THAT SUCH AND SUCH CAUSES DETERMINED THE TRACK OF THE OLD
ROAD, AND THAT IT RAN FROM WINCHESTER TO CANTERBURY
[Illustration]
If one looks at a map of England in relief one sees that five great
ridges of high land come, the first from just east of north, the
second from the north-east, the third and fourth from the east, and
the fifth from the south and west, to converge on Wilts and the
Hampshire border.
Roughly speaking, their area of convergence is Salisbury Plain, and it
has been suggested that Avebury and Stonehenge drew the importance of
their sites from this convergence; for these continuous high lands
would present the first natural highways by which a primitive people
could gather from all parts of the island.
The advantages afforded in the matter of travel by such hills (which
are called in great parts of their course the Cotswold, the Chilterns,
the North Downs, the South Downs, and the Dorsetshire Downs) are still
quite plainly apparent if a man will follow them on foot.
He will see from the heights even to-day the remains of the woodland
which made the valleys and the wealds originally far more difficult to
traverse. He will note the greater dryness of these heights, and he
will remark, if he contrast his cross-country going on the hills with
that of the valleys, that the geological formation of these heights,
with their contours, fit them peculiarly for an original means of
communication.
Four out of the five are great dry, turf-covered ridges of chalk,
steep towards the summer sun. The fifth range, the Cotswold, though
oolitic and therefore greasy under foot, is at the summit of its
western escarpment much drier than the valleys; for that escarpment is
steep, and drains off well into the valley of the Severn.
When one has once recognised the importance of these five radiating
lines of hills and of their point of convergence, one will next see
that of the five, one in particular must have had an especial value
perhaps in the very earliest times, and certainly in all the centuries
just preceding the historic period, during which Britain, from
similarities in religion, language, and blood, was closely connected
with the Continent. The passage westward from the Straits of Dover to
the Hampshire centres must have been by far the most important line of
traffic. We know that it has been so continuously in historic times,
and it is easy to prove that long before the opening of our national
history with the Roman invasions, some east-to-west road must have
been the leading road of England.
Few of the following considerations are new, but all are to the
purpose:
1. The Straits of Dover are the natural entry into the country. The
nature of that entry, and its very great effect upon the development
of our island, I will discuss later in connection with the town of
Canterbury. How far the Straits may have a rival lower down the
Channel I will discuss in connection with the town of Winchester. For
the present, the main point is that in the earliest times, whoever
came in and out of the country came in and out most easily by the only
harbours whence the further shore is visible.
2. When the Straits had been crossed and England entered, whither
would the principal road lead? The conformation of Kent forced it
westward, for the Thames estuary forbade a northern, the only
alternative route.
One track of great importance did indeed go north and west, crossing
near London. It was later known as the Watling Street; it was the
artery which drained the Midlands; it became the connection with
sacred Anglesey, ultimately the northern door into Ireland.
But no northern road--whether leading as did the Watling Street to
Chester, or bending round as did the Icknield Way north-east after
passing the ford of the Thames, or taking the island in diagonal as
did the Fosse Way, or leading from London to the Humber as did the
Ermine Street, or up at last to the Wall as did the Maiden Way--none
of these could have a principal importance until the Romans invented
frontiers: frontier garrisons to be fed, and frontier walls to be
defended. Before their time this northern portion of England, split by
the barren Pennines, hardly cultivated, leading nowhere, could not
have been a goal for our principal road. That must have run to the
south of Thames, and must have led from the Straits to the districts
of which I have spoken--Hampshire, the Mendips, the Wiltshire Hills,
Devonshire, and Cornwall.
3. The west of the island contained its principal supplies of mineral.
Lead indeed was found and exploited in the north, but perhaps not
before the Romans, whereas the variety and the amount of the wealth
in the valley of the Severn and the peninsula beyond gave all that
region an economic preponderance over the rest of the island. Tin, an
absolute necessity for the Mediterranean civilisation, was certainly
found in Cornwall, though the identification of the Scilly Islands
with the Cassiterides is doubtful.
The Mendips formed another metallic centre, presumably richer than
even the Devonian peninsula. Lead certainly came in early times
regularly from these hills, and Gloucester remained till the Middle
Ages associated with the tax on iron.
4. There is a fourth aspect of the matter: it is of a sort that
history neglects, but it is one the importance of which will be
recognised with increasing force if the public knowledge of the past
is destined to advance. It is that powers mainly resident in the mind
have moulded society and its implements.
That economic tendency upon which our materialists lay so great a
stress is equally immaterial (did they but know it) with the laws they
profess to ignore, and is but one form of the common power which
human need evokes. A man must not only eat, he must eat according to
his soul: he must live among his own, he must have this to play with,
that to worship, he must rest his eyes upon a suitable landscape, he
must separate himself from men discordant to him, and also combat them
when occasion serves. The south-west of England has had in this region
of ideas from the earliest times a special character and a peculiar
value. It is one in spirit with Brittany, with Ireland, and with
Wales; nor is it by any means certain that this racial sympathy was
the product of the Saxon invasions alone. It is possible that the
slower and heavier men were in Kent before Caesar landed, it must be
remembered that our theory of 'waves of population' perpetually
pressing aborigines westward remains nothing but a theory, while it is
certain that the sheltered vales and the high tors would nourish men
very different from those of the East Anglian flats or the Weald.
