Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  It is this continuity with the past that gives so great and inexhaustible an interest to an old civilisation like that of England: it is this that Americans and other strangers from new countries often fail to appreciate in the soil and sentiments of Britain. Every inch of ground has here its story, and rouses an intelligent curiosity in the minds of all its inhabitants. England is an endless and delightful puzzle: she offers us a riddle to solve, a queer custom to account for, a name or a relic to explain, at every turn. Why is Maidstone the county-town of Kent, and Chelmsford that of Essex? Why does Oxfordshire lie so one-sidedly to its capital, and Leicester stand so centrally to its shire? Why may we say Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, but not Sussexshire, Cornwallshire, or Cumberlandshire? Why is Old Sarum now desolate, while Shaftesbury still caps its waterless hill? Why is there a Winchester on the site of Venta Belgarum, while Venta Icenorum has died down to a mere provincial Caistor, and Venta Silurum to a forgotten Caer Went? Why is Anderida still utterly uninhabited, while York and London stand on the sites of Eburacum and Londinium? These are the questions which naturally present themselves on every hand in looking at any English shire or any English town. At the same time, the problems about a town are always somewhat different from those about a county; because a territorial division once set up may outlive immense changes in its component parts, and may even become a mere traditional administrative entity, without real organic unity or genuine separation from its neighbours; whereas a town must always go on attracting and retaining its population, or else it ceases altogether to exist, at least as a corporate and collective whole. Once begun, it may go on by means of very different causes from those which determined its first attractiveness; but some kind of sufficient ground for its existence it must always be able to show throughout all its history. Sometimes it begins by being a manufacturing place, and ends by being an agricultural centre; sometimes it owes its earliest impulse to its position as the head of navigation on a river, and traces its later importance to a railway or a coal-mine; sometimes even it sets out as a fortress or a royal residence, and sinks at last into a mere group of pleasant villas, depending for support upon pretty scenery or sunny climate. Manchester is now a great emporium of piece-goods; but its very name shows its alien origin, for it could never have owed its Roman termination chester to the cotton of South Carolina and Bombay. Canterbury now exists mainly as the metropolitan city of the English Church; but the Roman Durovernum certainly did not depend for its foundation upon the future minster of Ethelbert and Augustine, or upon the mediæval shrine of St. Thomas à Becket. Hastings and Brighton were large fishing stations long before they became fashionable watering-places; Cheltenham was a market town and capital of the Cotswold wool trade long before the discovery of the mineral waters led to the building of the Promenade and the Spa Houses. Reading was once the clan-centre of the Readingas; now it is a junction on the Great Western, and does an active business in Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits. Tamworth once stood a good chance of being the capital of all England; Dorchester-on-Thames and Winchester each in turn ran London close for the same honour; and Westminster has actually carried off the prize, though the outgrowth of the metropolis has now practically merged it into a single town with the City. On the other hand, a few places here and there have never swerved from their first love. London has always mainly depended upon the traffic of the Thames; Bristol has always been the port of the Avon; Bath has owed its existence throughout to its hot springs, Yarmouth to its fisheries, Wells to its abbey or cathedral. To unravel in each case the efficient causes at work in producing and maintaining any particular town is a task full of interest and instruction, and one for which English history affords exceptionally abundant materials.

