THE VALLEY OF THE STOUR
CAESAR IN KENT
It was upon as fair a spring morning as ever was in England, that I
set out from Canterbury through the West Gate, and climbing up the
shoulder of Harbledown, some little way past St Dunstan's, turned out
of the Watling Street, south and west into the old green path or
trackway, which, had I followed it to the end, would have brought me
right across Kent and Surrey and Hampshire to Winchester the old
capital of England. This trackway, far older than history, would
doubtless have perished utterly, as so many of its fellows have done,
but for two very different events, the first of which was the
Martyrdom of St Thomas, and the other the practice of demanding tolls
upon the great new system of turnpike-roads we owe to the end of the
eighteenth century. For this ancient British track leading half across
England of my heart, a barbarous thing, older than any written word
in England, was used and preserved, when, with the full blossoming of
the Middle Age in the thirteenth century, it might have disappeared.
It was preserved by the Pilgrims to St Thomas's Shrine. All those men
who came out of the West to visit St Thomas, all those who came from
Brittany, central and southern France and Spain, gathered at
Winchester, the old capital of the Kingdom, and when they set out
thence for Canterbury this was the way they followed across the
counties; this most ancient way which enters Canterbury hand in hand
with the Watling Street by the West Gate.
To describe a thing so ancient is impossible. It casts a spell upon
the traveller so that as he follows under its dark yews across the
steep hop gardens of Kent from hillside to hillside, up this valley or
that, along the mighty south wall of the North Downs to the great ford
of the Medway, and beyond and beyond through more than a hundred miles
to Winchester he loses himself; becomes indeed one with his
forefathers and looks upon that dear and ancient landscape, his most
enduring and most beautiful possession as a child looks upon his
mother, really with unseeing eyes, unable to tell whether she be fair
or no, understanding indeed but this that she is a part of himself,
and that he loves her more than anything else in the world.
But that glorious way in all its fulness was not for me. I had
determined to follow the Pilgrims' Road but a little way, indeed but
for one long day's journey, so far only as Boghton Aluph, where it
turns that great corner westward and proceeds along the rampart of the
Downs. But even in the ten miles twixt Canterbury and Boghton, that
ancient way gives to him who follows it wonderful things.
To begin with, the valley of the Stour. There can be few valleys in
this part of England more lovely than this steep and wide vale,
through the hop gardens, the woods and meadows of which, the Great
Stour proceeds like a royal pilgrim, half in state to Canterbury, and
on to the mystery of the marshes, and its death in the sea. Above
Canterbury certainly, and all along my way, there is not a meadow nor
a wood, nor indeed a single mile of that landscape, which has not been
contrived and created by man, by the love and labour of our fathers
through how many thousand years. And this is part of the virtue of
England, that it is as it were a garden of our making, a pleasaunce we
have built, a paradise and a home after our own hearts. And in that
divine and tireless making we, without knowing it, have so moulded
ourselves that we are one with it, it is a part of us, a part of our
character and nature. There lie ever before us our beginnings, the
earthworks we once defended, the graves we built, the defeats, the
victories, the holy places. By these a man lives, out of these he
draws slowly and with a sort of confidence the uncertain future, glad
indeed of this divine assurance that there is nothing new under the
sun.
Such monuments of an antiquity so great that they have no history but
what may be gathered from barrows and stones, accompany one upon any
day's journey in southern England, but it is only in one place that a
man can stand and say: Here began the history of my country. That
place as it happens lies as it should upon the Pilgrims' Road.
Beyond Harbledown, some two miles from Canterbury, he Pilgrims' Road
along the hillside passes clean through earthwork of unknown antiquity.
Well, it was here the Seventh Legion charged: here, indeed, we stand
upon the very battlefield which saw the birth of civilisation in our
island. Lying there in the early morning sunshine I considered it all
over again.
Caesar's first landing in Britain in B.C. 55 had been, as he himself
tells us, merely a reconnaissance. In the following summer, however,
he returned in force, indeed with a very considerable army, and with
the intention of bringing us, too, within that great administration
which he and his adoptive son Augustus were to do so much to make a
final and in many ways an indestructible thing.
It might seem that in spite of the lack of the means of rapid
communication we possess, the admirable system of Roman roads enabled
Caesar to administer his huge government--he was then in control of
the two Gauls--with a thoroughness we might envy. After his first
return from Britain in the early autumn of B.C. 55 he crossed the
Alps, completed much business in Cisalpine Gaul, journeyed into
Illyricum to see what damage the Pirustae had done, dealt with them
effectively, returned to Cisalpine Gaul, held conventions, crossed the
Alps again, rejoined his army, went round all their winter quarters,
inspected all the many ships he was building at Portus Itius and other
places, marched with four Legions and some cavalry against a tribe of
Belgae known as the Treviri, settled matters with them, and before the
summer of B.C. 54 was back at Portus Itius, making final preparations
for the invasion of Britain.