Now one of the forces which helps to produce a road is the necessity
of interchange--what physicists call potential--a difference between
opposite poles. Such a force is to be discovered in the permanent
character of the west; its permanent differentiation from our eastern
seaboard. Nor is it fantastic to insist upon the legends which
illumine this corner of the island. Glastonbury was for centuries the
most sacred spot in our country, and it was sacred precisely because
confused memories of an immense antiquity clung round it. The struggle
between the Romano-British princes and the heathen pirates, a struggle
the main effort of which must have taken place much further east, is
yet fixed by legend in that same land of abrupt rocks and isolated
valleys which forms the eastern margin of the Bristol Channel, and
Arthur, who was king if anything of the Logrians, yet has been given
by tradition a castle at Tintagel.
To the west, then, would the main road have gone so far as the mind
could drive it.
5. The eastern and western road would have been the main artery of
southern England, just as the Icknield Way (the north-eastern and
south-western one along the Chilterns) would have been the main artery
from the Midlands and from the men of the Fens, just as the road
along the Cotswold would have been the artery along the Severn valley
and from the bend of this at the Wrekin on up into the Fells and the
Pennines; and just as that along the Dorsetshire Downs would have been
the great means of communication for the Devonian peninsula.
Now of all these districts, the first was by far the most important.
Southern and eastern England, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, south
Berkshire, were the most open and the best cultivated areas, enjoyed
the best climate, and were most in touch with the civilisation of the
Continent. It is true to say that right down to the industrial
revolution the centre of gravity of England lay south of the Thames.
In the actual fighting the south always conquered the north, and
whereas influence monastic and constitutional would spread from either
end of the island, it was the southern which ultimately survived.
There is more. It was along the green-sand ridge of south England that
neolithic man had his principal seat. The getting of iron sprang up
before history on the red stone of the Sussex weald; it remained
there till our grandfathers' time. The oaks that grew from Kent to
Devon, along so many creeks from the Rother to the Tamar, built our
first ships. They remained our resource for this industry till the
Napoleonic wars. The _Victory_ was launched in Beaulieu River, and the
first eye-witness, Caesar, heard that in cultivation the south had
preceded the north.
6. Finally, not only was the district the best in England to develop
an important road, but the platform or site for that road was ready
provided, and invited use much more definitely than did any other way
from the narrow seas up into the island.
* * * * *
With this last point I am led to describe the natural causeway which
seems to call for a traveller landing in Kent to use it if he would go
westward, or for one leaving the inland country to use it as the last
part of his journey eastward towards the sea--I mean those heights
which are called in their entirety the North Downs.
There runs from the neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover right across
south England, in a great bow, a range of hills which for its length,
unchanging pattern and aspect, has no exact parallel in Europe.
A man who should leave the Straits with the object of reaching the
Hampshire centres would find a moderately steep, dry, chalky slope,
always looking full towards the southern sun, bare of trees, cut by
but three river valleys (and but one of these of any width), not often
indented with combes or projecting spurs: this conspicuous range would
lead him by the mere view of it straight on to his destination.
[Illustration]
When you have turned the corner of the valley of the Stour, you can
see for miles and miles the Kentish Downs like a wall pointing on
over the Medway to Wrotham and the villages beyond. When you reach
that projecting shoulder of Wrotham Hill you can still see on for
miles and miles the straight, clean-cut embankment of chalk inviting
you to pursue it westward at such a height as will clear the last
cultivation of the valleys, and as will give you some view of your
further progress. The end of each day's march is clearly apparent from
the beginning of it, and the whole is seen to lie along this
astonishingly homogeneous ridge. You do not lose that advantage for
perhaps four days of going until you reach the valley of the Wey and
the Guildford Gap; and even then for many miles further, though no
longer on the chalk but on the sand, a sharp hillside, still looking
at the sun, is afforded you in the Hog's Back.
You may say that from the Straits of Dover to Farnham, Nature herself
laid down the platform of a perfectly defined ridge, from which a man
going west could hardly deviate, even if there were no path to guide
him.
[Illustration: THESE PITS WHICH UNCOVER THE CHALK BARE FOR US
_See page 191_]
From Farnham to the converging point near Salisbury, where he would
meet the northern, the western, and the south-western roads, no
definite ridge continued; but high rolling downs of chalk gave him
good enough going, and led him along a water-parting which saved him
the crossing of rivers, and afforded for his last two or three days a
dry and firm soil.
Such, we must presume, was the full course of the original Road from
east to west. To put it the other way round, and give from west to
east the primeval track from the centre of south England to the
Straits of Dover, we may say that it would leave Stonehenge to enter
Hampshire near Quarley Hill, leave Bury Hill Camp on the right, pass
near Whitchurch, and so proceeding eastward, following the southern
edge of the watershed, would enter Farnham by the line of 'Farnham
Lane'; it would thence follow the southern side of the range of hills
until it reached the sea above the Portus Lemanis--the inlet which
covered the marshy plain below the present village Lympne.
Such was undoubtedly the earliest form of the Old Road, but upon this
original trajectory two exceptions fell in a time so remote that it
has hardly left a record. The western end of the Road was deflected
and came to spring, not from Stonehenge, but from the site of
Winchester; the eastern portion was cut short: it terminated, not at
some port, but at Canterbury, inland.
Why did Winchester come to absorb the traffic of the west, and to form
the depôt and the political centre of southern England? Why did
Canterbury, an inland town, become the goal of this long journey
towards the narrow seas?
The importance of the one and of the other can be explained. Let me
take them in order, and begin first with Canterbury.
THE CAUSES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF WINCHESTER AND CANTERBURY,
AND OF THEIR POSITION AS TERMINI OF THE OLD ROAD
The Straits of Dover fill the history of this island because they have
afforded our principal gate upon a full life.
