LONDON AND THE LOWER THAMES IN WARFARE
The last historical aspect in which we must consider the River of London is the military aspect; and this aspect has three clearly marked divisions. We have first to consider the Lower Thames as an avenue of invasion; next as an obstacle to invasion of the northern part of the island, or to the passage of the troops from the north to the south. Thirdly, we must estimate what effect upon the military history of the country London itself has had, commanding as it does the lowest crossing of the Thames, always forming a vast base of supply, and for centuries by its stores and munitions forming an ally or an enemy of capital importance to whichever party it supported so long as warfare was waged in England.
The first two of these considerations are very sharply defined not only in their nature, but also in the historical periods over which each one predominated. The Thames as an avenue of ingress or invasion belongs to the earlier part of English history. The importance of the lower river in this category ends very nearly with the close of the Dark Ages. Its second character, that of an obstacle to the invader who would go northward or to troops marching from the north southward, in the main is discoverable of course throughout history, but chiefly belongs to the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century. I will take these three points, therefore, in their order and deal first with the invasions of England which the Lower Thames has served. These invasions from the first recorded case of the almost to the last may be grouped together under one description. They were the raids of the pirates. It is true that these raids became, as the Dark Ages developed and the true Middle Ages approached, better and better organised, more definitely political and dynastic in plan, until at last they took on the character of regular warfare. But from the beginning to the end of the process we have little or no use of the Thames on the part of regular forces proceeding from the ancient civilisation of the Continent, from Gaul, or from the mouths of the Rhine. The whole story is a story of invasion from the outer and barbarian limits of Europe, that is, from the North Sea and the confines of the Baltic.
The early pirate raids upon this island, which were first called Saxon, hundreds of years later Dane, but which had through the whole of the Dark Ages much of one character of purposeless devastation, used the Thames for one of their chief entries. The earlier and less powerful raids seem to have made nothing of London. It was too much for them. But the later and worse tempest of the eighth and ninth and tenth centuries had London for their main object when they forced the river, and since it is a piece of history very little explored, it is worth a moment’s digression here.
What were the conditions under which the pirates conducted their raids upon the waterway?
First let us establish a little list of what was certainly known with regard to these attempts.
Of the first Saxon raids in connection with the Thames we know nothing. Even the distorted legends set down hundreds of years afterwards only preserve a recollection of a landing in Kent, in Thames, and the fighting that follows them is upon land and south of the river. Of what raids were made upon the Essex shore, or whether any were made, or whether (which is improbable) any attempt were made by these sparse destroyers against the walls and bridge of London, all the part, small or null or whatever it was, which the Thames played in the first pirate raids of the fifth and sixth centuries escapes us.
This is not the place in which to insist upon the unreliable character of that vast mass of popular history erected upon sheer guess-work and describing the early raids of the Saxon pirates as effecting in some way a reconstruction of England. The wilder sort of fiction dealing with that remote and almost unknown period talks of these first pirate raids as “the coming of the English.” We must, of course, neglect rhetoric of that kind. But it is worth while admitting a moment’s digression to impress on the reader upon what an absence of any thing approaching evidence all this academic guess-work has been raised. The one definite fact and the only one connected with the pirate raids which descended upon the eastern and southern river mouths and beaches of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, is the fact that these raids cut off southern and eastern Britain from the rest of civilisation. Of contemporary evidence there is nothing for more than 150 years, save one very vague denunciatory or apocalyptical document more in the nature of a sermon than a record, which testifies to the violent impression produced upon the civilised inhabitants of the island by these raids, and a couple of fragmentary sentences written perhaps by contemporaries, certainly not by eye-witnesses, and probably at a great distance from the scene of the trouble.
We do not know when the raids of the pirates began, nor whether they were already severe before Britain was cut off.
We do not know whether Southern and Eastern Britain was already occupied by kinsmen of the pirates serving as Auxiliary Troops within the Empire or no.
We do not know whether the maritime belts of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and Sussex spoke a Teutonic language before the pirate raids or no.
We do not know whether a Christian Church was sufficiently established in those belts for the raids to have had an opportunity of “destroying” such a Church.
We do not know in what numbers the pirates came nor with what object nor what the towns (which were the nucleus of that society) suffered or did not suffer from the invasions.
We have, as almost the sole instrument of historical analysis for a full 150 years, nothing but inference and the consideration of what is physically possible and physically impossible in the various theories that have been put forward.
Thus it is physically impossible that any very considerable number of men can have come over seas at any one moment in the small and shallow boats of the time, but for all the rest we have nothing but legend and our varying estimate of how the society attacked would probably have behaved and what the internal reactions within it under the strain of such an anxiety would probably have been. We can be fairly certain that an attack of this sort could not deal with a defended Roman town, though here and there a garrison on the coast may have been overwhelmed. We can be morally certain from all that we know of that society that men coming for loot would not kill slaves. On the other hand, we do not know how far the anarchy may have been increased by the presence of numerous escaped slaves in the welter. We have a right to exclude the fantastic—such as the astonishing idea that a great Roman town like London could be wiped out and then resettled by a totally new population, and we have a right to exclude as very nearly worthless odd stories cropping up hundreds of years later in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. On the other hand, we are bound to pay more respect to such a remark as that of the Venerable Bede when he testifies to the migration of a whole body of pirate population from the capital of Schleswig to that of Britain.
