined or occupied
or degraded, the communication with the rest of the island was cut
off; we know that when civilisation came back with St. Augustine it
had to work through the medium of little courts scattered up and down
these shores, and we can presume that writing and record and government
thus filtering through the south and east to the rest of the island
gradually spread the speech and certain of the customs of that south
and east eastward throughout the succeeding centuries.
Of more than that we are ignorant.
The Lower Thames, therefore, and the part that it played in that first
capital piece of fighting lies, unfortunately, outside the field of
positive history. We do not begin to get any true record of the Thames
as an avenue of invasion until the second raids begin, three centuries
after the first: those second raids which are collectively known in
this country under the title of “Danish.”
At the end of the eighth century the pirate raids from the north struck
England again. A few boats’ crews would land, especially in the north,
and raid a monastery or loot the outer barns of a steading, only to be
beaten off.
But a lifetime later, in the middle of the ninth century, the raids
increased in pressure. As early as 832 you get them in the mouth of
the Thames. It is a small matter. They land in Sheppey and raid that
sparsely inhabited, isolated island, but their raid was successful and
it taught them the way back. The next year they meet Egbert down in the
south-west in some considerable conflict, killing two of his leaders
and holding the battlefield. Two years later again they were in the
Irish Sea and were caught and beaten in an island raid in the west.
In 837 they were beaten off Southampton, to which they had come with
thirty-three ships--and perhaps at the most five thousand fighting men.
But again that same year a raid of theirs in Dorsetshire succeeded, and
the next year between Kent and Sussex they struck again, and before
winter in the hollow land of the Fens and in the Broads and in Kent.
It is with the year 839 that you get the first hint at an attack upon
London. It is not certain that that attack was Danish, but it is
almost certain that the mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to
a great simultaneous series of raids upon the French and the English
coasts which struck Picardy and Rochester in Kent as well as London.
Something we shall never know is what was pushing them. They had some
more adventurous man with his companions to rouse them in the Baltic
and off the Norwegian inlets, or there was passing over that unknown
pagan society of the north one of those spirits which pass over human
societies and lead them out to peril. They would risk the Bay of
Biscay, but their ships were caught by the Christians in the Asturias.
They even dared for the first time to winter without going home, and to
pass the time between one fighting season and the next upon an island
in the mouth of the Noir Moutier. They pushed as far as Seville and
the Moors ate them up. They ran up the Elbe to Hamburg in a force far
larger than anything that has been seen in the west. They ran up the
Seine to Rouen and further. They pushed through a gate of Paris and
were turned out.
[Illustration: TEDDINGTON]
They first charged at and then carried Bordeaux, and all this while
they raided Ireland. It was in the year 851 that there came at last
a great fleet of these purposeless destroyers to the Thames mouth,
three hundred and fifty ships so came, and Canterbury and London were
stormed. But their host, which so considerable a fleet must have
brought for the first time in numbers really threatening, was beaten as
it marched down the Stane Street to the raiding of the south. They were
met at Ockley[5] by the host of the English King Ethelwulf and were cut
to pieces. He had probably come up by that old way from Winchester
which leads through Alton into the Dorking Gap, and so had come up with
the raiders. Four years later these pirates, who had already learnt to
winter upon Christian land in Gaul, wintered in Sheppey. That they went
up the river next year we have no record, but ten years later, in 865,
they had been wintering in England, this time in Thanet. The Kentish
men paid them ransom, but the pagan kept no faith. He took the ransom
and harried the land. Thenceforward it is perpetual raiding up and down
England north of Thames. In ’71 they are in Reading, but not, it would
seem, by river, and Alfred beat them on Ashdown, but they were in no
way driven off. They held London all that winter, and year after year
they still marched up and down England.
The pirates, keeping more or less together in one horde, marched and
ravaged without strategical purpose and with no power of conquest,
organisation, or government, ruining as they went, and you have in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such phrases as: “Here the host travelled
over the mouth of Humber to York.” “Here the host went to Mercia and
to Nottingham.” “Here the host went again to York.” “Here the army
rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up their winter quarters
in Thetford.” “Here the host went into Northumbria, and took up their
winter quarters at Torksey.” “Here the host went to Repton”--and so
forth, to Cambridge, to Wareham, to Exeter--a perpetual raid until in
878 Alfred came out from behind Selwood and his hiding in the crisis
of his kingdom, and beat them for good on the bare chalk Down above
Eddington. Thenceforward the pressure is against the pirates.
