Part 3
But Grays is in the same bad topographical case as Purfleet, only rather worse. It is still less of a terminal for any road from the north. It connects with the east only through Stanford and the Horndon roads. To the north of it lay, completely cutting it off from any communication, the belt of marsh of which Mordyke is now the drainage line, and of which Orsett Fenn is the principal survival.
We have, then, on the north, only Purfleet and Grays; and both must be rejected. On the south, however, there is a series of isolated natural wharves which approach the main tidal stream, and not only stand fairly steep-on to its rise and fall, but are further of a soil upon their surface which permitted travel and an easy approach to the river in early times. These are, counting from the sea-reaches upward: Gravesend, where the chalk comes right down to the Thames; Greenhithe, where a tongue of the chalk juts out and touches the water; Erith, the point where the gravels, which some mighty stream laid down when the rivers of Northern Europe were discharging ten, twenty, or a hundred times the flood they have to-day, first approach the existing stream. At Woolwich sand and gravel closely approach the river and line it for so considerable a distance as to afford the platform for a fairly large town. Next up-river the same formation of gravels gives at Greenwich a hard along the stream, and immediately above another spit of the same actually touches the river at the point where used to stand the isolated village of Deptford.
Now any one of these natural hards along the south bank of the Thames between London and the sea would have afforded an excellent platform for the crossing of the river. It is true that the Thames is somewhat wider in its lower reaches than at the pool, but the difference was not so considerable as to balk those who first instituted the ferry and later the bridge of London. If one could cross the half-mile of water which lay before one at extreme high tides under the earliest conditions at Southwark, or bridge (as was done so long ago) the four hundred yards of the mainstream, there would have been no difficulty in dealing with the quarter of a mile at Deptford or at Greenhithe, nor even with the rather broader stream opposite Woolwich.
Save perhaps by a bridge of boats, a permanent crossing could not have been attempted at Erith or at Greenhithe, though the narrowing of the stream at Gravesend might well have allowed a more stable structure to be established. At any rate, a crossing even so broad as that opposite Erith has nowhere in Europe interfered with the passage of commerce, or of arms where both sides of a great stream lent themselves to such a passage. But it is here that each one of the points I have mentioned is at fault. Opposite Gravesend as opposite Greenhithe, opposite Erith as opposite Woolwich, Greenwich, and Deptford, there lies upon the northern bank a belt of marsh which forbids traffic. Tilbury Fort, opposite Gravesend, stands upon a tiny circle of harder land, but all around it are the Chadwell and the Tilbury marshes. Greenhithe has right against it the projecting expanse of West Thurrock Marsh, Erith the whole breadth of Wellington and Rainham marshes; and, as one approaches London, and the river narrows, matters seem only to get worse. Woolwich faces the expanse of originally flooded soil between the Lea and the Roding, with the most of which even the economic forces making for the expansion of London have been able to do nothing, and of which so unpleasant a relic of its original condition is left in Plaistow Marshes to-day; while opposite Greenwich and Deptford lay that perfectly impossible morass, which, though turned into water meadows by a river wall many centuries ago, is still perhaps the worst building ground within the London area. We call it the Isle of Dogs.
The reader must not imagine this lack of any two opposing hards upon London River below the City to be due to some coincidence. It has a fairly obvious geographical cause. Those points where the gravels and the chalk were touched by the scouring of the stream were naturally the outer cusp of its curves. The river having first determined a bend to the south or to the north, would eat away more and more on the outer edge of those bends (which the stream always follows both in flood and in ebb), and scour away the bank until it struck harder soils and was there checked. Deptford and Greenwich lie on the outer edge of the first great southern bend; Woolwich on that of the second; Erith on that of the third; Greenhithe the fourth; Gravesend the fifth; while both Grays and Purfleet represent similar checks to the bends towards the north.
Now it is evident that the same process which makes a river extend its curves outward more and more by the scouring the stream along the exterior edge leaves on the inside of the curve an increasing tongue or wedge of alluvial deposit. What we have, therefore, on the Lower Thames, the continual opposition of marsh to the rare hards, is only what we should expect from the geological history of the river, and the crossing place which was at last found is much more of a coincidence and accident than the absence of a crossing place below.
That crossing place was, of course, finally discovered opposite the steep gravel bank upon which the oldest part of the City of London is built.