If we could discover what happened between the first generation of the fifth century and the first generation of the seventh, the discovery would be the most important and interesting that could be made in connection with our history. For in Britain as in every other province of Europe the process by which civilisation entered into the Dark Ages is the explanation of all that followed. But the discovery has not yet been granted to us, and in all human probability never will be.
We know that the avenue of approach from the Continent to Britain, that is, the coasts of the south and east, were so far ruined or occupied or degraded, the communication with the rest of the island was cut off; we know that when civilisation came back with St. Augustine it had to work through the medium of little courts scattered up and down these shores, and we can presume that writing and record and government thus filtering through the south and east to the rest of the island gradually spread the speech and certain of the customs of that south and east eastward throughout the succeeding centuries.
Of more than that we are ignorant.
The Lower Thames, therefore, and the part that it played in that first capital piece of fighting lies, unfortunately, outside the field of positive history. We do not begin to get any true record of the Thames as an avenue of invasion until the second raids begin, three centuries after the first: those second raids which are collectively known in this country under the title of “Danish.”
At the end of the eighth century the pirate raids from the north struck England again. A few boats’ crews would land, especially in the north, and raid a monastery or loot the outer barns of a steading, only to be beaten off.
But a lifetime later, in the middle of the ninth century, the raids increased in pressure. As early as 832 you get them in the mouth of the Thames. It is a small matter. They land in Sheppey and raid that sparsely inhabited, isolated island, but their raid was successful and it taught them the way back. The next year they meet Egbert down in the south-west in some considerable conflict, killing two of his leaders and holding the battlefield. Two years later again they were in the Irish Sea and were caught and beaten in an island raid in the west. In 837 they were beaten off Southampton, to which they had come with thirty-three ships—and perhaps at the most five thousand fighting men. But again that same year a raid of theirs in Dorsetshire succeeded, and the next year between Kent and Sussex they struck again, and before winter in the hollow land of the Fens and in the Broads and in Kent.
It is with the year 839 that you get the first hint at an attack upon London. It is not certain that that attack was Danish, but it is almost certain that the mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to a great simultaneous series of raids upon the French and the English coasts which struck Picardy and Rochester in Kent as well as London. Something we shall never know is what was pushing them. They had some more adventurous man with his companions to rouse them in the Baltic and off the Norwegian inlets, or there was passing over that unknown pagan society of the north one of those spirits which pass over human societies and lead them out to peril. They would risk the Bay of Biscay, but their ships were caught by the Christians in the Asturias. They even dared for the first time to winter without going home, and to pass the time between one fighting season and the next upon an island in the mouth of the Noir Moutier. They pushed as far as Seville and the Moors ate them up. They ran up the Elbe to Hamburg in a force far larger than anything that has been seen in the west. They ran up the Seine to Rouen and further. They pushed through a gate of Paris and were turned out.
They first charged at and then carried Bordeaux, and all this while they raided Ireland. It was in the year 851 that there came at last a great fleet of these purposeless destroyers to the Thames mouth, three hundred and fifty ships so came, and Canterbury and London were stormed. But their host, which so considerable a fleet must have brought for the first time in numbers really threatening, was beaten as it marched down the Stane Street to the raiding of the south. They were met at Ockley[5] by the host of the English King Ethelwulf and were cut to pieces. He had probably come up by that old way from Winchester which leads through Alton into the Dorking Gap, and so had come up with the raiders. Four years later these pirates, who had already learnt to winter upon Christian land in Gaul, wintered in Sheppey. That they went up the river next year we have no record, but ten years later, in 865, they had been wintering in England, this time in Thanet. The Kentish men paid them ransom, but the pagan kept no faith. He took the ransom and harried the land. Thenceforward it is perpetual raiding up and down England north of Thames. In ’71 they are in Reading, but not, it would seem, by river, and Alfred beat them on Ashdown, but they were in no way driven off. They held London all that winter, and year after year they still marched up and down England.
The pirates, keeping more or less together in one horde, marched and ravaged without strategical purpose and with no power of conquest, organisation, or government, ruining as they went, and you have in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle such phrases as: “Here the host travelled over the mouth of Humber to York.” “Here the host went to Mercia and to Nottingham.” “Here the host went again to York.” “Here the army rode across Mercia into East Anglia and took up their winter quarters in Thetford.” “Here the host went into Northumbria, and took up their winter quarters at Torksey.” “Here the host went to Repton”—and so forth, to Cambridge, to Wareham, to Exeter—a perpetual raid until in 878 Alfred came out from behind Selwood and his hiding in the crisis of his kingdom, and beat them for good on the bare chalk Down above Eddington. Thenceforward the pressure is against the pirates.
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.
