FOOTNOTES:

LIMEHOUSE

This consideration is often missed, and it will therefore be worth while to explain it.A fairly regular height of tide covering daily the same expanse lends itself to the establishment of a regular crossing place, and though that crossing place may not be in continuous use from the difficulty of using it at low tide, it can be regularly counted upon to serve twice in the twenty-four hours. But if there is any very considerable difference in the state of the tides throughout each fortnight, then the opportunities for using the crossing are very much reduced, unless, indeed, one has a steep shore to deal with. Under such conditions one might find a spot where crossing was easy enough at the springs, and yet impossible at the neaps; and instead of a ferry regularly in use twice in the twenty-four hours, you would have one which could only be depended upon a few times in a month.

Now the Thames is a river in which this difference is considerable, and it has greatly strengthened the power of the waterway to act as an obstacle to travel from north to south.

This, then, is the first of the factors which have combined to make the Lower Thames the obstacle it was and is to travel. If we compare the Thames in this respect with the other great rivers which we have seen to be its parallels upon the Continent, we shall be struck by the greater effect of the tide in its waters.

The second factor in the establishment of such an obstacle is the type of soil over which the water works. It is evident that a tidal river and estuary in which sand and gravel or even chalk form the riparian soils will less produce marsh than clays will. A river which washes the silt of clays up and down with its tides will be defended by worse belts of bad land than one which runs through the other types of rock. Now in this respect also the Thames has a bad pre-eminence over its rivals. Chalk only comes near the stream once or twice, and for a very short distance, in its lower course, and though gravel and sand, as we shall see, approachthe banks in more than one place (and ultimately determine the site of London), this kind of soil is nowhere that which the mass of the stream churns up or carries down in its course. The Thames deals for many miles of its upper tidal waters with clays, bringing them down towards the mouth, and has settled them for centuries upon either side of its channel in the shape of deep alluvial marshes.

But there is more than this.

The third factor in the problem depends upon the contours of the land upon either side of the river. A river with steep banks, fairly narrow, bounded by hills, even though it be a highly varying tidal stream, and even though it scour through a great part of its tidal course a soil of clays, cannot form wide belts of marsh upon either bank.

It so happens that the Lower Thames—until the site of London is reached—nowhere enjoys even a short stretch of steep-on shore upon both banks at once. The few spotswhere higher land comes down to the water’s edge upon the southern or right bank are faced in every case by great level stretches opposite which, until modern works were undertaken, were regularly flooded with every return of the tide and were impassable; while the lower and smaller patches of land on the north bank (as at Purfleet or Grays) have marsh opposite them also to the south.

In this respect the Scheldt appears under primitive conditions even worse off than the Thames; but the Seine continually enjoys steep banks after the first twenty miles or so up from its estuary, and in at least half a dozen places from Caudebec (which roughly corresponds to Gravesend) and Rouen, the first bridge (which we have seen to correspond to London), there are opportunities for crossing the tidal Seine, even under primitive conditions, with no considerable obstacle of marsh upon either bank.

Now if we combine all this and consider the total effect of all three factors in theLower Thames valley we shall understand why no great road ever attempted to cross it, and why no line of travel runs transverse to it to-day. A mere examination of the contours would be almost sufficient, presenting, as they do, great flats in most places, stretching for miles from the main stream of the river. But beyond this you have the great variation of the tide and the type ofsurfacesoil with which the stream deals.

Civilisation has so considerably changed the aspect of all our streams, it has so embanked them and drained their neighbourhood, that in order to appreciate the original conditions which made it impossible to find a crossing place below London one must consult the new sheets of the Ordnance Geological Survey. They give us the drift or top-soil—which alone of course concerns travel. In this new survey the area covered by alluvium and the line where that alluvium impinges upon the older and harder soils to the north and the south are very clearly marked. That area with its boundary line gives onethe original area and the original boundary line of the Thames’ marshes, and it is very instructive.

