A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

OLD BRIDGES, EUROPEAN, PERSIAN AND CHINESE

I

Mediæval England was a forrestial country, and many a roadside wood gave shelter to footpads and bandits, who planned ambuscades, and amused themselves with rape and rapine and murder. If they were less ready to cut a throat than to broach a tun of wine[82] the terror inspired by their evil reputation told lies that duped everybody. In fact, travellers were pitied by Acts of Parliament, but they had greater faith in the Church, which enabled them to renew their failing courage with frequent prayer at shrines by the wayside. Saint after saint was called to their aid; and from the time of St. Dunstan the Church reckoned the building of bridges among the most urgent duties of charity. Some good must have been done, yet rivers and journeys were feared very much; fords were common, and an ambush near a ford was a peril difficult to encounter. In the “Ballad of Abingdon Bridge,” which dates from the time of Henry V, we see what fords were like and how their guardians behaved to travellers. “Another blissed besines is brigges to make,” the rustic poet cries, thinking of unfortunate wayfarers who were washed from their saddles into a flooded river:—

And som oute of their sadels flette [fall] to the grounde,

Wente forthe in the water wist no man whare,

Fyve wekys after or they were i founde,

Their kyn and their knowlech [acquaintance] caught them up with care.

And this life-tax claimed by rivers was not the only trouble. The keepers of a ford knew no pity, but got their toll in relentless ways, taking bread from the beggar’s wallet and “a hood or a girdel” from “the pore penyles.” Very often, too, great woods encircled riverside towns and manors, so that outlaws after dark could steal up close to the houses and the bridge; it was then that pilgrims welcomed with the greatest relief the cresset-lights that glimmered from some friendly building on the bridge—from a chapel, or a defensive gateway, or a small bickering windmill, or a good watermill buttressed against a pier and rising high above the parapet.

And now we must pass in review six old species of bridge:—

1. The Housed Bridge, such as we find in Brangwyn’s beautiful monochrome of the quaint bridge at Kreuznach, in Germany.

OLD BRIDGE WITH HOUSES AT KREUZNACH, ON THE RIVER NAHE, IN PRUSSIA. AN OLD MILL BRIDGE, SEEMINGLY

2. The Shrined Bridge, as in Brangwyn’s alert impression of the Gothic bridge at Elche, in Spain.

3. The Bridge of Mills, as represented in the very romantic sketch of the old and broken bridge at Millau, in Southern France, at the confluence of the Tarn with the Dourbie. Another example, much modernised, exists in France, at historic Meaux, about thirty-two miles from Paris.

4. The Chapelled Bridge, as at Wakefield, and Rotherham, and Pisa, and Avignon (see Frontispiece), and elsewhere.

5. The War-Bridge, which in Brangwyn’s art receives the most varied and vigorous recognition. Never before have they been studied so completely by an artist.

6. The Bridge of Shops, as at Venice in the Rialto.

II

We ought not to be surprised that mediæval bridges were connected in a self-evident manner with all the principal motive-powers of social life. They were excellent places where kings and nobles could show off their military ambition, and where the Church could be active in good work done for the safety of wayfaring. Shops on a bridge were valued because of the continuous traffic that brought trade to their doors; and a few private houses on a market bridge gratified a middleclass vanity, that took pride in paying the higher rents of a business thoroughfare. To live on Old London Bridge was a distinction; to be a tradesman on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, or on a timber bridge in Paris, was to be prosperous, for no bridge of shops was wide enough to be unpopular among those who had money to spend. Can anyone explain why the feminine joy of going to market has ever been most adventurous in narrow streets, or in short streets of a medium width?[83]

Whatever the reasons may be, here is a point to be remembered when we study such a bridge as the Rialto, at Venice, which carries three little streets on an arch twenty-four feet six inches high, and ninety-one feet in span, with a soffit about seventy-two feet wide. To-day the Rialto shops are trivial and mean, but in the great time of the Republic they displayed the most luxurious oddments of fashion, and delighted the idle rich. Very often it is said that the Rialto was built from a design by Michelangelo, as if this wonderful master of a tragic and supreme dignity could have amused his leisure with such a pretty whim in ornate building! Modern criticism shows a very poor taste when it repeats this old fallacy, or when it describes the Rialto as a masterpiece of architecture dating from the Renaissance. In comparison with the bridges of Isfahan, which belong to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Rialto is a mere toy. Its origin is the subject of Rondelet’s “Essai Historique sur le Pont de Rialto,” where we watch a great competition between Palladio and Antonio da Ponte. Palladio was the greater man, but the Senate rejected his designs, [84] and in 1588 Antonio da Ponte built his arched scaffold or centring and laid the first blocks of Istrian marble.

