Part 5
Perhaps the principal import of the Middle Ages in value was that of wine. It was a luxurious import for which there was a local demand, especially where you had the residence of the wealthier people, and, what was exceedingly important, it was _an import large in bulk_. It meant that ships would come either in great numbers or in heavy tonnage, and this in itself suggested London as a place of export for their return, made a speculative voyage to London worth taking, and developed the warehousing space and the wharf space of the port. Later came coal, later still the tropical products, and last of all the great passenger traffic. But in every stage of the development London has exercised a local power of demand for that kind of import which demanded bulk in storage.
As to the second point, the easy access to the foreign port whither export was to be made, London was again especially favoured, in its point of growth. To-day it is no longer so, as we shall see in a moment. London is going forward with the momentum of its past. But until quite modern times London looked more favourably at the points to which England exported than did the other island ports, its rivals. It lay in the full focus of that long curve of the Norman, the Picard, the Flemish and Dutch coasts, which were the principal markets of the Middle Ages. Right opposite were the Flemish cities that bought English wool--the staple export--right opposite, also, the mouths of the Rhine for communication with the interior Germanies and, though a little more distant than the northern ports, agreeable to all that Baltic and North Sea trade which grew up with the close of the Middle Ages. The league of mercantile towns called Hanseatic had its depôt in London from the middle of the thirteenth century. The northern ports of England that lie a little nearer had no hinterland to feed their commerce, and London was, moreover, the best clearing-house and centre of general exchange for them in all the north and west. In this character it surpassed even Bruges.
When all these conditions changed--when the discovery of the New World, and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country industries and one hundred other factors had taken away from the site of London its old topographical supremacy, the port was so firmly established that it provided its own sources of vitality.
It is always so in the economic affairs of a town or of a nation. Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the middle period of their growth; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish themselves. The River of London to-day is the capital example of this truth out of all Europe. A basin far too small for modern commerce, lying much too distantly up a river too narrow for modern commercial needs, dangerous of entry for ships of modern draft, and needing perpetual and enormous labour to keep it properly open, none the less preserves its place at the head of the ports of the world. As a depôt for commerce its wharves and docks extend to Tilbury, and that system of clearing which grew up naturally on the low gravel height above London Bridge, when the pool held all the shipping of the place and was a large and secure harbour, is still established on that same hill in the shape of the banks and the exchanges of the City of London, which cancel the exchanges, not of the pool below, but of I know not what fraction of the shipping of the whole world.
There is one last point to be considered in connection with London river as a port. It has been well made by Mr. Lyde in one of his short but remarkable geographical studies. The estuary of the Thames exactly faces that great and permanent frontier line between two parts of our European culture, upon either side of which lie contrasting speeches, traditions, and even religions.
That frontier roughly divides such areas of Western Europe as have continuously preserved the traditions of the Roman Empire from outer regions to the east and to the north, which only received the Christian religion and the Roman civilisation after the breakdown of central authority exercised from the Imperial city.
The estuary of the Thames opens like a funnel just opposite the point where this frontier between what some would call the “Teutonic” and “Latin” areas, reaches the sea.
It may not be at first sight apparent why a position of this kind is of capital commercial importance. The reason is rather moral than material, though it has its material element in the cheapness and expedition of carriage by sea.
