The Old Road (4 page)

But there are other chances. The wind might fail him, or the wind might so increase that he had to run before it. Did it fail him he would be caught by the flood tide some miles from land. He would drift up along the English shore, getting a few hundred yards nearer with every catspaw, and looking impatiently for some place to which he could steer. The dip in the cliffs at Dover would give him a chance perhaps. If he missed that he would round the South Foreland; he would have the advantage of smooth water, and he would make for the island Rutupiae, which stood at the southern entrance of the strait between the Isle of Thanet and the mainland. If his bad luck preserved, he might be swept up in what we now call the Gull Stream round the North Foreland; but the tide would have been making so long by this time as to be curling round Longnose, and even without the wind he could trust to it almost alone to make Reculvers. Similarly if the wind made him run before it and caused him to miss the Portus Lemanis, he would have
the advantage of a weather shore once he was round the South Foreland, and could run with smooth water under him into Rutupiae.

With the prevalent winds, then, and the tidal conditions of the Straits, a multiplicity of harbours was a necessity for this crossing. In a tideless sea—such as the Mediterranean—one harbour, and one alone, would have absorbed the trade of Kent. Under our tidal conditions, a coast most ill-provided was compelled to furnish no less than six.

I could add, were I not afraid of confusing the reader, many other examples of this necessity. For instance, when one runs from the Belgian ports, or Dunkirk, to England, ever so little a change in the wind may make it necessary to go north above the North Foreland. Again, there is the barrier of the Goodwins, which, in spite of legend, is probably prehistoric. If you could not get well south of that barrier at the first trial you had to go north of it. Everything has compelled men, so far, to provide as many chances as possible upon this coast, and at the present day the breakwater at Folkestone, the desperate
attempt which many still make to use the harbour of Rye, to some extent the great works of Dover, the poor relic of Sandwich, the continual improvement of Ramsgate, point to the same necessity. Perhaps some refuge less distant from the sea than the estuary of the Swale will be made again to replace Reculvers upon the north of the Kentish coast.

Now it is this multiplicity of Kentish harbours proceeding from the conditions of the tide which has created Canterbury.

When an army has to spread out like the fingers of a hand or the sticks of a fan in order to cover a wide area, it must start from some point of concentration.

When commerce is in doubt as to whether it will use this, that, or another out of many gates, it must equally have this point of concentration.

When defenders are expecting an invasion from many points of a circumference, their only plan is to make their base some central point whence radii depart to that circumference.

When the traveller is uncertain which of six places he can choose for his departure, he will halt at some point more or less central, while his decision is being made for him by the weather or by other circumstances.

When a merchant, landing, knows not in which of six towns he shall land, he must at least be certain that some one town, common as it were to all the six, can be reached the day after his landing; he must know that his correspondents can meet him there, and that he may make that common town his depôt for further transactions inland.

Thus it was that the six Kentish ports and more, standing on the edge of that rounded county, created Canterbury inland.

The town might have stood, theoretically, at any one of a great number of points; geometrically perhaps it ought to have been near the village of Goodnestone, which is the centre of all this circumference from Reculvers round to Lympne. But there is one governing condition which forbids us to look for such a centre anywhere save upon one line, and that condition is the river Stour. It is the only considerable body of fresh water, and the only easy means of communication with the interior. On the Stour, then, would the centre of these ports be.

It might conceivably have been placed as far westward as Wye, for here the Stour traverses the high ridge of land which provides a good road from Dover and Folkestone to the north and west, but though this ridge would have given a reason for the growth of our central town at this
spot, there is a better reason for its having risen six miles down stream.

The tendency was to build such a place as near as possible to the tide without losing the advantage of fresh water. In other words, Canterbury represents on a smaller scale the founding of Exeter, of Rouen, and of twenty other towns. Quite a short time ago the tide went up the Stour as far as Fordwych, just below Canterbury, and the presence of the tide up to a point just below the city, coupled with the presence of fresh water flowing from above the city, seems to me to have decided the matter.

The many conjectures upon the primitive state of Canterbury, whether it were a lake village built upon piles, or what not, I do not presume to discuss. The certain matter is that this place was the knot of south-eastern England, and the rallying-point of all the roads from the coast. Caesar landed at Deal, but Canterbury fort was the place he had to take; Augustine landed at Richborough, but Canterbury was the place wherein he fixed the origins of Christianity in England. It was bound to counterpoise
that other city of which I shall next speak, and to be for the Straits of Dover what Winchester was for the centre of south English civilisation. It so happened that, of the many characters it might have assumed, the ecclesiastical attached to it. It became the great nucleus of English worship, and the origin, under Rome, of English discipline and unity in the faith for nearly seven hundred years. At last, influencing as much as influenced by the event, the murder of its great Archbishop in the later twelfth century, lent it, for the last three hundred years of its hegemony, a position unique in Europe. Canterbury during those three hundred years was almost a sacred city.