This invasion, glorious as it was to be, and full of the greatest
results for us, was accompanied all through by a series of petty
disasters. Caesar had purposed to set out certainly early in July, but
delay followed upon delay, and when he was ready at last, the wind
settled into the north-west and blew steadily from that quarter for
twenty-five days. It had been a dry summer and all Gaul was suffering
from drought. The great preparations which Caesar had been making for
at least a year were at last complete, the specially built ships, wide
and of shallow draft, of an intermediate size between his own swift-
sailing vessels and those of burthen which he had gathered locally,
were all ready to the number of six hundred, with twenty-eight _naves
longae_ or war vessels, and some two hundred of the older boats. But
the wind made a start impossible for twenty-five days.
It was not till August that the south-west came to his assistance. As
soon as might be he embarked five Legions, say twenty-thousand men,
with two thousand cavalry and horses, an enormous transport, and
doubtless a great number of camp followers, leaving behind on the
continent three legions and two thousand horse to guard the harbours
and provide corn, and to inform him what was going on in Gaul in his
absence, and to act in case of necessity.
He himself set sail from Portus Itius, which we may take to be
Boulogne, at sunset, that is to say about half-past seven; but he must,
it might seem, have devoted the whole day to getting so many ships out
of harbour. The wind was blowing gently from the south-west, bearing
him, his fortunes and ours. At midnight the second of those small
disasters which met him at every turn upon this expedition fell upon
him. The wind failed. In consequence his great fleet of transports
was helpless, it drifted along with the tide, fortunately then running
up the Straits, but this bore him beyond his landing-place of the year
before, and daybreak found him apparently far to the east of the North
Foreland. What can have been the thoughts of the greatest of men,
helpless in the midst of this treacherous and unknown sea? To every
Roman the sea was bitter, even the tideless Mediterranean, how much
more this furious tide-whipt channel. Caesar cannot but have
remembered how it had half broken him in the previous year. Very
profoundly he must have mistrusted it. But his Gaulish sailors were
doubtless less disturbed; they expected the ebb, and when it came,
every man doing his utmost, the transports were brought as swiftly as
the long ships to that "fair and open" beach where Caesar had landed
in the previous summer, the long beach which Deal and Sandwich hold.
Caesar himself, as it happens, does not tell us that he landed in the
same place upon this his second invasion of Britain as he had done
before; it is to Dion Cassius that we owe the knowledge that he did
so. It is Caesar, however, who tells us that he landed about mid-day
and that all his ships held together and reached shore about the same
time. He adds that there was no enemy to be seen, though, as he
afterwards learned from his prisoners, large bodies of British troops
had been assembled, but, alarmed at the great number of the ships,
more than eight hundred of which, including the ships of the previous
year and the private vessels which some had built for their
convenience, had appeared at one time, they had retreated from the
coast and taken to the heights. The heights must have been the hills
to the south of Canterbury, nearly a day's march from the sea.
If Caesar landed, as we know from Dion Cassius that he did, in the
same place as he had done in the previous year, he must have known all
there was to know about the natural facilities there for camping,
about the supply of fresh water for instance. But perhaps he had not
considered the dryness of the summer. In any case it might seem to
have been some pressing need, such as the necessity for a plentiful
supply of fresh water, which forced him immediately to make a night
march with his army. Leaving as he tells us, under Quintus Atrius,
ten cohorts, that is, as we may suppose, two cohorts from each of his
five legions, and three hundred horse to guard the ships at anchor,
and to hold the camp, hastily made between midday and midnight, in the
third watch, that is between midnight and three o'clock, he started
with his five legions and seventeen hundred horse, as he asserts, to
seek out the enemy. Something, we may be sure, more pressing than an
attack upon a barbarian foe there was no hurry to meet, must have
forced Caesar to march his army sleepless now for two nights, one of
which had been spent upon an unusual and anxious adventure at sea, out
of camp, in the small hours, into an unknown and roadless country in
search of an enemy which had taken to its native hills. The necessity
that forced Caesar to this dangerous course was probably a lack of
fresh water. He was seeking a considerable river, for the smaller
streams, as he probably found, could not suffice after a long drought
for so great a force as he had landed.