In Brangwyn’s picture the Rialto is gay enough to belong to the joyous times of the Republic; and by comparing this picture with the pen-drawings of the bridges at Isfahan, in Persia, it is easy to note the difference in spirit between two cities that attained in the same age their greatest prosperity. In 1590, Isfahan became the capital of Persia; and by this year Venice had recovered from the destructive fire of 1577, and was beautifying herself in many ways, as with the Piazza di San Marco.

THE RIALTO, VENICE DESIGNED IN 1588 BY ANTONIO DA PONTE, ARCHITECT

At Isfahan no fewer than five old bridges cross the Zendeh Rud, the most ancient being the Pul-i-Marnun, which was built by Shah Tahmasp, who reigned from 1523 to 1575. It is not a great bridge, so it stands apart from the Pul-i-Khaju and the vast Bridge of Ali Verdi Khan, which undoubtedly are among the finest bridges in the world. Their beauty has such a gracious power, such brightness and grandeur, that even the Roman bridge at Alcántara may seem to rival it unsuccessfully. Brangwyn has drawn these Persian masterpieces, but the Pul-i-Khaju alone belongs to this section on housed bridges—except in some architectural points common to both. Their arches are Moorish, and their builders may have borrowed from the Romans an idea which has come down to our time in at least one antique monument, namely, the ruined aqueduct at Lyon, not far from Saint Irénée. Through the piers of this aqueduct arches are cut transversely, so as to form a side arcade all along the length of the structure. These lateral arches vary much in size, and some of them have been built up. I know not for what purpose they were used; but they lighten the piers, which are uncommonly massive. It is this arrangement—a vaulted gallery cut through the sides of piers—that we find also at Isfahan in the two historic bridges of the Sefi kings.

THE PUL-I-KHAJU OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN, PERSIA

The Pul-i-Khaju has been described many times, but Lord Curzon’s account of it is by far the most valuable:—

“The Pul-i-Khaju is shorter than the bridge of Ali Verdi Khan, being only 154 yards in length, owing to a contraction in the bed of the river, which here flows over a ledge of rock. The structure consists, in fact, of a bridge superimposed upon a dam. The latter is built of solid blocks of stone and is pierced by narrow channels, the flow in which can be regulated by sluices. This great platform is broken on its outer edge, the stones being arranged in the form of steps descending to the river-level. Upon the platform or dam repose the twenty-four main arches of the bridge, which is of brick, and the chief external features of which are four projecting two-storeyed hexagonal pavilions, one at each corner, and two larger pavilions of similar shape in the centre, a third storey being erected upon the roof of the more westerly of the two. As in the case of the Julfa Bridge, [85] the basement is pierced by a vaulted passage, running the entire length of the bridge through the piers on the top of the dam, and crossing the successive channels by stepping-stones six feet deep. The main roadway of the bridge, twenty-four feet broad, is also flanked by a covered gallery on each side, leading to the hexagonal pavilions, and opening by a succession of arches on to the outer air. Finally, there is a terrace-walk at the top, which was originally protected by a double parapet and screens. The pavilions were once adorned with rich paintings and gilding, and with panels containing inscriptions. The decoration is now more jejune and vulgar, and the spandrils of the arches are mostly filled in with modern tiles. In olden days this bridge was a favourite resort in the evening, where the young gallants of Isfahan marched up and down, or sat and smoked in the embayed archways overlooking the stream. Now it is well-nigh deserted save in the springtime, when the snows melt in the mountains, and in a few hours the Zendeh Rud is converted from a petty stream into a foaming torrent. Then the good folk of Isfahan crowd the galleries and arcades of the bridge, and shout with delight as the water first rushes through the narrow sluices, then mounts to the level of the causeway and spills in a noisy cascade down each successive stairway or weir, and finally pours through the main arches, still splitting into a series of cataracts as it leaps the broken edges of the dam.”[86]

Such is the Pul-i-Khaju. Her architect’s name is unknown, but she dates from the time of Shah Abbas II, who reigned between the years 1641 and 1666. Even in photographs she is a bridge of enchantment where from time to time all the tired geniuses of the world should go for a romantic holiday; the pavilions certainly await the coming of worthy guests, who would save them from the vulgar decoration which has displaced the old paintings and enrichments. That vaulted arcade in the basement, running transversely through all the piers, and crossing the channels by huge stepping-stones (one of the earliest bridges copied by primitive man from Nature’s object-lessons), has a great historic interest, though in pictures and photographs it attracts very little attention. Was it suggested by a Roman model, or was it rediscovered by the originality of a great architect? I have searched long for an answer to these questions, but in vain.