  I. EAST

  ST. ALBANS

  Among the undulating low tertiary hills which bound the alluvial London basin to northward, the great mediæval Abbey Church of St. Albans overlooks the winding little valley of the Ver from a faintly-marked ledge or step hanging midway between the river and the plateau above. As one gazes across the narrow dell from the site of Verulamium to the square and massive tower of the minster on the opposite slope, it is a curious thought that this small forgotten Hertfordshire town is the mother-city of London, and was already the recognised capital of the lower Thames region before London itself yet existed. A large fosse and earthwork, starting from and returning to the stream of the Ver — these Celtic river names have a wonderful vitality — and encircling on its way the existing town, together with a space of some four square miles, probably marks the site of the old straggling British metropolis: a mere stockaded village, into whose wide area all the women and cattle of the tribe could be huddled hastily for defence in time of war. Here doubtless stood the oppidum of the Cassii, and of their chieftain Cassivellaunus, as Cæsar Latinises the name; and here the Romans gained their first fruitless victory over the British prince. Certainly Verulamium, the village on the Ver, was the capital of his successor Tasciovanus, and remained the chief town of the Thames estuary till Cunobelinus removed his residence to Camalodunum, or Colchester. In those days the site of London still presented a long succession of marshy morasses, stretching from the flooded meadows at Battersea to the tidal flats of the Lea River estuary, now known as the Isle of Dogs; and from this vast lagoon, dotted with rising eyots and hithes, the Tower Hill and the height now crowned by St. Paul’s Cathedral stood out alone as two solitary and wooded tors. Indeed, all Middlesex was then apparently a trackless mark of forest, crossed only by a single aboriginal British war-trail. It was natural, therefore, that the native centre of the Thames basin should be pitched farther northward, among the drier and smaller valleys of the tributary streams. Verulamium was the spot on which the chieftains of the Cassii fixed their choice.

  When Aulus Plautius conquered the south-eastern region of Britain he made two notable changes in the arrangements of the Lea basin. The two have had singularly different fates. In the first place, he founded the new port and city of [Augusta], on the dun where the Hampstead heights abutted upon the joint estuary of the Thames and Lea; and this new city has slowly grown into the metropolis of the British Empire. In the second place, he set up a Roman station of Verulamium on the opposite side of the Ver from the British oppidum; and this station now forms the deserted ruin of Old Verulam, while the still more ancient site over against it is once more occupied in part by the modern town of St. Albans. It was the earliest Roman municipium raised in Britain; a few massive fragments of its flint-built wall, with bonding courses of tile, still remain; elsewhere a faint line of tree-covered mounds irregularly marks its oval circuit. Traces of an amphitheatre also exist. In Boadicea’s insurrection, both London and Verulam were completely destroyed, and all the Italian inhabitants massacred. But after the defeat of the Iceni by Paulinus, the city soon rose again, and became for a time the greatest Roman town in Britain. As Mr. Green, however, observes, the importance of towns in the Roman province was purely military. While the conquerors were mainly engaged in reducing the districts nearest to Gaul, Colchester, Verulam, and London were the greatest of Roman stations; as the tide of war rolled away northward and westward, Chester and Cærleon became the seats of the legions, and York the capital of the entire province. Even in the south itself, Verulam must slowly but surely have dwindled before the rising importance of London, the port on the greatest eastward river and the fortress that blocked the passage of the Thames to the Teutonic pirates. Nevertheless, it was during these later Roman days that the event occurred which has given the town its mediæval importance and its modern name. During the persecution of Diocletian, according to the well-known legend told us by Bede, one Albanus, a Roman resident, gave shelter to a hunted Christian clerk. Converted by his guest, he assumed the clerical cloak and gave himself up in his stead to his pursuers. He was led out from the municipium across the Ver to a hillock on the opposite slope, and there, with the usual miraculous accompaniments, was beheaded for the faith. When Germanus of Auxerre came to Britain to
put down the Pelagian heresy, he raised a wooden chapel over the martyr’s remains; and his own name is still commemorated in that of St. German’s Farm. Such is the one legend of the older British Christianity which has come down to us across the blank abyss of early English heathendom. Its mere survival is a point full of historical significance. The tale was already current at Verulamium in the early part of the fifth century, a hundred years after the event it describes; and it was handed down in part to Bede by the British monk Gildas, who himself saw the full brunt of the heathen Saxon invasion in the Midlands.

