Part 3
The estuary of the Seine was not only an obvious outlet, but it gave an opportunity for the early ships to creep under the protection of a windward shore. From the very heart of the country, from Rouen, and even from Pont de l'Arche, sea-going vessels could go down the stream with a strong tide helping them. They would have calm water as far as the point of Barfleur so long as the wind was south of west, and no danger save the reef of Calvados. Moreover, the trend of the land led them northward in the direction which they knew they had to follow if they were ultimately to find the English coast.
When this defence and indication failed the early sailor, at the corner of the Cotentin, where the land turns west again, he could find the little harbour of Barfleur whence to set out; he was there protected from the outer sea by reefs, and possessed, what was important to him, an excellent shore for beaching. He was sheltered even thus far from the prevailing winds.
Nor was this all. This coast was backed by bold high land, from three hundred feet near the coast to five hundred further inland, and marks of that kind, valuable as they still are, were a necessity to the early navigator. Such land would guide him home if his adventure failed, and it is worth while noticing, in the case of a man to whom all this was a great adventure, the sense of security with which the high hills upon the horizon furnished him in clear weather.
He set out then, and for the first few hours--in theory for close upon twenty-seven miles, and practically for more than twenty of the fifty-three he had to traverse--the French coast was still in sight on such days as could tempt him to cross the sea.
Now, by a happy accident, some of the highest land in the south of England stands dominating the narrowest part of this approach from France. Our Downs in Sussex are commonly receded from the sea-coast; from Brighton westward, their slope up from it is gentle, their escarpment is on the further side, and they are often veiled by the reek of the land. All the way from Beachy Head nothing gives a true mark until you get to this high headland of St. Catherine's Point, which overlooks the narrowest part of the passage.
One must have sailed across here to know how powerful is that hill. It stands steep up out of the sea, it is twice as high as Beachy Head, more than half as high again as Dover Cliff, and though it is but steep turf and not white chalk, it stands up so against the light looking southward, that one may see it at not much less than thirty miles distance as one runs northward so, with the westerly wind just aft of the beam and making for the land. Even in a haze it will stand above the mist and indicate the shore with its head so lifted as to show quite plain in the clearer sky. All this argument will be evident to those who know what a land-fall means. Even to-day, with the compass and the chart, it is the method of all our fishermen in the narrow seas to make some light or foreland, rather than to lay down a course; the violence and the changes of the channel current make it a surer method than any reckoning. In the first days a land-fall was everything. Every memory or relic of primitive navigation shows it a feeling-out for the high, conspicuous blue cloud, which, when you have fixed it once above the horizon, stands permanent and constant, turning at last into no cloud, but an evidence of human things after the emptiness of the sea.
The high land then, of itself, all but bridged the gap. In pure theory one might just catch sight of a fire on the top of St. Catherine's before one had seen the last of a similar flare upon the hills of the Cotentin, and in actual practice, in clear weather, it is but a very short run of fifteen miles or so from the last sight of the French coast to the making of St. Catherine's upon the horizon before one.
These considerations, then, the guide and protection of the Cotentin coast, the inlet of the Seine, the narrowing of the sea, the high land upon either side, would of themselves suffice to point this passage out as a natural way from the Continent to England. Were a man asked to-day where he would rather cross west of Etaples, he would answer, I think, 'from Cherbourg to the Wight'; and very many times, before writing was known or a record kept, men must have run easily through a long summer day, taking it in two tides, losing the land for but a quarter of their voyage, and confident that if evening overtook them, a beacon on St. Catherine's would light the northern horizon, even though half their journey remained to do.
I say this alone would prove the age of the route, but there is something which clinches the argument, and that is what we saw to be so important in the case of Kent--'The Choice of Entry.' How the tides of the narrow seas and the uncertain winds made imperative a choice of entries to the land I have already shown in my discussion of the Straits, and I need not repeat my arguments.
It is enough to remark that in this case of the Second Crossing, conscious human design could hardly have improved the conditions afforded by the Wight.
Behind it is a vast sheltered sheet of water, in shape a tripod, one of the arms of which, five miles in length by nearly one in breadth, is absolutely landlocked and safe in all weathers, while the other two are so commonly smooth and so well provided with refuge at Yarmouth, Lymington, New Town, the Medina, Portsmouth, and the Hamble as to form a kind of large harbour with subsidiary harbours attached.
To this great refuge two entries are provided, each aided by a strong tide, each narrow enough to break the outer sea, but not so narrow as to present grave dangers to small craft.