Areas which differ in the type of their culture tend to become polarised one towards the other for the purposes of exchange. Each will tend to produce something that the other lacks. Now the exchange between two such areas will, of course, proceed actively enough across innumerable points lying upon the frontier between them, but it will not penetrate very far inland, if there is in competition with the inland routes a water route. Thus Arras will exchange easily enough with, say, Aix-la-Chapelle, Metz with Trèves or Frankfort, but what of Rouen and the Baltic, Bordeaux and the Frisian Lowlands, Brittany and Vendée and the German Plain? It is evident that if no friction existed a direct sea-borne commerce along the north-western coasts of Europe would effect these exchanges; but there does exist a friction, especially in early times, consisting in the ignorance and, as it were, the credulity, separating places so far distant in mileage and, what is more important, in culture. If, then, a half-way house is found sufficiently familiar to either party, that half-way house will tend to become in this new aspect out of so many, a centre of exchange--and this is precisely what happened to London. The North Sea and the Baltic were familiar with London--but then so was the Channel and the Bay of Biscay. London river attracted in this fashion a sheaf of trade routes, drawn from the north and east, another from the south and west. And so true is this that to the present day, and in one curious slight but emphatic modern instance, you can see the process at work. Travellers intent upon no purpose of commerce but merely upon an excursion will leave London river for Boulogne and Calais, sometimes for Dieppe and Havre; other travellers will leave the same facility of egress for the Scheldt and the Rhine and the Dutch ports and the Elbe. But, unless I am mistaken, the more obvious track of a passenger steamer route between the French ports and the Belgian, Dutch, and German ones does not exist save in the case of the great liners which touch at Cherbourg. A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by sea or from some lower French port to, say, Amsterdam, would very probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one: but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this ‘facing’ of London River towards the great political frontier line of Europe, was of capital importance. Scandinavia, the Baltic, Frisia, and the Dutch ports had all known their way to London for centuries when the Norman Conquest, and still more the succeeding Angevin monarchy, brought round into London River a new wealth of trade from the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne.
In all that has preceded we have been considering London as the creation of the river in its civil aspect alone; it remains to consider the town and the stream in their effect upon the military history of the country, and to that I shall now turn.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] The reader may see quoted in full in Sir Laurence Gomme’s _The Governance of London_ (p. 346) the precedents upon which Coke founded his opinion in 1597, including the verdict of 29 Ed. I., concerning in particular the portage of salt upon the Thames.
“Quod nullus mensuarius sit de London usque Lachenlade nisi dicti mensuarii et bushelli de Ripa Reginae.”
V
LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE
The last historical aspect in which we must consider the River of London is the military aspect; and this aspect has three clearly marked divisions. We have first to consider the Lower Thames as an avenue of invasion; next as an obstacle to invasion of the northern part of the island, or to the passage of the troops from the north to the south. Thirdly, we must estimate what effect upon the military history of the country London itself has had, commanding as it does the lowest crossing of the Thames, always forming a vast base of supply, and for centuries by its stores and munitions forming an ally or an enemy of capital importance to whichever party it supported so long as warfare was waged in England.
The first two of these considerations are very sharply defined not only in their nature, but also in the historical periods over which each one predominated. The Thames as an avenue of ingress or invasion belongs to the earlier part of English history. The importance of the lower river in this category ends very nearly with the close of the Dark Ages. Its second character, that of an obstacle to the invader who would go northward or to troops marching from the north southward, in the main is discoverable of course throughout history, but chiefly belongs to the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. I will take these three points, therefore, in their order and deal first with the invasions of England which the Lower Thames has served. These invasions from the first recorded case of the almost to the last may be grouped together under one description. They were the raids of the pirates. It is true that these raids became, as the Dark Ages developed and the true Middle Ages approached, better and better organised, more definitely political and dynastic in plan, until at last they took on the character of regular warfare. But from the beginning to the end of the process we have little or no use of the Thames on the part of regular forces proceeding from the ancient civilisation of the Continent, from Gaul, or from the mouths of the Rhine. The whole story is a story of invasion from the outer and barbarian limits of Europe, that is, from the North Sea and the confines of the Baltic.
The early pirate raids upon this island, which were first called Saxon, hundreds of years later Dane, but which had through the whole of the Dark Ages much of one character of purposeless devastation, used the Thames for one of their chief entries. The earlier and less powerful raids seem to have made nothing of London. It was too much for them. But the later and worse tempest of the eighth and ninth and tenth centuries had London for their main object when they forced the river, and since it is a piece of history very little explored, it is worth a moment’s digression here.
What were the conditions under which the pirates conducted their raids upon the waterway?