The problem is one of approach from the south. From the north there is no firm soil at all within the neighbourhood of the riverbed from the sea upwards until one reaches the slight eminence of the City, unless one counts the isolated patches at Purfleet and Grays, the approach to which from the north was not only originally difficult but connected with no reasonable line of travel. One has but to look at the map to see that Purfleet could have been approached from the north by no considerable road. It might have formed some sort of terminal for an eastern road but only that at the expense of a long detour such as is made by the main road to-day through Ockendon or by the railway, for immediately behind lies a belt of what was originally marsh. Moreover, even if primitive travel had drifted by this somewhat circuitous route to the hard patch at Purfleet, itwould have found no crossing there; immediately opposite lay the very wide belt of marshy land which flanks either side of the Darent. That river comes in almost exactly opposite the small belt of natural hard on which Purfleet stands.

Primitive travel, then (and for that matter modern travel too, unless it is at a great expense of engineering), could not approach the northern bank of the Thames between the sea reaches and the City of London save, and that with difficulty, by the very small exceptional patches of Purfleet and Grays, and at Purfleet would have discovered no opportunities for a crossing: the bank opposite being a particularly wide and impossible stretch of marsh at this point.

Now as to Grays: That very pleasant place does give some approach both in soil and contour to the water from the north. It is just on the edge of the chalk, just above the old limit of high water, and its original nucleus, though not actually on the stream, would require but a short causeway to reach it.

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 somemighty 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.

GREENWICH

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 earliestconditions 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, butall 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 geographicalcause. 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 quiteshallow 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 indeedprojected 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.

GREENHITHE

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 thelowestpassage of the Thames,but also that no practicable passage could be found for some considerable wayupthe 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 opportunitiesaboveas well asbelowit.

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 thereis (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 crossingat London is unique—it is, on the contrary, but the last of a long series of crossings—it is because it is thelowestcrossing 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 beenestablished (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 evidencewe 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, thephrase of Tacitus, speaks of the town particularly as amarket. 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.

STRAND ON THE GREEN

[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 ofLondonin the Victoria County Histories.

LONDONTHE PORT OF THE THAMES

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 ofcommerce. It is London as a market, and as a market the port of which was the Thames, which we must nextconsider, 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 towhythis 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 theRhine. 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 doesnot 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 doesbecause 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 theworld 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 oflittle 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.

THE THAMES FROM GREENWICH PARK

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 whichnecessarily 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 ofall the great markets in wealth, population, and shipping.

I will take these two sets of causes separately.

As to the first, what made the greatness of the Thames as a port for London, and of London, therefore, as a market before the modern era of geographical discovery?

A natural market exists only where two natural conditions are present: ease of approach from without, and what may be calleddraining powerfrom within.

I mean by ease of approach from without a natural facility for the arrival of goods from areas of production foreign to those of the market. And I mean by “draining power from within” some topographical or other condition which makes domestic produce run naturally towards the one centre of this market.

To these two natural conditions must be added two further political ones: first, one must have such a society connected with that market as gives it security, and,secondly, such a society as is organised by its activity and adventure for production or for exchange, or for both.

Now all these four conditions London enjoyed from a very early time. I have pointed out elsewhere, and shall point out again in these pages, the nature of the political security which London has enjoyed for so many centuries. It did not lie in any particularly peaceful character peculiar to the country as a whole, for while London was growing to greatness England was a continual theatre of domestic war. It lay in the great size which the city had attained, coupled with the breadth of its stream, and in its numerical proportion to the general population of which it was the capital. The fact that London was never besieged or sacked depended upon these characters, and they in turn, therefore, guaranteed that local security which is the first political necessity of a great and continuous market.

As to the commercial and productive character of the inhabitants of Britain, itescapes any material analysis. We must postulate it as a constant fact running through the known and recorded centuries of our history, and we may ascribe it according as we more love ease or veracity to whatever cause we feel most flattering or most true. No proof is possible. We can only say in this respect that certain areas of Europe have shown these characters for greater or less periods of time, and that others equally well endowed have not shown them, but have shown other characters perhaps as valuable.

The main fact in this connection is that whether the productive areas of Great Britain were exporting raw material (as during the most active centuries of the Middle Ages, when wool was our chief export), or whether (as later became the case) manufactured articles and coal were the stand-by of our oversea trade; whether we consider the period before or after the development of our carrying trade; whether we are concerned with an industrial or an agricultural England; whether we are observing latecenturies in which the English showed a passionate interest in novelty and foreign adventure, or far more numerous early centuries in which they were indifferent to distant voyages—throughout the whole story with all its changes the productive area of the island has always maintained a high standard of wealth in comparison with its neighbours and its aptitude for exchange has always been equally high.

