far more than of any other series of national events before the Danish
invasions. That process is more exactly recorded, less legendary, and
more consecutively told because it was (to all contemporary watchers)
the capital event of the time, and to all posterity the one thing that
explained men to themselves.
We know also that, not so much the nucleus of the conversion as the
secure vantage from which it marched outward, was the triangle of
Kent. We can believe that the civilisation of Kent was something quite
separate from the rest of the south-eastern portion of England, and
that the many customary survivals which are, to this day, native to
the county are remaining proofs of its unique character among the
petty kingdoms during the mythical period between the withdrawal of
the Romans and the arrival of St. Augustine.
The early hold of civilisation upon Kent is explicable. But when the
influence of Rome begins to spread again over England you have
distances covered which are astounding; there occur sporadic incidents
of the highest importance in spots where they would be the least
expected. Among the very first of these is the first baptism of a
West-Saxon King.
It was certainly at Dorchester that this baptism took place and the
choice of the site, little as we know of the village or city, has
filled every historian with conjecture. Up to the very landing of St.
Augustine we are still dependent upon what is half legendary and very
meagre record. The chief point indeed as regards this part of the
country is the tradition of a battle fought against the British at
Bedford by the West Saxons and the occupation of "four towns." This
success was put down by tradition to the year 571, but everything was
still so dark that even this success is a legend.
Within the lifetime of a man you have the baptism of Cynegil, the king
of the West Saxons, at Dorchester, and that baptism takes place less
than forty years after the complete submission of Kent.
The Chronicle, in mentioning this date, is no longer upon legendary
ground: it is dealing with an event which was kept on record by
civilised men who understood the art of writing, who could speak
Latin, who could bear their records to Rome, and, what is more, the
fact and the date are confirmed by the Venerable Bede.
It is imagined by some authorities that the fulness of the story and
its apparent accuracy depend upon access to some early ecclesiastical
record preserved at Dorchester and now lost. At any rate, Dorchester,
whether because it had been, up till then, an unconquered Roman town,
or for whatever other reason, becomes at once the ecclesiastical
centre and one to which, even when this baptism takes place, the King
of Northumbria was at the pains of travelling southward to, to be
present as sponsor for the new Christian.
The story has a special historical interest, because it shows how very
vague were the boundaries and the occupancies of the little wandering
chieftains of this period. It need hardly be pointed out that no
regular division into shires can have existed so early, and, as we
have already insisted, the Thames itself was not a permanent boundary
between any two definable societies, yet those who regard the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as historical would show one Penda had appeared
a few years before as the chief of a group of men with a new name, the
Mercians--probably a loose agglomeration of tribes occupying the
middle strip of England; a group whose dialect and measures of land
are, perhaps, the ancestors of the modern Midland dialect and most of
our measures. Cynegil's baptism could not have taken place in
territory controlled by Penda, for he was the champion of all the
Anti-Christian forces of the time, and though he had just defeated the
West Saxons, and (according to a later legend) pushed back their
boundary to the line of the Thames, his action, like that of all the
little kings of the barbaric age in Britain, can have been no more
than a march with a few thousands, a battle, and a retreat. In a word,
the true and verifiable story of Cynegil's baptism is one of the many
valuable instances which help to prove the unreliability of that part
of the early Chronicle which does not deal with ecclesiastical
affairs.
The priest who received Cynegil into the Church was one Birinus, an
Italian, and perhaps a Milanese; he appears, from his first presence
in Dorchester, to have fixed the seat of a bishopric in that village.
His reasons for choosing the spot are as impossible to discover as are
the origins of any other of the characteristics of the place. It was,
in any case, as were so many of the sees of the Dark Ages, a frontier
see--a sort of ecclesiastical fortress, pushed out to the very limits
of the occupation of the enemy.
Whether Dorchester continued to be a bishopric from this moment
onwards we cannot tell; but no less than three hundred years
afterwards--in the tenth century--it appears again, and this time as
the centre of the gigantic diocese which stretched throughout the
whole of Middle England and right up to the Humber. The Conquest came,
the diocese was cut up just afterwards, and the seat of the bishop
finally removed from the village to Lincoln, and with the Conquest the
importance of Dorchester as a fortified position, an importance which
it had held for untold centuries, began to decline in favour of
Oxford.
The artificial chain of fortifications up the Thames Valley, which had
their origin under William the Conqueror, will call our attention to
many other spots besides Oxford as these pages proceed, but it is
interesting at this moment to consider Oxford in its early military
aspect, when it succeeded Dorchester, and came forward as the chief
stronghold of the upper Thames Valley above Wallingford.
