London, Volume 1
Knight, Charles
1841
The Silent Highway.
The Silent Highway.
of the most remarkable pictures of ancient manners which has been transmitted to us is that in which the poet Gower describes the circumstances under which he was commanded by King Richard II. The good old rhymer,-- as Chaucer calls him,--who probably resided in , where his monument may yet be seen in the church of St. Mary Overies, had taken boat; and upon the broad river he met the king in his stately barge. It was an accidental meeting, he tells us. The monarch, who had come most probably from his palace of , where even thousands ministered, it is said, to his luxurious tastes, espied the familiar face of the minstrel, and stopped him upon that great highway of London, which was an open road for the meanest as for the highest. He called him on board his own vessel, and desired him to book This was the origin of the . But the poet shall record the story in his own simple words:-- Nothing can be more picturesque than this description, and nothing can more forcibly carry us into the very heart of the past. With the exception of some of the oldest portions of the , there is scarcely a brick or a stone left standing that may present to us a memorial of of years ago. There, indeed, is the river, still flowing and still ebbing,--the most ancient thing we can look upon,--which made London what it was and what it is. Nearly all that then adorned its banks has perished; and many of the stirring histories of the busy life that moved upon its waters have become to us as obscure as the legend of But the poet calls upon our imagination to fill up the void. | |
of the most ancient pictorial representations of London which exists is of a date some years later than the poem we have quoted. It is found in a manuscript preserved in the , and represents the captivity of the Duke of Orleans in the Tower. The manuscript itself, which consists of the poems of the royal captive, was probably copied in the time of Henry VI.; but the illumination purports to represent the London of an earlier date, with its bridge, its lofty-spired cathedral, its numerous churches, its gabled houses. Under these walls we may imagine the poet and his patron to have glided, amidst crowded wherries, and attendant barges, and the merry sounds of song and clarion, and the shouts of the people. Often had the king so passed between his palace of and his . But the state was to end in misery, and degradation, and a solitary and mysterious death. | |
The of Gower, in the true spirit of the romantic times, tells us of the town which was founded by the Trojan Brute. Here was the fable which the middle-age minstrels rejoiced in, and which History has borrowed from Poetry without any compromise of her propriety. The origin of nations must be fabulous; and if we would penetrate into the dark past we must be satisfied with the torch-light which fable presents to us. We commend, therefore, the belief of the good citizens of London, who, in the time of Henry VI., sent the king a copy of an ancient tract, which says of London, This is dealing with a legend in a business-like manner, worthy of grave aldermen and sheriffs. Between Brute and Richard II. there is a long interval; and the chroniclers have filled it up with many pleasant stories, and the antiquarians have embellished it with many ingenious theories. We must leap over all these. ancient writer, however, who speaks from his own knowledge,--William Fitz-Stephen, who died in ,--has left us a record in his which will take us back a few years further. The original is in Latin. Here, then, years ago, we find the river-bank of London in the same state as described by Sir Thomas More in his imaginary capital of Amaurote :-- The Saxon chronicle tells us that in the year Earl Godwin, with his navy, passed along the southern side of the river, and so assailed the walls. A years after, in the time of Fitz-Stephen, the walls were gone. About the same period arose the stone bridge of London; but that has perished before the eyes of our own generation. | |
There is another passage in Fitz-Stephen which takes us, as do most of his descriptions, into the every-day life of the ancient Londoners-their schools, their feasting, and their sports:-- | |
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The sport, which maybe still seen amongst the watermen of the Seine, and of the Rhine, was the delight of the bold youth of London in the days of Henry II. Fitz-Stephen tells us of this amongst the sports of the people generally; and the | |
4 | circumstance shows that they were accustomed to exercise themselves upon their noble river. centuries afterwards Stow saw a somewhat similar game:-- Of the antiquity of these customs we have evidence in drawings of a beautiful illuminated &c., of the century, in the . Howel says,
