Part 6

More than twenty years later they raided from Boulogne into Kent, and it was in that same raid in 893 that again the Thames was violated. Haesten, whom we call Hasting, came up so far as Milton, that is the first good landing-place upon the southern shore of the inland Thames just opposite Tilbury.[6] He was working with another force to the south in the Rother, but nothing came of this double attack. There was no sailing up river. The station at Milton was broken up and Hasting went down river, crossed to the northern shore, and established himself at Benfleet. The men of London, with a reinforcement of the national army, took his fort and broke all that part of the Danish force, and his ships were either destroyed or brought up river to London, or some up the Medway to Rochester, but Hasting himself who had been raiding was not captured. He came back with that part of his force which had been with him, summoned sundry parties of the raiding Danes from other parts of England, made a new base not far from the old one, and started upon a new raid right across England to the Western Sea. When he had returned he brought such ships as remained to him up river into the Lea, built yet another fort upon that stream twenty miles from London. Once more that base was destroyed. The river Lea was blocked below their settling place, such ships as they had, destroyed or taken to London again. And meanwhile the astonishing Danish host survived, raiding out again across England in a final effort. But their sea power was gone. They wintered at Bridgenorth in the west. Their few remaining ships, six in number, attempted the Isle of Wight and Devon. Alfred beat them off, also catching three aground, but of the remaining three two were left upon the Sussex coast and their crews hanged in Winchester. The last one left, full of wounded men, made East Anglia. In 901 Alfred died, but though he had prevented the raiding of the Danes from destroying Christian England, the plundering went on year after year, but for many years the Thames was free. Seventeen years later they fell upon Severn mouth and were beaten off, and the story goes on with a gradual reconquest of the posts which the pagans had established in the Midlands. It was not until 980 that they touched again at Thames mouth in Thanet, harrying it, and two years later they seem to have come up river and attacked London once more, but there is a bare mention of it, and nothing further. But with that end of the century you come to a very different set of wars--a political attempt of the northern raiders, now organised in regular fashion, and almost a kingdom by themselves, upon the verge of accepting Christianity and of entering into the European Commonwealth. These new fights were fought not for plunder but for conquest. They ended in success, and the critical moment of the campaign was decided in the Thames.

All the fighting of the thirty odd years which established the Danish dynasty in England and led up to the great reign of Canute, has for its pivot or centre the estuary of the Thames and in successive attacks upon the defence of, or in the alliance of London.

Ethelred the Unready, when he forms his first plans against Olaf, gathers his fleet in the Pool of London--though he does nothing with that fleet (992). When, two years later (994), Olaf makes his alliance with Sweyn, it is again up the estuary of the Thames that he sails to make his great attack upon the City--but London beat him off. Though London is attacked again from the _land_ in 1009 and with very great vigour in 1013, Edmund Ironside, a boy who all but saved his house, fought alternately north and south of the estuary against the armies landed from the invading fleet.

That campaign (the campaign of 1016) is as excellent an example of the part the Lower Thames played in the warfare of this island before the Norman Conquest as one could choose. In the month of May Canute makes his attempt to reduce the capital. He cut a canal through the alluvium of Suffolk to get his ships round the Bridge head, so that he held London from the River side both above bridge and below, and he dug his trench all round the north, east, and west over against the walls. But he did not reduce the town. Edmund Ironside coming up from the west, re-entered it. The invader retired to an entrenched camp at Greenwich. When later the whole invading fleet had dropped down the Thames and sailed out of the estuary, you get a strategical playing north and south of that obstacle which is most illuminating. Canute attacks the Suffolk shore. Edmund marches thither, having the estuary to the south of him. Canute then sails across the mouth of the Thames and attacks Kent shore. Edmund counter-marches, _is compelled to take the long route crossing the Thames at London_, and finds the Danish advance at Otford to the south of the estuary. He defeats it. Canute thereupon once more crosses the mouth of the Thames and attacks the Essex shore, and once more Edmund goes back by the long land route, crosses at London, gets to the north of the estuary, and fights and loses (by treachery) his great action on the Crouch at Ashington, near Rochford.

You could not have within a shorter space of time a clearer view both of what the Lower Thames meant as an avenue of approach to invasion during the Dark Ages that were coming to a close, and what it was to mean as an obstacle to a passage of armies during the centuries of the Middle Ages which were about to open. The Lower Thames played no great part between this date, 1016, and the invasion of William the Conqueror. A fleet seems to have stood on it perpetually for the defence of the kingdom under Canute, but did not serve as an avenue of invasion, nor was that fleet brought to action.

The Lower Thames last appears before the Conquest as an element in warfare when Godwin and his sons enter the mouth of the River in 1052, the fifty ships of the King not daring to offer battle. London favoured this particular advance, allowed Godwin to pass under the Bridge without obstacle (which shows how the masts were stepped), and with that successful but hardly challenged expedition ends the first chapter of the Lower Thames in English warfare: the chapter of its use in the Dark Ages as an avenue of invasion into the heart of the country and against London and, already by the early eleventh century, its strategical value as an obstacle to the movement of troops from north to south.

The Lower Thames in the warfare of the Middle Ages, and indeed up to that of the seventeenth century and the Civil Wars--that is, throughout a space of six hundred years (from 1066 to 1644), appears in English warfare only in the character of the main obstacle of crossing South England.

It is impossible to develop a negative aspect of this kind at any great length, nor is it even possible to affirm it as an universal negative. I can indeed call to mind no case of the transport of troops in any considerable numbers from the north to the south of the Lower Thames, or vice versa, during the period in question. But even if some considerable exception be discovered, it does not affect the general thesis that the great groups of civil war which marked the history of England in the Middle Ages and during the seventeenth century were powerfully affected in their strategy by the interruption to eastern communications to north and south, which was caused by the Lower Thames and its estuary.