The land has been so often turned and returned in at least twenty centuries of building that it is not easy to-day to reconstruct the original conditions of that crossing; and, unless we look at all the evidence, slight as it is, it is easy to fall into errors upon it. Thus several writers upon this subject have often spoken as though the gravel-topped knoll upon which the original London stood was the sole factor in establishing the crossing, and I have myself fallen into the error of believing that the approach from the south could only be made over a long artificial causeway.
A further consideration of the evidence, and especially of that concerning surface soils to the south of the crossing, has convinced me (subject to yet further evidence which may appear) that the opportunity for a crossing near the site of London Bridge was almost as tempting from the south side as it was from the north. It is true that no considerable rise of land is to be discovered on the Southwark side until we have gone some distance from the river, and the contour lines do not, therefore, suggest an easy crossing at this spot. But much more important than the lie of the land was the nature of the surface over which travel must proceed. The rocks across which a road is driven are not of the first importance in primitive times, though they become important, of course, when the road is expected to bear very great loads, or when it is so thoroughly metalled that the presence of good stone in its neighbourhood has to be considered. What is important to a primitive track is the immediate soil under foot, and if that be fairly hard and dry it can be quite shallow and yet sufficient for the purposes of travel.
Thus, one can point out to many a path across the clay of the weald which picks its way from one shallow patch of sand, gravel, or stone to another, over country the main base of which is clay, and there is a similar example (with which I have dealt in another volume)[2] in the upper valley of the river Wey. There, once the primitive track has left the chalk and come to the marshy alluvials of the lower levels, it picks its way in this fashion from one long strip of gravel to another; and though these strips of gravel are shallow--mere casual drifts in many cases--they are sufficient for the purposes of the road. Now in the case of the crossing of the Thames at London, the new Geological Ordnance Survey, as it gives the drift as well as the rocks, shows us that a spit of sandy gravel projected into the alluvial mud of the Thames valley just opposite the “bluff” upon which the oldest part of London stands, and indeed projected so far towards the stream that the last traces of it are not lost until beyond Guy’s Hospital--that is, until within little more than a furlong of the present high-water mark. The causeway which might therefore be necessary to approach the stream from the south in all states of the tide need only have been such a hardening of the track over the mud as is necessary between the high- and low-water mark of any tidal river where a ferry is to be established, and we must believe that the river at high water washed the gravel spit.
Upon the farther or northern bank traces of artificial embankment (indicating the original limit of alluvial mud upon that side) have been found upon the line of Thames Street, and the Roman wall ran just to the north of it. The total width, then, which had to be negotiated at this point was one at the very most of seven hundred yards, and perhaps much less than that, and it was one which at high water was flanked to the south, as to the north, by a hard surface across which the river could be approached.
No such conditions were to be discovered between this point and the sea, and, far inland as this point was, it was therefore the lowest practicable crossing of the Thames. Thus it was that the Thames established London.
It has also been maintained that this crossing formed not only the first practicable way to one coming up from the sea and seeking the _lowest_ passage of the Thames, but also that no practicable passage could be found for some considerable way _up_ the river either; in other words, that the opportunity for going over the Thames near the site of London Bridge was an isolated and all the more valuable one from the absence of similar opportunities _above_ as well as _below_ it.
We must be very careful before we accept such an argument. It is as certain as inference can make it that an original crossing, perhaps older than that of London, passed the Thames in the neighbourhood of Lambeth Bridge. The road which the Romans made or straightened from the south-east, that is, the first great main road from the Straits of Dover to the north, the Watling Street, points directly to this spot, and the presence of good going on the south bank at least strengthens the conjecture, coupled as it is with the antiquity of Westminster as an inhabited site, and the long-established ferry which plied for centuries from the neighbourhood of Lambeth Palace to the opposing “Horseferry” Road.
The formation of the surface-soil in this neighbourhood is well worthy of study.
Immediately in the bounds of Lambeth Church and Palace the superficial hard gravels (which have been approaching the river for two miles and leaving a belt of marsh to their right or north) touch the stream. Not quite opposite, but nearly so--quite nearly enough for the establishment of a ferry--the large isolated patch of gravel which lay between the two mouths of the old brooks and which supported the nucleus of Westminster affords a good landing-place. It is true that there is (or was) a patch of bad ground immediately to the north of this gravel, but very soon the rising ground which is now marked by Constitution Hill and Grosvenor Gardens gave good going and led the track up, nearly coincident with Park Lane, to “Tyburn,” whence the Watling Street makes straight for the north and west along the line of the modern Edgware Road.