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From the time of Fitz-Stephen to that of Gower we may readily conceive that the water-communication between part of London and another, and between | |
5 | London and , was constantly increasing. A portion of was moveable, which enabled vessels of burden to pass up the river to unload at and other wharfs. Stairs (called bridges) and Water-gates studded the shores of both cities. Palaces arose, such as the Savoy, where the powerful nobles kept almost regal state. The Courts of Law were fixed at ; and thither the citizens and strangers from the country daily resorted, preferring the easy highway of the Thames to the almost impassable road that led from to the village of Charing, and onward to London. John Lydgate, who wrote in the time of Henry V., has left us a very curious poem, which we shall often have occasion to refer to, entitled He gives us a picture of his coming to London to obtain legal redress of some grievance, but without money to pursue his suit. Upon quitting Hall, he says, This is undoubtedly the Water-gate; and, without describing anything beyond the cooks, whom he found busy with their bread and beef at the gate, he adds, By water he no doubt went, for through Charing he would have made a day's journey. Wanting money, he has no choice but to return to the country; and having to go he applies to the watermen at :-- We have a corroboration of the accuracy of this picture in Lambarde's The old topographer informs us that in the time of Richard II. the inhabitants of Milton and Gravesend agreed to carry in their boats, from London to Gravesend, a passenger, with his truss or farthell, for . |
The poor Kentish suitor, without in his pocket to pay the Gravesend bargemen, takes his solitary way on foot homeward. The where he was welcomed with the cry of , ahoy--was the great landing-place of the coasting-vessels; and the king here anciently took his toll upon imports and exports. The Kentishman comes to from ; but it was not an uncommon thing for boats, even in those times, to accomplish the feat of passing through the fall occasioned by the narrowness of the arches of ; and the loss of life in these adventures was not an unfrequent occurrence. Gifford, in a note upon a passage in Ben Jonson's says somewhat pettishly of the old bridge, A greater man than an alderman--John Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk--nearly perished there in . This companion of the glories of Henry V. took his barge at St. Mary Overies, with many a gentleman, squire, and yeoman, But there were landing-places in abundance between and , so that a danger such as this was not necessary to be incurred. When the unfortunate Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was condemned to do penance in London, in open places, on several days, she was brought by water from ; and on the , was put on shore at the Temple bridge; on the , at the Old Swan; and, on the , at . Here, exactly centuries ago, we have the same stairs described by the same names as we find at the present day. The Old Swan (close to ) was the Swan in the time of Henry VI., as it continued to be in the time of Elizabeth. If we turn to the earliest maps of London we find, in the same way, , and , and Essex Stairs, and . The abiding-places of the watermen appear to have been as unchanging as their thoroughfare--the same river ever gliding, and the same inlets from that broad and cheerful highway to the narrow and gloomy streets. | |
The watermen of London, like every other class of the people, were once musical; and their to many a harmony, which, if not so poetical as the song of the gondoliers, was full of the heart of merry England. The old city chronicler, Fabyan, tells us that John Norman, Mayor of London (he held this dignity in ), was John Norman-- The watermen's ancient chorus, as we collect from old ballads, was and their burden was still the same in the time of Henry VIII., not forgetting, Well might the mayor who carried the pomp of the city to the great Thames, and made deserve the praises of watermen in all time! We could willingly spare many more intrinsically valuable things than the city water-pageant; for it takes us even now into the old forms of life; and if it shows us more than all other pageants something of the perishableness of power and dignity, it has a fine, antique grandeur about it, and tells us that London, and what belongs to London, are not of yesterday. | |
We every now and then turn up in the old Chronicles, and Memoirs, and Letters that have been rescued from mice and mildew, some graphic description of the use of the river as the common highway of London. These old writers were noble hands at scene-painting. What a picture Hall gives us--of the populousness of the Thames!-the perfect contrast to Wordsworth's in the story which he tells us of the Archbishop of York, after leaving the widow | |
