Many daggers, spears, swords and other weapons from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries have been found in the river, many of them bent or broken in the manner of the offerings of weapons from the Bronze Age. Some of them bore inscriptions to whatever god, or power, would welcome them: Ave Ami (“Hail, friend”) and Ecce Edwardus (“Behold Edward”) among them. Miniature weapons, made of pewter, were also cast into the waters in the same spirit as the weapons of bone from the Iron Age. Tiny cannons and guns, as well as jugs and cauldrons, have also been found; a small medieval frying pan, complete with miniature fish, has also been recovered. These have been classified as medieval toys, lost by some unlucky child on an expedition down the river, but historians of the Thames may pause before accepting such an attribution. They may not be toys at all but the imitation of real objects designed for another purpose.
How had such knowledge of the river’s customs survived for more than three thousand years? It was not written in any medieval book of practice. It must have been preserved in legends and memories that were associated with the Thames. Even as late as the nineteenth century, pins were folded or bent before being thrown into the water. It is an extraordinary example of the persistence of custom and ceremonial. No less significant are the animal offerings made to the river. In the foundations of a fourteenth-century quay, at Trig Lane, two halves of a sheep’s jaw were laid in alignment with a wooden beam. It was a way of protecting the structure from the depredation of the waters. Beneath the foundations of the second arch of Blackfriars Bridge, laid in the 1760s, was found a tranche of animal and human bones. Old customs do not seem to disappear. In the nineteenth century it was still customary for ships’ captains to throw a penny into the river in order to “buy wind.”
The sacred or magical activity of the river is attested by a stranger form of artefact known as the bellarmine, or witch’s bottle. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were used as a precaution against witchcraft, and contained iron nails, scraps of cloth, partly burnt coals and other small items. They have been found at Paul’s Pier wharf and at Stepney, at Westminster and at Lambeth, at Gravesend and at Chiswick; many more must await discovery, and they are practical evidence of the close association between the river and the supernatural. It is a link that has remained unbroken since the dawn of the Mesolithic.
The Thames seems to contain the debris of the world—bird-cages and urethral syringes, watches and wooden stools, pipes and phials and wigcurlers. German pottery lies above Venetian glass. A flint hand-axe might share the same stretch of river-bed with a sixteenth-century pot and a nineteenth-century bicycle wheel. A German bomb may lie beside a miniature horse-pistol, and a fragment of Roman statuary beside a blackened relic of the Great Fire. A medieval carpenter’s axe may end beside a Roman cooking pot and a nineteenth-century coin-box. In the ancient river all time is redeemable, past and present suspended together in intimate association. The river defies time. The thick mud and silt of its waters lack oxygen and therefore prevent organic decay. Ironwork can be retrieved which, after washing, shines as brightly as the day of its manufacture. Bronze and brass still gleam in the depths. A nineteenth-century clay pipe, found on the foreshore, looks as if it had been discarded a moment before. The river is a great depository of past lives; it is still the home of past cultures that flourished beside its banks.
CHAPTER 43
Head of the River
There is a curious connection between the Thames and severed heads. Of course the heads paraded on London Bridge are the most obvious tokens of this association, but they are a relatively late manifestation of an ancient phenomenon. Heads were deposited in the river from the earliest times. Recent research confirms that almost three hundred skulls have been discovered in the river itself, dating from the Neolithic to the Iron Ages, and that they had been placed there in a “defleshed” condition. This would mean that the flesh was physically scraped from them or, more likely, that they were left to rot until the flesh had fallen away. Only fourteen of them included the mandible. But these are only the documented remnant of what seems to have been wholesale practice. Neolithic skulls have been found placed in pits beside the river; one such pit, at Sutton Courtenay, contained ten human skulls. In some instances the lower mandibles had been removed prior to burial. Marks on a cranium found at Staines suggest that the head was indeed severed from the body at an early stage. Recent excavations have also uncovered a number of human skulls, dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages, that were deliberately placed in riverine locations. Whether this was for the purposes of punishment or of veneration remains unclear.
From the Celtic or Early British period a large number of Roman and British skulls have been discovered in the river below Chelsea Bridge. It might be surmised that these are simply the remains of a more than usually bloody battle, but of course this does not explain why only the skulls have been recovered. It seems more likely that they were severed from the bodies before being placed in the Thames. The stretch of the river at Battersea Bridge was once known as a “Celtic Golgotha,” a place of skulls. A paper, published as early as 1857, was entitled “On the discovery of Celtic crania in the vicinity of London.” At Strand-on-the-Green, over one hundred human skulls were discovered in the late 1920s. There have been similar finds at Kew and at Hammersmith. The preponderance of the skulls dates from the late prehistoric period, and we may wish to conclude that at some point in its history the Thames was in certain respects a charnel house. The majority of these finds were made between London and Oxford, with particular concentrations in the stretch of the river between Richmond and Mortlake. This may reflect the patterns of population by the Thames, or it may be that these areas are simply the ones that have been most extensively dredged in recent years.