He himself asserts that he advanced "by night" across that roadless and
unknown country a distance of twelve miles. We know of course of what
the armies of Caesar were capable in the way of marching; there have
never been troops carrying anything like their weight of equipment
which have done better than they; but to march something like fifteen
thousand men and seventeen hundred horse twelve miles in about three
hours into the unknown and the dark, is an impossible proceeding. That
march of "about twelve miles" cannot have occupied less than from six
to eight hours, one would think, and the greater part of it must have
been accomplished by daylight, which would break about half-past three
o'clock. As we have good reason to think, Caesar's march, however long
a time it may have occupied, was in search of fresh water, and it is
significant that when the Britons were at last seen, they "were
advancing to the river with their cavalry and chariots from the higher
ground." In other words, Caesar's march had brought him into the valley
of the Great Stour, where he not only found the water he sought, but
also the enemy, who had probably followed his march from the great
woods all the way.
[Illustration: ON THE STOUR NEAR CANTERBURY]
The spot at which Caesar struck the valley was, as we may be sure, that
above which the great earthwork stands, opposite Thannington. Here upon
the height was fought the first real battle of Rome upon our soil. It
was opened by the Britons who "began to annoy the Romans and to give
battle." But the Roman cavalry repulsed them so that they again sought
refuge in the woods where was their camp, "a place admirably fortified
by nature and by art ... all entrance to it being shut by a great
number of felled trees." But like all barbarians, the Britons were
undisciplined and preferred to fight in detached parties, and as
seemed good to each. Every now and then some of them rushed out of the
woods and fell upon the Romans, who continually were prevented from
storming the fort and forcing an entry. Much time was thus wasted
until the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, having formed a _testudo_
and thrown up a rampart against the British fort, took it, and drove
the Britons out of the woods, receiving in return a few, though only a
few, wounds. Thus the battle ended in the victory of our enemies and
our saviours. Caesar tells us that he forbade his men to pursue the
enemy for any great distance, because he was ignorant of the nature
of the country, and because, the day being far spent, he wished to
devote what remained of the daylight to the building of his camp.
Caesar speaks of this camp and rightly of course, as a thing of
importance. We know from his narrative, too, that it was occupied by
some fifteen thousand foot and seventeen hundred horse, with their
baggage and equipment for more than ten days. Where did it stand? It
must have been within reach of the river, for without plentiful water
no such army as Caesar encamped could have maintained itself for so
long a period as ten days; exactly where it was, however, we shall in
all probability never know.
Wherever it was, there Caesar spent the night, both he and his army,
sleeping soundly, we may be sure, after the sleepless and anxious
nights, one spent in the peril of the sea, the other in a not less
perilous night march in a roadless and unknown country.
Yet did Caesar sleep? Towards sunset the wind arose, and all night a
great gale blew. This was the fourth misfortune the expedition had
experienced. It had first been delayed for twenty-four days in
starting; it had then lost the wind and had been for hours at the mercy
of the tide, only landing at last when the day was far spent after a
whole night upon the waters; it had been compelled by lack of water to
quit the camp at the landing-place without rest, and utterly weary and
sleepless, to undertake a perilous night march in search of water. And
now in the darkness, after the first encounter with the enemy, a great
gale arose.
How often during that night must Caesar have awakened and thought of
the sea and his transports. It was, as he would remember, just such a
storm which had ruined him in the previous summer. To avoid a like
disaster he had had his boats built for this expedition, shallow of
draft and with flat bottoms that they might be beached. But with the
Mediterranean in his mind and the certain weather of the south, Caesar,
seeing the August sky so soft and clear, had anchored and not beached
the ships after all. Perhaps the late landing, the necessity of
building a large camp, and finally the perilous lack of water had
prevented him from calling upon his men for a task so enormous as the
beaching of eight hundred ships. Whatever had prevented him, that
task was not undertaken. The eight hundred ships were anchored in the
shallows, when, upon that third night of the expedition, a great gale
arose.
Anxious though he must have been, very early in the morning of the
following day, he sent out three skirmishing parties to reconnoitre
and pursue the defeated Britons of the day before; but the last men
were not out of sight when gallopers came in to Caesar from Quintus
Atrius, at the camp by the shore, to report "almost all the ships
dashed to pieces and cast upon the beach because neither the anchors
and cables could resist the force of the gale, nor the sailors or
pilots outride it, and thus the ships had dashed themselves to pieces
one against another."
The appalling seriousness of this disaster, as reported to Caesar, was
at once understood by him. He recalled his three parties of
skirmishers, and himself at once returned to Quintus Atrius and the
ships. He tells us that "he saw before him almost the very things
which he had heard from the messengers and by letters"; but he adds
that only "about forty ships were lost, the remainder being able to be
repaired with much labour." This he at once began with workmen from the
Legions, and others he brought from the Continent, and at the same
time he wrote to Labienus at Portus Itius "to build as many ships as
he could." Then he proceeded to do what he had intended to do at
first; with great difficulty and labour he dragged all the ships up
on the shore and enclosed them in one fortification with the camp. In
these matters about ten days were spent, the men labouring night and
day. Then he returned to the main army upon the Stour.