All isolated territories--valleys difficult of entry, peninsulas,
islands--have this double quality: they are not sufficient to live a
full life of themselves, but, receiving sufficient material of
civilisation from the larger world outside, they will use it
intensively and bring it to the summit of perfection.
Cut off, they wither. Nowhere does humanity fall more abject and
lethargic than in such defended places, if the defence be too long
maintained. But let them admit from time to time the invasion of
armies or ideas, and nowhere does humanity flourish more densely or
higher. The arts, the fierce air of patriotism, in whose heat alone
the gems of achievement can form, the solution of abstract problems,
the expression of the soul in letters--for all these things seclusion
provides a special opportunity. It protects their origins from the
enemies of seeds, it nurtures their growth with the advantage of a
still air, it gives them a resting-place for their maturity.
The valleys prove my thesis. The abandoned valleys of Savoy and
Piedmont are goitrous, smitten, sterile. They are the places where, in
the Middle Ages, vapid degradations of religion (the Waldensian for
instance) could arise; they are the back-waters of Europe. Contrast
with them the principal and open valleys; the valley of the
Grésivaudan, a trench sown with wealth and vigour, the dale which is
the backbone of strong Dauphiné, or that valley of the Romanche from
which the Revolution sprang, or that of the Ticino which comes down
from the Alps to the Italian plain, rejoicing like a virgin stepping
forward into the ample day of her womanhood, arms open and all
informed with life. Remember the Limagne and the Nemosian vineyard; I
could think that God had made these half-secluded places to prop up
our fading memories of Paradise.
And as the valleys, so the islands also prove it. Consider Crete,
Cyprus, Sicily--for the matter of that our own island--what they can
be when they are linked with neighbouring civilisation, and what when
they are cut off.
The place of landing, therefore, is always capital and sacred for
islands, and with us that place was chiefly the Kentish shore.
It might seem natural that some special haven upon that shore should
absorb our traditions and receive our principal road. It was not so.
Canterbury, and no port, received that road and became the nucleus of
worship in the island. Why?
Canterbury, and not some port, is the terminus of the Old Road, on
account of the effect of the tide in the Straits of Dover. The bastion
of Kent, jutting out into the sharpest current of the narrow seas,
distorts and confuses the violent tides of the Channel. Now complexity
of tides involves a multiplicity of harbours, and many neighbouring
harbours among which seamen choose as necessity may drive them,
involve a common centre inland.
That is the whole of my argument.
We have already seen how necessarily this corner of England will
attract exit and entry. The most powerful emotion connected with that
attraction was the sight of land. There is but one small section of
the continental coast whence England, the sun shining on the chalk
cliffs, can be clearly seen; and it can be so seen but upon certain
days, say one day out of three. The little section lies between
Sangatte and Ambleteuse. Here a great hill, whose seaward projection
is the cape of Gris Nez, affords a good look-out, and hence I say that
at least 120 days out of the year the further shore is visible. On
rarer occasions it may be got beyond Calais on the east, and as far as
the high sandhills near Etaples on the south and west.
[Illustration]
Similarly there is but a small section of the Kentish coast whence the
further shore can be seen. It extends from the South Foreland, you
may say, to the hill above Folkestone; half a day's walk. There are
days when you can see it as far north as Ramsgate Hill, but those days
are rare; further west than Folkestone it is hardly ever seen (for
the country is flat) save under conditions of mirage, such as startled
the people of Hastings at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
There are from the continental side no good starting-points from the
coast immediate to Gris Nez; it is rocky, uncertain, and unprovided
with inlets. Calais, to the east, was probably the earliest port of
departure. Here, at least, is a hole in the land, and there are two
considerations which make it probable that the earliest men would
start from this side of Gris Nez rather than the other. The first is
that they could run as far as possible sheltered from the prevailing
winds--for these come from the west and south-west; with such winds
they would, up to the point of Gris Nez, be in calm water, while if
they started from Boulogne they would have no such advantage. The
second is that they could run with an ebb tide down to Gris Nez, and
then if the wind failed so that they could not cross in one tide, the
flood would be to their advantage when they neared the English coast.
It would take them up again under lee of the land, round the South
Foreland to Sandwich. From Boulogne they would have to start without
shelter, run up on a flood tide, and if they missed that tide they
might have drifted down again under the full force of the prevailing
wind, any distance along the English coast. Boulogne ultimately became
the principal port of exit and entry. It was certainly so used by the
Romans; but Calais must, I think, have been the earliest
starting-point.
From Calais, then, the run would have been made to the English shores.
But when we note the conditions of this corner of England several
things strike us. In the first place, the number of the harbours.
These included originally Winchelsea, Rye, the Portus Lemanis, Dover,
Richborough, Reculvers; in all six harbours in this small stretch of
coast. If we look at the place to-day we find something similar; men
will attempt Rye, they will make Folkestone or Dover for choice;
Sandwich at a pinch in quite small boats. Ramsgate after Dover gives
the best of modern opportunities. There is something more. Most of
these harbours were and are bad; most of them were and are artificial.
It is true that in ancient times the strait which divided the Island
of Thanet from the mainland afforded an excellent shelter at either
end. Reculvers was at one end, and the island of Rutupiae
(Richborough) at the other. If one could not get into Richborough and
was carried round the North Foreland, one could always beat round into
Reculvers; but Dover was not much of a harbour; the Port Lemanis must
have been open to the south wind and was probably very shallow; Rye,
though better than it is now, was never a steep shore, and was always
a difficult place to make. The modern harbours may, without
exaggeration, be described as every one of them artificial. Folkestone
is distinctly so. The old harbour of Dover has silted up centuries
ago, and the gas works of the town are built over its site. Ramsgate
would be of no value but for the two constructed piers.