Perhaps Old London Bridge at her best, after the building of None-such House, in 1576, may have been as entertaining to the eye as is the magic of the Pul-i-Khaju, though inferior to this masterpiece as a work of art. The earliest representation of Old London Bridge comes to us from the fifteenth century, in a miniature that graces the poems of Charles d’Orléans.[87] It shows five piers much broader than the adjacent voids, also a line of picturesque timber houses jutting out from the parapet, and a great chapel of apsidal form, with wrought pinnacles and two tiers of decorated windows. This Gothic church, dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, rises from water-level to a height exceeding that of the tallest house on the bridge.

In Howell’s “Londinopolis” (edition of 1657) it is said that during King John’s reign, 1199-1216, a mayor of London, “being master workman of the bridge, builded from the foundation the large chappel on the bridge upon his own charges, which chappel was then endowed with two priests and four clerks, beside chantries.” It was put on the east side; there were two storeys, one with an entrance from the river, the other with a porch on the roadway. So boat-farers had their own place of worship on London Bridge, and they walked to their praying-stools over a pavement of black and white marble. Both storeys were brilliantly lighted; in the upper one there were eight windows.

The first architect of Old London Bridge, Peter Colechurch, “priest and chaplain,” died in 1205, and was buried in the Chapel of St. Thomas, just twenty-two years after Saint Bénézet was laid to rest in his bridge chapel at Avignon. Between 1176 and 1183 Colechurch may have had some correspondence with Bénézet, for both were heads of religious bodies engaged at the same time on similar work. “Their letters to one another would interest engineers,” remarks Professor Fleeming Jenkin, as if engineers alone were attracted by Old London Bridge.

In 1176, when Colechurch prepared his designs, everybody was excited about a great and very useful enterprise. The King, the clergy, the citizens of London, even country-folk, endowed the bridge with lands or sent money to hasten its completion. The Archbishop of Canterbury subscribed a thousand marks. During the sixteenth century the list of donors was still to be seen “in a table fair written for posterity,” treasured in the chapel on the bridge.[88] Stow makes no reference to the mayor who at his own expense built the chapel; he says only that Colechurch was buried “in the chapel builded on the same bridge in the year 1205.” Four years later the bridge was finished by three “worthy merchants of London—Serle Mercer, William Almaine, and Benedick Botewrite, principal masters of work.” Their director-in-chief was a Frenchman, brother Isembert by name, whose magnificent bridge at Saintes had delighted King John, and who was chosen to superintend the finishing of Old London Bridge a little while before the death of Colechurch.

In July, 1212, a terrific fire occurred on the bridge, beginning at the Southwark end, but spreading to the houses at the north end also; no fewer than 3000 persons lost their lives. Citizens gathered at the north end to watch the spectacle, and were overtaken by the swift-travelling flames and by panic also. Many jumped into the river and were drowned; others were killed by falling timbers, and many were scorched to death. Again and again, in after years, London Bridge and her chapel were ravaged by fire; as in 1300, in 1471, in 1632, in 1666, and in September, 1725.

Here is Stow’s picture of the houses:—

“The building was of timber, very substantial and beautiful, for the houses were three stories high, besides the cellars, which were within and between the piers, and over the houses were stately platforms, leaded, with rails and ballasters about them, very commodious and pleasant for walking and enjoying so fine a prospect up and down the river, and some had pretty little gardens with arbours.”

All this fine architecture was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but a still better pile of buildings was put up, and now the houses were separated by a roadway twenty feet wide. In earlier times the passage between the houses ranged in width from twelve feet to fourteen. At last, in 1756, every house on the bridge was pulled down, but the chapel was granted a few years more of life. Guess why? Because some vandal or other was willing to use the chapel as a warehouse. At about the same time the chapel on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire, was a tobacco shop. As for the merchant who leased the Chapel of St. Thomas à Becket, he built a new ceiling with heavy beams that crossed each other; soon he tired of his warehouse, and then—then the historic old fane was destroyed. A city is like a board meeting—from time to time it has a conscience.

