occupation? It is but a conjecture, though a plausible one, that when
the pirate raids grew in severity this knoll down stream was
fortified, while still the ruling class was Latin speaking and while
still the title of Cæsar was familiar, whether before or after the
withdrawal of the Legions. If this were the case, then, on the analogy
of other similar sites, one may imagine something like the following:
that in the Dark Ages the masonry was used as a quarry for other
constructions, that the barbarians would occasionally stockade the
site, though not permanently, and only for the purposes of their
ephemeral but constant quarrels; and one may suggest that when the
barbaric period was ended, by the landing of William's army, the place
was still, by a tradition now six hundred years old, a public area
under the control of the Crown and one such as would lend itself to
the design of a permanent fortification. William, finding it in this
condition, erected upon it the great keep which was to be the last of
his fortifications along the line of the river, and the pivot for the
control of London.
This keep is of course the White Tower, which still impresses even our
generation with the squat and square shoulders of Norman strength. It
and Ely are the best remaining expressions of the hardy little men,
and it fills one, as does everything Norman, from the Tyne to the
Euphrates, with something of awe. This building, the White Tower, is
the Tower itself; the rest is but an accretion, partly designed for
defence, but latterly more for habitation. Its name of the "White"
Tower is probably original, though we do not actually find the term
"La Blaunche Tour" till near the middle of the fourteenth century. The
presumption that it is the original name is founded upon a much
earlier record--namely, that of 1241, in which not only is it ordered
that the tower be repainted white, but in which mention is also made
that its original colour had been "worn by the weather and by the long
process of time." Such a complaint would take one back to the twelfth
century, and quite probably to the first building of the Keep. The
object of whitening the walls of the Tower is again explicable by the
very reasonable conjecture that it would so serve as a landmark over
the long, flat stretches of the lower river. It was the last
conspicuous building against the mass of the great town, and there are
many examples of similar landmarks used at the head of estuaries or
sea passages. When these are not spires they are almost invariably
white, especially where they are so situated as to catch the southern
or the eastern sun.
The exact date at which the plan was undertaken we do not know, but it
is obviously one with the scheme of building Windsor, and must date
from much the same period. The order to build was given by the
Conqueror to the Bishop of Rochester, Gundulph. Now Gundulph was not
promoted to the See of Rochester till 1077. Exactly twenty years
later, in 1097, the son of the Conqueror built the outer wall. The
Keep was then presumed to be completed, and at some time during those
twenty years it must have been begun, probably about 1080. That which
we have seen increasing, the military importance of Windsor,
diminished the military importance of the Tower, until, with the close
of the Middle Ages, it had become no more than a prison. It was not
indeed swamped by the growth of the town, as was its parallel the
Louvre, but the increase of wealth (and therefore of the means of
war), coupled with the correspondingly increased population, made both
urban fortresses increasingly difficult to hold as mediæval
civilisation developed.
The whole history of the Tower is the history of military misfortune,
which grows as London expands in numbers and prosperity. It probably
held out under Mandeville when the Londoners (who were always the
allies of the aristocracy against the national government) besieged it
under the civil wars of Stephen; but even so there was bad luck
attached to it, for when Mandeville was taken prisoner he was
compelled to sign its surrender. Within a generation Longchamp again
surrendered it to the young Prince John; he was for the moment leading
the aristocracy, which, when it was his turn to reign, betrayed him.
It was surrendered to the baronial party by the King as a trust or
pledge for the execution of Magna Charta, and though it was put into
the hands of the Archbishop, who was technically neutral, it was from
that moment the symbol of a successful rebellion, as it had already
proved to be in the past and was to prove so often again.
It was handed over to Louis of France upon his landing, and during the
next reign almost every misfortune of Henry III. is connected with the
Tower. He was perpetually taking refuge in it, holding his Court in
it: losing it again, as the rebels succeeded, and regaining it as they
failed. This long and unfortunate tenure of his is illumined only by
one or two delightful phrases which one cannot but retain as one
reads. Thus there is the little written order, which still remains to
us for the putting of painted windows into the Chapel of St John, the
northern one of which was to have for its design "some little Mary or
other, holding her Child"--"quandam Mariolam tenenten puerum suum."
There is also a very pleasing legend in the same year, 1241, when the
fall of certain new buildings was ascribed to the action of St.
Thomas, who was seen by a priest in a dream upsetting them with his
crozier and saying that he did this "as a good citizen of London,
because these new buildings were not put up for the defence of the
realm but to overawe the town," and he added this charming remark: "If
I had not undertaken the duty myself St. Edward or another would have
done it."