The gravel bank north of the ford, by which what is presumed to have
been the drovers' road from south to north crossed the river, had
supported a very considerable population, and had attained a very
considerable civil importance, long before the Conquest. It is
difficult to believe that any new, especially that any extensive,
centres of population grew up in Anglo-Saxon Britain, upon sites
chosen by the barbarians. The Romans had colonised and densely
populated every suitable spot. The ships' crews of open pirate vessels
had no qualities suitable to the founding of a town; and when there is
no direct evidence it is always safer of the two conjectures in
English topography to believe that any spot which we find inhabited
and flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon period, even at its close, was not
a town developed during the Dark Ages but one which the pirates, when
they first entered the island, had found already inhabited and
flourishing, though sometimes perhaps more British than Roman. But
though this is always the more historical way of looking at the
probable origin of an English town it must be admitted that there is
no direct evidence of any town upon the site of Oxford before the
Danish invasions, and the first mention of the place by name is as
late as eleven years after Alfred's death, when it is recorded that
Edward, his son, "took possession of London and of Oxford and of all
lands in obedience thereunto."
This first mention, slight as it is, characterises Oxford as being the
town of the upper Thames Valley at the opening of the tenth century,
and we have what is usually a good basis for history--that is,
ecclesiastical tradition and a monastic charter--to show us that a
considerable monastery had existed upon the spot for a century and a
half before this first mention in the Chronicle.
There still exists in the modern town, to the west of it, a large
artificial mound, one of those which have been discovered here and
there up and down England, and which are characteristic of a late
Saxon method of fortification. Before the advent of the Normans these
mounds were defended by palisades only, and were used as but
occasional strongholds. It may be conjectured that this Saxon work at
Oxford dates from somewhat the same period as does the first mention
of the town in the Chronicle. Twelve years later Alfred's grandson is
mentioned as dying at Oxford. It may be presumed that his death would
indicate the presence of a royal palace. We hear nothing more of this
town during the remainder of the tenth century, but we have a long
account in what is probably an accurate record of the rising of the
townsmen against the Danes in the beginning of the eleventh. The
Scandinavians made their last stand in the church of the monastery,
and the townsmen burnt it. Five years later a new host of Danes took
and burnt the town; and four years later again, Sweyn, in his terrible
conquering march, captured it, after very little resistance, in the
same year in which he took the crown of England. The brief episode of
Edmund Ironside again brings the town into history: he slept here upon
his way to London in the late autumn of 1016, and here, very probably,
he was killed. From that moment the fortress (as it now certainly was)
enters continually into that last anarchy which was only cured by a
second advent of European civilisation and the success of its armies
at Hastings.
The great national council of 1018, which may be called the settlement
of Canute, was held at Oxford, and in 1036 another national council,
of even greater importance, which was held to decide upon the
succession of Canute's heirs, was again held at Oxford, and it was at
Oxford that, four years later, the first Harold died.
Meanwhile, in the near neighbourhood of the city, at Islip, Queen Emma
had, half a lifetime earlier, borne a son, who, after the death of all
these Danes, remained the legitimate heir to the English throne. Islip
was, most probably, not royal, but a private manor of the Queen's,
which descended to the Confessor, and it is interesting to note in
passing that it was his gift of this land and of its church to
Westminster Abbey which originated the present connection between the
two--a connection which has now, therefore, behind it nearly nine
hundred years of continuity.
In the few hurried months before Hastings the last of the great
Anglo-Saxon meetings in the town was summoned. It was held at the end
of October, 1065, and was that in which Harold's policy was agreed to.
Within twelve months Harold himself was dead, and a victorious
invading army was marching upon Wallingford.
In all this record it is clear that Oxford held a continually growing
place in the life of England, and especially as a stronghold of
whoever might be governing England. What battle was fought there, if
any, or how the Normans got it, we do not know, but it is presumed
that it suffered in the fighting because the number and value of its
houses is given in the subsequent Survey as having fallen very largely
indeed.
It is always well, whenever one comes across the Domesday Survey in
history, to remember that the whole record is very imperfectly
understood. We do not know quite what was being measured: we do not
know, for instance, in the case of a town like Oxford, whether all the
inhabited houses were counted; or whether only those who by custom
gave taxes were counted; nor can we be certain of the meaning of the
word _vastus_, save that it has some connection either with
destruction or dilapidation, or lack of occupation, or, possibly, even
remission of taxation. But the theory of a sack is not without
foundation, for we know that in the case of York (which was certainly
sacked by Tostig in 1065 and then again by William in 1068) what is
probably a destruction of a similar kind, though a rather greater one,
is expressed in similar words.
