INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Through the flats that bound the North Sea and shelve into it imperceptibly, merging at last with the shallow flood, and re-emerging in distant sandbanks and less conspicuous shoals, run facing each other two waterways far inland, which are funnels and entries, as it were, scoured by the tide.

Each has at the end of the tideway a narrow, placid, inland stream, from whence the broader, noisier sea part also takes its name. Each has been and will always be famous in the arms and in the commerce of Europe. Each forms a sort of long great street of ships crowded in a traffic to and fro. For each has its great port. The one Antwerp, the other London. The Scheldt is the name of the first, which leads to Antwerp, and makes the opportunity for that great market of the world. But the second is the River of London, much older in its destinies, and probably more destined to endure in its functions of commerce.

I know not how to convey that picture in the mind, which the eyes do not see, and yet by which a man is haunted if he has read enough of books and seen the maps, when he comes up through the Narrows of Dover Straits from the wide, empty seas three days behind and knows that there lies before his owner a choice between the eastern and the western gate. That choice is in the case of every ship determined long before. She has the dull duty to do of turning to the right or to the left, and her orders bind her to the river of the Netherlands or of England as it may be. But if you will consider many centuries and the changing adventures of business you will still—as you pass northward between the two shores of Flanders and of Britain, and as you see their recession upon either side of the northern way which opens before you—understand that doubt upon the future and the rivalry of the two rivers which is soon to be so deeply impressed upon the politics of our time.

I could think of the Scheldt and of the Thames as two antagonists facing each other before conflict across a marked arena, which is that of the shallow, tumbling, and yellow water of the North Sea; or as two forces pitted one against the other, streams each of which would force the other back if it could find the strength; or as two Courts in a perpetual jealousy one of the other, intriguing and making and losing point after point in a game of polity.

When the statisticians have done their talk—and very brainless it is—of resources and of metals, two opposing lives are left standing behind either of the great towns, and either of the great sea rivers. The one is the experiment of the modern Germanies; the other is the founded tradition of England; and the more closely a man considers each of these the greater contrast does he discover between the causes of either’s energy of come and go.

A third great tidal river is also concerned with these seas, also helps to determine their commerce, also supports its great inland town. That river is the Seine, and I shall, in the pages which follow, use the Seine also for the example it affords in the analogies and contrasts and parallels which I propose to draw. But it is the Scheldt and the Thames which still remain the greater opponents. The united political life of Gaul, which was inherited and transformed by the French Monarchy, forbade the growth of a great commerce to the north. Paris became not only the political centre of France but its main market as well, and to-day the water carriage of Paris—that is, the traffic of its port—is greater than that of any maritime town in the country. Only if Normandy had developed as an independent state would Rouen have become what Antwerp and London have become. Rouen would then have been, without doubt, the point of transhipment between the inland and the maritime waterways, and the distance of the town from coal would hardly have affected it more than does the distance of London. Its situation as a political junction would have determined its greatness. As it is the Lower Seine may be set beside the Scheldt and the Thames for an illustration in their topography and in the origins of their human settlements, but it does not afford a true commercial parallel to-day, and Rouen is no third rival to the two great ports which are before our eyes and in this generation struggling for primacy.

It is the custom of sailors to speak of that water by which they approach a great town under the name of the town. Men coming up from Yarmouth Roads inland do not speak of the Yare, but of Norwich River. For, to the sailor the river is but a continuation of, or an access to, his port, and the Lower Thames is thus universally known from the sea as London River. The term is an accidental one, but it contains the true history of the connection between the stream and the town. The Thames made London. London is a function of the Thames, and it is in such a connection that I propose to regard it in this essay: London as the great crossing place of the Thames, and as the custodian and fruit of what early may have been the chief ferry, but has for nearly two thousand years been the chief bridge; London as the market of which the Thames is the approach and the port; London as a habitation of which the great street is the Thames, a street for centuries the main highway of its people, lost for a time and now recovering its ancient use; London as the civil and religious head of revenues which were drawn from the Thames Valley; and London as the determinant, through its position upon the Thames, of English military history.