Now what is the meaning of this multiplicity, and of all this interest
in preserving such a multiplicity even by artificial means? The tide
is the clue to the problem.
Consider a man starting from the continental shore to reach England;
consider him sailing with a fresh breeze, for if the breeze was not
fresh his chances of crossing in a reasonable time and of making any
particular place of landing were small. Consider the fact that if he
crossed in a fresh breeze that breeze would be, three times out of
four, from the south or west. He runs under the lee of Gris Nez, and
when he is beyond that point of rock, he gets into the short, sharp
tumble of the sea which is raised by such a wind against the tide, for
he has started at the ebb. He runs down with the wind abeam perhaps as
far as the end of the Varne (where we now have the Varne Buoy), for
the tide so takes him. He sees the water breaking and boiling at this
shallow place. It settles near the turn of the tide. He holds on
easily, making less westing and pointing well up to the shore. There
opens before him a broad but very shallow lagoon with probably some
central channel which he knows. He enters and has made the most
favourable of the many crossings he knows. It is the Portus
Lemanis--our Lympne.
But there are other chances. The wind might fail him, or the wind
might so increase that he had to run before it. Did it fail him he
would be caught by the flood tide some miles from land. He would drift
up along the English shore, getting a few hundred yards nearer with
every catspaw, and looking impatiently for some place to which he
could steer. The dip in the cliffs at Dover would give him a chance
perhaps. If he missed that he would round the South Foreland; he would
have the advantage of smooth water, and he would make for the island
Rutupiae, which stood at the southern entrance of the strait between
the Isle of Thanet and the mainland. If his bad luck preserved, he
might be swept up in what we now call the Gull Stream round the North
Foreland; but the tide would have been making so long by this time as
to be curling round Longnose, and even without the wind he could trust
to it almost alone to make Reculvers. Similarly if the wind made him
run before it and caused him to miss the Portus Lemanis, he would
have the advantage of a weather shore once he was round the South
Foreland, and could run with smooth water under him into Rutupiae.
With the prevalent winds, then, and the tidal conditions of the
Straits, a multiplicity of harbours was a necessity for this crossing.
In a tideless sea--such as the Mediterranean--one harbour, and one
alone, would have absorbed the trade of Kent. Under our tidal
conditions, a coast most ill-provided was compelled to furnish no less
than six.
I could add, were I not afraid of confusing the reader, many other
examples of this necessity. For instance, when one runs from the
Belgian ports, or Dunkirk, to England, ever so little a change in the
wind may make it necessary to go north above the North Foreland.
Again, there is the barrier of the Goodwins, which, in spite of
legend, is probably prehistoric. If you could not get well south of
that barrier at the first trial you had to go north of it. Everything
has compelled men, so far, to provide as many chances as possible upon
this coast, and at the present day the breakwater at Folkestone, the
desperate attempt which many still make to use the harbour of Rye, to
some extent the great works of Dover, the poor relic of Sandwich, the
continual improvement of Ramsgate, point to the same necessity.
Perhaps some refuge less distant from the sea than the estuary of the
Swale will be made again to replace Reculvers upon the north of the
Kentish coast.
[Illustration]
Now it is this multiplicity of Kentish harbours proceeding from the
conditions of the tide which has created Canterbury.
When an army has to spread out like the fingers of a hand or the
sticks of a fan in order to cover a wide area, it must start from some
point of concentration.
When commerce is in doubt as to whether it will use this, that, or
another out of many gates, it must equally have this point of
concentration.
When defenders are expecting an invasion from many points of a
circumference, their only plan is to make their base some central
point whence radii depart to that circumference.
When the traveller is uncertain which of six places he can choose for
his departure, he will halt at some point more or less central, while
his decision is being made for him by the weather or by other
circumstances.
When a merchant, landing, knows not in which of six towns he shall
land, he must at least be certain that some one town, common as it
were to all the six, can be reached the day after his landing; he must
know that his correspondents can meet him there, and that he may make
that common town his depôt for further transactions inland.
Thus it was that the six Kentish ports and more, standing on the edge
of that rounded county, created Canterbury inland.
* * * * *
The town might have stood, theoretically, at any one of a great number
of points; geometrically perhaps it ought to have been near the
village of Goodnestone, which is the centre of all this circumference
from Reculvers round to Lympne. But there is one governing condition
which forbids us to look for such a centre anywhere save upon one
line, and that condition is the river Stour. It is the only
considerable body of fresh water, and the only easy means of
communication with the interior. On the Stour, then, would the centre
of these ports be.
It might conceivably have been placed as far westward as Wye, for here
the Stour traverses the high ridge of land which provides a good road
from Dover and Folkestone to the north and west, but though this ridge
would have given a reason for the growth of our central town at this
spot, there is a better reason for its having risen six miles down
stream.
The tendency was to build such a place as near as possible to the tide
without losing the advantage of fresh water. In other words,
Canterbury represents on a smaller scale the founding of Exeter, of
Rouen, and of twenty other towns. Quite a short time ago the tide went
up the Stour as far as Fordwych, just below Canterbury, and the
presence of the tide up to a point just below the city, coupled with
the presence of fresh water flowing from above the city, seems to me
to have decided the matter.