First let us establish a little list of what was certainly known with regard to these attempts.
Of the first Saxon raids in connection with the Thames we know nothing. Even the distorted legends set down hundreds of years afterwards only preserve a recollection of a landing in Kent, in Thames, and the fighting that follows them is upon land and south of the river. Of what raids were made upon the Essex shore, or whether any were made, or whether (which is improbable) any attempt were made by these sparse destroyers against the walls and bridge of London, all the part, small or null or whatever it was, which the Thames played in the first pirate raids of the fifth and sixth centuries escapes us.
This is not the place in which to insist upon the unreliable character of that vast mass of popular history erected upon sheer guess-work and describing the early raids of the Saxon pirates as effecting in some way a reconstruction of England. The wilder sort of fiction dealing with that remote and almost unknown period talks of these first pirate raids as “the coming of the English.” We must, of course, neglect rhetoric of that kind. But it is worth while admitting a moment’s digression to impress on the reader upon what an absence of any thing approaching evidence all this academic guess-work has been raised. The one definite fact and the only one connected with the pirate raids which descended upon the eastern and southern river mouths and beaches of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is the fact that these raids cut off southern and eastern Britain from the rest of civilisation. Of contemporary evidence there is nothing for more than 150 years, save one very vague denunciatory or apocalyptical document more in the nature of a sermon than a record, which testifies to the violent impression produced upon the civilised inhabitants of the island by these raids, and a couple of fragmentary sentences written perhaps by contemporaries, certainly not by eye-witnesses, and probably at a great distance from the scene of the trouble.
We do not know when the raids of the pirates began, nor whether they were already severe before Britain was cut off.
We do not know whether Southern and Eastern Britain was already occupied by kinsmen of the pirates serving as Auxiliary Troops within the Empire or no.
We do not know whether the maritime belts of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and Sussex spoke a Teutonic language before the pirate raids or no.
We do not know whether a Christian Church was sufficiently established in those belts for the raids to have had an opportunity of “destroying” such a Church.
We do not know in what numbers the pirates came nor with what object nor what the towns (which were the nucleus of that society) suffered or did not suffer from the invasions.
We have, as almost the sole instrument of historical analysis for a full 150 years, nothing but inference and the consideration of what is physically possible and physically impossible in the various theories that have been put forward.
Thus it is physically impossible that any very considerable number of men can have come over seas at any one moment in the small and shallow boats of the time, but for all the rest we have nothing but legend and our varying estimate of how the society attacked would probably have behaved and what the internal reactions within it under the strain of such an anxiety would probably have been. We can be fairly certain that an attack of this sort could not deal with a defended Roman town, though here and there a garrison on the coast may have been overwhelmed. We can be morally certain from all that we know of that society that men coming for loot would not kill slaves. On the other hand, we do not know how far the anarchy may have been increased by the presence of numerous escaped slaves in the welter. We have a right to exclude the fantastic--such as the astonishing idea that a great Roman town like London could be wiped out _and then resettled by a totally new population_, and we have a right to exclude as very nearly worthless odd stories cropping up hundreds of years later in the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_. On the other hand, we are bound to pay more respect to such a remark as that of the Venerable Bede when he testifies to the migration of a whole body of pirate population from the capital of Schleswig to that of Britain.
If we could discover what happened between the first generation of the fifth century and the first generation of the seventh, the discovery would be the most important and interesting that could be made in connection with our history. For in Britain as in every other province of Europe the process by which civilisation entered into the Dark Ages is the explanation of all that followed. But the discovery has not yet been granted to us, and in all human probability never will be.
We know that the avenue of approach from the Continent to Britain, that is, the coasts of the south and east, were so far ruined or occupied or degraded, the communication with the rest of the island was cut off; we know that when civilisation came back with St. Augustine it had to work through the medium of little courts scattered up and down these shores, and we can presume that writing and record and government thus filtering through the south and east to the rest of the island gradually spread the speech and certain of the customs of that south and east eastward throughout the succeeding centuries.