This intimate connection between the city and the river we all instinctively feel, and the two are connected together as no other waterway with its capital can be connected throughout Europe. For the Thames is all that every other river is to every other capital, wherever some great stream is connected with a chief city. But whereas in every other case it is but one or another of the functions of such a stream that history can remark, in the case of London it can remark them all. Little sea-borne traffic reaches Paris by the Seine; the Tiber could never be a street for Rome; Vienna neglects the Danube; Antwerp protects no great crossing, nor has ever been the nucleus of a State; Rouen—the nearest parallel—was not the strategical pivot of Normandy, nor ever formed, as London forms, a chief fraction in the economic power of its province. The two rivers which are sacred to Lyons never fed that town; the Rhone watered but did not lead to Arles. The towns of Lombardy depend upon the fertility of the Po Valley, but the stream is nothing to their commerce or to their political eminence, and Milan, and Venice, and Turin are independent of it. Saragossa was the mistress of Arragon,but the Ebro did not make Saragossa, and as for Madrid, the trickle which runs below Madrid is best described in the story of the Spanish patriot who was dying of thirst after battle, but upon being offered a cup of water, said, “Give it to the poor Manzanares.” Lisbon and Cadiz are maritime, not fluvial, and look where you will throughout the civilisation of Europe you will not find, save in the case of London, this complete interdependence between a great town and its river.

In tracing or establishing this intimate bond between London and the Thames one must guard against an error which the modern reader rightly suspects and is justly ready to criticise or to deny when it appears in any piece of historical writing. That error is the error of materialism.

A generation ago it was universal, and there was no phenomenon in the story of England or of Europe from the emplacement of a city to the growth of the Church which was not traced to inanimate causes superior to, and independent of, any action of the Will. This philosophy narrowed, distorted, and dried up every department of knowledge, and while the area of learning increased with a rapidity hitherto unknown, the spirit inhabiting that conquest was starved. It was as though the time could not contain at once the energy to discover and the energy to know, and as though the covering of so vast a field in so short a period was achieved inevitably at a cost of profundity. That a bias towards the mechanical and the necessary should be present in the physical sciences—in chemistry for instance—is to be expected, that it should have invaded biology was less excusable, but that it should have been permitted to affect (as it did) the business native to man—his building, his institutions, his very dreams—was an excessive blunder, and the spirit of all the younger men to-day is running if anything too strongly in reaction against that ebb-tide of the soul. They reject the dogmas of their fathers which would bend everything man has done to material circumstance, which would talk of man as the slave rather than the master of his instruments, and which, in an argument absurdly circular, “interpreted history in the terms of Economics”:—and they are right.

Even in the sphere of topography, where the physical limitations of human action are the main subject of the writer, they expect a full admission of the soul of man and even—which is very wise—some recognition of that mysterious genius which inhabits every place and is perhaps its vital part.

They are right. No one can see the marriage between London and its river without wondering in what degree things other than ponderable and measurable things may enter into the habitation of man. There is nothing man does, of course, which has not in it the soul. But it may be also true that there is nothing done to man wherein some soul is not also. Now the homes of man and the air and the water and the wind and the earth, against which in part and with which in part those homes arise, are so woven in with his fate—which is a spiritual fate—that we must properly lend to these insensate things some controlling motive; and we may rightly say, though only by the use of metaphor, that all these things have a spirit within them. I cannot get away from it that the Thames may be alive, and London most certainly is.

But all these things, though one may put them in the form of statements, are really questions; and questions to which no sort of answer has yet been discovered.

II

THE APPROACH UP RIVER

There is perhaps no journey in the world in which the past and what now is and the links between them stand out more clearly stratified than a journey up the Thames upon the tide from the Sea-reach to the Pool.

I will describe it; for it is upon a physical experience of this kind (I mean the seeing of history through the eye to the north and to the south of the narrowing river and the feel of the stream under one) that any historical essay upon the River of London must be built.

I have heard it said that the experience is a common one, seeing that so many thousand men of the articulate, travelled, and experienced class (who can relate their experience to some purpose) have entered London by river. Any one (I am told) who comes in from the East or from Holland to the docks will know what I mean. But I do not think this is so. I do not think that the thing seen rapidly from the decks of a liner, perhaps cut short at Tilbury, perhaps missed because the voyage is at night, is quite what I intend to emphasise. Nor am I certain that the proportion of those fifty miles is accurately seized when they are experienced from the height of some great steamer whence the strength and nature of the stream, its ebb and flow, its local life, are missed.