The many conjectures upon the primitive state of Canterbury, whether
it were a lake village built upon piles, or what not, I do not presume
to discuss. The certain matter is that this place was the knot of
south-eastern England, and the rallying-point of all the roads from
the coast. Caesar landed at Deal, but Canterbury fort was the place he
had to take; Augustine landed at Richborough, but Canterbury was the
place wherein he fixed the origins of Christianity in England. It was
bound to counterpoise that other city of which I shall next speak,
and to be for the Straits of Dover what Winchester was for the centre
of south English civilisation. It so happened that, of the many
characters it might have assumed, the ecclesiastical attached to it.
It became the great nucleus of English worship, and the origin, under
Rome, of English discipline and unity in the faith for nearly seven
hundred years. At last, influencing as much as influenced by the
event, the murder of its great Archbishop in the later twelfth
century, lent it, for the last three hundred years of its hegemony, a
position unique in Europe. Canterbury during those three hundred years
was almost a sacred city.
Having said so much, then, about the eastern end of the Road, and why
that end was found inland and not upon the sea, let us consider its
western region and determine what forces produced the political
domination of Winchester.
* * * * *
We have seen that the route from the island centre of Stonehenge and
Avebury (the plain where the old roads meet) to the Straits of Dover,
may be regarded as the original of our communications across the south
of the island, from the rich west to the mainland. Such it might have
remained to this day, and such it would certainly have remained
throughout the period preceding the Roman invasion, and throughout the
barbaric centuries which succeeded the withdrawal of the legions, had
not a powerful influence (to repeat what was said above) modified the
original track and substituted, at least for its earlier portion as
far as Farnham, another road. We know that the great way from west to
east which should have had its origin in Salisbury Plain, found it as
a fact in Winchester.
Why was this? Why did the encampment or town upon the Itchen gather
round itself a special character, and become the depôt into which
would stream the lead of the Mendips, the tin of Cornwall, and the
armies of all Britain south of Gloucester and west of the Wiltshire
Avon? To sum up all these questions we may ask in one phrase, as we
asked at Canterbury: What made Winchester?
The answer is again, The Sea: the necessities and the accidents of the
crossing of the Channel; and just as Canterbury was made by the
peculiarity of the Straits, by the bastion of Kent, confusing and
disturbing the rush of the narrow channel, and causing the complexity
of meeting tides, so Winchester was made by the peculiar conditions
under which the Channel can be passed at what I will call, for the
purposes of this essay, the 'Second Crossing': that is, the passage
from the jutting promontory of the Cotentin to the southern cape of
the Isle of Wight, which stands so boldly out into the sea, and
invites adventure from the French shore.
The great opportunity of this passage is far less apparent to us
moderns than it was to earlier men. With our artificial methods,
especially our regular service of steam, we are ignorant or forgetful
of the sea, and the true emotions which it arouses have decayed into
the ineptitudes with which we are all familiar. We talk of
'commanding' that element in war; there are even some who write as
though we of the towns were native to it; there are very few who
understand with what divinity it has prompted, allured, and terrified
the past of our race, or under what aspect it may prompt, allure, and
terrify the men of a future decline.
By the map alone no one could discover the character of this Second
Crossing. After the Straits of Dover the 'sleeve' of the Channel
widens so considerably that no clear alternative passage appears to be
provided. From Etaples right away to Ushant one might think a sea so
wide was of much the same peril and adventure to any early sailor.
Physical experience of many passages corrects such an error; a
consideration of the political history of the Continent tends further
to correct it. The Second Crossing was, and has always been, and will,
we may presume, in the future be, second only in importance to that of
the Straits.
[Illustration]
If the narrowing of the sea, due to the northward projection of
Normandy and the southern projection of the Isle of Wight, were alone
our guide, not very much could be made of it. It is more than double,
it is nearly three times the distance between Gris Nez and
Shakespeare's Cliff, though far less than the breadth of the Channel
either above or below. But the narrowing of the sea at this point is
but a small part of its advantage. On either side is the most ample
opportunity for protection. On either side high land will comfort and
guide a sailor almost throughout the passage, and upon the northern
shore is the best conceivable arrangement of chances for his rescue
from a gale or from the chance of a tide. The deep estuary of the
Seine sufficiently cuts off what is west from what is east of it to
make every one upon the western side avoid the difficulty of a journey
to Calais and seek some approach of his own to reach England; and
south-western England is enough of a unity to demand also a secondary
port of its own, whence it may seek the shore of the Continent and
escape upon favourable occasions the long journey eastward to the
Straits.
Let us consider these points in detail.
The estuary of the Seine was not only an obvious outlet, but it gave
an opportunity for the early ships to creep under the protection of a
windward shore. From the very heart of the country, from Rouen, and
even from Pont de l'Arche, sea-going vessels could go down the stream
with a strong tide helping them. They would have calm water as far as
the point of Barfleur so long as the wind was south of west, and no
danger save the reef of Calvados. Moreover, the trend of the land led
them northward in the direction which they knew they had to follow if
they were ultimately to find the English coast.
When this defence and indication failed the early sailor, at the
corner of the Cotentin, where the land turns west again, he could find
the little harbour of Barfleur whence to set out; he was there
protected from the outer sea by reefs, and possessed, what was
important to him, an excellent shore for beaching. He was sheltered
even thus far from the prevailing winds.
Nor was this all. This coast was backed by bold high land, from three
hundred feet near the coast to five hundred further inland, and marks
of that kind, valuable as they still are, were a necessity to the
early navigator. Such land would guide him home if his adventure
failed, and it is worth while noticing, in the case of a man to whom
all this was a great adventure, the sense of security with which the
high hills upon the horizon furnished him in clear weather.
He set out then, and for the first few hours--in theory for close
upon twenty-seven miles, and practically for more than twenty of the
fifty-three he had to traverse--the French coast was still in sight on
such days as could tempt him to cross the sea.