It is a point often neglected that the Norman Conquest, though of course it introduced a new and much more developed culture than Saxon England had possessed, did not find an impoverished land which the newcomers might “develop.” It found an exceedingly wealthy country according to the standards of the time; and the extent and variety of that wealth stands out very clearly in the narrative of contemporaries. Four centuries later, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, foreign observers make precisely the same comment. It is the packed wealth of South England filling itscomparatively small area which the foreign envoy notes. We have a striking piece of evidence surviving before our eyes in the number, decoration and amplitude of our churches to which I have already alluded.

To continue the proof after the Tudors would be superfluous. There was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found in the seventeenth century, the close of which we have unhappily seen in our own generation, when the wealth of England was so superior to that of any other rival that the material circumstances of life among the wealthier classes of the country seemed to belong to a different world from that of neighbouring nations, and when the economic supremacy of England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend.

London, then, for all these centuries has enjoyed the two political conditions necessary to the establishment of a chief market, security and a productive area in the hands of a race by its genius inclined to exchange.

There remain the two natural conditions: ease of approach from without and “draining power” from within.

Now when we turn to these natural conditions we find that in the matter of ease of approach the Thames was unrivalled. London was, of course, far from the sea—a point with which I will deal in a moment—but there was no haven north of the Mediterranean which called so readily for commerce upon a large scale. Given the political conditions for a market—security and active powers of production and exchange—the Thames was as good a highway to that market as any that could be found. No vessels until quite modern times had to consider their draught or fear the entry of the river (at least, through channels which the pilots commanded), and once within the inland water a swinging tide was at the service of the ships. There were, within that inland stretch, no obstacles, no high intervening hills to becalm, no narrows or islands.

In this ease of access, again, must bereckoned the position of the Thames relatively to opposing ports. The wide funnel opened at a few hours’ sail from all that line of ports which begins with the mouth of the Seine and ends with the northernmost mouths of the Rhine. What we now call the coasts of Normandy, Picardy, Flanders, Belgium, and Holland lay, even at their extremes, within one double tide of the Thames.

It is true that they also lay equally convenient to any one of the lesser havens upon the Sussex, the Kent, the Essex, or the Norfolk coasts, but the ample space afforded by the river, the opportunity for a crowd of shipping, coupled with opportunities for inland trading, were to be found nowhere else in the south and east of the island as they were to be found up London River.

GRAVESEND

In this connection the use of the tide should be noted. By a peculiarity which has not been without its effect upon the history of the river the flood carries a man past the Kentish coast long past high water and indeed until a moment very close to thatin whichanothertide, that from the North Sea, carries its sweep of water up the river. Thus, though the tide reach high water shortly after noon in Dover Harbour, a man outside will carry the stream with him all up past the Kentish coast until close upon five o’clock. He has but to get round Longnose and he finds this other tide serving him—a tide that has been making from three o’clock or thereabouts, coming in from the North Sea, and that will carry him right up river as long as the wind or daylight permits him to follow it; a tide that does not reach its height at Gravesend until eight that evening, or in the Pool of London until nine. In other words, the River of London afforded to the vessel coming in from the south a double tide which, clever picked up, gave a continuous voyage from the Channel right down into the sheltered water inland.

At this point it is interesting to consider why the principal harbours of the Middle Ages, in the north and west of Europe, at least, and upon tidal seas, so constantlydeveloped not upon the coast itself, but at some distance up a stream or creek and inland.

Consider the examples: Havre comes late in the development of the Seine—the original port is Harfleur; Bristol stands up a tortuous and narrow channel well inland, and not upon the estuary of the Severn at all; Liverpool had its first nucleus four miles from the open sea; Preston quite twelve; Chester more than twenty, of which the last five or six were a narrow river above the estuary; Nantes is another striking example—something like one day’s sail from the sea; Antwerp, Rotterdam—Bruges itself lying those few miles inland upon its canal—follow the general rule; and so does Norwich, and so does Colchester, and so does Boston, and so does Glasgow; Bordeaux tells the same story, and so does the Royal Harbour of Montreuil. And in general, while a great number of smaller ports rose upon the very coast of the Atlantic, the North Sea, or the Channel, there seemed to be, untilmodern times at least, a tendency for the main depôts of sea-borne commerce to lie thus inland. Why was it?

