The earthworks at Sinodun, the permanent garrisons along the river associated with the British chieftain Ambrosius, the armed camp on the isle of Sheppey, the Viking encampment at Fulham, the battle at Kempsford between Ethelmund of the Hwiccas and Woxtan of Wiltshire in the early ninth century, the siege of the Tower of London by the Yorkists in 1460, all tell the same story. The conflict between Stephen and Matilda, in the earlier part of the twelfth century, was in part a contest of ownership of the castles along the Thames. The river is the vital link to London and prosperity.
That is why other notables have flocked to the river, among them the secular and ecclesiastical leaders of the country. The Strand, between the City and Westminster, was lined with palaces. York House, Winchester House and Durham House—the residences of the Bishop of York, the Bishop of Winchester and the Bishop of Durham respectively—were built on the banks of the Thames. Lambeth Palace, built as a residence for the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1200, is less than a mile upstream on the opposite bank. As late as 1657, when the Tudor magnificence of the Thames had departed, James Howell remarked in Londinopolis upon “the stately palaces that are built on both sides of her banks so thick, which made divers foreign ambassadors to affirm, that the most glorious sight in the World (take water and land together) was to come upon a high Tide from Gravesend, and shoot the Bridge to Westminster.” At a slightly earlier date Michael Drayton celebrated the Strand—meaning literally the stretch of land that runs along the river—as expressing “the wealth and bravery of the land.”
It is such a familiar pattern of residence that it generally goes unremarked. But why should the leaders of the land wish to live in close proximity to the Thames? Precisely because from the very earliest times it has been the site of power. Notable people have lived by the river as a matter of instinct and of custom. Spiritual leaders, in particular, seem to have claimed the river as their proper home. The same pattern persists in later centuries. The Houses of Parliament are built by the river, despite the risks of riverine attack. County Hall is on the south bank of the Thames, as is the present headquarters of the Greater London Authority. The major public buildings of the city seem naturally to find their place beside the Thames.
There was one other notable contribution by the Normans, and their medieval successors, to the life of the Thames. It lies in the expansion of religious communities by the river. They have all now disappeared, or lie in ruins, but in earlier centuries they were a great presence by the Thames; they included the monastic and conventual establishments of Godstow, Bisham and Medmenham; the abbeys of Abingdon and Reading and Dorchester, Eynsham, Rewley and Osney, Streatley and Chertsey and Cholsey; the priories of Cricklade and Lechlade; the nunneries of Burnham and Little Marlow.
Certain of them had existed as early as the seventh century, in particular the Benedictine monasteries of Westminster, Chertsey and Abingdon. These establishments were in large part the civilising force within the Thames Valley; with their skill in estate management, their commitment to scholarship, and their connection to the sources of continental learning, the Benedictine monks did more than anyone else to enlighten the early years of Saxon rule by the river. In The Historic Thames Hilaire Belloc goes so far as to state that the new country that emerged in the course of the Saxon era “was actually created by the Benedictine monks.”
There is of course the historic foundation of Westminster Abbey, which can be dated to the beginning of the seventh century when the first Christian king of the East Saxons, Sebert, patronised a Benedictine monastery here. His tomb now rests in the abbey. The early monastery was erected upon a triangular patch of waste ground known appropriately as “Thorney Island” this island of shingle and marsh and thorns was bounded by the Thames and by two small streams that issued into the river. It was an unpromising spot, but the black-cowled monks were known for their skill in turning waste and wilderness into flourishing land. The later history of the abbey is better known, with the work of Edward the Confessor in 1050 and the rebuilding of the church by Henry III in the thirteenth century. It has remained a sacred place ever since, a river shrine where all the monarchs of England (with the exception of Edward V and Edward VIII) have been crowned. The area may already have been sacred by tradition, since London antiquarians have suggested that on this island was once a pagan shrine to Apollo. In an eighth-century charter it was described as the “terrible place,” the adjective here meaning sacred terror or holy terror. Such places seem to spring up naturally by the river.