7 | of Edward IV. in the sanctuary of , sitting returning home to in the dawning of the day; Cavendish, in his furnishes as graphic a description of the great Cardinal hurrying to and fro on the highway of the Thames, between his imperious master and the injured Katharine, when Henry had become impatient of the tedious conferences of the Court at Blackfriars sitting on the question of his divorce, and desired to throw down with the strong hand the barriers that kept him from the Lady Anne:-- Between and the Tower, and the Tower and Greenwich, the Thames was especially the royal road. When Henry VII. willed the coronation of his Queen Elizabeth, she came from Greenwich attended by When Henry VIII. avowed his marriage with Anne Boleyn, she was brought by from Greenwich to the Tower, The river was not only the festival highway, but the more convenient , for kings as well as subjects. Hall tells us, The interesting volume of the contains item upon item of sums paid to watermen for waiting with barge and boat. The barge was evidently always in attendance upon the king; and the great boat was ever busy, moving household stuff and servants from to Greenwich or to Richmond. In we have a curious evidence of the king being deep in his polemical studies, in a record of payment We see the on the Thames, in all her pomp, as Raleigh saw her out of his prison-window in the Tower, in , as described in a letter from Arthur Gorges to Cecil:-- In the time of Elizabeth and the James, and onward to very recent days, the of the Thames was studded with the palaces of the nobles; and each palace had its landing-place, and its private retinue of barges and wherries; and many a freight of the brave and beautiful has been borne, amidst song and merriment, from house to house, to join the masque and the dance; and many a wily statesman, muffled in his cloak, has glided along unseen in his boat to some dark conference with his ambitious neighbour. Nothing could then have been more picturesque than , with its broad gardens, and lofty trees, and embattled turrets and pinnacles. Upon the river itself, busy as it was, fleets of swans were ever sailing; and they ventured unmolested into that channel which is now narrowed by vessels from every region. Paulus Jovius, who died in , describing the Thames, says, Shakspere must have seen this sight, when he made York compare the struggle of his followers at the battle of Wakefield to a swan encountering a tidal stream:--
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But there were those, during centuries, to whom the beauties of the silent highway could have offered no pleasure. The Thames was the road by which the victim of despotism came from the Tower to Hall, in most cases to return to his barge with the edge of the axe towards his face. example is enough to suggest many painful recollections. When the Duke of Buckingham was conducted from his trial to the barge, But these exhibitions, frequent as they were, occupied little of the thoughts of those who were moving upon the Thames, in hundreds of boats, intent upon business or amusement. In the beginning of the century the river was at the height of its glory as the great thoroughfare of London. Howel maintains that the river of Thames hath not her fellow, Of the Stow computes that there were in his time as many as ; and he makes the very extraordinary statement, that there were watermen upon the rolls of the company, and that they could furnish men for the fleet. The private watermen of the court and of the.. nobility were doubtless included in this large number. It is evident, from the representations of a royal procession in the early times of James I., that, even on common occasions, the sovereign moved upon | |
9 | the Thames with regal pomp, surrounded with many boats of guards and musicians : |
The Inns of Court, too, filled as they were not only with the great practitioners of the law, but with thousands of wealthy students, gave ample employment to the watermen. Upon the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Palatine, in , the gentlemen of the Inner Temple and presented a sumptuous masque at court. When Charles was created Prince of Wales, in , he came from Barn Elms to in great aquatic state. In , when Henrietta Maria arrived in London (), What a contrast does this splendour and rejoicing present to the scene which a few years disclosed!- (says Mr. Mead, the writer of this letter,) The , to which the daughter of Henri Quatre was thus conveyed, had another tale to tell in some years; and the long tragedy of the fated race of the Stuarts almost reaches its catastrophe, when, in a cold winter night of , the wife of James II. takes a common boat at to fly with her child to some place of safety; and when in a few weeks later the fated king steps into a barge, surrounded by Dutch guards, amidst the triumph of his enemies, and the pity even of those good men who blamed his obstinacy and rashness: says Evelyn,-- But let us turn from political changes to those more enduring revolutions which changes of manners produce. | |