Two other historic facts find a place here. In March, 1782, the right of toll was discontinued, so that Londoners were separated from a direct personal interest in the welfare of their bridge, just as free education separates parents from their most sacred duties. Eight years earlier, in 1774, the waterworks of little windmills were destroyed by fire, after bickering for 192 years under the shadow of Old London Bridge.

The end was drawing near. New London Bridge was begun on March 15th, 1824. George Rennie made the designs after studying the Bridge of Augustus at Rimini, and his brother, Sir John Rennie, directed the workmen on a site 200 feet west of the Old Bridge; just as Peter Colechurch crossed the Thames a little west of the earliest known timber bridge built by Londoners.[89] It took only seven years to carry out the designs of Rennie, whereas Colechurch and his successor, the Frenchman Isembert, were busy for thirty-three years. On August 1st, 1831, New London Bridge was opened by William IV, and by the second year of Victoria’s reign the old bridge was dead and gone. It had taken a long time to murder her, fragment by fragment, but yet she lived almost as long as the first Westminster Bridge, designed by M. Labelye, which lasted from 1750 to 1853.

NEW LONDON BRIDGE, DESIGNED BY GEORGE RENNIE, AND CARRIED OUT BY HIS BROTHER, SIR JOHN RENNIE. OPENED TO THE PUBLIC IN 1831

One purpose of Old London Bridge has been forgotten: she was an arcaded dam, and she deepened the water for shipping on the eastern side. According to Arber’s reprint of “Euphues and his England,” there were twenty arches in all, “whereof each one is made of excellent freestone squared, every one of them being three-score foote in height, and full twenty in distance one from an other.” This latter statement is incorrect. The arches ranged in width from 18 feet to 32 feet 6 inches, and the piers varied in breadth from 25 to 34 feet; they were raised on strong elm piles, covered with thick planks bolted together, and they occupied not less than two-thirds of the waterway. Yet modern engineers played the fool with this ancient breakwater. Several arches were thrown into one large span, so the Thames poured through the bridge with an increased and uneven force; the ground current developed a scour that dug deep holes under the piers, and into these holes tons of stuff were poured ineffectually, for the scour continued to undercut the foundations. Even Labelye’s bridge at Westminster was affected very much by this new devilry in the ground current of the Thames.

It was Euphues who described the old bridge as “a continuall streete, well replenyshed with large and stately houses on both sides.” To-day we have one bridge well replenished with houses (unless the vandalism of trade has made a recent feast of it), but its architecture is not large and stately. I refer to William Pulteney’s Bridge at Bath, an experiment of the eighteenth century, when amateurs trifled with architecture, and architects trifled with amateurs. The structure is sedately prim and dull, but yet it is admirable, for it has tried to renew in England a generative tradition that links every housed bridge to the earliest lake-villages.

So I am glad to say that the crippled old buildings on the High Bridge at Lincoln—a favourite subject of Peter de Wint—have been restored. This work was done, and done very well, thirteen years ago, under the direction of two architects, and a long account of the repairs, with a full-page illustration, was published in “The Builder,” March 21, 1903. The illustration shows the back view of the houses with the bridge beneath and beyond. The restoration is conservative and excellent, but time alone can mellow it from a thorough newness into a ripe completeness. Even then it will be a poor little monument when compared with its Florentine superior the Ponte Vecchio, which history gives to Taddeo Gaddi and the fourteenth century.

The Ponte Vecchio has but one fault—the long and level roof, which has two parallel lines of a most unpliant straightness. Why should an architect put himself at odds with the curved witchery that Nature gives to her sky-lines and horizons? In other respects the Ponte Vecchio has a charming citizenship haunted by romance. Even the beaked piers are not too large, though they are said to date from the year 1355. Perhaps they were remodelled by Renaissance art; certainly they have a style not unlike that of the great Ammanati. As for the three arches, they are well balanced, their roadway has a gentle slope, and their shape goes about half-way between a cycloid and a surbased round arch. The cycloid form appears in the arches of another Florentine bridge, Ammanati’s masterpiece, the incomparable Ponte della Trinità. Some of the many-windowed tiny cots that project from the parapet of the Ponte Vecchio seem to be stuffy compromises between tombs and homes; they would be fit resting-places for the occasional ghosts that men of science welcome, after infinite hesitation unrelieved by humour.

