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[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S FROM THE RIVER THAMES]
ENGLAND
by
FRANK FOX
Author of "Ramparts of Empire" "Peeps at the British Empire," "Australia
and Oceania"
With 32 Full-Page Illustrations in Colour
London
Adam and Charles Black
1914
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
To bring within the limits of one volume any detailed description of
England--her history, people, landscapes, cities--would be impossible. I
have sought in this book to give an impression of some of the most
"English" features of the land, devoting a little space first to an attempt
to explain the origins of the English people. Thus the English fields and
flowers and trees, the English homes and schools are given far more
attention than English cities, English manufactures; for they are more
peculiar to the land and the people. More markedly than in any superiority
of her material greatness England stands apart from the rest of the world
as the land of green trees and meadows, the land of noble schools and of
sweet homes:
Green fields of England! wheresoe'er
Across this watery waste we fare,
One image at our hearts we bear,
Green fields of England, everywhere.
Sweet eyes in England, I must flee
Past where the waves' last confines be,
Ere your loved smile I cease to see,
Sweet eyes in England, dear to me!
Dear home in England, safe and fast,
If but in thee my lot lie cast,
The past shall seem a nothing past
To thee, dear home, if won at last;
Dear Home in England, won at last.
That is the cry of an Englishman (Arthur Hugh Clough). On the same
note--the green fields, the dear homes--a sympathetic visitor to England
would shape his impressions on going away.
If, by chance, the reading of this book should whet the appetite for more
about England, or some particular part of the kingdom, there are available
in the same series very many volumes on different counties and different
features of England. To these I would refer the lover or student of England
wishing for closer details. My impression is necessarily a general one;
and it is that of a visitor from one of the overseas Dominions--not the
less interesting, I hope, certainly not the less sympathetic for that
reason.
FRANK FOX.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE BRITONS AND THE ROMANS 1
CHAPTER II
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE NORMANS 16
CHAPTER III
THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE AND THE ENGLISH LOVE OF IT 28
CHAPTER IV
THE TRAINING OF YOUNG ENGLAND 43
CHAPTER V
ENGLAND AT WORK 64
CHAPTER VI
ENGLAND AT PLAY 81
CHAPTER VII
THE CITIES OF ENGLAND 101
CHAPTER VIII
THE RIVERS OF ENGLAND 114
CHAPTER IX
ENGLAND'S SHRINES 125
CHAPTER X
THE POORER POPULATION 137
CHAPTER XI
THE ARTS IN ENGLAND 155
CHAPTER XII
POLITICAL LIFE IN ENGLAND 171
CHAPTER XIII
THE DEFENCE OF ENGLAND 187
INDEX 203
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. St. Paul's from the River Thames _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. The Chalk Cliffs of England 1
3. North Side, Canterbury Cathedral 8
4. Richmond, Yorkshire 17
5. Norman Staircase, King's School, Canterbury 24
6. A Kent Manor-House and Garden 33
7. A Sussex Village 40
8. The Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College, Cambridge 49
9. St. Magdalen Tower and College, Oxford 56
10. Broad Street, Oxford, looking West 59
11. Eton Upper School 62
12. Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge, London 65
13. Harvesting in Herefordshire 72
14. Football at Rugby School 81
15. Cricket at "Lord's" 88
16. Trout-fishing on the Itchen, Hampshire 97
17. Dean's Yard, Westminster 104
18. Sailing Boats on the Serpentine, Hyde Park, London 107
19. Watergate Street, Chester 110
20. The River Rother, Sussex 115
21. Thames at Richmond, Surrey 118
22. Spring by the Thames 121
23. Windsor Castle from Fellows' Eyot: Early Spring 124
24. Glastonbury Abbey, Somersetshire 128
25. Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford-on-Avon 137
26. Gipsies on a Gloucestershire Common 144
27. The Tower from the Tower Bridge, looking West 153
28. Westminster Abbey from the end of the Embankment 160
29. Westminster and the Houses of Parliament 169
30. Hyde Park, London 176
31. Battleships Manoeuvring 193
32. Changing the Guard 200
[Illustration: THE CHALK CLIFFS OF ENGLAND--THE NEEDLES, ISLE OF WIGHT]
ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND--THE BRITONS AND THE ROMANS
When Europe, as it shows on the map to-day, was in the making, some great
force of Nature cut the British Islands off from the mainland. Perhaps it
was the result of a convulsive spasm as Mother Earth took a new wrinkle on
her face. Perhaps it was the steady biting of the Gulf Stream eating away
at chalk cliffs and shingle beds. Whatever the cause, as far back as man
knows the English Channel ran between the mainland of Europe and "a group
of islands off the coast of France"; and the chalk cliffs of the greatest
of these islands faced the newcomer to suggest to the Romans the name of
_Terra Alba_: perhaps to prompt in some admirer of Horace among them a
prophetic fancy that this white land was to make a "white mark" in the
Calendar of History.