It is so with all other great ports. The myriads that come in nowadays to England by the Mersey have no opportunity for judging the estuary, the meaning of the opposing shores, nor that character of south Lancashire which lies before their eyes in the mist and is so singular a factor in the makeup of England.

I think that to know the River of London the journey must be made from the sea upwards, in something not larger than a barge, in a motor boat, or in a fishing vessel, or little half-rater, and taken upon one tide with an easterly wind, as all the men of the past took it, making the great port upstream under the weather they had chosen. In this way, with little freeboard between one’s feet and the changing level of the broad water, and with not too rapid a passage of the stations upon either bank, and with some true measure wherewith to gauge in detail what one sees, one can understand the river. It was in a progress such as this that the painters came to understand the Lower Thames, and nothing has nourished a more national art than this valley, though its interpreters have been rare.

You see five successive stages clearly marked in such a voyage.

You see, in the first place, that everything up to the very gates of London must have been, at the beginning of our history, as desolate as any province in Europe. The rare places at which high and firm land comes down to the modern stream are, as it were, isolated, and live a life upon the defensive. Nowhere (as we shall see when we come to examine London as a crossing place) does some good habitable site stretch down to either opposing bank. There is no natural gateway upon the Lower Thames; no twin villages defending a gap; nor the projection from the north as from the south of tongues of high land or even good arable land, the proximity of which, one to the other upon either shore, would give humanity to the river. All the miles of it are desolate marshes, either to the one side or to the other, most commonly upon both, and the few spots where an exceptional formation has given firm building ground and fertile fields as well close to the river have something about them exceptional and, as it were, beleaguered. It is a gross and an unhistorical exaggeration to say (as many of our academic people are saying) that all that valley was a flooded lagoon until historic times. It was not that. But it was a long succession of very wide, watery marshes, with knolls of slightly higher land standing up therein. Consider, for instance, the view to the northward, from the height just above and east of Dartford. There you have two good miles of what was marsh and still is largely marsh to the main stream, and beyond, upon the farther shore, another three or four miles of the same flats, with odd, exceptional rises at Rainham, at Aveney, or upon the edge of the flat of Upminster. It is the same from the Abbey Wood, east of Woolwich. Plumstead Marshes and Barking Level made one morass, four miles wide at least, or nearer five, drowned twice a day into a great level sheet of water, until some civilisation came to dyke up the tidal stream and confine it to the central bed, which it had scoured in its windings through such a desolation. Now of all that primitive effect of waste, abandoned places very much remains in such a journey as I have suggested. It is true that a wall of earth everywhere controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks of mud for miles upon either side of his going. But he still sees in so many places as to make them the chief note of the lower reaches, at least, great Flats without a soul upon them, unbroken by tree or house or hedge, and plainly saved by artifice alone from flooding. This run up the Lower Thames is, save for the exceptional approach of high land in one place or another (as at Gravesend or Erith) like a sail through the Fenland, and this character of desertion, silence, and morass, the oldest foundation of all, is still quite plainly the background of what one sees and remembers when one comes up the River of London to London from the sea.

So much, then, for the first layer.

The second should by right be Roman: but nothing Roman remains; no, nor anything of the Dark Ages. Unless we believe what is probable enough, but not proved in any way, that the great containing walls of earth (notably that round the Isle of Dogs) were Roman work, we can distinguish nothing in such a journey to mark the first thousand years of Christendom. Far out beyond the Sea-reach, Reculvers was a Roman station in the estuary, but the ways have eaten it away. No great monastic nucleus of the Dark Ages could be founded in that inhospitable land. There was no palace of the kings standing near the central stream until the neighbourhood of London was approached. There was not even a fortress. Indeed it is odd to think how empty all that approach from the sea to the greatest of the western Roman towns was and remained. It was not until the Middle Ages began to flower that the Lower Thames put forth any human signs—at least of such a sort as have come down to us. The remains of them are very few, but they are distinctive.