Supposing a man approaching St. Catherines's Point from the south. The wind fails him, and he is compelled by the tide to drift to the east or to the west; at an equal distance from the point either way he will find an entry into the inland water. Suppose a sudden change in the direction of the wind or in its intensity makes him run before it, from any direction but that of the north (which in itself would provide him with a windward shore) he could make one of the two entries of which I speak. It is true that a nasty shelf and overfalls follow a portion of the shore opposite Ventnor, but, like the reefs of the Cotentin, they do not run so far out as to affect my argument.
There are hardly any conditions under which, after his passage from the Continent, the early sailor would have found it impossible to make either the Needles channel or Spithead. It is a perfect harbour, and though it has but lately recovered its ancient importance, the inland waters, known as the Solent, Southampton Water, and Spithead were certainly, after the Straits, the chief landing-places of these islands. Porchester, Brading, Cowes perhaps, and Bittern certainly, show what the Romans made of the opportunity. All the recorded history of England is full of that group of harbours and that little inland sea, and before history began, to strike the island here was to be nearest to Salisbury Plain and to find the cross-roads of all the British communications close at hand; the tracks to the east, to the west, to the Midlands were all equally accessible.
Finally, it must be noted that the deepest invasion of the land made here is made by the submerged valley of Southampton Water, and the continuation of that valley inward is the valley of the Itchen. The inland town to which the port corresponded (just as we found Canterbury corresponding to the Kentish harbours) is Winchester.
Thus it was that Winchester grew to be the most important place in south England. How early we do not know, but certainly deeper than even tradition or popular song can go it gathered round itself the first functions of leadership. It was possessed of a sanctity which it has not wholly lost. It preserves, from its very decay, a full suggestion of its limitless age. Its trees, its plan, and the accent of the spoken language in its streets are old. It maintains the irregularities and accretions in building which are, as it were, the outer shell of antiquity in a city. Its parallels in Europe can hardly show so complete a conservation. Rheims is a great and wealthy town. The Gaulish shrine of 'the Virgin that should bear a Son' still supports from beneath the ground the high altar of Chartres. The sacred well of a forgotten heathendom still supports with its roof the choir of Winchester.[1] But Chartres is alive, the same woman is still worshipped there; the memory of Winchester is held close in a rigidity of frost which keeps intact the very details of the time in which it died. It was yielding to London before the twelfth century closed, and it is still half barbaric, still Norman in its general note. The spires of the true Middle Ages never rose in it. The ogive, though it is present, does not illumine the long low weight of the great church. It is as though the light of the thirteenth century had never shone upon or relieved it.
It belongs to the snow, to winter, and to the bare trees of the cold wherein the rooks still cry 'Cras! cras!' to whatever lingers in the town. So I saw it when I was to begin the journey of which I write in these pages.
To return to the origins. The site of Winchester, I say, before ever our legends arose, had all the characters which kept it vigorous to within seven hundred years of our own time. It was central, it held the key to the only good middle passage the Channel afforded, it was destined to be a capital. From Winchester therefore a road must necessarily have set out to join what had been, even before the rise of Winchester, the old eastern and western road; this old road it would join by a slow approach, and merge with it at last and seek Canterbury as a goal.
The way by which men leaving Winchester would have made for the Straits may have been, at first, a direct path leading northwards towards the point where the old east-and-west road came nearest to that city. For in the transformation of communication it is always so: we see it in our modern railway lines, and in the lanes that lead from new houses to the highways: the first effort is to find the established road, the 'guide,' as soon as possible.
Later attempts were made at a short cut. Perhaps the second attempt was to go somewhat eastward, towards what the Romans called Calleva, and the Roman road from Winchester to Calleva (or Silchester) may have taken for its basis some such British track. But at any rate, the gradual experience of travel ended in the shortest cut that could be found. The tributary road from Winchester went at last well to the east, and did not join the original track till it reached Farnham.
This short cut, feeder, or tributary which ultimately formed the western end of our Road was driven into a channel which attracted it to Farnham almost as clearly as the chalk hills of which I have spoken pointed out the remainder of the way: for two river valleys, that of the Itchen and that of the Wey led straight to that town and to the beginning of the hill-platform.
It is the universal method of communication between neighbouring centres on either side of a watershed to follow, if they exist, two streams; one leading up to and the other down from the watershed. This method provides food and drink upon the way, it reduces all climbing to the one clamber over the saddle of the ridge, and, if the beginning of the path is struck out by doubtful pioneers, then, as every pioneer in a new country knows, ascending a stream is the best guide to a pass and descending one on the further side is the best guide to open spaces, and to the habitations of men.