Having said so much, then, about the eastern end of the Road, and why that end was found inland and not upon the sea, let us consider its western region and determine what forces produced the political domination of Winchester.

We have seen that the route from the island centre of Stonehenge and Avebury
(the plain where the old roads meet) to the Straits of Dover, may be regarded as the original of our communications across the south of the island, from the rich west to the mainland. Such it might have remained to this day, and such it would certainly have remained throughout the period preceding the Roman invasion, and throughout the barbaric centuries which succeeded the withdrawal of the legions, had not a powerful influence (to repeat what was said above) modified the original track and substituted, at least for its earlier portion as far as Farnham, another road. We know that the great way from west to east which should have had its origin in Salisbury Plain, found it as a fact in Winchester.

Why was this? Why did the encampment or town upon the Itchen gather round itself a special character, and become the depôt into which would stream the lead of the Mendips, the tin of Cornwall, and the armies of all Britain south of Gloucester and west of the Wiltshire Avon? To sum up all these questions we may ask in one phrase, as we asked at Canterbury: What made Winchester?

The answer is again, The Sea: the necessities and the accidents of the crossing of the Channel; and just as Canterbury was made by the peculiarity of the Straits, by the bastion of Kent, confusing and disturbing the rush of the narrow channel, and causing the complexity of meeting tides, so Winchester was made by the peculiar conditions under which the Channel can be passed at what I will call, for the purposes of this essay, the 'Second Crossing': that is, the passage from the jutting promontory of the Cotentin to the southern cape of the Isle of Wight, which stands so boldly out into the sea, and invites adventure from the French shore.

The great opportunity of this passage is far less apparent to us moderns than it was to earlier men. With our artificial methods, especially our regular service of steam, we are ignorant or forgetful of the sea, and the true emotions which it arouses have decayed into the ineptitudes with which we are all familiar. We talk of 'commanding' that element in war; there are even some who write as though we of the towns were native to it; there are very few who understand
with what divinity it has prompted, allured, and terrified the past of our race, or under what aspect it may prompt, allure, and terrify the men of a future decline.

By the map alone no one could discover the character of this Second Crossing. After the Straits of Dover the 'sleeve' of the Channel widens so considerably that no clear alternative passage appears to be provided. From Etaples right away to Ushant one might think a sea so wide was of much the same peril and adventure to any early sailor.

Physical experience of many passages corrects such an error; a consideration of the political history of the Continent tends further to correct it. The Second Crossing was, and has always been, and will, we may presume, in the future be, second only in importance to that of the Straits.

If the narrowing of the sea, due to the northward projection of Normandy and the southern projection of the Isle of Wight, were alone our guide, not very much could be made of it. It is more than double, it is nearly three times the distance between Gris Nez and Shakespeare's Cliff, though
far less than the breadth of the Channel either above or below. But the narrowing of the sea at this point is but a small part of its advantage. On either side is the most ample opportunity for protection. On
either side high land will comfort and guide a sailor almost throughout the passage, and upon the northern shore is the best conceivable arrangement of chances for his rescue from a gale or from the chance of a tide. The deep estuary of the Seine sufficiently cuts off what is west from what is east of it to make every one upon the western side avoid the difficulty of a journey to Calais and seek some approach of his own to reach England; and south-western England is enough of a unity to demand also a secondary port of its own, whence it may seek the shore of the Continent and escape upon favourable occasions the long journey eastward to the Straits.

Let us consider these points in detail.

The estuary of the Seine was not only an obvious outlet, but it gave an opportunity for the early ships to creep under the protection of a windward shore. From the very heart of the country, from Rouen, and even from Pont de l'Arche, sea-going vessels could go down the stream with a strong tide helping them. They would have calm water as far as the point of Barfleur so long as the wind was south of west, and no danger
save the reef of Calvados. Moreover, the trend of the land led them northward in the direction which they knew they had to follow if they were ultimately to find the English coast.

When this defence and indication failed the early sailor, at the corner of the Cotentin, where the land turns west again, he could find the little harbour of Barfleur whence to set out; he was there protected from the outer sea by reefs, and possessed, what was important to him, an excellent shore for beaching. He was sheltered even thus far from the prevailing winds.

Nor was this all. This coast was backed by bold high land, from three hundred feet near the coast to five hundred further inland, and marks of that kind, valuable as they still are, were a necessity to the early navigator. Such land would guide him home if his adventure failed, and it is worth while noticing, in the case of a man to whom all this was a great adventure, the sense of security with which the high hills upon the horizon furnished him in clear weather.

He set out then, and for the first few
hours—in theory for close upon twenty-seven miles, and practically for more than twenty of the fifty-three he had to traverse—the French coast was still in sight on such days as could tempt him to cross the sea.