Of all that life of the Middle Ages which the English countrysides preserve in so many visible relics—and especially in a host of parish churches surpassing all of the kind in Europe—the Lower Thames has but one clear instance remaining to the eye; and that is the little isolated church of St. Clement’s. Rainham is too far from the water, the legends and associations surrounding the well of St. Chad are also too distant to count in the picture. The endowed foundations of religion either stood remote from the river-bank or have disappeared. London, but for the Great Fire, would have supplied in this the emptiness of the lower river.

But for that capital accident in the history of the city, which renders London so different in outward aspect from all other great European towns, the Middle Ages would still break upon one in a sheaf of spires showing over the flats from Woolwich Reach, at least, and perhaps from farther down the stream. But that accident—the Great Fire of the seventeenth century—has left London stripped of the Gothic and, alone of the great capitals of Europe, no impress of our four hundred years of Gothic remains with the traveller as he comes upstream. When we consider the two parallels to London upon the Continent—the parallels I have chosen as ports upon the two great tidal rivers of the north-west—Antwerp and Rouen, the loss will be apparent.

For miles and miles over the flats of the Scheldt the sailor making for Antwerp sees the high steeple upon his horizon fixed against the sky, and, late as was its building, this watch-tower of Antwerp is of the true Middle Ages; Europe was still Europe and one when its last stone was laid.

Still more does the sailor making for Rouen have the Middle Ages before him as he rounds the Ferry Reach and comes up northward into the sweep of the river before the town. In spite of the extraordinary and meaningless gate which the new travelling bridge makes for the city, its cathedral still dominates the whole view; surrounding it, the high pitch of St. Vincent, the belfry of St. Maclou, the rebuilt towers of St. Ouen, give their character to all the smoky basin of houses between the Seine and the hills.

A far more splendid sight was the Gothic group of London as one came upon it up river before the Great Fire. A score of spires stood in varying height and perspective before the master spire of the cathedral. Old St. Paul’s upon its hill carried the loftiest cross in Christendom—far higher in the air than Strasburg; and old St. Paul’s had been built, as had nearly every great monument of the Middle Ages, with a special eye to the landscape whence it should be seen and which, in a sense, it should control. The huge and somewhat ill-proportioned pyramid of St. Dunstan’s by the very excess of its bulk made a landmark which is the first thing to strike us when we look at a sketch of the river made at any time before 1665. We are fortunate, moreover, in our retention of such memorials. No other northern town, I think, possesses a complete panorama of its appearance in the first half of the sixteenth century such as London possesses in the great work of Wyngaerde in the Bodleian. And though the seventeenth century, with its triumph of engraving, produced a great number of such documents throughout Europe, Visscher’s drawing is unique in its importance, while we have at the end of the series Hollar’s careful delineation of the square mile of ruins after the Great Fire.

This is perhaps the most remarkable piece of pictorial evidence open to English history, and any one who will look at that long string of churches burnt out to shells, and of private houses reduced to a few feet of black and crumbling wall, will see what a revolution in the outward aspect of the river and of its port, and what a breach in the outward continuity of London the Great Fire means. The Conservative temper into which the English fell (with regard to their externals, at least), after the sixteenth century, would have preserved the architectural past of London (and that to our own day) much more perfectly than the past of any great city of the Continent has been preserved. It seems due to the national spirit that a view more ancient even than that of Rouen should greet the traveller coming in by Thames; but the accident of the Great Fire has forbidden it.

On the contrary, the note of the approach to London nowadays from the Lower Thames is a note peculiarly and strongly modern. It is as though the abnormal expansion of our perilous Industrialism in the last hundred and fifty years had not only conquered but obliterated the eighteen centuries from which it suddenly arose. Here and there an odd survival left remaining of deliberate purpose serves but to emphasise the capture of the Lower Thames by that crazy mechanical giant so recently born and already so blind and old. You have the noble front of Greenwich, you have the charming little “mail” opposite, you have, most distinctive, perhaps, of all the survivals upon the river, the Fort of Tilbury. Save for these a huge and hardly national commerce, plainly suffering the domination of a few, has eaten up the scene of Thames-side and marks it more and more as one comes in through the outlying miles until one is relieved by older, dingier, and more gracious things near the heart of the whole business in the Pool.