We can only guess, but I would suggest that three factors combined to establish such a state of things: First, the little boats used for inland transport and the vehicles dependent upon roads and therefore upon bridges would seek a place of trans-shipment at some point upon the river where it had not yet become too broad or too rough, and so long as this place was accessible from the sea, the higher up river it was the better for them.

Next must be counted the security of a perfectly land-locked harbour for the smaller craft, which formed so much the largest part of maritime transport. A perfectly land-locked natural harbour upon the coast was a very rare thing. Let the stretch of water be only of the size of Southampton Water at its mouth, or of the Solent, and they would be wrecked in a high wind, but rivers everywhere afforded a secureprotection when once one had entered their narrow channel.

Thirdly, we must consider the advantage which such sites presented against the attacks of pirates, and the better opportunities for defence which a considerable inland town possessed, with its resources in the surrounding fields and population over the smaller seaports.

In considering the first of these points we must remember that there was always a tendency for the central depôt or main commercial town to arise somewhat inland and to be served by subsidiary ports, if there were no direct access to it by water—and even if there were. Canterbury is an example of this, so is Winchester, so is Amiens, and so is Arras, and so is Caen, and so is Rennes, and a host of others.

In balancing the various advantages offered by various sites for the establishment of a market, a preponderating advantage must always be a position lying in the midstof several centres of production, and, since man is a land animal, these sites would normally lie inland. When they were served by a river so much the better; when they were served by a great and secure river, they could not fail to grow as London has grown.

As part of this ease of access must be reckoned, the peculiar character of the Thames, much more open to the wind than the Seine, not blocked by any island, affording once within the estuary a constant depth amply sufficient for all vessels until quite recent times.

But all this would not have given London its place had not a city established at the lowest crossing of the Thames exercised in a peculiar degree that “draining power” of which I have spoken.

We have seen how the system of British roads necessarily converged upon London, and if we consider one or two other features in English topography, we shall see why London provides a common depôt for nearly the whole of English exports in afashion which no other city could show for any other equally large area of production.

Before the north of England was industrialised, three things were mainly required to establish what I have called the “draining” power of any market in the island. First, that it should be fairly central to all the south and Midlands; secondly, that it should afford a convenient centre of demand for various foreign products; thirdly, that it should be as close as possible to such continental markets as principally received our export.

Given those three conditions combined in any one place, and so far as the great mass of Britain was concerned, a point would be established to which would flow the main part of the produce which the Continent desired to purchase by exchange.

Observe how all these three conditions coincide in the case of London and of that Lower Thames which was its port.

When I say with regard to the first condition that the point we are seeking must be“central” to the south and east of the Island and to the Midlands, I am using a word which needs expansion. I mean that we must have a point to which the communications of commerce already lead, and one not too ex-centric to the area tapped.

Now at the first glance at the map London does give an impression of ex-centricity, of lying upon one side: and that towards the east and the south.

But when we begin to consider certain qualifying conditions, we shall find that London is fairly central, even geometrically, to the area in question, and that, when we are considering the economic “weight” of the various parts of this area, London may by a metaphor be said to be near the “centre of gravity” of such an area.

Cut off, in the first place, the Dumnonian Peninsula—that is, Devon and Cornwall,—the Welsh Highlands, and the Pennines. Consider (that is) South England, East Anglia, and the Midlands. You have an area roughly square, and about two hundred miles every way.

In drawing such a square, take for your extreme points Chester on the north-west, a point midway between Portland and Exmouth on the south-west; upon the north-east a point a little north of Cromer, and upon the south-east a point in the Straits of Dover, a trifle west of the line between Dungeness and Boulogne. Such a square includes a good deal that is outside our area, much of the estuary of the Severn, a strip of the Channel, a wedge of the North Sea and of the Wash, and a wedge of Pennine land to the north; but it also excludes a certain amount properly within our area as some of the richest parts of Kent and of Norfolk and Suffolk. We may therefore take this square for a fair average, and we shall see that even upon the test of distance London is not so ex-centric as might be imagined. Draw the two diagonals of this square, and you will find that London lies upon one of them at a distance of less than forty miles from the centre.

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