We have before us a goodly folio volume of some or pages, closely printed, and containing about lines, for the most part of heroic verse, entitled . John Taylor, who made this collection of his tracts in , was literally a Thames waterman, working daily for his bread. He says, The waterman's verses are not so ambitious as those of the Venetian gondolier, Antonio Bianchi, who wrote an epic poem in cantos; but they possess a great deal of rough vigour, and altogether open to us very curious views of London manners in the early part of the century. Taylor is never ashamed of his trade; and he cannot endure it to be supposed that his waterman's vocation is incompatible with the sturdiest assertion of his rights to the poetical dignity : In of his controversies--for he generally had some stiff quarrel on hand with witlings who looked down upon him-he says, addressing William Fennor,
Such a spirit would go far to make a writer whose works would be worth looking | |
11 | at centuries after the praise or abuse of his contemporaries was forgotten; and so homely John Taylor, amongst the race of satirists and manner-painters, is not to be despised. (as he makes Fenuor call him) lived in a poetical atmosphere. He probably had the good fortune to ferry Shakspere from to ; he boasts of his acquaintance with Ben Jonson; and the cause of his great quarrel with Fennor is thus set forth: Taylor had taken his waterman's position in a spot where there was a thriving trade. The was the landing-place to which the inhabitants of , and of , and of London west of Paul's, would daily throng in the days of the Drama's glory; when the Globe could boast of the highest of the land amongst its visitors; when Essex and Southampton, out of favour at court, repaired thither to listen, unsatiated, to the lessons of the great master of philosophy; when crowds of earnest people, not intent only upon amusement, went there to study their country's history, or learn the in a school where the poet could dare to proclaim universal truths in an age of individual dissimulation; and when even the idle profligate might for a moment forget his habits of self-indulgence, and be roused into sympathy with his fellows, by the art which then triumphed, and still triumphs, over all competition. Other places of amusement were on the Bankside--the Paris |
12 | Garden, the Rose, and the Hope playhouses; and in earlier times, and even when the drama had reached its highest point of popular attraction, on the same spot were the --places of resort not only for the rude multitude, but to which Elizabeth carried the French ambassador to exhibit the courage of English bull-dogs. Imagine , the peculiar ground of summer theatres and , with no bridge but that of London, and we may easily understand that John Taylor sang the praises of the river with his whole heart--
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But the empire of the watermen was destined to be invaded; and its enemies approached to its conquest, after the Tartarian fashion, with mighty chariots crowded with multitudes. Taylor was not slow to complain of this change. In his published in , he tells us that, and he adds, that In a prose tract, published in the following year, Taylor goes forth to the attack upon with great vehemence, but with a conviction that his warfare will not be successful: He maintains that This is a very exact computation, formed perhaps upon personal enumeration of the number of hired coaches passing to . He naturally enough contrasts the quiet of his own highway with the turmoil of the land-thoroughfare: The history of this innovation we shall have to recount in a future paper. The irruption of coaches must have been as fearful a calamity to John Taylor and his fraternity in those days, as the establishment of railroads has been to postmasters and postboys in our own, These transitions diminish | |