Ritualised heads have also been discovered in the river, perhaps the most notable being that of the emperor Hadrian that was thrown into the Thames close to London Bridge. The marble head of a woman was also found in that stretch of the Thames, and the bronze head of a girl close to the foreshore by Fish Street Hill. And then there is the phenomenon, in the waters of the Thames, of statues with their heads deliberately removed. Some small bronze figurines, for example, were found in the river without heads. Was this some form of communication with the underworld of spirits or with the deities of the river?
The significance and sacredness of the human head were undoubtedly part of ancient British ritual worship. The British believed that the soul resided in the head, rather than the heart, and it may be that in depositing the head the worshippers were also offering up the soul to the other world of which the river was an emblem. Tacitus relates that the Saxons, long before they colonised Britain, were prone to drowning their enemies in the river as sacrifices to the god Nerthus. The Celts severed the heads of both enemies and fellow countrymen for ritual purposes before, like the Saxons, dropping them into the river. It was not simply a pagan practice, however. There have been numerous finds of Christian saints’ effigies missing their heads. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we will discover, both severed heads and headless corpses have been recovered from the waters of the Thames.
There is a story connected with this phenomenon, to be found in one of the Celtic dindshenchas, or ballads. It concerns a hero, Riach, who built a “house” or temple over a well in which he placed the severed heads of warriors killed in battle. The aura or power of these decapitated heads excited the water to such an extent that it became dangerous, and Riach was forced to erect a more steadfast structure above the well in order to contain it. It was of no avail. The waters rushed over him, and he was drowned. Here the connection is explicitly made between the severed heads of warriors, and the presence of sacred water. The water in some sense responds to the mana of the heads. Is there here some remote explanation for the ritual of depositing human skulls in the Thames? Camden believed that the name of Maidenhead was derived from the veneration of the head of a British maiden, said to have been one of the eleven thousand vi
rgins martyred with St. Ursula on the banks of the Rhine.
There are other myths of the head, marking even closer associations with the Thames itself. The universal Celtic god, Belinus, was charged with the duty of taking the heads of the sacrificed and of transporting them to the underworld. It has already been suggested that Billingsgate, the market by the Thames, was named after Belinus. The etymology may or may not be fanciful; but it is suggestive, if Belinus was indeed considered to be one of the ancient deities of the river. Another legend of the river is equally interesting. The British giant, Bran, having been mortally wounded in a battle with the Irish, ordered that his head be carried down the Thames and placed by the river at Tower Hill as a bulwark against invasions. As the rowers progressed down the river, the severed head uttered prophecies about the island’s destiny. The ancient poems claim that King Arthur removed the head, believing that the country needed no other defender than himself. That is why London, and England, became the victim of Roman invasion. Bran also means “raven” in modern Welsh and in ancient Brythonic. So Charles II was merely reviving an ancient tradition when he placed the ravens in the Tower.
Another relatively recent discovery has confirmed the pattern of ritual killing. Towards the end of the twentieth century a collection of forty-eight human skulls was found in the Walbrook, one of the tributaries of the Thames that entered the river near Cannon Street. Ten human skulls were also found in another London tributary of the Thames, the river Lea. There are no doubt many more still to be discovered. The Walbrook heads were once believed to represent the victims of Boudicca’s invasion of London in AD 60, or perhaps the remnants of some other conflict between the Romans and the British. But the question then remains, why only the skulls? They are of young adult males and, more pertinently, they all appear to have been defleshed before being deposited in the running water. Their mandibles are also missing.
The heads on London Bridge, therefore, take their place in a long tradition. They were deposited there over a period of many centuries; sometimes they were tarred, and sometimes left in their natural state of decapitation. They were stuck upon pikes or poles, and left to rot in the sun and the rain. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the first heads are recorded, they were placed on a tower or gate on the northern side of the bridge nearest to the city. The first known instance is the head of Sir William Wallace. Then at some later date, not recorded, the site was changed to the great stone gate nearest Southwark on the south side of the river. This became known as Traitor’s Gate. A German traveller counted some thirty heads in 1598, and a map of 1597 shows them clustered together like grapes in a bunch. In fact the heads were not the only human members placed in that position. The legs and “quarters” of convicted traitors were also exhibited there, so that the gate was said to resemble a butcher’s shambles. Those engaged in this gruesome practice, however, were participating in a ritual more ancient than they could ever have imagined: they may not have been punishing the dead but, rather, offering up their souls to the Otherworld which is the Thames.
CHAPTER 44
The River of Death
In the spring of 2004 an exhibition was held on the south bank of the Thames, in London, that excited much public attention. It was entitled “Missing,” and it contained the photographs of some eighty people who had simply disappeared. No more appropriate spot could have been chosen for such an exhibition. The Thames is a river of the disappeared. In the registers of the National Missing Persons bureau, out of the first eighty unidentified bodies noted, some fourteen had been found in or beside the Thames: “found in the Thames near Erith…found in the Thames near the Millennium Wheel…found in the Thames at Rotherhithe…found in the River Thames near Hammersmith Bridge.” And so the litany goes on. It is not at all unusual in the history of the river.