But that delay of ten days had given the Britons time to recover
themselves and to gather all possible forces. Caesar returned to his
army to find "very great forces of the Britons already assembled" to
oppose him, and the chief command and management of the war entrusted
to Cassivellaunus, who, though he had been at war with the men of
Kent, was now placed, so great was the general alarm, in command of
the whole war.
Caesar, however, cannot have been in any way daunted save perhaps by
the memory of the time already lost and the advancing season. He at
once began his march into Britain. We may well ask by what route he
went, and to that question we shall get no certain answer. But it
would seem he must have marched by one of two ways for he had to cross
the Stour, the Medway and the Thames. We may be sure then that his
route lay either along the old trackway which, straightened and built
up later by the Romans, we know as the Watling Street, which fords the
Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by
the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the
North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at
Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble,
Caesar himself giving no indications.
Now, when I had well considered all this, I went on to that loveliness
which is Chilham; passing as I went, that earthwork older than any
history called Julaber's Grave, marked by a clump of fir trees. Here
of old they thought to find the grave of that Quintus Laberius, who
fell as Caesar relates, at the head of his men, on the march to the
Thames; but it was probably already older when Caesar passed by, than
it would have been now if he had built it.
No one can ever have come, whether by the Pilgrims' Road or another,
into the little hill-village of Chilham, into the piazza there, which
is an acropolis, without delight. It is one of the surprises of
England, a place at once so little, so charming and so unexpected that
it is extraordinary it is not more famous. It stands at a point where
more than one little valley breaks down into the steep valley of the
Stour and every way to it is up hill, under what might seem to be old
ramparts crowned now with cottages and houses, till suddenly you find
yourself at the top in a large piazza or square closed at the end by
the church, at the other by the castle, and on both sides by old lines
of houses; really a walled _place_.
The church dedicated in honour of Our Lady is of some antiquity in the
main and older parts, a work of the fourteenth century replacing
doubtless Roman, Saxon and Norman buildings, but with later additions,
too, of the Perpendicular time in the clerestory, for instance, and
with much modern work in the chancel. Of old the place belonged to the
alien Priory of Throwley in this county, itself a cell of the Abbey of
St Omer, in Artois; but when these alien houses were suppressed,
Chilham like Throwley itself went to the new house of Syon, founded by
the King. To-day, apart from the English beauty of the church, not a
work of art but of history, its chief interest lies in its monuments,
some strangely monstrous, of the Digges family--Sir Dudley Digges
bought Chilham at the beginning of the seventeenth century--the
Colebrooks, who followed the Digges in 1751 and a Fogg and a Woldman,
the latter holding Chilham until 1860. There is little to be said of
these monuments save that they are none of them in very good taste,
the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the
Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the
Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and diapered
pattern in relief.
[Illustration: CHILHAM]
But it was not the church, beautiful though I found it on that
afternoon of spring, that made me linger in Chilham, but rather the
castle, which occupies the site of a Roman camp; and perhaps of what a
camp? It may be that it was here Caesar lay on the first night of his
resumed march after the disaster of the ships. It may be that it was
here, after all, that Quintus Laberius fell, and that here he was
buried so that the ancient earthwork known as Julaber's Grave, though
certainly far older than Caesar, was in fact used as the tomb of the
hero whose immortality Caesar insured by naming him in his
Commentaries. Who knows? If Julaber is not a corruption of Laberius as
the old antiquaries asserted, and as the people here about believe,
one likes to think it might be, for no other explanation of this
strange name is forthcoming.
So I went on through King's wood, and as I came out of it southward I
saw a wonderful thing. For I saw before me that division or part of
the world which stands quite separate from any other and is not
Europe, Asia, Africa nor America, but Romney Marsh. It lay there
under the sunset half lost in its own mists, far off across the near
meadows of the Weald, for I was now upon the southern escarpment of
the North Downs and in the foreground rose the town of Ashford where
I was to sleep. It was twilight and more, however, before I reached
it, for in those woods I heard for the first time that year the
nightingale, and my heart, which all day had been full of Rome, was
suddenly changed, so that I went down through the dusk to Ashford,
singing an English song:
By a bank as I lay, I lay,
Musing on things past, heigh ho!
In the merry month of May
O towards the close of day--
Methought I heard at last--
O the gentle nightingale,
The lady and the mistress of all musick;
She sits down ever in the dale
Singing with her notès smale
And quavering them wonderfully thick.
O for joy my spirits were quick
To hear the bird how merrily she could sing,
And I said, good Lord, defend
England with Thy most holy hand
And save noble George our King.