13 | something of the pleasure with which we must ever contemplate a state of progress; but the evil is temporary and the good is permanent, and when we look back upon the past )we learn to estimate the evil and the good upon broad principles. Half-a-century hence, a London without railroads, that inns and stages might be maintained, would appear as ludicrous a notion as that of a London without carriages, that John Taylor might row his wherry in prosperity, gladdened every day by the smiles of ladies, --and not have to complain that Peace be to honest John Taylor. He was the prince of scullers; for he rowed in a wherry from London to York, on occasion; made what he calls on another voyage; and passed, from London to Hereford, on a adventure. He never bated and yet the coaches, and other evil accidents, drove him from his waterman's trade, and he finished his eccentric career as a victualler at Oxford, writing against sectaries and schismatics, and filling bumpers to prerogative, on to a good old age. |
The revolutions of half-a-century made wonderful changes in the aspect of the Thames. The Restoration found the famous old theatres swept away, and the ancient mansions towards the east invaded by the traders. Wharfs took the place of trim gardens; and if the nobleman still kept his state-boat, the dirty coal-barge was anchored by its side. D'Avenant has given a description of this state of things, which he puts into the mouth of a Frenchman:-- | |
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It is easy to perceive that during the progress of these changes-all indicating the advance of the middle classes, and the general extension of public accommodation and individual comfort--the river was every day becoming less and less a general highway for passengers. The streets from to | |
14 | were paved, after a fashion; the foot-passenger could make his way, though with some danger and difficulty; and the coach, though sometimes stuck in a hole, and sometimes rudely jostled by the brewer's cart, progress through and . But the time was approaching when the great capital would find out that bridge was somewhat insufficient, and that ferries and wherries were uncertain and inconvenient modes of passage from shore to another. was finished about . In or years later, London could number bridges, the noblest structures of the modern world. Alas, for the watermen! They were a cheerful race, and Dogget did a wise thing when he endowed the river with his annual coat and badge. But they have gradually dwindled-and where are they now? They are not even wanted for the small commerce of the Thames. Steam-vessels bring every possible variety of lading up the river, where formerly the little hoys had their share of a coasting-trade; and the market-cart has entirely appropriated to itself the vegetable burthens of Covent-garden. Steele has given us a lively description of a boat-trip from Richmond in an early summer-morning, when he
Things are changed. |
Howel, amongst his enumeration of the attractions of the city, says, And when the idler was tired of this sport, and would turn his back even upon shuffle-board and cock-fighting, he had nothing to do but to step down to or the Temple, and have an afternoon of such recreation as can now only be found at a distance of miles from . continues Howel ; Imagine a waterman, in these our days of his decay, tired of waiting for a fare at , strike out into the mid-stream with his draw-net! What a hooting would there be from to ! Or conceive an angler, stuck under of the piers of , patiently expecting to be rewarded with a salmon, or at least a barbel. Yet such things were a century ago. There are minute regulations of the to be observed in the western parts of the Thames, which clearly show that the preservation of the fish, even in the highway between London and , was a matter of importance; and very stringent, therefore, are the restrictions against using eel-spears, and wheels, and There is a distinct provision that fishermen were not to come nearer than the Old Swan on the north bank, and St. Mary Overies on the south. Especially was enactment made that no person should Woe for the anglers! The salmons and the swans have both quitted the bills of mortality; and they are gone where there are clear runnels, and pebbly bottoms, and quiet nooks under shadowing osiers, and where the water-lily spreads its broad leaf and its snowy flower, and the sewer empties not itself to pollute every tide, and the never-ceasing din of human life is heard not, and the paddle of the steam-boat dashes no wave upon the shore. | |
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We have seen a Frenchman's description of our Thames as a highway; and it may be well to look at the same author's picture, in the character of an Englishman, of the Seine, and its conveyances:-- | |
[n.15.1] London, at all periods, could exhibit better accommodation than this; though D'Avenant's Frenchman complains of the landing at But we select the description, to contrast the Parisian passageboat of with the London steamer of . Our readers will kindly accompany us on a quarter of an hour's voyage from the Shades Pier to Hungerford Market. | |
