Part 1 (1/2)

Highways and Byways in London.

by E. T. Cook.

CHAPTER I

HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS

”London: that great sea whose ebb and flow At once is deaf and loud, and on the sh.o.r.e Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more, Yet in its depths what treasures!”--_Sh.e.l.ley._

”Citizens of no mean city.”

The history of London is--as was that of Rome in ancient times--the history of the whole civilised world. For, the comparatively small area of earth on which our city is built has, for the last thousand years at least, been all-important in the story of nations. Its chronicles are already so vast that no ordinary library could hope to contain all of them. And what will the history of London be to the student, say, of the year 3000 A.D., when our present day politics, our feelings, our views, have been ”rolled round,” once more, in ”earth's diurnal force,” and a.s.sume, at last, their fair and true proportions?

In ”this northern island, sundered once from all the human race,” has for centuries been lit one of the torches that have illumined humanity. Not even Imperial Rome shone with such a l.u.s.tre; not even the Caesars in all their purple ruled over such a mighty, such an all-embracing empire.

The history of this mighty empire is bound up with the history of London. For, the history of London is that of England; it was the river, our ”Father Thames”--her first and most important highway, a ”highway of the nations,”--that brought her from the beginning all her fame and all her glory. Partly by geographical position, partly by ever-increasing political freedom, and partly, no doubt, by the efforts of a dominant race, that glory has, through the centuries, been maintained and aggrandised.

And why, some may ask, is London what it is? Why was this spot specially chosen as the capital? Surrounded by marshes in early Roman times, periodically inundated by its tidal river, densely wooded beyond its marshes, it can hardly have seemed, in the beginning, an ideal site. Why was not Winchester--so important in Roman times, and, later, the capital of Wess.e.x--preferred? Why were not Southampton or Bristol--apparently equally well placed for trade--favoured? We cannot tell. The site may have been chosen by Roman London because it was the most convenient point for pa.s.sing, and guarding, the ferry or bridge over the Thames, and for keeping up the direct communication between the more northerly cities of Britain, and Rome. Or, the nearer proximity to the large Continent, the better conditions for trade offered by the wide estuary of the Thames, possibly account for London's supremacy.

The early Roman city on this time-honoured site, the poetically named ”Augusta,”--that replaced the primitive British village--flourished greatly in the early days of the Christian era, and was large and populous; though the Romans did not consider it their capital, and never--we know not why--created it a ”municipium,” like Eborac.u.m (York), or Verulamium. It was founded some time after the visit of Julius Caesar to Britain, B.C. 54, and it occupied a good deal of the area of the present _City_, extending, however, towards the east as far as the Tower, and bounded on the west by the present Newgate. The old Roman fort stood above the Wallbrook. Here in old days ran a stream of that name, long fouled, diverted, forgotten, and, like the Fleet River, only now remembered by the name given to its ancient haunt. The city of Augusta--or _Londinium_ as Tacitus calls it--has left us hardly a trace of its undoubted splendour. In London, ever living, relics of the past are hard to find. The lapse of centuries has deeply covered the old Roman city level, and what Roman remains exist are generally discovered, either in the muddy bed of the Thames, or at a depth of some twelve to nineteen feet below the present street. Of Roman London there is scarce a trace--a few meagre relics in Museums, a few ancient roots of names still existing, an old bath, traces of a crumbling wall, the fragment that we call ”London Stone,”

the locality of Leadenhall Market (undoubtedly an old ”Forum”), and a portion of the old Roman Way of ”Watling Street”--the ancient highway from London to Dover--running parallel with noisy Cannon Street.

All this seems, perhaps, little when we think of the undoubted wealth and power of the old ”Londinium,” or ”Augusta.” But it has always been the city's fate to have its Past overgrown and stifled by the enthralling energy and life of its Present. It is as a hive that has never been emptied of its successive swarms. This is, more or less, the fate of all towns that ”live.” The Roman town was, of course, strongly walled, and the names of its gates have descended to us in the present ”Ludgate,” ”Moorgate,” ”Billingsgate,” ”Aldgate,”

&c.--names very familiar to us children of a later age--and now mainly a.s.sociated with the more prosaic stations on the Underground Railway!

Nevertheless, prosaic as they are, these stations commemorate the old localities. Roman London was at no time large in circ.u.mference, extending only from the Tower to Aldgate on one side, from the Thames to London Wall on the other. And when the Romans left, and the Saxons, after a brief interval, took their place, the city still did not grow much larger, nor did the blue-eyed and fair-haired invaders contribute much to the decaying fortifications; though it is said that King Alfred--he whose ”millenary” we have recently commemorated--restored the walls and the city as a defence against the ravages of the Danes.