Even when Henry's misfortunes were at an end, and when the Battle of
Evesham was won, the Tower was perpetually unfortunate. A body of
rebels surrounded it, and in the defence were present a great number
of Jews, who had fled from the fighting in the city only to find
themselves pressed for service in defence of the fortress. From that
moment they make no further appearance in English military history
till the South African War, unless indeed their appearance in chains
thirteen years later in this same Tower as prisoners for financial
trickery can be counted a military event.
Upon this occasion the siege was raised by the promptitude and energy
of Prince Edward--the man who as King was to march to Cærnarvon and to
the Grampians had already in his boyhood shown the energy and the
military aptitude of his grandfather King John. He was but twenty
years old, yet he had already done all the fighting at Lewes, he had
already won Evesham, and now, at the end of spring, he made one march
from Windsor to the Tower and relieved it. It was almost the last time
that the Tower stood for the success of authority. From this time
onwards it is, as it had been before, the unfortunate symbol of
successful rebellion. Edward II. had to leave it in his fatal year of
1326, the Londoners poured in and incidentally massacred the Bishop of
Exeter, into whose hands it had been entrusted.
In 1460 it surrendered to the House of York, and from that time
onwards becomes more and more of a prison and less and less of a
fortress.
The preponderatingly military aspect of the Thames Valley in English
history dwindles with the dwindling of military energy in our
civilisation, and passes with the passing of a governing class that
was military rather than commercial.
Sites which owed their importance to strategical position, and which
had hence grown into considerable towns, ceased to show any but a
civilian character, and even in the only episode of consequence
wherein fighting occurred in England since the Middle Ages--the
episode of the Civil Wars--the banks of the Thames, though perpetually
infested by either army, saw very little serious fighting, and that
although the line of the Thames was the critical line of action during
the first stage of the war.
For the Civil Wars as a whole were but an affair upon the flank of the
general struggle in Europe: the losses were never heavy, and in the
first stages one can hardly call it fighting at all.
The losses at the skirmish of Edge Hill were, indeed, respectable,
though most of them seem to have been incurred after the true fighting
ceased, but with that exception, and especially upon the line of the
Thames itself, the losses were extraordinarily small.
One may say that Oxford and London were the two objective points of
the opposing forces from the close of 1642 to the spring of 1644. The
King's Government at Oxford, the Parliament in London, were the civil
bases, at least, upon which the opposing forces pivoted, and the two
intermediate points were Abingdon and Reading. To read the
contemporary, and even the modern, history of the time, one would
imagine from the terms used that these places were the theatre of
considerable military operations. We hear, with every technicality
which the Continental struggle had rendered familiar to Englishmen, of
sieges, assaults, headquarters, and even hornworks. But when one looks
at dates and figures it is not easy to treat the matter seriously.
Here, for instance, is Abingdon, within a short walk of Oxford, and
the Royalists easily allow it to be occupied by Essex in the spring of
'44. Even so Abingdon is not used as a base for doing anything more
serious than "molesting" the university town. And it was so held that
Rupert tried to recapture it, of all things in the world, with
cavalry! He was "overwhelmed" by the vastly superior forces of the
enemy, and his attempt failed. When one has thoroughly grasped this
considerable military event one next learns that the overwhelming
forces were a trifle over a thousand in number!
Next an individual gentleman with a few followers conceives the
elementary idea of blocking the western road at Culham Bridge, and
isolating Abingdon upon this side. He begins building a "fort." A
certain proportion of the handful in Abingdon go out and kill him and
the fort is not proceeded with: and so forth. A military temper of
this sort very easily explains the cold-blooded massacre of prisoners
which the Parliament permitted, and which has given to the phrase
"Abingdon Law" the unpleasant flavour which it still retains.
The story of Reading in the earlier part of the struggle is much the
same. Reading was held as a royal garrison and fortified in '43.
According to the garrison the fortification was contemptible,
according to the procedures it was of the most formidable kind. Indeed
they doubted whether it could be captured by an assault of less than
5000 men, a number which appeared at this stage of the campaign so
appalling that it is mentioned as a sort of standard of comparison
with the impossible. The garrison surrendered just as relief was
approaching it, and after a strain which it had endured for no less
than ten days; but the capture of Reading was not effected entirely
without bloodshed; certainly fifty men were killed (counting both
sides), possibly a few more; and the whole episode is a grotesque
little foot-note to the comic opera upon which rose the curtain of the
Civil Wars. It was not till the appearance of Cromwell, with his
highly paid and disciplined force, that the tragedy began.