Thus the whole plan of the Wars of the Roses, infinitely confused though it is in detail, involves a striking up from or down to London with perpetual action west of London, but there is never any attempt to turn a southern or a northern position by the crossing of the Lower Thames in force--at least that I can call to mind. You have the same thing earlier in the Barons’ Wars. When Henry III. wishes to make a base for himself in South England and begins by advancing on Rochester, Simon makes no attempt to cut across anywhere below London. On the contrary, he marches south from that lowest crossing, making sure of intercepting the King on his march round parallel with the coast. In the succeeding campaign the line of the Severn determines everything, and here again the Upper Thames is crossed and recrossed as well, the Lower Thames not at all; and when we come to the great Civil Wars of the seventeenth century or, as our forefathers called them, “the Great Rebellion,” you have perhaps the clearest instance since the campaign of Edmund Ironside of how the estuary of the Lower Thames determined by its obstacle the strategy of the east of England. Speaking in very general terms and from the point of view of strategy alone as distinct from the great moral and social forces at work, the Parliament won because it continuously held not only London but a great triangle of the Eastern English land; Kent in the main, and all East Anglia, and after the second year of the war Lincolnshire as well.

Now imagine in the place of the estuary of the Thames continuous land communication and you will see what a difference that change would have made. Charles at the very beginning of the campaign, though he could not have besieged a town as large as London, could very probably have marched past it and chastised East Anglia, broken up its recruiting centres, etc., confident that there was open to him an alternative retreat to the west upon either side of London. Nay, he could, had he been successful in this early part of the war, in an East Anglian raid have continued that success in the south-east. He might, I imagine, have isolated London, though he could not have besieged it. As it was, the two halves of his enemy’s country divided for _his_ purposes by the Lower Thames were for _their_ purposes united by common radii converging at London and by the control of all the Lower River as a continuous avenue of transport and supply.

What was still heartily Royalist in Sussex (and I believe I may count here many of the castles) was, through the action of that same obstacle, a hopelessly isolated patch which Parliament had later little difficulty in reducing. But suppress the Lower Thames and it would have given Charles a solid base for advance.

We must not exaggerate the point, for the strategy of the time was very confused, and sometimes at first almost purposeless; but none the less in any campaign, however muddled, the main natural strategy imposed by topography invariably appears, and for what it is worth I cite it in this case of the Lower Thames and of the Civil Wars.

The third point, of course, in this connection of the Lower Thames with the Civil Wars waged in this island is the position of London: and that position is twofold. London has one great strategical character as the lowest crossing place of the Thames; it has another great strategical character as the chief natural base in the island.

The first of these two characters is obvious, and as obviously recurs throughout the whole history of battle between the Norman Conquest and the Parliamentary Wars. Whoever has possession of London has possession of the secure crossing place nearest the sea which gives immediate interior communication between one section of the east of the island and the other, and as a rule to have possession of London is to have command sooner or later of the whole of the south and east upon that account.

But the second character, London as a base, is of even more importance. You had here a town so great that after the Dark Ages it need never stand a siege. It is further a town the supplies of which under primitive conditions lay almost always uncut. Unless a man had so considerable a fleet that he could cut off supplies by River, so well organised a transport that he could keep both banks of that broad stream perpetually in touch, and finally so very large a command that he could hold the whole circuit of the walls securely and the Bridge end on the Southwark side as well, London could not be, strictly speaking, besieged, and, from the Danish Wars onwards, London never was.

Not only was this great centre of supply nourished by the Thames immune from such isolation, but it could also furnish stores of provision, remounts, and all that was necessary for a medieval army in quantities more than sufficient for the restoration or recruitment of such a force; hence we find London perpetually turning the scale during six centuries of fighting, and it is almost true to say that he who has London ultimately wins the war. It was the size of London, and in particular its value as a recruiting centre, which checked Charles I. after Edgehill. London made the fortune of Simon de Montfort; London appears to have remounted the Barons in the most critical moment of the campaign of Magna Charta; and London was the necessary pivot upon which William the Conqueror was compelled to hinge all his work of pacification after Hastings. Indeed, the position of London could not be better illustrated than in this early example, where the Norman found it impossible or inadvisable to attempt a direct attack upon it, was compelled to isolate it temporarily by sweeping a line of devastation around it, and made it his first care to recognise its customs and pre-eminence in the kingdom.

With the conclusion of this brief survey of the part which the Lower Thames and London as the creation of the Lower Thames has played in the history of warfare I must close this Essay.

I would close it, as I began it, by the qualification that all those material causes which are the delight of one who traces out the effects of historical geography are but half the story. Of the spirit of place and of the human motive without which such mere topography would be meaningless, I have said little or nothing in this consideration of the River of London building up London through two thousand years; but that is because this business of the soul in any historical matter must be separately treated, and that in a spirit always alien, and sometimes antagonistic, to the chain of material cause and effect.

Nevertheless, it is the soul of London and of London River which has driven forward the story of both of them together, much more than any material limits within which that soul was compelled to act. And that is why to-day overlying the vestiges--often now completely hidden--of the original material framework, London and the River rather control that framework and what were once the necessary condition of port and market and crossing place than are controlled by them.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The reader should be warned that this famous action has been ascribed by modern pedantry to all manner of other places and sites. For my part I will trust our ancestors, the tradition of the place, and the obvious strategies of the Roman Road.

[6] Or Milton Creek out of the Swale. So Professor Oman will have it in his book upon _England Before the Conquest_. But he gives no proof. Milton on the Thames itself would have seemed a much safer and more accessible base.