Considered geographically, the British Islands, taking the sum of the whole
five thousand or so of them (counting islets), are of slight importance.
Yet a map of the world showing the possessions of Great Britain--the area
over which the people of these islands have spread their sway--shows a
whole continent, large areas of three other continents, and numberless
islands to be British. And when the astonishing disproportion between the
British Islands and the British Empire has been grasped, it can be made the
more astonishing by reducing the British Islands down to England as the
actual centre from which all this greatness has radiated. It is true that
the British Empire is the work of the British people: as the Roman Empire
was of the Italian people and not of Rome alone. But it was in England that
it had its foundation; and the English people made a start with the British
Empire by subduing or coaxing to their domain the Welsh, the Scottish, and
the Irish. Not to England all the glory: but certainly to England the first
glory.
There is at this day a justified resentment shown by Scots and Irish, not
to speak of Welshmen, when "England" is used as a term to embrace the whole
of the British Isles. (Similarly Canadians resent the term "America" being
arrogated by the United States.) A French wit has put very neatly the case
for that resentment by stating that ordinarily an inhabitant of the British
Isles is a British citizen until he does something disgraceful, when he is
identified in the English newspapers as a "Scottish murderer" or an "Irish
thief": but if he does something fine then he is "a gallant Englishman."
That is neat satire, founded on a slight foundation of truth. Very often
"England" is confounded with "Great Britain" when there is discussion of
Imperial greatness. I do not want to come under suspicion of inexactness,
which that confusion of terms shows. But writing of England, and England
alone, it is just to claim at the outset that the actual first beginning of
that great British power which has eclipsed all records of the world was in
England: and it is worth the while to inquire into the causes which made
for the growth of that power. It is necessary, indeed, to make that
inquiry and get to know something of English history before attempting to
look with an understanding eye upon English landscapes, English cities, and
the English people of to-day. The classic painters of the greatest age of
Art used landscape only as the background for portraiture. The human
interest to them was always paramount. And, whether one may or may not go
the whole way with these painters in the appraisement of the relative value
of the human or the natural, clear it is that a human interest heightens
the value of every scene; and there can be no full appreciation of a
country without a knowledge of its history.
"When a noble act is done--perchance in a scene of great natural beauty:
when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and
the sun and the moon come each and look upon them once in the steep defile
of Thermopylae: when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow
of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break
the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty
of the scene to the beauty of the deed?" Assuredly "yes" to that question
from Emerson, and assuredly, too, they pay back every day what they have
borrowed, giving to a noble landscape the added charm of its human
association with a noble deed. The white cliffs of England are beautiful
and impressive as they show like gleaming ramparts defending green fields
and fruitful valleys. But they become more beautiful and more impressive as
one thinks of them confronting the Romans stepping from Gaul to a wider
conquest; or facing William of Normandy as he set out to enforce a weak
claim with a strong sword; or set like white defiant teeth at the great
ships of the Spanish Armada as they passed up the English Channel with
Drake in pursuit, the unwieldy Spanish galleons showing like bulls pursued
by gadflies.
Let us then look for a moment at England in the making before considering
the England of to-day.
When the British Isles were cut off from the mainland, England was, without
doubt, inhabited by people akin to the Gauls. The people of the French
province of Brittany are to-day very clearly cousins of the people of those
districts of England, such as Cornwall, which preserve most of the old
Briton blood. Separation from the mainland does not seem to have effected
very much change in the national type by the time that history came on the
scene to make her records. Caesar found the Britons very like the Gauls.