Saxon London, however, which in its time flourished exceedingly, and existed for some 400 years, is, so far as we are concerned, more dead even than Roman London. Successive fire and ravage have obliterated all traces of it. Norman London, which after the Conquest replaced Saxon London, did not, apparently, differ greatly in externals from its predecessor. The churches were now mainly built of stone, but the picturesque houses were, as we know, despite successive destroying fires, still constructed of wood. From Norman London, we retain the ”White Tower,”--that picturesque ”keep” of London's ancient fortress--the crypt of Bow Church, and that of St. John's, Clerkenwell, with part of the churches of St. Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, and St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate. Little escaped the many great fires that in early times devastated the city.

As for the ancient highways of London, very possibly these did not differ greatly in their course from our modern ones; for the Anglo-Saxon race has always been very conservative in rebuilding its new streets, regardless of symmetry or directness, on the lines of the destroyed ones. At any rate, we know that the original church of St.

Paul's--the first of three built on this site, founded by Ethelbert about the year 610--and that of Westminster--altered, rebuilt, and enlarged by successive kings--must have early sanctified these spots, and necessitated thoroughfares between the two. Nay, even in Roman times, temples of Diana and Apollo are believed to have adorned these historic sites. It is strange, indeed, that the old, long-vanished Roman wall, pierced only by a few gates, and the ancient street-plans laid down by the Roman road surveyor, should still keep modern traffic more or less to the old lines. A few new streets have recently been made from north to south, but still the main traffic goes from east to west, owing to the paucity of intersecting thoroughfares. The city of London, as laid out in Roman times, remained, through Saxon and Norman dominion, practically of the same extent and plan as late as the time of Elizabeth, in whose reign there were as many houses within the city walls as without them. Roman influence is still dominant in modern London. The large block of ground without carriage-way about Austin Friars is a consequence of the old Roman wall having afforded no pa.s.sage. And possibly many of the narrow, jostling City streets have in their day reflected the shade and sun of Roman ”insulas,” each with its surrounding shops, just as, later, their dimensions may have shrunk between the overhanging, high-gabled houses of Tudor times, to widen again under the tall Stuart palaces of the Restoration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Sandwich-board Men._]

The high antiquity and conservatism of London are shown in nothing more than in these narrow, crooked streets--streets so different from those of any other big metropolis--streets that our American cousins, in all the superiority of their regular ”block” system, permit themselves to jeer at! We know, however, little for certain of the actual topography of London streets, until the important publication of Ralph Aggas's map in 1563, soon after Elizabeth had begun to reign.

This map of ”Civitas Londinium” is strange enough to look at in our own day. Its main arteries are the same as ours: the ancient highway of the Strand is still the Strand; those of ”Chepe” and ”Fleete” still flourish; Oxford Street, then the ”Oxford Road” and ”The Waye to Uxbridge,” ran between hedgerows and pastures, in which, according to Aggas, grotesque beasts sported; the thoroughfare of the ”Hay Market,”--not yet, indeed, ”a scene of revelry by night,”--curves between vast meadows, in one of which a woman of gigantic size appears to be engaged in spreading clothes to dry; Piccadilly, at what is now the ”Circus,” is merely called ”The Waye to Redinge,” and is innocently bordered by trees. In these infantine beginnings of the now populous ”West End,” there are, indeed, occasional plots occupied by ”Mewes,” but St. Martin's Church (then a small chapel) stands literally ”in the Fields,” and St. Martin's Lane is altogether rural.

In a later map--one of the year 1610--the main arteries are still the same; but, though the town had grown rapidly with the growth of commerce in Elizabeth's reign, ”London” and ”Westminster” are still represented as two small neighbouring towns surrounded by rural meadows; while ”Totten-court” is a distant country village, Kensington and ”Marybone” are secluded hamlets, Clerkenwell and ”St. Gylles” are altogether divided from the parent city by fields, and ”Chelsey” is in the wilds.

It is strange that London fires--and London, in the middle ages, was specially prolific in fires--have never altered the course of the city's highways. Sir Christopher Wren wished, indeed, after the Great Fire of 1666, to be allowed to alter the plan of the desolated town and make it more symmetrically regular: with all due admiration of his genius, one cannot, however, help feeling a certain thankfulness that destiny averted his schemes, and that in the prosaic London of our own day we can still trace the splendour, the romance of its past. Thus, even in the grimy city ”courts” we can still imagine a Roman ”impluvium,” or the ancient gardens of Plantagenet palaces; in the blind alleys of ”Little Britain,” the splendours of the merchants'

mansions; in the ugly lines of mews and slums, the limits of the vanished Norman convent closes. The boundaries are still there, though nearly all else has gone. For, though Londoners are generally conservative with regard to their chief sites and the lines of their streets, they have, so far as their great buildings are concerned, always been by nature iconoclastic. Not that we of the present day need give ourselves any airs in this matter. Although, indeed, for the last half-century the spirit of antiquarian veneration has been abroad, yet the great majority of Londoners are hardly affected by it, and the pulling down of ancient buildings continues almost as gaily as ever at the present day. It may be said that we pull down for utilitarian reasons; well, so did our forefathers; Londoners have always been practical. Religious zeal may occasionally have served to whet their destructive powers, but the results are pretty much the same. Perhaps Henry VIII.--that Bluebeard head of the Church and State--has, in his general dissolution of the monasteries and alienation of their property, been the greatest iconoclast in English annals; yet even he must have been nearly equalled by the Lord Protector Cromwell, whose Puritanical train wrought so much havoc among London's monuments of a later age. Reforms and improvements, all through the world's history, have always been cruelly destructive.