Now, by a happy accident, some of the highest land in the south of
England stands dominating the narrowest part of this approach from
France. Our Downs in Sussex are commonly receded from the sea-coast;
from Brighton westward, their slope up from it is gentle, their
escarpment is on the further side, and they are often veiled by the
reek of the land. All the way from Beachy Head nothing gives a true
mark until you get to this high headland of St. Catherine's Point,
which overlooks the narrowest part of the passage.
One must have sailed across here to know how powerful is that hill. It
stands steep up out of the sea, it is twice as high as Beachy Head,
more than half as high again as Dover Cliff, and though it is but
steep turf and not white chalk, it stands up so against the light
looking southward, that one may see it at not much less than thirty
miles distance as one runs northward so, with the westerly wind just
aft of the beam and making for the land. Even in a haze it will stand
above the mist and indicate the shore with its head so lifted as to
show quite plain in the clearer sky. All this argument will be evident
to those who know what a land-fall means. Even to-day, with the
compass and the chart, it is the method of all our fishermen in the
narrow seas to make some light or foreland, rather than to lay down a
course; the violence and the changes of the channel current make it a
surer method than any reckoning. In the first days a land-fall was
everything. Every memory or relic of primitive navigation shows it a
feeling-out for the high, conspicuous blue cloud, which, when you have
fixed it once above the horizon, stands permanent and constant,
turning at last into no cloud, but an evidence of human things after
the emptiness of the sea.
The high land then, of itself, all but bridged the gap. In pure theory
one might just catch sight of a fire on the top of St. Catherine's
before one had seen the last of a similar flare upon the hills of the
Cotentin, and in actual practice, in clear weather, it is but a very
short run of fifteen miles or so from the last sight of the French
coast to the making of St. Catherine's upon the horizon before one.
These considerations, then, the guide and protection of the Cotentin
coast, the inlet of the Seine, the narrowing of the sea, the high land
upon either side, would of themselves suffice to point this passage
out as a natural way from the Continent to England. Were a man asked
to-day where he would rather cross west of Etaples, he would answer, I
think, 'from Cherbourg to the Wight'; and very many times, before
writing was known or a record kept, men must have run easily through a
long summer day, taking it in two tides, losing the land for but a
quarter of their voyage, and confident that if evening overtook them,
a beacon on St. Catherine's would light the northern horizon, even
though half their journey remained to do.
I say this alone would prove the age of the route, but there is
something which clinches the argument, and that is what we saw to be
so important in the case of Kent--'The Choice of Entry.' How the tides
of the narrow seas and the uncertain winds made imperative a choice of
entries to the land I have already shown in my discussion of the
Straits, and I need not repeat my arguments.
It is enough to remark that in this case of the Second Crossing,
conscious human design could hardly have improved the conditions
afforded by the Wight.
Behind it is a vast sheltered sheet of water, in shape a tripod, one
of the arms of which, five miles in length by nearly one in breadth,
is absolutely landlocked and safe in all weathers, while the other two
are so commonly smooth and so well provided with refuge at Yarmouth,
Lymington, New Town, the Medina, Portsmouth, and the Hamble as to form
a kind of large harbour with subsidiary harbours attached.
To this great refuge two entries are provided, each aided by a strong
tide, each narrow enough to break the outer sea, but not so narrow as
to present grave dangers to small craft.
Supposing a man approaching St. Catherines's Point from the south.
The wind fails him, and he is compelled by the tide to drift to the
east or to the west; at an equal distance from the point either way he
will find an entry into the inland water. Suppose a sudden change in
the direction of the wind or in its intensity makes him run before it,
from any direction but that of the north (which in itself would
provide him with a windward shore) he could make one of the two
entries of which I speak. It is true that a nasty shelf and overfalls
follow a portion of the shore opposite Ventnor, but, like the reefs of
the Cotentin, they do not run so far out as to affect my argument.
There are hardly any conditions under which, after his passage from
the Continent, the early sailor would have found it impossible to make
either the Needles channel or Spithead. It is a perfect harbour, and
though it has but lately recovered its ancient importance, the inland
waters, known as the Solent, Southampton Water, and Spithead were
certainly, after the Straits, the chief landing-places of these
islands. Porchester, Brading, Cowes perhaps, and Bittern certainly,
show what the Romans made of the opportunity. All the recorded
history of England is full of that group of harbours and that little
inland sea, and before history began, to strike the island here was to
be nearest to Salisbury Plain and to find the cross-roads of all the
British communications close at hand; the tracks to the east, to the
west, to the Midlands were all equally accessible.
Finally, it must be noted that the deepest invasion of the land made
here is made by the submerged valley of Southampton Water, and the
continuation of that valley inward is the valley of the Itchen. The
inland town to which the port corresponded (just as we found
Canterbury corresponding to the Kentish harbours) is Winchester.
Thus it was that Winchester grew to be the most important place in
south England. How early we do not know, but certainly deeper than
even tradition or popular song can go it gathered round itself the
first functions of leadership. It was possessed of a sanctity which it
has not wholly lost. It preserves, from its very decay, a full
suggestion of its limitless age. Its trees, its plan, and the accent
of the spoken language in its streets are old. It maintains the
irregularities and accretions in building which are, as it were, the
outer shell of antiquity in a city. Its parallels in Europe can hardly
show so complete a conservation. Rheims is a great and wealthy town.