This tributary gradually superseded the western end of the trail, and the Old Road from the west to the east, from the metal mines to the Straits of Dover, had at last Winchester for an origin and Canterbury for a goal. The neglected western end from Farnham to Stonehenge became called 'The Harrow Way,' that is the 'Hoar,' the 'Ancient' way.[2] It fell into disuse, and is now hardly to be recognised at all.
The prehistoric road as we know it went then at last in a great flat curve from Winchester to Canterbury, following the simplest opportunities nature afforded. It went eastward, first up the vale of the Itchen to the watershed, then down the vale of the Wey, and shortly after Farnham struck the range of the North Downs, to which it continued to cling as far as the valley of the Stour, where a short addition led it on to Canterbury.
Its general direction, therefore, when it had settled down into its final form, was something of this sort:--
When Winchester began to affirm itself as the necessary centre of south England--that is of open, rich, populated, and cultivated England--the new tributary road would rapidly grow in importance; and finally, the main traffic from the western hills and from much of the sea also, from Spain, from Brittany, and from western Normandy, probably from all southern Ireland, from the Mendips, the south of Wales, and the Cornish peninsula, would be canalised through Winchester. The road from Winchester to Farnham and so to Canterbury would take an increasing traffic, would become the main artery between the west and the Straits of Dover, and would leave the most permanent memorials of its service.
* * * * *
Winchester and Canterbury being thus each formed by the sea, and each by similar conditions in the action of that sea, the parallel between them can be drawn to a considerable length, and will prove of the greatest value when we come to examine the attitude of the Old Road towards the two cities which it connects. The feature that puzzles us in the approach to Canterbury may be explained by a reference to Winchester. An unsolved problem at the Winchester end may be referred for its solution to Canterbury, and the evidence of the two combined will be sufficient to convince us that the characters they possess in common are due to much more than accident.
Of all the sites which might have achieved some special position after the official machinery of Rome with its arbitrary power of choice had disappeared, these two rose pre-eminent at the very entry to the Dark Ages, and retained that dual pre-eminence until the great transition into the light, the Renaissance of civilisation at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth.
For six or seven hundred years the two towns were the peculiar centres of English life. Winchester was a capital longer than London has been; Canterbury ruled the religion of this island for over nine hundred and forty years.
So much we know for certain, and more may be presumed; but I have conjectured that these sites were of equal importance before the advent of Rome, and such a conjecture needs support. I will maintain that the barbaric centuries which followed the decline of the Empire reproduced in Britain original conditions, and restored their value to sites neglected during the period of Roman order.
Rome, in this frontier province, put her capital in the north, at York, and her principal garrisons in the north also; but even though she did not at first admit their importance, Canterbury and Winchester, with London, insensibly preponderated: London, through which half the roads are marked in the itinerary; Canterbury and Winchester whence, to this day, great Roman roads may be discovered radiating like the spokes of a wheel.
That the importance of these sites should have increased with the increasing barbarism of the Dark Ages is, I repeat, an evidence of their great antiquity. The arbitrary and official forces of society had disappeared. An ancient sanctity beyond history, the track of hunters, the ford, the open hillside, chance opportunities of defence, soil, food, water, all the primal things which determine the settlements of savages, were again at work in the fifth century. The force of merely natural tendencies increased as the consciousness of civilisation faded, and when after the defeat of the pagans in the ninth century Christendom had just been saved and the light slowly began to grow, these forces remained (though with gradually diminishing power) and moulded Europe until the Angevine and the Capetian, the reinvigorated Papacy, the adventure of the Crusades, and the study of the Code, had created once more the fixity of a true civilisation: a civilisation whose institutions and philosophy are our own to-day.
What, then, are the common attributes which we can note in Winchester and Canterbury, which would have drawn savage men to their sites, which therefore give them their tradition, and from which we can induce the causes of their rival power?
Each is near the sea, each near a port or ports; in the case of each, this port, or group of ports, commands one of the two passages to the Continent, and to the homes of civilised men. In each case the distance from the sea is that of a day's march for an army with its baggage. Disembark your men at Southampton or at Dover with the dawn and you hope that night to rest secure behind the walls of Winchester or Canterbury.
The reason of this arrangement was as follows: an inland place has many advantages over a fortified town on the seashore as the resting-place of an army. It has a better food supply; communication from it radiates upon all sides, not only from half its circumference (indeed in many ports there is but one narrow exit along the isthmus of the peninsula or up the valley which forms its harbour). There is likely to be more wood, a matter of great importance for fuel and fortification and sometimes for the construction of engines of war; it will have more fresh water. It may not be a salient, but it is an important, fact that in early times the population of an inland place would be trained for fighting upon land, and its energies would not be divided by the occupation of sea-faring; and finally, your inland fortress is liable to but one form of attack. You may have landed your men after a successful voyage, but, on the other hand, you may have landed them after a hot pursuit. In the first case it is not a disadvantage to sleep the night sheltered by walls inland, and in the second case it is a necessity.