For, while churches and palaces were destroyed as relics of Popery, while works of art were demolished, and frescoes whitewashed in reforming zeal, fresh life was always sprouting, fresh energy ever filling up gaps, ever obliterating the traces of the past, the relics of the older time. Sir Walter Besant, in his picturesque and vivid sketch of English history, has realised well for us the city's past life:--

”It is (he says of the Reformation) at first hard to understand how there should have been, even among the baser sort, so little reverence for the past, so little regard for art; that these treasure-houses of precious marbles and rare carvings should have been rifled and destroyed without raising so much as a murmur; nay, that the very buildings themselves should have been pulled down without a protest.... It seems to us impossible that the tombs of so many worthies should have been destroyed without the indignation of all who knew the story of the past.... Yet ... it is unfortunately too true that there is not, at any time or with any people, reverence for things venerable, old, and historical, save with a few. The greater part are careless of the past, unable to see or feel anything but the present.... The parish churches were filled with ruins, ...

the past was gone.... The people lived among the ruins but regarded them not, any more than the vigorous growth within the court of a roofless Norman castle regards the donjon and the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away the stones and sold them for new buildings.”

Yet, though in London's history there were, as we have seen, occasional great upheavals, such as the Reformation, the Fires, the Protectorate, it was more the rule of change that went on unceasingly between whiles--change, such as we see it to-day, the incessant beat of the waves on the sh.o.r.e--that has obliterated the former time. ”The old order changeth, giving place to new”; and strange indeed it is, when one comes to think of it, that anything at all should be left to show what has been. The monasteries, the priories, the churches, that once occupied the greater portion of the city, and filled it with the clanging of their bells, so that the city was never quiet--these, of course, had mainly to go. The Church had to make way for Commerce; the Monasteries for the Merchants. The London of the early Tudors was still more or less that of Chaucer, and contained the same Friars, Pardoners, and Priests. The paramount importance of the Church is shown by the old nursery legends that circle round Bow bells; and the picturesque figure of Whittington, the future Lord Mayor, listening, in rags and dust, to the cheering church bells that tell him to ”turn again,” is really the connecting link between the Old and the New Age.

A few of the great monastic foundations of London escaped Henry VIII.'s acquisitive zeal, and have, as modern school-boys have reason to know, been devoted to educational and other charitable aims. It was, indeed, eminently suitable that in the cla.s.sic precincts of the ruined monastery of the ”Grey Friars” should arise a great school--the School of Christ's Hospital (colloquially termed the ”Blue-Coat School”)--where, till but the other day, the ”young barbarians” might be seen at play behind their iron barriers, backed by the fine old whitely-gleaming, b.u.t.tressed hall that faces Newgate Street. It was fitting, too, that the early dwelling of the English Carthusian monks--the place where Prior Houghton, with all the staunchness of his race, met death rather than cede to the tyrant one jot of his ancient right--should become not only a great educational foundation, but also a shelter for the aged and the poor. We know it as the ”Charterhouse”; as a picturesque, rambling building of sobered red-brick, built around many courtyards, its princ.i.p.al entrance under an archway that faces the quiet Charterhouse Square. The place has a monastic atmosphere still; to those, at least, who reverently tread its closes and byways--byways hallowed yet more by inevitable a.s.sociation with the sacred shade of Thomas Newcome; shadow of a shade, indeed! fiction stronger, and more enduring, than reality!

Yet the Charterhouse is, so to speak, an ”insula” by itself in London, a world of its own; possessing an ancient sanct.i.ty undisturbed by the neighbouring din of busy Smithfield, the unending bustle of the great city. More essentially of London is the curious unexpectedness of buildings, places, and a.s.sociations. What is so strange to the inexperienced wanderer among London byways is the manner in which bits of ancient garden, fragments of old, forgotten churchyards, isolated towers of destroyed churches, deserted closes, courts and slums of wild dirt and no less wild picturesqueness, suddenly confront the pedestrian, recalling incongruous ideas, and historical a.s.sociations puzzling in their very wealth of entangled detail. The ”layers” left by succeeding eras are thinly divided; and the study of London's history is as difficult to the neophyte as that of the successive ”layers” of the Roman Forum.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The s...o...b..ack._]