In the building of Westminster Abbey the Thames was associated with supernatural visitation. A legend recounts the appearance of St. Peter on the south bank of the river, at Lambeth, from where he asked a fisherman to row him over to Thorney Island. There, with his own hands, Peter performed the ceremony of consecration. At the time of Edward the Confessor, a monk of Westminster was vouchsafed a vision in which the apostle commanded the monarch to restore the abbey church in the place “which I chose and loved…honoured with my presence, and made illustrious by my miracles.” This church by the river became the hallowed sanctuary of such relics as blood from Christ’s side and milk from the Virgin Mary, a beam from the holy manger and a fragment of the true cross. It also became the sepulchral church of England, a vast mortuarium by the side of the river in the spirit of the prehistoric burial sites that have been excavated in recent years.
The origins of the Benedictine monasteries of Chertsey and Abingdon are also surrounded by legends and stories of supernatural intervention, but their immediate and intimate connection with the river is better attested. Both of these foundations were established upon marshy or swampy ground, but both commanded a superior position on the Thames itself. The monastery at Abingdon, for example, was erected a mile downstream from an ancient ford. The monks eventually diverted the course of the river so that it flowed beside their walls; at a later date they bridged the river at two points, and built a causeway to link the two bridges. They were adept at exploiting the possibilities of the river, which is one reason why they originally chose the setting of the Thames. The monastery was also the gateway to the fertile valley that is still known as the Vale of the White Horse.
The consolidation and expansion of the religious foundations of the Thames Valley really began after the Conquest. The abbeys of Westminster, Chertsey and Abingdon were enlarged and reinforced; they were then joined by a sequence of abbeys that grew up along the course of the river. From the mother house of Cluny, in Burgundy, came the establishment of Reading Abbey, of Bermondsey Abbey, and of Osney Abbey. Then there were the abbeys of Eynsham and Rewley, the priories of Lechlade and Cricklade, the abbey and monastery of Dorchester, the Charterhouse at Sheen, the little nunneries of Ankerwycke, Burnham, Littlemore, Goring and Little Marlow, the foundations of Medmenham and Bisham and Cholsey. These are only a selection of the religious communities that sprang up by the Thames, claiming it as their natural territory.
The religious Orders possessed most of the land beside the Thames. It has been estimated that the eight largest religious houses owned between them the manors of Shifford, Eynsham, South Stoke, Radley, Cumnor, Witham, Botley, the Hinkseys, Sandford, Shillingford, Swinford, Medmenham, Appleford, Sutton, Wittenham, Culham, Abingdon, Goring, Cowley, Littlemore, Cholsey, Nuneham, Wallingford, Pangbourne, Streatley, and Stanton Harcourt. These are the names of the upper river, comprising almost its whole length. Closer to London the religious Orders administered and farmed Sonning, Wargrave, Tilehurst, Chertsey, Egham, Cobham, Richmond, Ham, Mortlake, Syon, Sheen, Kew, Chiswick, and Staines. This is of course not to mention their extensive possessions along the banks of the Thames in London itself, nor their possessions within Oxford. They seem almost to be an emanation or extension of the Thames, a spiritual body that rested upon the river.
They became the centre of organised life and of industry; the great abbeys built the bridges that can still be seen across the river, and they supervised the agricultural life of the communities in which they were es
tablished. The Benedictines were well known for their agricultural expertise, for example, particularly in cutting back forests and in reclaiming marshes for arable land. These skills were all the more necessary beside the banks of the Thames. They were also the recipients of rich donations and bequests from all over the country, and indeed became the largest landowners in the kingdom. They were in every sense the centre of the life of the Thames. They established the local prosperity of the region and, if the Thames Valley is still one of the principal areas where the economic and technological wealth of the country is situated, it is in some part owing to the efforts of the religious Orders six or seven centuries ago. There was a habit of residence by the banks of the Thames long before the monastic Orders arrived there, but the great foundations materially assisted the process of settlement and cultivation.