It seems unjust to pass, with no more than a mention, that lovely little isolated relic at Tilbury. Here was for centuries the natural gate, the military defence of the port. When the range of ordnance was not much more than hailing distance, no defences could be thought of upon the broadening water of the Hope, still less in the funnel of the Sea-reach. But Tilbury, standing over against Gravesend, defended the first point at which the river had narrowed sufficiently to be commanded by batteries from the shore.

In the earliest map of this point (which is preserved in the Admiralty) one may trace the way in which the river was closed. There ran out from the northern bank, pointing somewhat downstream, a sort of barrier. We have no indication of its structure. A few piles would have been sufficient to prevent a passage and to canalise traffic into the open space that was left in the midst of the stream; for this space was not left free, as we might have supposed, just under the guns of the fort, but at a range which seems upon the drawing to be about 250 yards. Whether a corresponding permanent work existed upon the Gravesend shore I am ignorant, but it was obviously easy to emplace guns there when they might be needed. Meanwhile Tilbury, with its continual preparation for arms and as continual innocence of them, with its one chief historic memory of the Armada, remains the most perfect relic of the past upon all the stretch of the river. The swamped land round about has defended it and isolated it, and that great regard for the old things of the nation which is a virtue to be proud of has saved it from decay.

For the rest, as I say, and with the exception of those rare survivals of which Tilbury is the most striking, modern industrialism, down to its last manifestations, has captured the Lower Thames and stands in a bleak contrast against the windy emptiness of the flats. Nowhere is one more oddly struck by this than opposite the great tanks which have been put up for the storage of petrol—the last of our necessities. From Tilbury upwards, wherever there is available space or good ground, it is the haste, the necessity, and the carelessness of modern exchange directed for the immediate profit of men who perpetually change their methods of acquirement (and even their homes) that marks the river. It is a new sort of desolation, the obverse (and not a pleasant one) of that more natural desolation which Nature made by stretching out her marshes and lagoons upon either side of the tideway.

And I say “exchange,” not production. Thames-side used to do many things, but in particular to tan leather and to build ships. The tanneries have nearly gone; the shipyards are in process of death. In the last journey which I made up the tide some months ago to see London once more from the river I passed what may be the last of the men-of-war built upon Thames-side. It lay completing upon the northern shore. It was the ship round which had turned the discussion whether or no the Thames could still successfully build against the north, and if the official answer is to be that it cannot, then this decision will mark the end of the oldest trade of the river and that most native to its life. But we live in a time when most things are dying.

For all this lamentable cloak of purposeless industrialism, chaotic and already murmuring with the sounds of its own dissolution, the gradual envelopment of a man who comes up river, his reception by the hugeness of modern London is a thing which no one who has experienced it can forget.

Indeed, the utter ruin of order and of plan, which is but the outward manifestation of the ruin of religion, has destroyed the sense of approach everywhere around that great helpless, apathetic nation which we call London, save where it could not be wholly destroyed, and that is along the water which was its most ancient highway.

Come in from what direction you will, save by the Thames, and the approach to London is a waste of eyesight. No one has imagined for two hundred years such a thing as a gate or a limit. There is no kind of salutation offered or of barrier presented or of definition laid down. Draggle-tail financial experiments of no interest or purpose to those responsible for them, save abstract wealth, stand isolated in fields as often as not given up to weeds and rubbish, and new roads half made end everywhere in dust-heaps or in mud. Then for one mile after another you pass the thousands of little houses all shamelessly similar, for in none does a man intend to make his being, to possess his soul, or to live and die there. There is not even a city wall remaining from the past, nor so much as a broad outer street, delimiting what may still be noble and permanent from these hopeless suburbs. Little scraps of what were once happy and united villages still stand like islands in this flood of mean brick. For the most part they are to be distinguished no longer save by the narrowness and crookedness of their streets, and when at last one comes to the inner part, where there is something of history and of meaning and of an inherited culture, one comes upon it without introduction and without grace. Of all cities that ever were, modern London least deserves a wall, gates, and a senate.