More than twenty years later they raided from Boulogne into Kent, and
it was in that same raid in 893 that again the Thames was violated.
Haesten, whom we call Hasting, came up so far as Milton, that is the
first good landing-place upon the southern shore of the inland Thames
just opposite Tilbury.[6] He was working with another force to the
south in the Rother, but nothing came of this double attack. There was
no sailing up river. The station at Milton was broken up and Hasting
went down river, crossed to the northern shore, and established himself
at Benfleet. The men of London, with a reinforcement of the national
army, took his fort and broke all that part of the Danish force, and
his ships were either destroyed or brought up river to London, or some
up the Medway to Rochester, but Hasting himself who had been raiding
was not captured. He came back with that part of his force which had
been with him, summoned sundry parties of the raiding Danes from other
parts of England, made a new base not far from the old one, and started
upon a new raid right across England to the Western Sea. When he had
returned he brought such ships as remained to him up river into the
Lea, built yet another fort upon that stream twenty miles from London.
Once more that base was destroyed. The river Lea was blocked below
their settling place, such ships as they had, destroyed or taken to
London again. And meanwhile the astonishing Danish host survived,
raiding out again across England in a final effort. But their sea
power was gone. They wintered at Bridgenorth in the west. Their few
remaining ships, six in number, attempted the Isle of Wight and Devon.
Alfred beat them off, also catching three aground, but of the remaining
three two were left upon the Sussex coast and their crews hanged in
Winchester. The last one left, full of wounded men, made East Anglia.
In 901 Alfred died, but though he had prevented the raiding of the
Danes from destroying Christian England, the plundering went on year
after year, but for many years the Thames was free. Seventeen years
later they fell upon Severn mouth and were beaten off, and the story
goes on with a gradual reconquest of the posts which the pagans had
established in the Midlands. It was not until 980 that they touched
again at Thames mouth in Thanet, harrying it, and two years later they
seem to have come up river and attacked London once more, but there is
a bare mention of it, and nothing further. But with that end of the
century you come to a very different set of wars--a political attempt
of the northern raiders, now organised in regular fashion, and almost
a kingdom by themselves, upon the verge of accepting Christianity and
of entering into the European Commonwealth. These new fights were
fought not for plunder but for conquest. They ended in success, and the
critical moment of the campaign was decided in the Thames.
All the fighting of the thirty odd years which established the Danish
dynasty in England and led up to the great reign of Canute, has for its
pivot or centre the estuary of the Thames and in successive attacks
upon the defence of, or in the alliance of London.
Ethelred the Unready, when he forms his first plans against Olaf,
gathers his fleet in the Pool of London--though he does nothing with
that fleet (992). When, two years later (994), Olaf makes his alliance
with Sweyn, it is again up the estuary of the Thames that he sails to
make his great attack upon the City--but London beat him off. Though
London is attacked again from the _land_ in 1009 and with very great
vigour in 1013, Edmund Ironside, a boy who all but saved his house,
fought alternately north and south of the estuary against the armies
landed from the invading fleet.
That campaign (the campaign of 1016) is as excellent an example of the
part the Lower Thames played in the warfare of this island before the
Norman Conquest as one could choose. In the month of May Canute makes
his attempt to reduce the capital. He cut a canal through the alluvium
of Suffolk to get his ships round the Bridge head, so that he held
London from the River side both above bridge and below, and he dug his
trench all round the north, east, and west over against the walls. But
he did not reduce the town. Edmund Ironside coming up from the west,
re-entered it. The invader retired to an entrenched camp at Greenwich.
When later the whole invading fleet had dropped down the Thames and
sailed out of the estuary, you get a strategical playing north and
south of that obstacle which is most illuminating. Canute attacks the
Suffolk shore. Edmund marches thither, having the estuary to the south
of him. Canute then sails across the mouth of the Thames and attacks
Kent shore. Edmund counter-marches, _is compelled to take the long
route crossing the Thames at London_, and finds the Danish advance at
Otford to the south of the estuary. He defeats it. Canute thereupon
once more crosses the mouth of the Thames and attacks the Essex shore,
and once more Edmund goes back by the long land route, crosses at
London, gets to the north of the estuary, and fights and loses (by
treachery) his great action on the Crouch at Ashington, near Rochford.