Whether, however, the number given in the town list of the Conqueror
is or is not due to the destruction wrought by the Conquest we must be
very careful not to estimate the population of that time upon the
basis to-day such a list would afford. The figures of Domesday stand
for a much larger population than most historians have hitherto been
inclined to grant, as may be shown by considerations to which I shall
only allude here, as I shall have to repeat them more fully upon a
later page when I speak of urban life upon the Thames. The nomadic
element in the life of the early Middle Ages; the smallness of the
space allotted for sleeping; the large amount of time spent out of
doors; the great proportion of collegiate institutions, not only
monastic but military; the life in common which spread as a habit to
so many parts of society beyond the monastic; the large families which
(from genealogy) we can trust to be as much a character of the early
Middle Ages as they, were not the character of the later Middle Ages,
the crowd of semi-servile dependants which would be discovered in any
large house--all these make us perfectly safe in multiplying by at
least ten the number of households counted in the Survey if we would
get at the population of those households, and it must be remembered
that the houses counted, even in those parts of England which were
fairly thoroughly surveyed, can only represent a _minimum_ number,
whatever was the method of counting. The lists may in some instances
include every single household in a place, though from what we know of
the diversity of local custom this is unlikely. In most places it is
far more likely that the list covered but some portion that by custom
owed a public tax, and this is especially true of the towns.
After Dorchester, which was the first of the fortresses of the Thames,
so far as we have any knowledge, and after Oxford, which came next,
and appears to have been founded since the beginning of recorded
history in these islands, there remain to be considered the other
strongholds which held the line of the valley.
It would be easy to multiply these if one were to consider all
fortifications whatsoever connected with the general strategic line
formed by the Thames, but such a catalogue would exceed the boundaries
set to this book. It is proposed to consider only those which were
strictly connected with the passage of the stream, and of such there
are but three besides Dorchester and Oxford, for that at Cricklade is
doubtful, and in any case determines a passage which could be always
outflanked upon either side, while the great fortress of the Tower,
lying as it does upon the estuarial Thames below bridges, does
directly protect a highway.
These three strongholds directly connected with the inland river are
Wallingford, Reading and Windsor, and of the three Wallingford and
Windsor were more directly military: the last, Reading, appears to
have been but an adjunct to a large and civil population; the fourfold
quality of Reading in the history of the Thames, as a civil
settlement, as a religious centre, as a stronghold, and as one of the
very few examples of modern industrial development in the valley, will
be considered later. We will take each of the three strongholds in
their order down stream.
What determined the importance of Wallingford is not easy to fix
nowadays. The explanation more usually given to the great part which
this crossing of the Thames played in the early history of Britain is
the double one that it was the lowest continuously practicable ford
over the river, and that it held the passage of the great road going
from London to the west.
Now it is true that any traveller making from London to Bath, or the
Mendip Hills, and the lower Severn would, on the whole, find his most
direct road to be along the Vale of the White Horse, but the
convenience of this line through Wallingford may easily be
exaggerated, especially its convenience for men in early times before
the valleys were properly drained. Though the ford at Abingdon was
more difficult than the ford at Wallingford, yet the line through
Abingdon westward along the Farringdon road was certainly shorter than
the line through Wantage. Whether the old habit, inherited from
pre-historic times, of following the chalk ridge had produced a
parallel road just at the foot of that ridge and so had made
Wallingford, Wantage, and all the southern edge of the Vale of the
White Horse the natural road to the west, or whether it was that the
great run of travel ran, when once the Thames had been crossed at
Wallingford, slightly south-west towards Bath, it is certain that the
Wallingford and Wantage line is the line of travel in early history.
There is no record, and but very little basis for conjecture, as to
the origin of the fortifications at Wallingford. Not much is left of
them, and though there is some Roman work in the place it is work
which has evidently been handled over and over again. It is certainly
somewhat late in English history that this "Walled Ford" is heard
of--with the tenth century. Its first castle is, of course, Norman,
and contemporary with that of Oxford--or rather a year later than that
at Oxford, and from the Conquest onward it remains royal. From that
time, also, it is perpetually appearing in English history. It was the
place of confinement of Edward I. when, as Prince Edward, he was the
prisoner of Leicester. It was the attempt to succour that prisoner
which led to his removal to Kenilworth, and finally to that escape
which permitted him to fight the battle of Evesham. Wallingford passed
to Gaveston in Edward the Second's reign, and, remaining continually
within the gift of the crown, to the Despenser in the succeeding
generation, and finally to Isabella, who declared her policy from
within the walls of Wallingford when she returned to the country. It
was next held by her favourite, Mortimer, and we afterwards find it,
throughout the fourteenth century, a sort of appanage of the
heir-apparent, and especially of the Duchy of Cornwall, to which it
was attached until the Reformation. It was for a moment under the
custody of Chaucer's son: it nursed the childhood of Henry VI., but
with the beginning of the next century it had already lost its
importance. After half that century had passed the castle was already
falling into disrepair; much of the masonry of the town and of the
fortress, lying squared and convenient to the river, had been moved
down stream for the new buildings at Windsor, and when, nearly a
century later again, the Civil War broke out, it was not until after
some considerable repair that the place could pretend to stand a
siege. It fell to the Parliament, and, before the Restoration, was
carefully destroyed, as were throughout England so many foundations of
her past by the orders of Oliver Cromwell.