But the entry by the river cannot be wholly destroyed. The river is too strong. And therefore a man does here receive a physical impression almost worthy of the magnitude of the things he seeks. He does get some idea of London and some introduction to it. The houses and the places of change, and the great stores and the abrupt street-ends with their water steps, cluster in groups with narrower and narrower gaps between them, until at last they come up all together in rank and enclose one avenue of flood, banked everywhere by brick and crowded with the interlacing of vessels. It is a thing which, if a man could draw it properly, would make the best record of our time for the curiosity of those who are to come after us. Accustomed as we are to an eternal noise drowning thought and human life wherever the haphazard and violent activity of our time is at work, there is an odd broken silence in this waterway of sails and chains and alarms, guarded and hemmed in by the leagues of houses. The mainspring of the moving road is silent, the power of that one thing in the view which is not made by man, the rushing upward of the water; between all these new and artificial things the strength of the Thames survives with no more sound in its going than when it went through other silences before men found it.

III

LONDON THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES

LONDON THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE THAMES

It is a commonplace which must be repeated whenever the connection of the Thames with London is referred to, that the capital matter in that connection is London’s position as the lowest crossing point upon the Thames. That affirmation, standing alone, is of no use to history unless one also explains why it was so important to find a crossing place as low as possible down the river, and the many causes which combine to make that lowest crossing place the neighbourhood of London Bridge. These last especially require a full explanation because, of the many converging reasons for selecting that site, the chief were, until quite recently, imperfectly studied.

Why was it of such great importance for man, from the beginnings of a settled occupation in this island, to discover a convenient crossing place as low down as possible upon the course of the Thames? And why, when once this crossing place had been established, would it become the principal meeting-place in the country?

The answer to these questions is to be found, not only in the shape of the island, but in the position of its best soil and in its relation to the Continent.

It is obvious that the main connection between Great Britain and the Continent must be by the Straits of Dover. It is not only the shortness of the trajectory from the mainland to the island which makes the Straits of Dover the necessary and permanent entry into this country, it is a number of other things as well: as, that communication is very easy from the opposing shore inland; that that opposing shore was provided for ages with a harbour peculiarly suitable to early traffic—the Portus Itius (now the silted-up plain between the hills behind Boulogne); the conformation of the high land upon either side at Grinez and at Dover Cliffs which, in the centuries when the thing was important, gave an uninterrupted sight of land during the crossing; and the choice of entry which the various inlets (now filled up) afford from the Portus Lemanis behind Folkstone, the old inlet at Dover, and the old Mouth of the Stour to what was once the sheltered channel between Thanet and the mainland behind the island of Richborough. So powerful has been the topographical effect of the Straits that no revolution in travel has dispossessed them of their original importance. The great expansion in our means of communication has only emphasised the bond which is established by the Straits between this island and the Continent of Europe, and so throughout the whole of the old world. When, a few years hence, a man sets out to travel by land to India or to China, he will cross from Dover and will take his train at Calais. Were communication inland as uninterrupted throughout this island as it is throughout the opposing portion of the Continent, a system of roads would naturally have established itself, radiating from some depôt common to the various ports of Kent, just as a system of roads grew up upon the Continent, radiating from Calais and from Boulogne, and forming a network inland with such central points as Bavai, Amiens, Cassel, etc., to form pivots for the whole.