We have stood for a few minutes on the eastern side of , looking upon that sight which arrests even the dullest imagination-mast upon mast, stretching farther than the eye can reach, the individual objects constantly shifting, but the aggregate ever the same. We pass to the western side, and descend the steps of the bridge. We are in a narrow and dirty street, and we look up to the magnificent land-arch which crosses it. A turn to the left brings us to the river. A bell is ringing; we pass through a toll-gate, paying , and in a few seconds are on board of the little steam-boats, bearing the poetical name of some flower, or planet, or precious gem. As the hand of the clock upon the pier approaches to of the divisions of the hour, the boat prepares to start. The pilot goes to the helm; the broad plank over which the passengers have passed into the boat is removed; the cable by which it is attached to the pier, or to some other boat, is cast off. The steam is up. For a minute we appear as if we were passing down the river; but, threading its way through a dozen other steam-winged vessels, the boat darts towards the Surrey shore; and her prow is breasting the ebbing tide. What a gorgeous scene is now before us! The evening sun is painting the waters with glancing flames; the cross upon the summit of that mighty dome of shines like another sun; churches, warehouses, steam-chimneys, shot-towers, wharfs, bridges--the noblest and the humblest things-all are picturesque; and the eye, looking upon the mass, sees nothing of that meanness with which our Thames banks have been reproached. In truth, this juxtaposition of the magnificent and the common fills the mind with as much food for thought as if from to there was splendid quay, curtaining the sheds, and coal-barges, and time-worn landings which meet us at every glance. The ceaseless activity with which these objects are associated renders them even separately interesting. We see the goings--on of that enormous traffic which makes London what it is; and whilst we rush under the mighty arches of the iron bridge, and behold another, and another, | |
16 | and another spanning the river, looking as vast and solid as if they defied time and the elements; and also see the wharfs on the bank, although the light be waning, still populous and busy,--and the foundries, and glass-houses, and printing-offices, on the other bank, still sending out their dense smoke,--we know that without this never-tiring energy, disagreeable as are some of its outward forms, the splendour which is around us could not have been. But the boat stops. Without bustle, some passengers leave us at , and as many come on board. The operation is finished in a minute or . We are again on our way. We still see the admixture of the beautiful and the mean, but in another form. The, dirty. Whitefriars is the neighbour of the trim Temple. Praised be the venerable Law which has left us green spot, where trees still grow by our river-side, and which still preserves some relies of the days that are gone! Another bridge, perhaps the noblest, is again passed; and the turrets and pinnacles of are spread before us, with the smart modern mansions that have succeeded the old palatial grandeur of the century. The sight is not displeasing, when we reflect that the ground upon which once stood some dozen vast piles, half house and half fortress, is now covered with hundreds of moderate-sized dwellings, filled with comforts and even luxuries unknown to the days of rushes and tapestry, into whose true sanctuaries no force can intrude, and where, if there be peace within, there is no danger of happiness being disturbed by violence without. But we are at Hungerford-wharf. The greater portion of the freight is discharged, ourselves amongst the number. The boat darts through , and farther onward to ; and in another hour some of its passengers are miles on the road to Southampton. We are in as the gas-lights are peeping; and we are thinking of what is, and what it was. |
Footnotes: [] Camera Regia; which title, immediately after the Norman Conquest, London began to have.-CAMDEN. [] Stow, book i. [] Utopia, b. ii. c. ii. [] Londinopolis: 1657. [] Had. MS., No. 565, quoted in Chronicles of London Bridge. [] Skelton. [] Hall. [] Londinopolis, p. 403. [] Howes' Continuation of Stow's Annals, p. 1007. [] Ellis's Letters, vol. iii. . 196. [] Taylor, after the publication of this volume, printed about fifty more tracts, in prose and verse. [] Taylor's Motto, p, 50. [] Praise of Hemp-seed. [] The World runs on Wheels. [] The World runs on Wheels, Works,p. 238. [] Entertainment at Rutland House, D'Avenant's Works, 1673, p. 352. [] Spectator, No. 404. [] Stow's London, book v. [n.15.1] Entertainment at Rutland House, p. 356. |