They had not developed into a maritime people. Fisheries they had, for food
and for pearls; but they had none of the piratical adventurousness of the
Norsemen. That they were naked, woad-painted savages, those Britons of
Caesar's time, has been held long as a popular belief. But that is hardly
tenable in the light of the knowledge which recent archaeological
investigation has given, though, likely enough, they painted for battle, as
soldiers of a later time used to wear plumes and glittering uniforms to
impress and frighten the enemy.
Excavations in more than one district of late have shown that the early
Britons possessed a good share of civilisation before ever the Romans came
to their land. Thus near Northampton there is a place which used to be a
camp of the Britons prior to the Roman occupation. The camp has an area of
about four acres, and was defended by a ditch fifteen feet deep, and about
thirty feet wide, with a rampart on either side of the fosse.
Here were discovered the bases of what are considered to have been the
remains of the hut-dwellings of the occupiers of the camp. Of these some
three hundred were found filled with black earth and mould, and from them
many most interesting articles were obtained. There were many iron relics,
such as swords, daggers, spear heads, knives, saws, sickles, adzes, an axe,
plough-shares, nails, chisels, gouges, bridles (one with a bronze
centre-bit), and a well-formed pot-hook made of twisted iron. In bronze
there were remains of two sword scabbards, four brooches, some fragments
belonging to horse harness, pins and rings, and a small spoon. There were
also glass beads and rings, a fragment of jet, a number of spindle
whorls for spinning, bone combs used in weaving, and about twenty
triangular-shaped bricks pierced through each corner, considered to be loom
weights to keep the warp taut; more than a hundred querns or millstones,
some of the corn which was ground in them (this fortunately happened to be
charred and so preserved), and remains of about four hundred pots, nearly
all used for domestic purposes. One of the bronze scabbards bears on the
top an engraved pattern of the decorative art of the period, showing the
Triskele, a sun symbol often found on remains of the Bronze Age in Denmark
as well as elsewhere.
Similar pre-Roman relics have been obtained from the Marsh Village near
Glastonbury, from Mount Coburn near Lewes, and from near Canterbury. The
unmistakable evidence of these relics is that the pre-Roman Briton could
spin and weave, knew how to plough and when to sow, was an excellent
carpenter, and was an expert in metal work, both in iron and bronze, and
possessed a decorative art. He was therefore not a "savage" as savages were
understood in those days.
We must consider the Britons, then, of Caesar's time as possessed of some
degree of civilisation. They understood fabrics, pottery, metals,
architecture. They had come into contact with the civilisation of the
Mediterranean Sea long before his day. The Scilly Islands off the coast of
Cornwall can reasonably be identified as the Casserterrides of the
Phoenicians, where the merchants of Tyre and Sidon bought tin, giving
cloth in exchange. It is said, indeed, that an ingot of tin with a
Phoenician mark upon it was dredged up once from Falmouth Harbour.
Probably the very earliest mention of Britain is by Hecataeus (B.C. 500,
about the time when Marathon was fought). He described Britain then as an
isle of the Hyperboreans, and alleged that the inhabitants "raised two
crops in the year and worshipped the sun."
[Illustration: NORTH SIDE, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL]
That may be the first original sneer at the British climate, the sneer
which now takes the form that whenever the sun appears in England it is
photographed, lest the inhabitants of the island should forget what it is
like. (There is an Australian "drought" story of the same order of humorous
exaggeration, that in a certain district the rain from heaven had been
withheld so long, and grass had so long disappeared, that when at last
relief came and the grass grew the sheep would not eat it, as they did not
recognise what it was!) But perhaps Hecataeus was serious. It is not at all
unlikely that the gossip Hecataeus had of the Isle of the Hyperboreans came
from Phoenician sources, and referred to that south-westerly extremity of
Cornwall which gets the full benefit of the warm Gulf Stream, and has in
consequence an astonishingly mild climate for its latitude, a climate quite
capable of producing sometimes two crops a year.
As for sun worship, there are many indications of the practice of its
rites in prehistoric Britain. The "Round Towers" which are sprinkled over
Ireland can best be explained by a theory of sun worship. Stonehenge, in
the south of England, which dates back to about 1500 years B.C., was
probably a temple of sun worship. There are the ruins of a temple, possibly
of the sun, at Avebury (Wilts.) of even older date.