But I regret always that from the Ponte Vecchio I can get no idea of the effect made in nature by Old London Bridge. Is there extant any bridge that helps us to realise the work of Colechurch and Isembert? The once famous watermills at Meaux, in Brie, and the Pont du Marché there, are somewhat of an aid in this matter. Brangwyn visited them in 1913, and was fascinated. Some writers say that the first watermills at Meaux were built in the twelfth century; and on a recent photograph taken from a picture I read: Meaux, Les Moulins sur Pilotis, xii. siècle. But these mills disappeared before the year 1835, and they belonged to the end of the fifteenth century, not to the twelfth. Viollet-le-Duc put this date on record, together with the fact that the bridge and its mills were entirely of wood.[90] In 1420 the English captured Meaux, and they held it till 1438, when they were defeated by the Constable de Richmont. Had they retained the little town till the end of the century, we might venture to suppose that the timber bridge and its wooden mills were built by our ancestors, in order to keep themselves in mind of Old London Bridge. The modern mills are many-storeyed places of business, and they stand very erect on stone piers. To-day the Pont du Marché has eight stone arches, and a single row of early timbered houses. I have four photographs of it, and in each it is charming. Next summer I may see it in nature, but if a pontist travelled to see all the bridges that attract him, he would need a life of several hundred years and a river Pactolus to finance his research.[91]

Is there any reason why England should not have a great bridge of shops, or of watermills, or of houses? Let Brangwyn and Mr. Lutyens collaborate, and then we shall have a masterpiece indeed! Here and there we have a small bridge with a watermill close at hand; there is one in Sussex between Midhurst and Easebourne, for example, but I know not one that warms my patriotism with a glow of pride. Viollet-le-Duc draws three charming pictures of French mill bridges which have disappeared. There was the Pont aux Meuniers at Paris, that crossed the great arm of the Seine below the Pont au Change, facing the Palais; it resembled the Millers’ Bridge at Meaux. A great stone bridge at Châlon-sur-Saône was decorated with round towers above the piers, and between these towers, on the right of every arch, a little mill was busy. This mediæval arrangement, so rich with a quaint citizenship, lasted till the seventeenth century. Over the Loire at Nantes was another picturesque bridge that united in itself the merits of many good burgesses. Impudent houses with peaked roofs were balanced on the piers and throve well as shops; a footway of wood was corbelled out from the parapet; and between some of the piers windmills behaved like human creatures, for the harder they toiled over the business of daily bread, the more loudly they complained. Their noise implied that corn was very hard to crush; and the reluctant movement of their revolving wind-sails was an image of self-pity.

THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE AT VENICE, OVER THE CANAL OF ST. GIOBBE. BRICK AND STONE. RENAISSANCE

As mediæval towns of importance were encompassed by walls and defended by castles, there was little free space; hence the building of a new bridge was always a great event; it enlarged the civic life and prepared a foundation for a new street or for a fresh line of defensive works. Thus the Bridge of Saintes was a long line of fortifications ([p. 300]), while the bridges of Paris were housed and populous, unlike many a village where poor Jacques, in the midst of unceasing war, lived the life of a hunted wolf. Unfortunately, the tenants of Paris bridges wanted to thrive at their landlords’ expense, and at last they ruined the landlords, who were bridges, not men, I am sorry to say. The great corbels that supported the houses pressed too heavily on the spandrils; caves and hiding-places were dug into the piers; and when the houses were removed from the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont Saint-Michel, it was found that every tenant had misused his home, even to the extent of excavating secret chambers behind the haunches of an arch. For human nature has ever claimed the privilege of doing justice to itself in actions of foolish violence.