We can also provide a working model of an abbey’s relationship with the river. The water first pours into the corn mill and then, after moving the wheels that grind the grain, it is diverted into the next building where it flows into the boiler that is heated to prepare the beer for the monks’ drinking; it is then drawn into the fulling machines for the shrinking and cleaning of cloth, where it raises and lowers the heavy hammers and mallets employed therein. Then it enters the tannery of the abbey. Other branches and diversions of the river are also used in cooking, watering and washing. Finally, at the close of its labours, it carries away the refuse and scours all clean. The Thames was the Proteus of the working world.
The abbeys were also the centre of national education. One of the abbots of Abingdon was the most celebrated historian of early England, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and in that abbey one of the sons of William the Conqueror was instructed. There are apocryphal reports of Saxon “colleges” being established at Lechlade and Cricklade, near the source of the Thames, but another riverine foundation has a more authentic history. The monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford was the predecessor of, and direct inspiration for, the university itself. The earliest years of that institution cannot now be recovered, but by the ninth century it had become a centre for learning. Among the earliest to endow it was King Alfred himself, the patron of English scholarship, and Oxford became known as “the fountain whence issued many learned clerks.” The king may be said to have restored or re-established it, because there are reports that his nominees as teachers—Grymbald and John the Monk—had to contest for supremacy with “the old students” of the place. By the end of the eleventh century Theobald of Etampes was describing himself as “Magister Oxenfordiae.” It should be recalled that Oxford is almost entirely encircled by water, and many have noticed what Max Beerbohm called in Zuleika Dobson (1911) its “mild miasmal air.” As John Wycliff declared, “not unworthily is it called the Vineyard of the Lord. It was founded by the Holy Fathers and situated in a splendid site, watered by rills and fountains, surrounded by meadows, pastures, plains and glades; it has been rightly called the house of God and the gate of heaven.”
At the time of the Reformation, and the dissolution of the religious establishments, the organised religious life of the Thames was all but destroyed. The smaller houses were the first to be closed, among them Hurley Priory, Bisham Priory, Eynsham Abbey, Rewley Abbey, Goring Priory, Medmenham Priory, Chertsey Abbey, Cholsey Abbey and Ankerwycke Priory. Then the commissioners turned their vengeance upon the larger establishments, among them Godstow Abbey and Osney Abbey, Abingdon Abbey and the friary at Reading, as well as the friaries and monastic colleges of Oxford. The priories of Lechlade and Cricklade, the nunneries of Burnham and Little Marlow, were also extinguished. Generations of religious observance and ceremony, conducted by the river, were removed at the instigation of a sovereign who cared as little for the sacred history of the river as for the spiritual heritage of the nation itself. Only the abbey of Dorchester, and Westminster Abbey, survived the general destruction and decay. The rest were looted and rifled. The refectory at Abingdon became a malt-house, while the refectory at Hurley became a stable. The religious establishments of Sutton, Bisham and Medmenham became part of private houses. The occasional wall, or fishpond, may survive; there are fragments of graveyards, or cloisters, to be glimpsed. In nineteenth-century studies of the Thames, there are engravings of ruins. But even these ruins have for the most part disappeared.
All that remains of Reading Abbey, for example, are some scattered masses of flint rubble from which the stone facing has been removed; one inner gateway has survived, but it is much restored. In its original form this great twelfth-century foundation would have resembled Durham Cathedral, a splendour of the riverine landscape. Its ruins are now not much visited. It is doubtful if many of the inhabitants of Reading know that they are there. This was the abbey in which Henry I was buried, and in which Henry II was offered the crown of Jerusalem. Thomas à Becket consecrated the church in the reign of that king. Here John of Gaunt was married, and the English parliament assembled three times. In the cloisters of Reading Abbey was written one of the loveliest and most celebrated of all English songs, “Sumer Is Icumen In.” This four-part song, the first of its kind, was written by John of Fornsete in the thirteenth century. It is the only part of the abbey that can be said truly to have survived.
Of the nunnery at Godstow, the line of one wall remains. Nothing of the original structure of the twelfth century has survived. Of Chertsey Abbey, William Stukeley the antiquary, wrote, in Itinerarium Curiosum (1724), that
so total a dissolution I scarcely ever saw…as if they meant to defeat even the inherent sanctity of the land. Human bones, of the abbots, monks and great personages, who were buried in great numbers in the church and cloisters, which lay on the south side of the church, were spread thick all over the garden, so that one might pick up handfuls of bits of bones at a time everywhere among the garden-stuff.