Even after Cromwell had come forward as the chief leader, in fact if
not in name, the apparent losses are largely increased by the random
massacres to which his soldiers were unfortunately addicted. Thus
after Naseby a hundred women were killed for no particular reason
except that killing was in the air, and similarly after Philiphaugh
the conscience of the Puritans forbade them to keep their word to the
prisoners they had taken, who were put to the sword in cold blood: the
women, however, on this occasion, were drowned.
After the Civil Wars all the military meaning of the Thames
disappears. Nor is it likely to revive short of a national disaster;
but that disaster would at once teach us the strategical meaning of
this great highway running through the south of England with its
attendant railways, it would re-create the strategical value of the
point where the Thames turns northward and where its main railways
bifurcate; it would provide in several conceivable cases, as it
provided to Charles I. and to William III., the line of approach on
London.
* * * * *
So far as we have considered the Thames, first as a line of
pre-historic settlements, passing successively into the Roman, the
barbaric and the Norman phases of our history; and secondly, as a
field on which one can plot out certain strategical points and show
how these points created the original importance of the towns which
grew about them.
In the next part of these notes I propose to consider the economic or
civil development of the Thames above London, and to show how the
foundations of its permanent prosperity was laid. That economic
phenomenon has at its roots the action of the Benedictine Order. It
was the great monasteries which bridged the transition between Rome
and the Dark Ages throughout North-Western Europe; it was they that
recovered land wasted by the barbarian invasions, and that developed
heaths and fens which the Empire even in its maturity had never
attempted to exploit.
The effect of the barbarian invasions was different in different
provinces of the Roman Empire, though roughly speaking it increased in
intensity with the distance from Rome. It is probable that the actual
numbers of the barbarian invaders was small even in Britain, as it
certainly was in Northern Gaul, but we must not judge of the effect
produced upon civilisation by this catastrophe, as though it were a
mere question of numbers. So large a proportion of the population was
servile, and so fixed had the imagination of everyone become in the
idea that the social order was eternal; so entirely had the army
become a professional thing, and probably a thing of routine divorced
from the civilian life round it, that at the close of the fourth
century a little shock from without was enough to produce a very
considerable result. In Eastern Britain, small as the number of the
invaders must necessarily have been, religion itself was almost, if
not entirely, destroyed, and the whole fabric of Roman civilisation
appears to have dissolved--with the exception, of course, of such
irremovable things as the agricultural system, the elements of
municipal life, and the simpler arts. Even the language very probably
changed in the eastern part of the island, and passed from what we may
conceive to have been Low Latin in the towns and Celtic dialects in
the country-sides, with possibly Teutonic settlements here and there
along the eastern shore, to a generally confused mass of Teutonic
dialects scattered throughout the eastern and northern half of the
island and enclosing but isolated fragments of Celtic speech.
So far as we can judge the disaster was complete, but it was destined
that Britain should be recivilised.
St Augustine landed, and after the struggle of the seventh century
between those petty chieftains who sympathised with, and those who
opposed, the order of cultivated European life, the battle was won in
favour of that civilisation which we still enjoy. It would have been
impossible to re-create a sound agriculture and to refound the arts
and learning; especially would it have been impossible to refound the
study of letters, upon which all material civilisation depends, had it
not been for the monastic institution. This institution did more work
in Britain than in any other province of the Empire. And it had far
more to do. It found a district utterly wrecked, perhaps half
depopulated, and having lost all but a vague memory of the old Roman
order; it had to remake, if it could, of all this part of a Europe. No
other instrument was fitted for the purpose.
The chief difficulty of starting again the machine of civilisation
when its parts have been distorted by a barbarian interlude, whether
external or internal in origin, is the accumulation of capital. The
next difficulty is the preservation of such capital in the midst of
continual petty feuds and raids, and the third is that general
continuity of effort, and that treasuring up of proved experience, to
which a barbaric time, succeeding upon the decline of a civilisation,
is particularly unfitted. For the surmounting of all these
difficulties the monks of Western Europe were suited to a high degree.
Fixed wealth could be accumulated in the hands of communities whose
whole temptation was to gather, and who had no opportunity for
spending in waste. The religious atmosphere in which they grew up
forbade their spoliation, at least in the internal wars of a Christian
people, and each of the great foundations provided a community of
learning and treasuring up of experience which single families,
especially families of barbaric chieftains, could never have achieved.
They provided leisure for literary effort, and a strict disciplinary
rule enforcing regular, continuous, and assiduous labour, and they
provided these in a society from which exact application of such a
kind had all but disappeared.