For a mile or two farther up, until the gravel in Chelsea was reached, opposite the steep land of Battersea crossing may have been difficult, but between Battersea and Chelsea it was certainly as easy in early times, or easier than at London Bridge, and after that, of course, as one goes westward the passage of the river becomes easier and easier until on the present western limits of London, at Brentford, you have what is almost certainly an original ford across the river, at low tide at least, and one which some authorities have regarded as the crossing place of Julius Cæsar.
It is not, therefore, because the crossing at London is unique--it is, on the contrary, but the last of a long series of crossings--it is because it is the _lowest_ crossing of the Thames that it came to be of such capital importance in the history of this island. Upon it converge the great military road from Chichester and the Great Port, the still more important road from the Kentish ports, and in particular from the Straits of Dover, the road from Shoreham going directly northward, of which such slight but such conclusive evidence has been discovered. These from the south--while from the north the great eastern road from Colchester and the corn-lands of Essex, the northern road with its branches to the ports and to the corn-lands of East Anglia, the north-western road from the garrison at Chester with its branch to the arable lands of Lancashire, past the fortress of Manchester, and even the western road from Bath and from the mines of the Mendip and from the garrison of Caerleon, all converge.
Once this scheme of ways had been established (and they were certainly all complete before the end of the fourth century), once London had thus become the hub of a wheel of such spokes and the centre of such a web, the Thames which had made it, making also its commerce from the sea and its value as a point of transhipment between inland and sea-borne traffic, assured its eminence over all the other towns of the island.
I will not here repeat the arguments which I have dealt with in other studies, and which are advanced in defence of various hypothetical dates for the first building of the bridge. Its establishment across the river marked, of course, the completion of the process whereby London was produced. For once the bridge was there it was a necessary terminal to sea-borne traffic, and a convenient one to inland traffic; it was the military communication between north and south, and the commercial one as well. I will close by distinguishing between the very few pieces of actual evidence and the presumption built upon them.
We have a line of Roman remains pointing to a place upon the northern bank, somewhat to the east of London Bridge and almost coincident with the opening of the subway. Opposite it we have the old landing place near “Stoney Lane” which is supposed to indicate a southern causeway meeting this identical causeway from the north. Between the two there may have been in early Roman times a ferry. On the other hand, we have the Stane Street pointing directly at the southern terminal of old London Bridge (a trifle to the east of the modern bridge) and we have the undoubted presence of that bridge through the Dark Ages, which did not, as a rule, possess any considerable monument which they had not inherited from Rome. We have, further, the fact that the earliest line traceable for the Roman town puts London Bridge nearly at its centre; and again the fact that on the line of the bridge certain Roman relics have been unearthed or fished up.
In the absence of more positive evidence we may take it as sufficient for history that in the natural course of things a ferry probably preceded the bridge, yet the bridge existed, if not when the Romans came, at any rate shortly after their occupation.[3]
Thus it was, then, that the River of London seems to have made London.
The Thames was so situated in the island that a crossing place of a permanent sort had to be established as far down the stream as possible. This place was found where the stream was still broad, tidal, and a port. Once bridged the same spot would mark the terminal of sea-borne traffic and the place of exchange between foreign and domestic produce, while the roads radiating north and south from such a crossing would further establish its pre-eminence.
But that pre-eminence was, from some very early period, _commercial_. The first mention of London in recorded history, the phrase of Tacitus, speaks of the town particularly as a _market_. As a market London has grown, and as a market it is still chiefly eminent. But London is a market only because it is a port, and it is the port of the Thames. In that aspect I will next consider the connection between the town and its river.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Warfare in England_, Williams & Norgate.
[2] _The Old Road_, Constable & Co.
[3] The arguments with regard to the age of the bridge and the earliest position of the crossing will be found set out in their most recent form and most fully by Mr. R. A. Smith, F.S.A., in the first volume of _London_ in the Victoria County Histories.
IV
LONDON
THE PORT OF THE THAMES
That a town would group up on the lowest crossing of the Thames, once that crossing with its bridge or ferry was definitely established, is obvious enough. That this town would be important and large if there were a sufficient development of population and culture in the island is equally obvious. Both consequences would naturally follow from the topography of Britain. But that this town should become of such high importance in the European scheme and of such overwhelming importance in the national scheme; further, that this town should soon grow to be the second town in size of Western Europe, and at last by far the first, is not so immediate a conclusion from the known topographical conditions which brought it into being. That moral and material growth of London is due, of course, to the supremacy which London enjoyed and enjoys as a place of _commerce_. It is London as a market, and as a market the port of which was the Thames, which we must next consider, and we must ask ourselves upon what so considerable and historical a phenomenon has been based. The matter is usually dismissed by an affirmation lacking analysis and still more lacking proof. Our text-books are too often satisfied with telling us that “the exceptionally favourable position of London as a commercial centre” was at the root of the town’s greatness. The affirmation is perfectly true, but it does not provide its own explanation nor satisfy our curiosity as to _why_ this position should have meant so much.