The Gaulish shrine of 'the Virgin that should bear a Son' still
supports from beneath the ground the high altar of Chartres. The
sacred well of a forgotten heathendom still supports with its roof the
choir of Winchester.[1] But Chartres is alive, the same woman is still
worshipped there; the memory of Winchester is held close in a
rigidity of frost which keeps intact the very details of the time in
which it died. It was yielding to London before the twelfth century
closed, and it is still half barbaric, still Norman in its general
note. The spires of the true Middle Ages never rose in it. The ogive,
though it is present, does not illumine the long low weight of the
great church. It is as though the light of the thirteenth century had
never shone upon or relieved it.
It belongs to the snow, to winter, and to the bare trees of the cold
wherein the rooks still cry 'Cras! cras!' to whatever lingers in the
town. So I saw it when I was to begin the journey of which I write in
these pages.
To return to the origins. The site of Winchester, I say, before ever
our legends arose, had all the characters which kept it vigorous to
within seven hundred years of our own time. It was central, it held
the key to the only good middle passage the Channel afforded, it was
destined to be a capital. From Winchester therefore a road must
necessarily have set out to join what had been, even before the rise
of Winchester, the old eastern and western road; this old road it
would join by a slow approach, and merge with it at last and seek
Canterbury as a goal.
The way by which men leaving Winchester would have made for the
Straits may have been, at first, a direct path leading northwards
towards the point where the old east-and-west road came nearest to
that city. For in the transformation of communication it is always so:
we see it in our modern railway lines, and in the lanes that lead from
new houses to the highways: the first effort is to find the
established road, the 'guide,' as soon as possible.
Later attempts were made at a short cut. Perhaps the second attempt
was to go somewhat eastward, towards what the Romans called Calleva,
and the Roman road from Winchester to Calleva (or Silchester) may have
taken for its basis some such British track. But at any rate, the
gradual experience of travel ended in the shortest cut that could be
found. The tributary road from Winchester went at last well to the
east, and did not join the original track till it reached Farnham.
[Illustration]
This short cut, feeder, or tributary which ultimately formed the
western end of our Road was driven into a channel which attracted it
to Farnham almost as clearly as the chalk hills of which I have spoken
pointed out the remainder of the way: for two river valleys, that of
the Itchen and that of the Wey led straight to that town and to the
beginning of the hill-platform.
[Illustration: GLIMPSES OF THE ITCHEN AWAY BEHIND US
_See page 133_]
It is the universal method of communication between neighbouring
centres on either side of a watershed to follow, if they exist, two
streams; one leading up to and the other down from the watershed. This
method provides food and drink upon the way, it reduces all climbing
to the one clamber over the saddle of the ridge, and, if the
beginning of the path is struck out by doubtful pioneers, then, as
every pioneer in a new country knows, ascending a stream is the best
guide to a pass and descending one on the further side is the best
guide to open spaces, and to the habitations of men.
[Illustration]
This tributary gradually superseded the western end of the trail, and
the Old Road from the west to the east, from the metal mines to the
Straits of Dover, had at last Winchester for an origin and Canterbury
for a goal. The neglected western end from Farnham to Stonehenge
became called 'The Harrow Way,' that is the 'Hoar,' the 'Ancient'
way.[2] It fell into disuse, and is now hardly to be recognised at
all.
The prehistoric road as we know it went then at last in a great flat
curve from Winchester to Canterbury, following the simplest
opportunities nature afforded. It went eastward, first up the vale of
the Itchen to the watershed, then down the vale of the Wey, and
shortly after Farnham struck the range of the North Downs, to which it
continued to cling as far as the valley of the Stour, where a short
addition led it on to Canterbury.
Its general direction, therefore, when it had settled down into its
final form, was something of this sort:--
[Illustration]
When Winchester began to affirm itself as the necessary centre of
south England--that is of open, rich, populated, and cultivated
England--the new tributary road would rapidly grow in importance; and
finally, the main traffic from the western hills and from much of the
sea also, from Spain, from Brittany, and from western Normandy,
probably from all southern Ireland, from the Mendips, the south of
Wales, and the Cornish peninsula, would be canalised through
Winchester. The road from Winchester to Farnham and so to Canterbury
would take an increasing traffic, would become the main artery between
the west and the Straits of Dover, and would leave the most permanent
memorials of its service.
* * * * *
Winchester and Canterbury being thus each formed by the sea, and each
by similar conditions in the action of that sea, the parallel between
them can be drawn to a considerable length, and will prove of the
greatest value when we come to examine the attitude of the Old Road
towards the two cities which it connects. The feature that puzzles us
in the approach to Canterbury may be explained by a reference to
Winchester. An unsolved problem at the Winchester end may be referred
for its solution to Canterbury, and the evidence of the two combined
will be sufficient to convince us that the characters they possess in
common are due to much more than accident.
Of all the sites which might have achieved some special position after
the official machinery of Rome with its arbitrary power of choice had
disappeared, these two rose pre-eminent at the very entry to the Dark
Ages, and retained that dual pre-eminence until the great transition
into the light, the Renaissance of civilisation at the end of the
twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth.
For six or seven hundred years the two towns were the peculiar centres
of English life. Winchester was a capital longer than London has been;
Canterbury ruled the religion of this island for over nine hundred and
forty years.
So much we know for certain, and more may be presumed; but I have
conjectured that these sites were of equal importance before the
advent of Rome, and such a conjecture needs support. I will maintain
that the barbaric centuries which followed the decline of the Empire
reproduced in Britain original conditions, and restored their value to
sites neglected during the period of Roman order.
Rome, in this frontier province, put her capital in the north, at
York, and her principal garrisons in the north also; but even though
she did not at first admit their importance, Canterbury and
Winchester, with London, insensibly preponderated: London, through
which half the roads are marked in the itinerary; Canterbury and
Winchester whence, to this day, great Roman roads may be discovered
radiating like the spokes of a wheel.