Remembering all these things, it is evident that to have your town of refuge within a day's march of the landing-place is a condition of its value to you. It is far preferable to reach fortification within the daylight than to pass your first halt under the strain of partial and temporary defence.
Winchester and Canterbury are each, of course, upon rivers. They are each upon rivers just above the limit to which the tide would help light-draught, primitive boats, and where yet they could enjoy the fresh water coming down from above. So Caen, so Norwich, and a hundred other cities, have been founded upon rivers a day's march inland from port, and (with the exception of the tide) similar conditions perhaps produced the greatest of all these examples--Rome.
The similarity of the rivers is also remarkable: each of such a size that it can be canalised for traffic above the city, and yet used to turn mills; each supplying industries that depend upon water, especially brewing and tanning; each divided for such a purpose into a number of small regular trenches which flow along the lower streets of the city--an arrangement only possible where a flat site has been chosen--the Itchen, tumbling along the eastern boundary of Winchester, and the Stour, on the northern gate of Canterbury, complete a parallel almost as strong as that of the cities which stand upon them.
They are of much the same length, depth, rapidity of stream, and volume of water. They flow very clear--running over the chalk, clean and potable streams. At a point where each cuts through a range of hills, a point somewhat below the last ancient ford, and just barely above the recorded limit of the tide, a point right on the valley floor where the hills recede somewhat, each bears its city.
Of both towns we are certain that they were prehistoric centres. Not only have the earliest implements of men been discovered in their soil, but it is evident that the prehistoric mode of defence in these islands was used by each--a camp or temporary refuge crowning the hill above the settlement and defended by great circumvallations of earth. Canterbury has the camp in Bigberry Wood; Winchester that upon St. Catherine's Hill. In each town a considerable British population existed before the Roman invasion. In each the coins of British kings struck under the influence of Greek commerce, a century to a century and a half before the Christian era, are to be discovered. The name of each has a British root when it first appears in British history. Canterbury, Durovernum, was the town upon the river bank; and Winchester still preserves the trace of such an origin: the 'Venta' of the Romans: the Celtic 'Gwent'--an open space.
Each was Roman; each occupied much the same area; from each radiated a scheme of Roman roads; upon each the history of Roman Britain is silent; each first appears recorded in the story of the pirate invasions and of the conversion of England after the dissolution of the Imperial scheme.
Such were the two towns which answered each other like peaks over the rich belt of south England. The one the king's town, the other the primate's; the political and the ecclesiastical capitals of all those natural and dark centuries. By a division common to the history of our ancestors in all parts of Europe, one fell naturally to the Court, the other to the Church. The king in Winchester, the primate in Canterbury, 'like two strong oxen pulled the plough of England.' And each, as was necessary to the period, had its great tomb, but not at the same time. Winchester, the capital, had in the Dark Ages its lamp of sanctity. In the Middle Ages this focus moved to the east--to Canterbury. There could be no rivalry. Winchester created its own saint, St. Swithin, with the murder of à Becket Canterbury put out the light of Winchester and carried on the tradition of a shrine; from that time onwards Winchester declines, while Canterbury survives chiefly as the city of St. Thomas.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The sacredness of wells is commingled all through Christendom with that of altars. As, for instance, the wells in the cathedrals of Chartres, of Nimes, of Sangres, and in St. Nicholas of Bari. In Notre Dame at Poissy, in St. Eutropius at Santes (a Roman well), in the Augustinian chapel at Avignon (now a barracks). In Notre Dame at Etampes there are three wells. There is a well in St. Martin of Tours, in the Abbey of Jobbes, in the Church of Gamache. Our Lady of the Smithies at Orleans (now pulled down) had a well into which Ebroin threw St. Leger, the Bishop; and close by at Patay there is one in St. Sigismund's into which Chlodomir threw some one or other. Old Vendée is full of such sacred wells. The parish church of Praebecq has one, of Perique, of Challans (filled up in fourteenth century). At Cheffoi you can see one in full use, right before the high altar and adorned with a sculpture of the woman at the well--and this is but a short and random list.
[2] See upon this abandoned portion Mr. Shore's article in the third volume of the _Archæological Review_.
THE CAUSES OF THE PRESERVATION OF THE OLD ROAD; ITS GENERAL CHARACTER, AND OUR APPLICATION OF THIS IN OUR METHOD OF RECOVERING IT