But communication within the island of Britain was not thus uninterrupted in all directions. One great obstacle lay across it from east to west, and that obstacle was the Thames. How complete an interruption the Thames formed, especially in its lower course, I will describe in a moment; it must suffice to notice here that for one who would reach all the fertile land of East Anglia and of what is now Hertfordshire, for one who would reach from the landing-place in Kent the wheat lands of what is now Essex, and the centres of population in what is now Norfolk (both of them originally capital sites of population before the growth of modern industry), the profound wedge driven into the land by the estuary of the Thames and its continuation in the tidal river formed an almost insurmountable obstacle. There was no straight line from say Canterbury to the Midlands and to the central east of the island with its great mass of arable soil. More than this: if one looks at a map of England on which moorland and waste country is distinguished from the arable soil, it will be apparent that north of the Wash the latter takes the form of a long and somewhat narrow strip corresponding at first to the lower valley of the Trent and farther north again to the Vale of York. A direct line to this arable northern strip from any principal Kentish centre (and Canterbury was such) would take one across the Thames estuary and was therefore impossible. The farther up river a practicable crossing was found the longer the detour it involved. The only considerable population in Britain that was early accessible to a road-system proceeding directly from Kent was the population of what later came to be called Wessex, that is, the central southern districts of which Winchester was the capital. As a matter of fact we find a road of immemorial antiquity proceeding directly east and west from Canterbury to Winchester along the ridge of the Chalk, but a similar road northward was blocked by the obstacle of the Thames. We shall see in a moment that the discovery of a good crossing place fairly low down in the course of the river not only saved a long detour by the upper valley for travel proceeding from the Straits of Dover to the eastern Midlands, and ultimately to the plain of York, but also afforded a fairly direct line in another direction which was essential to travel, namely, the direction of the north-west and the main ports which establish communication with Ireland.

We may take it, then, as established, that there existed from the earliest times a necessity, or a necessary tendency, to found and keep up a permanent crossing place at the lowest practicable point in the Thames valley.

Once that crossing was founded and continuously maintained it was equally necessary that it should grow into the chief meeting place of the island; that is, the chief market and therefore the chief town. Indeed the various advantages such a crossing would have form so rare a combination that we should be perfectly justified, even if we had not the evidence we have, in making certain of the existence of a great and important London early in history.

All the causes which we have seen to feed the commercial growth of the site from the sea were reinforced by the inland communications which met at this crossing place. The bridge (as I have shown elsewhere) made a terminal not only to sea-borne traffic, but to all the inland traffic from down the upper valley. It became the place of transhipment. It was further the terminal, and the necessary terminal, of the three great roads from north-west, from the north, and from the east, which combined at this point to seek the Straits of Dover to the south; and once this nexus was woven, once the market and place of meeting was fixed, it must further become the goal of other roads against which the Thames did not originally provide an obstacle. Thus it was that a road would necessarily be established from this crossing place to the west and to the south-west. Though the main traffic from the fertile Lower Severn valley would more naturally make for the Straits by way of the Chalk ridges, yet, when once London with its market supplies and depôts was established, a main road would necessarily aim at the Straits through London rather than south of the Thames. And though the secondary entries into the island from the Continent by Southampton Water, and by the ports to the west of it, would naturally send out arteries of communication northward and westward, yet their communication north-eastward through London would soon acquire the chief place. That London would have become what it did through no more than these domestic causes may well be denied. The main factor in its growth was throughout the centuries what it remains to-day—the commerce of the tidal Thames. But standing at the head of that commerce London also gathered to itself, as the main crossing point of the Thames, the communications of the whole island.

The peculiar and determining effect this had upon the military history of England I have mentioned in another study,[1] and shall expand in this. Parallel effects could be found in every other department of activity, not only in commerce but in the political machinery of England, of English feudalism, and of the English monarchy, and later of English aristocratic government. London once so formed upon its river was the centre or support of each in turn supreme in the island.

Having established this, let us consider why the crossing place came just here upon the line of the river, and to solve that problem we must recollect what it is that acts as a barrier to communication, especially in early times. This barrier is certainly not to be found in hills of such a gentle sort as diversify south England. The breadth of a stream, up to half a mile or so, and apart from broken water, though of considerable importance in the problem, is again not the chief difficulty, for man has always been able to cross water if his approach to it was unimpeded. The true obstacle was marsh—bad going. It is still the chief impediment to modern engineering, and the difficulty which men found during earlier centuries in negotiating any considerable breadth of marsh translates itself to-day into the expense which a similar undertaking now involves. Belts of marsh impeding or actually forbidding travel across them have been formed upon one, the other, or both banks in so unbroken a chain down the Lower Thames valley as to make that valley the obstacle it was and is to transverse travel. The first factor in the formation of such marsh is the tide. If you have a considerable difference between high and low water, and if that difference is further complicated by great variations between the neap and the spring tides, the difficulty of the barrier of marsh affected by such a tide will be correspondingly increased.