That the importance of these sites should have increased with the
increasing barbarism of the Dark Ages is, I repeat, an evidence of
their great antiquity. The arbitrary and official forces of society
had disappeared. An ancient sanctity beyond history, the track of
hunters, the ford, the open hillside, chance opportunities of
defence, soil, food, water, all the primal things which determine the
settlements of savages, were again at work in the fifth century. The
force of merely natural tendencies increased as the consciousness of
civilisation faded, and when after the defeat of the pagans in the
ninth century Christendom had just been saved and the light slowly
began to grow, these forces remained (though with gradually
diminishing power) and moulded Europe until the Angevine and the
Capetian, the reinvigorated Papacy, the adventure of the Crusades, and
the study of the Code, had created once more the fixity of a true
civilisation: a civilisation whose institutions and philosophy are our
own to-day.
What, then, are the common attributes which we can note in Winchester
and Canterbury, which would have drawn savage men to their sites,
which therefore give them their tradition, and from which we can
induce the causes of their rival power?
Each is near the sea, each near a port or ports; in the case of each,
this port, or group of ports, commands one of the two passages to the
Continent, and to the homes of civilised men. In each case the
distance from the sea is that of a day's march for an army with its
baggage. Disembark your men at Southampton or at Dover with the dawn
and you hope that night to rest secure behind the walls of Winchester
or Canterbury.
The reason of this arrangement was as follows: an inland place has
many advantages over a fortified town on the seashore as the
resting-place of an army. It has a better food supply; communication
from it radiates upon all sides, not only from half its circumference
(indeed in many ports there is but one narrow exit along the isthmus
of the peninsula or up the valley which forms its harbour). There is
likely to be more wood, a matter of great importance for fuel and
fortification and sometimes for the construction of engines of war; it
will have more fresh water. It may not be a salient, but it is an
important, fact that in early times the population of an inland place
would be trained for fighting upon land, and its energies would not be
divided by the occupation of sea-faring; and finally, your inland
fortress is liable to but one form of attack. You may have landed
your men after a successful voyage, but, on the other hand, you may
have landed them after a hot pursuit. In the first case it is not a
disadvantage to sleep the night sheltered by walls inland, and in the
second case it is a necessity.
Remembering all these things, it is evident that to have your town of
refuge within a day's march of the landing-place is a condition of its
value to you. It is far preferable to reach fortification within the
daylight than to pass your first halt under the strain of partial and
temporary defence.
Winchester and Canterbury are each, of course, upon rivers. They are
each upon rivers just above the limit to which the tide would help
light-draught, primitive boats, and where yet they could enjoy the
fresh water coming down from above. So Caen, so Norwich, and a hundred
other cities, have been founded upon rivers a day's march inland from
port, and (with the exception of the tide) similar conditions perhaps
produced the greatest of all these examples--Rome.
The similarity of the rivers is also remarkable: each of such a size
that it can be canalised for traffic above the city, and yet used to
turn mills; each supplying industries that depend upon water,
especially brewing and tanning; each divided for such a purpose into a
number of small regular trenches which flow along the lower streets of
the city--an arrangement only possible where a flat site has been
chosen--the Itchen, tumbling along the eastern boundary of Winchester,
and the Stour, on the northern gate of Canterbury, complete a parallel
almost as strong as that of the cities which stand upon them.
They are of much the same length, depth, rapidity of stream, and
volume of water. They flow very clear--running over the chalk, clean
and potable streams. At a point where each cuts through a range of
hills, a point somewhat below the last ancient ford, and just barely
above the recorded limit of the tide, a point right on the valley
floor where the hills recede somewhat, each bears its city.
Of both towns we are certain that they were prehistoric centres. Not
only have the earliest implements of men been discovered in their
soil, but it is evident that the prehistoric mode of defence in these
islands was used by each--a camp or temporary refuge crowning the hill
above the settlement and defended by great circumvallations of earth.
Canterbury has the camp in Bigberry Wood; Winchester that upon St.
Catherine's Hill. In each town a considerable British population
existed before the Roman invasion. In each the coins of British kings
struck under the influence of Greek commerce, a century to a century
and a half before the Christian era, are to be discovered. The name of
each has a British root when it first appears in British history.
Canterbury, Durovernum, was the town upon the river bank; and
Winchester still preserves the trace of such an origin: the 'Venta' of
the Romans: the Celtic 'Gwent'--an open space.
Each was Roman; each occupied much the same area; from each radiated a
scheme of Roman roads; upon each the history of Roman Britain is
silent; each first appears recorded in the story of the pirate
invasions and of the conversion of England after the dissolution of
the Imperial scheme.
Such were the two towns which answered each other like peaks over the
rich belt of south England. The one the king's town, the other the
primate's; the political and the ecclesiastical capitals of all those
natural and dark centuries. By a division common to the history of our
ancestors in all parts of Europe, one fell naturally to the Court, the
other to the Church. The king in Winchester, the primate in
Canterbury, 'like two strong oxen pulled the plough of England.' And
each, as was necessary to the period, had its great tomb, but not at
the same time. Winchester, the capital, had in the Dark Ages its lamp
of sanctity. In the Middle Ages this focus moved to the east--to
Canterbury. There could be no rivalry. Winchester created its own
saint, St. Swithin, with the murder of à Becket Canterbury put out the
light of Winchester and carried on the tradition of a shrine; from
that time onwards Winchester declines, while Canterbury survives
chiefly as the city of St. Thomas.