There is some force, perhaps what Dickens called the attraction of repulsion, that still calls many people to the river. There have always been vagrants and beggars sleeping or living beneath the bridges, or huddled in the “pulpits” or passing ways on the bridges themselves. The poorest outcasts of both sexes are known to have employed the seats of the Victoria Embankment, from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge, almost as soon as it was constructed. Their enduring fascination with the river is a matter of speculation. Has it to do with the prospect of time, thankfully, passing? Has it to do with the possibility of immersion? Or does it represent the more mundane desire to be near others suffering the same distress and discomfort? The Thames may call out to the forlorn and to the neglected because it has always been touched by sweat, and labour, and poverty, and tears. The solitaries and vagrants are moved by the same need and loneliness. The river is a great vortex of suffering.
Its darkness has meant that it has been associated with the devil. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were men in the pageants who dressed themselves as demons, and spouted red and blue fire from their mouths across the waters of the Thames. “Terrible and monstrous wild men they were,” Stow wrote, “and made a hideous noise.” There was a river-front building on the marshes near Barking, close to the foreshore at Galleons Reach, that was known at the end of the eighteenth century as “the Devil’s House” it was long in a ruinous condition, and was used as a shelter for cattle. Just above Radcot there was a stretch of the river that was known as “Hell’s Turn,” the meaning of which remains unclear.
The Thames is in many respects the river of the dead. It has the power to hurt and to kill. The figure of the Thames wherryman, and that of the ferryman crossing the river at Lambeth and Gravesend and other localities, seems ultimately to derive from Charon. There were steps known as Dead Man’s Stairs at Wapping where, by some accident of tide and current, the corpses of the recently drowned tended to congregate. There is a U-bend between the Isle of Dogs and Deptford, where the drowned may be delayed in their course towards the sea. It was once known as Deadman’s Dock, the name given because of the number of corpses that were found there when the dock was being constructed. If the body missed these fatal junctions, and drifted down in its decomposing state past Lower Hope Reach, then there was no hope. It would disappear for ever. There was also Dead Man’s Island, lying near Tailness Marsh in the estuary, so called because the corpses of cholera victims were buried there; the bodies came from the prison ships, or “hulks,” that were moored in the vicinity during the Napoleonic Wars. Bodies from more recent periods have also been found there; one of them, according to a local waterman, “had shrimps coming out of his eyes, his mouth, his nose….”
It has always been a treacherous river, with its hidden tides and dangerous currents silently working beneath the calm surface. It is extraordinary how quickly a person can go under, sucked down as if grabbed by unseen hands. In the areas beside the old docksides the water would sometimes simply appear, without steps or wharves, and the unwary pedestrian would have to start back violently to escape falling into its depths.
The river has always possessed an attraction for suicides, but certain stretches seem most favoured. In the late eighteenth century a French writer, Pierre Jean Grosley, explained that the banks of the Thames were crowded with wharves and manufactories in order to shield the river from the population considering “the natural bent of the English, and in particular the people of London, to suicide.” There is a recent example of one young woman who travelled from Paris in order to drown herself in the Thames.
Water is indeed the melancholy element, with its appearance of transitoriness. The water dissolves and passes. It is the material out of which the house of despair might be constructed. There is always the sense in which the flowing water induces repose and forgetfulness, but what if that repose and forgetfulness were to be indefinite? What if the charm of isolation and withdrawal were to attach itself to the swirling dark water itself? This is the way of the suicide.
From the medieval period there are several accounts of suicide in the river, despite the fact that it was considered to be a mortal sin
deserving hell. That is why the suicides were always considered to be insane. Alice de Wanewyck, for example, “drowned herself in the port of Dowgate, being non compos mentis.” Other Thames suicides were “in a mind other than their rightful mind.” There were of course many medieval citizens who found their quietus in the river for other reasons: many were simply killed, and thrown into the water. There are also accounts of drunken Londoners slipping down the water-stairs and falling into the river.
Most of the suicides in the Thames have remained anonymous and unlamented—it was perhaps for that reason that they chose the river in the first place—but the historical records have documented a few individual cases. In his diary for 24 February 1666, Pepys records that “going thro’ bridge by water, my waterman told me how the mistress of the ‘Beare’ tavern, at the Bridge-foot, did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drown herself…it seems she has had long melancholy upon her and hath endeavoured to make away with herself often.” In the 1680s the son of Sir William Temple, then Secretary of War, hired a waterman “to shoot the bridge” in other words, to go beneath London Bridge at the time when the tide downriver turned into a torrent through the arches. Just as his boat was crossing beneath a narrow arch, Temple flung himself into the water and immediately sank. It was discovered later that his pockets were filled with stones, but they were hardly necessary. Hundreds of tons of water drove his body to the bottom where it rotated, rose and was then beaten down again. If he had survived the fall he would no doubt have become enmired in the mud at the bottom of the river which acts as a kind of quagmire for those who land upon it. If that did not kill him, then the cold of the water would have destroyed him within six or seven minutes. In the history of London crime there is not one recorded example of a criminal swimming across the river to escape from his pursuers. It is too daunting a barrier.
Thames Page 41