  When the East Saxon pirates swarmed across the low hills north of still unconquered London to Verulam they fell upon the Roman station and the church of the protomartyr, a little time before the period when Gildas wrote his despairing jeremiad over the destruction of Britain. The rough sea-wolves from the pathless cranberry marshes of Sleswick were astonished at the massive walls and paved roads of the Roman city. Such works must needs have been the handicraft of the Watlings, those Teutonic giants who laid the glittering track of the Milky Way across the vault of heaven. So they called the city Watlinga-ceaster, the castrum of the Watlings; and that is one of the names which it bears in Bede’s history, though the older name survived side by side with the barbaric innovation under the slightly altered guise of Verlama-ceaster. So, too, they knew the paved road which led them on to blockade the doomed city of London by the name of the Watling Street; and that name the Roman causeway still preserves throughout its whole course across the Midlands of England. Whether Verulam then lay waste, and if so how long, we cannot tell with certainty. But there is no good reason to suppose that it was ever deserted during the early English period. It is clear that the memory of St. Alban never died out at Verulam. For two centuries we know nothing of the place; and then, long after the conversion of the English, during the last days of the independent petty kingdoms, we hear that Offa of Mercia determined to build an abbey at the spot where Alban was beheaded, on the knoll of Holmhurst, in honour of the old British martyr. Place and person were both significant. Mercia was the most Welsh of all the English principalities: Offa himself had just conquered Powysland, and incorporated a large fresh body of Welsh tributaries; his ancestors had been in close alliance with native Welsh princes; and it was probably to mark the sense of unity between his Welsh and English subjects that he determined to raise a great minster in place of the little church which covered the remains of the most famous martyr of the older race. On the other hand, he had lately annexed London and Kent to his dominions; and it was a wise piece of policy to place a body of hospitable Mercian monks on the connecting line of Watling Street, near the point where the old East Saxon and Mercian territories marched together. Offa’s church and Benedictine monastery, richly endowed with neighbouring land, soon grew into great importance. The people of Verulam gradually deserted their Roman walls, and came to live under the protection of St. Alban and his great minster. Shortly before the Norman Conquest, Abbot Eadmer collected materials for rebuilding the minster on a larger scale. But the troubles of Harold’s time put a stop to the project; and when William crossed the Thames at Wallingford, and marched upon London by the Watling Street, the monks bravely attempted to stop him, almost single-handed, by erecting wooden barricades upon the road.

  The first Norman abbots carried out the scheme of rebuilding the minster; and a large part of the existing abbey, including the tower and transepts, belongs to this great architectural period. The materials were largely derived from the ruins of Verulam. Strangely enough, the shrine of the British saint became one of the most popular in all England, and rich pilgrims from London brought it an abundance of gifts. The town which grew up around the abbey was a typical instance of the monastic burgh. Indeed, throughout all its history St. Albans (as distinguished from old Verulam) has been wholly dependent upon ecclesiastical arrangements. The soil was the abbot’s; the burgesses were his men; the town was entirely at his mercy, as the barons’ towns were at the mercy of their lords. Endless disputes arose about the abbot’s monopoly of grinding corn; about his penny for hunting, fishing, wood-cutting, and pasturage. In Wat Tyler’s rebellion the peasants and craftsmen of St. Albans rose against the monastery; and one William Grindecobbe wrung a charter from Richard II., with which he burst at the head of his followers into the abbey cloisters, and summoned the abbot to deliver up the papers which kept the townsmen in servitude. The mob broke the millstones, which visibly symbolised the hateful monopoly, and divided them into little pieces as souvenirs of the revolt. But in the reaction which followed Wat Tyler’s death, William Grindecobbe was hanged, with many of his followers, and the hastily granted charter was at once rescinded. Here, as elsewhere in England, the freedom of the serf was won slowly and imperceptibly — not by any single administrative measure. In later days, as wealth increased and the value of land rose, the minster became immensely rich, and counted Wolsey himself among its abbots. The great church bore its own varied architectural history on its face till its recent restoration, beginning with the Norman tower built by Paul of Caen from Roman bricks, and ending with the perpendicular portions erected just before the dissolution. At that barbarous period, all the conventual buildings except the abbey church and gateway were destroyed; and even the great minster itself would have been pulled down had not the burgesses purchased it from the grantee for their own parish church. Like all purely monastic towns, St. Albans declined after the dissolution; and to this day it centres entirely round the now restored abbey. Lord Bacon, who took his two titles from St. Albans and Verulam, had his seat at Gorhambury, close by. To-day the town lives on mainly by pure vis inertiæ, and by the nearness to London which may yet make it into a considerable place. The two names of Verulam and St. Albans are in themselves, perhaps, fuller of historical suggestiveness than any others in the whole expanse of modern England.