I think, indeed, that most observant people in reading this or similar phrases must, if they had any knowledge of the map, have been struck with the apparent disadvantages under which a site such as that of London suffers. It has not behind it a vast hinterland from which it should be able to gather raw material for export, nor is it a natural outlet for the various products of several different regions as is, for instance, the region surrounding the mouths of the Rhine. It is not central to the European scheme as Lyons was for so many centuries, and Paris for so many centuries more. It lies a long way up its stream from the sea. No system of converging waterways unites in its neighbourhood. There seems at first sight, therefore, no reason why London should have obtained more than a local importance.
When we consider its advantages as a general meeting-place for varied foreign commercial interests, a first view will profit us little. London is on no general European highway but lies ex-centric to Europe far upon the north and west of the general area which European culture covers; nor does its more central position since the discovery of the New World avail the argument, for the greatness of London was planted and its future continuance assured long before Europeans had known and developed the Western Continent. London, again, does not seem to invite commerce by lying upon the frontier common to two civilisations; it does not lie upon any economic boundary line as do the cities of the Levant and notably the cities of Palestine. It is, if we consider the economics of commerce during at any rate the first 1500 years of our era, almost at the edge of the world.
To explain the supremacy of London as a market more than one thesis is put forward for general acceptance which must, I think, be condemned. Thus we have the thesis that London occupies the position it does _because it is almost in the centre of the land hemisphere_. As a matter of fact the actual centre of that hemisphere is not far from the neighbourhood of Falmouth, and is at any rate within the limits of Britain. If we trace upon a globe a great circle or “equator” so as to include the greatest mass of land surface possible, we find our southern ports, and London amongst them, to lie near the Pole of such an Equator, and this argument has been of some weight with those who have not paused to consider what that “land hemisphere” means. If the climate of the world were everywhere equal and most of its soil equally productive, then the fact that the great estuary of the Thames lay almost central to the greatest mass of land would have its importance--though the mouths both of the Seine and of the Scheldt, of the Rhine, and for that matter of the Elbe, would not be so far distant as to explain the peculiar supremacy of London. But in the first place the most part of that mass of land did not enter into the commercial scheme until quite modern times, and secondly, the variations of its climate and of its productivity destroy the theory. Not far to the north of our port (relatively to so great a thing as the planet) lies that vast circle of uninhabited or hardly habitable frozen land which is not only almost useless for the purposes of exchange, but which also bars any passage of commerce across it. Not so very far to the south, again, runs the belt of desert east and west across Africa and Asia, the worst part of which, the widest, is also the nearest to us and is called the Sahara. It is of little use to have a central position between, say, Japan upon the one side and Cape Town upon the other, if the Greek Circle which connects us with Japan passes, as it does, through the Polar Ice. There are certain central positions which explain the supremacy of some particular site, but these positions are nearly always central to limited areas over which travel is uninterrupted. The great market of Nijni Novgorod in Russia is an example of this sort. Chicago in the United States of America is another. But London is no parallel to such cases as these, so far as the world or even Europe is concerned. It is fairly central (as we shall see) to what was once the chief wealth of England: it is ex-centric to all else.
Still less will the many arguments based upon fairly modern conditions solve the problem which confronts us. Thus the great export trade of modern England is mainly based upon coal. But the estuary of the Thames is not a natural place of export for coal. The political relations which necessarily bind this country to-day to other countries of the same speech throughout the New World have a vast effect in continuing and expanding our oversea exchanges, but all the ports natural to such ties lie upon our south or west. London does not face the New World. It looks away from it.
The truth is that the singular position of the Lower Thames as a terminal for international commerce, and of its port as an international market, must be sought in a medley of causes, the chief of which fall into two clear categories. We have first the causes which made London what it was before the transformation of commerce through the discoveries of the Renaissance and the later gigantic expansion which reposes upon modern facilities of communication. Once London is thus established as the second great city of the West, we have the later causes which permit it to continue in the enjoyment of that position, and to nourish it until the city whose port was the Thames became not the second but by far the first of all the great markets in wealth, population, and shipping.
I will take these two sets of causes separately.