Of the abbey itself nothing remains but a piece of broken gateway and a few stones from its once encompassing wall.
CHAPTER 15
Liquid History
In the sixteenth century the Thames became the river of royal pomp and procession; this was the river down which Henry VIII, and pre-eminently Elizabeth I, sailed in state. It was the river of pageant—gilt barges decorated with banners and streamers, awnings and tapestries, flags sewn with tiny bells that rang out in the breeze, musicians playing their sackbuts and cornets upon the water, barges and galleys swathed in cloth of gold and arras. It was the river of pleasure, and the river of spectacle. It was the stage upon which the rulers and principals of the kingdom could display themselves to the populace. It was the theatre of water.
Anne Boleyn, dressed in cloth of gold, processed down the Thames for her coronation in 1533; it was said that the barges following her stretched for four miles. On that day, according to contemporary reports, “there were trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody.” The barges themselves were “gorgeously garnished with banners, pennons and targets richly covered.” The state barge of the lord mayor led the procession “adorned by flags and pennons hung with rich tapestries and ornamented on the outside with scutcheons of metal, suspended on cloth of gold and silver.” It was the triumph of the Thames as much as of the ill-fated queen. The Thames was the appropriate setting for extravagance and conspicuous wealth.
It was the same river that carried Anne Boleyn to her beheading three years later; it was the same route, from Greenwich to the Tower, but the river was now the baleful conduit of death. This was also the river upon which Sir Thomas More, and later the young Princess Elizabeth, were taken to the Tower. It was the river down which the body of Elizabeth was taken to the Palace of Whitehall. In Annales Britannia (1615) William Camden wrote that
The Queen was brought by water to White-hall,
At every stroake the oars did let tears fall:
More clung about the Barge, fish under water
Wept out their eyes of pearl, and swam blind after.
It was the river that seemed to curl through the af
fairs of state, noble or ignoble, bloody or benign, and was an intrinsic part of royal London. That is also why the great palaces of the nobility and the clergy were built on the banks of the river, so that they might be near the ultimate source of power. Although the belief in the water’s divinity had apparently been dispelled, the continuing invocation of nymphs and sea gods—not least in the Thames pageants—suggests that there was some residual faith in the deities of the river. It was the river that blessed the monarch, not the reverse.
The Thames was seen as the microcosm of the kingdom, incorporating past and present, the world of pastoral and the world of the city, the centre of secular as well as of religious activities, the site of sports and carnivals. It was considered to be “another Helicon” where Apollo and his Muses had alighted, so that under its benign influence London surpassed Rome and Athens. The excitement and energy of London were the excitement and energy of the Thames.
It was also the highway along which all the traffic of London passed—not just for the fishermen in their coracles, and not just for the merchants in their vessels from Spain and the Low Countries, but for the ordinary citizens who used the Thames as the most convenient means of transport through London. Of course they travelled across the water from north to south, especially when London Bridge was busy and crowded, but also they sailed along the north bank to the various “stairs” where they could alight and continue their journey. The streets of the city were narrow and perilous, and it was considered safer and easier to travel by water. The number of small boats, barges, lighters, tilt-boats and ferries upon the river was a source of perpetual interest to foreign observers. And of course there were hundreds of watermen with their boats for hire, the water continually in motion with their labouring oars. There were many occasions when the press of boats was so great that traffic came to a halt in what became known as a “lock” or “jam.” This was the Thames well known and even celebrated for its crowded wharves and busy shores. It is not at all surprising that the citizens congregated along its banks, since in the sixteenth century the majority of Londoners still earned their living directly or indirectly from the river. From a distance, it was said, the Thames looked like a forest of masts. At any one time there were estimated to be some two thousand vessels on the water, as well as three thousand watermen. In a map from the middle of that century the various “stairs” or landing places are depicted as places of great and restless activity. It was the cartographer’s way of asserting the primacy of the river.
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