  COLCHESTER

  On the northward slope of a gentle valley between two lines of Eocene hills, not far from the flat eastern coast of Essex, lies a small, square, sleepy town, girt round even now by Roman walls — a town which may lay claim to be, with one exception probably, the oldest in all England. St. Albans can alone boast a greater antiquity than Colchester; and even at St. Albans there is not the same pervading sense of continuity with the remote past as in the quiet Essex market-town which still bears the Roman title of the colony as an integral part of its modern name. No other inhabited place nearer to us than the mouldering white Provençal cities that cap the dry hills of the Rhone valley has preserved throughout so much of its ancient Roman aspect as Colchester. You drive up from the Mile End Railway Station through a straggling modern suburb — that inevitable outgrowth of the railway system — and enter North Hill by a gap which represents the original gate in the walls of Suetonius Paulinus. Thence, as you go through the town, you pass stage by stage upward through all the centuries of English history. The High Street leads you to the Norman castle keep, ruined in the civil wars of the Commonwealth; and without the walls on the other side lie the mediæval remains of St. Botolph’s Priory and the scanty relics of St. John’s Abbey. The Botanic Gardens bear to this day the name of the Crutched Friars; while a long straight street beyond the east boundary leads over a small hill to the old port of Hythe, once, as its name implies, the busy haven for the woollen manufactures of Colchester, and still the head of navigation for a few coal-boats on the lazy oyster-fishing estuary of the Colne.

  Even the town of Suetonius, however, was not the earliest Colchester of all. The site has been one of strategical importance in all times, from those of the flint-weaponed men who raised the Grimes Dyke beyond Lexden, to those of the modern camp and the cavalry barracks which now cover the high ground south of the borough. Colchester forms the natural centre of the Essex coast-land. It stands in the corner of a peninsula, enclosed on the north by the River Colne, flowing originally through a swampy bottom, and on the south by a smaller stream which still bears the strange and suggestive title of the Roman Riv
er. The neck of this peninsula, between the flanking swamps, was guarded from primitive times by a long line of rude earthworks, usually attributed to the Britons of Cæsar’s age, but really shown to be of neolithic origin by the character of the flint implements and other associated remains. Over the wide space between these limits — adopted no doubt by later races — stretched perhaps the British camp of refuge, known from its chief height as Camalodunum. But whether that original British fortress occupied the same site as the Roman colony of like name may be reasonably doubted. A good local archæologist has placed it at Lexden; and the claims of Maldon to be the primitive Camalodunum must not be overlooked. The Celtic word so Latinised by our authorities must have sounded really something like Cmaldun [?], and Mældun is the earliest English form of Maldon in the Chronicle. [The god Camalos is anyhow the patron deity of this fort.] When Cæsar visited Britain the leading native tribe [in the south-east] was that of the Trinobantes [or Trinovantes], or men of modern Essex (including Middlesex and Hertfordshire); and their king, Tasciovanus, shortly afterwards fixed his chief camp at Verulam, or St. Albans. His son, Cunobelinus — Shakspeare’s Cymbeline — removed the clan capital to the first Camalodunum, wherever that may have been — certainly a dun or irregular stockaded hill fortress of the common early Celtic type. Coins bearing his name and that of the town are not uncommon. After the great campaign of Aulus Plautius, the Trinovantes were subdued, and Camalodunum was immediately occupied by the Romans. If Maldon, however, was really the British capital, then the Roman colony, founded sixteen years later, though it bore the same name, must have been erected on a site thirteen miles distant as the crow flies — a case which may be paralleled with that of old and new Sarum, or old and new Carthage. No other supposition equally harmonises the conflicting claims of Maldon and Colchester; for though the latter is undoubtedly Colonia by material continuity, the former is almost as clearly [?] Camalodunum by etymological identity.