It has often been remarked with surprise that cities and strongholds
once densely inhabited and heavily built can disappear and leave no
material trace to posterity. That they do so disappear should give
pause to those historians who are perpetually using the negative
argument, and pretending that the lack of material evidence is
sufficient to disturb a strong and early tradition. Those who have
watched the process by which abandoned buildings become a quarry will
easily understand how all traces of habitation disappear.
Three-quarters of what was once Orford, much of what once was Worsted,
has gone, and up and down the country-sides to-day one could witness,
even in our strictly disciplined civilisation, the removal, by
purchase or theft, of abandoned material.
The whole of Wallingford has suffered this fate--the mound, presumably
artificial, upon which the first keep stood, and which was, probably,
a palisade mound of Anglo-Saxon times, remains, but there is upon it
no remaining masonry.
Next down stream of the points with a strategic importance in English
history comes Reading. But the strategic importance of Reading was not
produced by the town's possessing a site of national moment: it was
produced only by local topography. Reading was never (to use a modern
term) a "nodal point" in the communications of England.
It may be generally laid down that mere strength of position is noted
and greedily seized in barbaric times alone. For mere strength of
position is a mere refuge. A strong position (I do not speak, of
course, of tactical and temporary, but of permanent, positions),
chosen only because it is strong, will save you during a critical
short period from the attack of a fierce, unthoughtful, and easily
wearied enemy--such as are all barbarians; but it cannot _of itself_
fall into a general scheme of defence, nor, _simply because it is
strong_, intercept the advance of an adversary or support a line of
opposition and resistance. Position is always of _advantage_ to a
fortress, and, in all but highly civilised times, a _necessity_--as we
shall see when we come to discuss Windsor--but it is not sufficient. A
fortress, when society is organised, and when the feud of one small
tribe or family against another is not to be feared, derives its
principal value from a command of established communications, and
established aggregations of power--especially of economic power. Towns
alone can feed and house armies; by roads and railways alone can
armies proceed.
There are, indeed, examples of a chain of positions so striking that,
from their strength alone, a strategic line imposes itself; but these
are very rare. Another, and much commoner, exception to the rule I
have stated is the growth of what was once a barbaric stronghold,
chosen merely for its position, into a larger centre of population,
through which communications necessarily lead, and in which stores and
other opportunities for armies can be provided. Such places often
preserve a continuity of strategic importance, from civilised, through
barbaric, to civilised times again. Laon is an excellent instance of
this, and so is Constantine another, and so is Luxembourg a
third--indeed they are numerous.
But, in spite of--or, rather, as is proved by--these exceptions the
fortresses of an organised people are found at the conjunction of
their communications, or at places (such as straits or passes) which
have the monopoly of communication, or they are identical with great
aggregations of population and opportunity, or at least they are
situated in spots from which such aggregations can be commanded.
Position is always of value, but only as an adjunct.
Now Reading, save, perhaps, in barbaric times, when the Thames was the
main highway of Southern England, occupied no such vantage until the
nineteenth century. To-day, with its large population, its provision
of steam and electrical power, and above all, its command of the main
junction between the southern and middle railways, Reading would again
prove of primary strategic importance if we still considered warfare
with our equals as a possibility. But during all previous centuries,
since the Dark Ages, Reading was potentially, as it is still actually,
civilian; and, indeed, it is as the typical great town of the Thames
Valley that it will be treated later in these pages.
The long and narrow peninsula between the Kennet and the Thames was an
ideal place for defence. It needed but a trench from the one marsh to
the other to secure the stronghold. But though this was evident to
every fighter, though it is as such a stronghold that Reading is
mentioned first in history, yet the advantage was never permanently
held. Armies hold Reading, fall back on the town, fight near it, and
raid it: but it is never a great fortress in the intervals of wars,
because, while Oxford commanded the Drovers' Road, Wallingford the
western road, and Windsor (as we shall see in a moment) London itself,
Reading neither held a line of supply nor an accumulation of supply,
and was, therefore, civilian, though it was nearly as easy to hold as
Windsor, as easy as Dorchester, its parallel, easier than Oxford, and
far easier than Wallingford, which had, indeed, no natural defences
whatsoever.
Proceeding with the stream, there is no further stronghold till we
come to Windsor.
Even to-day, and in an England that has lost hold of her past more
than has any rival nation, Windsor seems to the passer-by to possess a
meaning. That hill of stones, sharp though most of its modern outlines
are, set upon another hill for a pedestal, gives, even to a modern
patriot, a hint of history; and when it is seen from up-stream,
showing its only noble part, where the Middle Ages still linger, it
has an aspect almost approaching majesty.