The monastic institution, so far as Western Europe was concerned, was
comparatively young when the work in Britain was begun. The fifth
century had seen its inception; it was still embryonic in the sixth;
the seventh, which was the date of its great conquest of the English
country-sides, was for it a period of youth and of vigour as fresh as
was, let us say, the thirteenth century for the renaissance of civil
learning. We must not think of these early foundations as we think of
the complicated, wealthy, somewhat restricted and privileged bodies of
the later Middle Ages. They were all more or less of one type, and
that type a simple one. They all sprang from the same Benedictine
stem. It was the quality of all to be somewhat independent in
management, and especially to work in large units, and out of the very
many which sprang, up all over the island three particularly concern
the Thames Valley. Each of them dates from the very beginnings of
Anglo-Saxon history, each of them has its roots in legend, and each of
them continued for close upon a thousand years to be a capital
economic centre of English life. These three great Benedictine
foundations are WESTMINSTER, CHERTSEY, and ABINGDON.
When civilisation returned in fulness with the Norman Conquest,
another great house of the first importance was founded--at Reading;
and, much later, a fourth at Sheen. To these we shall turn in their
place, as also to the string of dependent houses and small foundations
which line the river almost from its source right down to London:
indeed the only type of religious foundation which historic notes such
as these can afford to neglect is the monastery or nunnery built in a
town, and for the purposes of a town, after the civic life of a town
had developed. These very numerous houses (most numerous, of course,
in Oxford), such as the Observants of Richmond and a host of others,
do not properly enter into the scheme we are considering. They are not
causes but effects of the development of civilisation in the Thames
Valley.
Abingdon, Westminster, and Chertsey are all ascribed by tradition, and
each by a very vital and well-documented tradition, to the seventh
century: Abingdon and Chertsey to its close; Westminster, with less
assurance, to its beginning. All three, we may take it, did arise in
that period which was for the eastern part of this island a time when
all the work of Europe had to be begun again. Though we know nothing
of the progress of the Saxon pirates in the province of Britain, and
though history is silent for the hundred and fifty years covered by
the disaster, yet on the analogy of other and later raids from the
North Sea we may imagine that no inland part of the country suffered
more than the valley of the Thames. All that was left of the Roman
order, wealth and right living, must have appeared at the close of
that sixth century, when the Papal Mission landed, something as
appears the wrecked and desolate land upon the retirement of a flood.
To cope with such conditions, to reintroduce into the ravaged and
desecrated province, which had lost its language in the storm, all its
culture, and even its religion, a new beginning of energy and of
production, came, with the peculiar advantages we have seen it to
possess for such a work, the monastic institution. For two centuries
the great houses were founded all over England: their attachment to
Continental learning, their exactitude, their corporate power of
action, were all in violent contrast to, and most powerfully
educational for, the barbarians in the midst of whom they grew. It may
be truly said that if we regard the life of England as beginning anew
with the Saxon invasion, if that disaster of the pirate raids be
considered as so great that it offers a breach of continuity in the
history of Britain, then the new country which sprang up, speaking
Teutonic dialects, and calling itself by its present name of England,
was actually created by the Benedictine monks.
It was within a very few years of St. Augustine's landing that
Westminster must have been begun. There are several versions of the
story: the most detailed statement we have ascribes it to the
particular year 604, but varied as are the forms in which the history,
or rather the legend, is preserved, the truth common to all is the
foundation quite early in the seventh century. It was very probably
supported by what barbaric Government there was in London at the time
and initiated, moreover, according to one form of the legend, and that
not the least plausible, by the first bishop of the see. The site was
at the moment typical of all those which the great monasteries of the
West were to turn from desert places to gardens: it was a waste tract
of ground called "Thorney," lying low, triangular in shape, bounded by
the two reedy streams that descended through the depression which now
runs across the Green Park and Mayfair, and emptied themselves into
the Thames, the one just above, the other 100 or 200 yards below, the
site of the Houses of Parliament.
The moment the foundation was established a stream of wealth tended
towards it: it was at the very gate of the largest commercial city in
the kingdom and it was increasingly associated, as the Anglo-Saxon
monarchy developed, with the power of the Central Government. This
process culminated in the great donation and rebuilding of Edward the
Confessor.
The period of this new endowment was one well chosen to launch the
future glory of Westminster. England was all prepared to be permeated
with the Norman energy, and when immediately after the Conquest came,
the great shrine inherited all the glamour of a lost period, while it
established itself with the new power as a sort of symbol of the
continuity of the Crown. There William was anointed, there was his
palace and that of his son. When, with the next century, the seat of
Government became fixed, and London was finally established as the
capital, Westminster had already become the seat of the monarchy.