It would be impossible to attempt even to hint at all the evidence in the
matter. But what may be accepted quite safely as a fact is, that in
prehistoric times the Briton was no laggard in the path of civilisation:
that indeed he was among the early pilgrims on that path. Even as far north
as the Yorkshire Wolds--it is clear from recent excavations--there was a
thick local population of men in the Neolithic Age. The burial mounds of
these Neolithic tribes have lately been excavated, and have given much
valuable evidence as to the history of Man. The "Ipswich Man," too--the
indubitable remains of a man who walked upright and who had skull
accommodation for a human brain, discovered in strata of a most remote age
of the earth--proves that in the little corner of the world which was to
have such a wonderful history in the far future, there were early
indications of promise.
It is worth while to clear our British ancestors of the reproach of being
woad-painted savages at a time of the world's history when every European,
almost, had learned at least the use of skins. For those Britons were
responsible for that "Celtic fringe" which to-day shows so largely in our
poetry and our politics, and in other walks of life. The ancient Briton
enters into the making of modern England through the strong traces of his
ancestry left in Cornwall, Devon, the Marches of Wales, and elsewhere.
But respectably clothed, arm-bearing, house-building personage as he was,
the ancient Briton would never have made a very great mark in the world if
he had been left to himself. He would never have overflowed to send out
tidal waves of conquest like the Norsemen or the Goths. Possibly even in
those early days he had his Celtic qualities of poetry and imagination and
argumentativeness, and spent much of his energy in dreaming things instead
of doing things. It was when the Romans came that England began to shape
towards a big place in the world.
The Romans do not seem to have had a very bloody campaign in subduing that
part of Britain which is now England. The people were rather softer than
the Gauls of the mainland. Their country was penetrated by several rivers
such as the Thames, which gave easy highways to the Roman galleys. The
gentle contours of the country made easy the building of the Roman roads,
which were the chief agents of Roman civilisation. But the Roman dominion
in the British Islands stopped with England. Scotland, Wales, Ireland
remained unsubdued. That fact was to have an important bearing on the
future of England. Step by step, Fate was working for the making of the
people who were to cover the whole earth with their dominions.
We have seen that in the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate
and fertile peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the
temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a
climate singularly mild and promotive of fertility. When the separation
from the mainland came because of the cutting of the English Channel, the
Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their soft
environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a
comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very
proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores.
With the Roman invasion the future English race won a benefit from both
those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power freed
the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness
which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous
winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they
treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local
pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to
take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the
singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before
Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of
Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some
years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the
time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the
Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say,
northern Africa or Spain. All the appurtenances of Roman civilisation had
been brought to Britain. It was no mere barbarous province. It had its
great watering-places such as Bath, and its fine cities and its vineyards,
though the British climate nowadays is accused of not being able to grow
grapes. British oysters, too, were famous among the gluttons of Rome, and
one Roman emperor is said to have raised a British oyster to the rank of
consul as a mark of his appreciation. (This jest of the table, if all
stories can be credited, has since been repeated in England, and is
responsible for the "Sir Loin" of beef and also the "Baron" of beef.)
But side by side with the growth of a gracious civilisation in England,
there was constant warfare on the borders. The wilder natives of the
British islands refused the Roman sway, and threatened by their forays the
security of the new cities. This made necessary a great military
organisation, which has left its mark on the England of to-day in the Roman
roads and the sites of Roman military camps dotted all over the country
from the Thames to the Tweed. The remains of these camps are quite
distinguishable in many places; and generally they are known as "Caesar's
camps," whether Julius Caesar ever saw their neighbourhood or not. Probably
Carausius was the "Caesar" of many of these camps.
Despite the border wars the Romanised Britons got on fairly comfortably
until the failing power of the Roman Empire made it necessary for the Roman
legions to withdraw to Italy. This left Romanised Britain to be attacked by
the wilder Britons of the north and the west. That these attacks should
have been as successful as they were, hints that the south Briton of
England was rather a soft fellow. Since, as we will find later, the
Anglo-Saxon--once comfortably settled in England--showed a tendency also to
become a soft fellow, and had to be pricked to greatness by the Dane and
the Norman, it would almost seem that this gentle, green, cloudy England
has ultimately a softening effect on its inhabitants. But fresh blood pours
in to bring vigour. England invites adventurers by her beauty and then
tames them. Because of her perpetual invitation the British nation has been
made of a brew of Briton, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman bloods,
and all these people have left their mark on the landscape of the country.