Of more than that we are ignorant.
The Lower Thames, therefore, and the part that it played in that first capital piece of fighting lies, unfortunately, outside the field of positive history. We do not begin to get any true record of the Thames as an avenue of invasion until the second raids begin, three centuries after the first: those second raids which are collectively known in this country under the title of “Danish.”
At the end of the eighth century the pirate raids from the north struck England again. A few boats’ crews would land, especially in the north, and raid a monastery or loot the outer barns of a steading, only to be beaten off.
But a lifetime later, in the middle of the ninth century, the raids increased in pressure. As early as 832 you get them in the mouth of the Thames. It is a small matter. They land in Sheppey and raid that sparsely inhabited, isolated island, but their raid was successful and it taught them the way back. The next year they meet Egbert down in the south-west in some considerable conflict, killing two of his leaders and holding the battlefield. Two years later again they were in the Irish Sea and were caught and beaten in an island raid in the west. In 837 they were beaten off Southampton, to which they had come with thirty-three ships--and perhaps at the most five thousand fighting men. But again that same year a raid of theirs in Dorsetshire succeeded, and the next year between Kent and Sussex they struck again, and before winter in the hollow land of the Fens and in the Broads and in Kent.
It is with the year 839 that you get the first hint at an attack upon London. It is not certain that that attack was Danish, but it is almost certain that the mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to a great simultaneous series of raids upon the French and the English coasts which struck Picardy and Rochester in Kent as well as London. Something we shall never know is what was pushing them. They had some more adventurous man with his companions to rouse them in the Baltic and off the Norwegian inlets, or there was passing over that unknown pagan society of the north one of those spirits which pass over human societies and lead them out to peril. They would risk the Bay of Biscay, but their ships were caught by the Christians in the Asturias. They even dared for the first time to winter without going home, and to pass the time between one fighting season and the next upon an island in the mouth of the Noir Moutier. They pushed as far as Seville and the Moors ate them up. They ran up the Elbe to Hamburg in a force far larger than anything that has been seen in the west. They ran up the Seine to Rouen and further. They pushed through a gate of Paris and were turned out.
They first charged at and then carried Bordeaux, and all this while they raided Ireland. It was in the year 851 that there came at last a great fleet of these purposeless destroyers to the Thames mouth, three hundred and fifty ships so came, and Canterbury and London were stormed. But their host, which so considerable a fleet must have brought for the first time in numbers really threatening, was beaten as it marched down the Stane Street to the raiding of the south. They were met at Ockley[5] by the host of the English King Ethelwulf and were cut to pieces. He had probably come up by that old way from Winchester which leads through Alton into the Dorking Gap, and so had come up with the raiders. Four years later these pirates, who had already learnt to winter upon Christian land in Gaul, wintered in Sheppey. That they went up the river next year we have no record, but ten years later, in 865, they had been wintering in England, this time in Thanet. The Kentish men paid them ransom, but the pagan kept no faith. He took the ransom and harried the land. Thenceforward it is perpetual raiding up and down England north of Thames. In ’71 they are in Reading, but not, it would seem, by river, and Alfred beat them on Ashdown, but they were in no way driven off. They held London all that winter, and year after year they still marched up and down England.
The pirates, keeping more or less together in one horde, marched and ravaged without strategical purpose and with no power of conquest, organisation, or government, ruining as they went, and you have in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such phrases as: “Here the host travelled over the mouth of Humber to York.” “Here the host went to Mercia and to Nottingham.” “Here the host went again to York.” “Here the army rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up their winter quarters in Thetford.” “Here the host went into Northumbria, and took up their winter quarters at Torksey.” “Here the host went to Repton”--and so forth, to Cambridge, to Wareham, to Exeter--a perpetual raid until in 878 Alfred came out from behind Selwood and his hiding in the crisis of his kingdom, and beat them for good on the bare chalk Down above Eddington. Thenceforward the pressure is against the pirates.