For instance, it is disgusting to read about the desecration thrust upon English bridge chapels after the reign of Henry the Eighth. As an example we can take the Chapel of St. Mary on Wakefield Bridge, Yorkshire, a beautiful piece of Decorated Gothic dating from the fourteenth century. After the Reformation it became many profane things, including an old clothes shop, a warehouse, a den of flax-dressers, a newsroom, a cheesecake house, a tailor’s shop, and I know not what else; so “we think upon her stones, and it pitieth us to see her in the dust.” At last—it was in 1847—an effort was made to rescue her from further degradation: quite a big effort, for it cost £3000, yet the cause had nothing to do with sport or with self-advertisement. To raise so much money in the service of history was a great achievement. But the chosen architect was less fortunate than he might have been; he was one of those Victorian “restorers” whose zeal at times was excessive. In a few months the Chapel of St. Mary was rebuilt, almost, so thorough was the renovation. Even the original front was torn off and carted to the grounds of Kettlethorpe Park, where it still remains, I believe; and not enough care was shown in the choice of building materials, for the new work was carried out in Bath stone and Caen stone, which were much too soft for the Wakefield atmosphere. Indeed, the new front perished so quickly that in less than forty-five years a part of its detail looked more friable than the ancient work at Kettlethorpe; and a second renovation became necessary.

The subscriptions raised for these remodellings and repairs call to mind the fact that in much earlier times Wakefield Bridge and its chapel were objects of charity. For example, in 1391, the fourteenth year of Richard II, William de Bayley, of Mitton in Craven, left C sol ad confirmacionem cantarie in Capella Sce Mariæ sup Pont de Wakefield; and a deed dated the 27th of September, 1454, the thirty-second year of Henry VI, mentions a yearly dole of three shillings to be paid to the bridge chapel at Wakefield. At an earlier date, in 1398, two chantries were ordained in St. Mary’s Chapel, thanks to the generosity of William Terry and Robert Heth, who obtained licences from Richard II “to give and assign to two chaplains celebrating divine service in the chapel of St. Mary, on Wakefield Bridge, lately built, ten pounds rent in Wakefield, Stanley, Ossett, Pontefract, Horbury, Heckmondwike, Shafton, Darfield, Preston, Jackling, and Frystone by the water.” Norrison Scatcherd gives this quotation from a document in the archives of the Hatfield family, but I know not what to say of it; for a charter of an earlier date mentions a sum of £10 and two chaplains ([p. 230]).

However, the chapel is built on a little island in the river Calder, and the plan is arranged below so as to offer the least resistance to the river. “The extra width required for the chapel above is obtained by corbelling out on each side, which gives a total external width of about twenty feet. The total length is about forty-five feet. The front towards the bridge is very elaborate, and is divided into five ogee-headed compartments, with buttresses between. Three of these, the centre and two ends, are doorways, the other two being panelled. Over this is a series of five panels filled with sculpture representing the Annunciation, the Birth of Jesus, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost on the Disciples. Surmounting the whole are battlements; and a bold group of pinnacles at each end of the front over the buttresses. Each side has three three-light windows, and the east end has a large window of five lights; all have rich Decorated tracery. A well-designed turret stands at the north-east angle, and contains the staircase which communicates with the roof and crypt. On the north, south, and east fronts is a panelled parapet, and there is a canopied niche over the east windows. There was formerly a priest’s house adjoining, but the last vestiges of it were removed in 1866.... The windows on the south and east are filled with stained glass. The interior is in good repair, and is fitted up for service.”[92] And service also is held there.[93]

Leland, who returned from his antiquarian tour in 1542, collected in Wakefield a good many suppositions about the origin of St. Mary’s Chapel. He was happy there, because a right honest man fared well for “2 pens a meale.” On the east side of a fair bridge of stone, under whose nine arches the Calder flowed, Leland was charmed to see a right goodly chapel of Our Lady, with two cantuary priests founded in it, by the townsmen, as some say; but, on the other hand, the Dukes of York were taken as founders because they had obtained the mortmain. He heard someone say that Edward IV’s father, or else the Earl of Rutland, brother to Edward IV, “was a great doer of it,” for “a sore batell was fought in the south feeldes of this bridge,” and in the flight of the Duke of York’s party, either the duke himself, or his son the Earl of Rutland, was slain a little above the bars, beyond the bridge, going up into the town of Wakefield. “At this place is set up a cross in rei memoriam.”

Very often to-day, as in Leland’s time, the Chapel of St. Mary is supposed to have been founded later than 1460, partly to commemorate the battle of Sandal Castle Field, now called the battle of Wakefield, and partly as a monument to a boy of eighteen, poor Edmund Earl of Rutland, second son of the Duke of York, who was murdered by the “black Lord Clifford,” called the Butcher. Then a royal chantry seems to have been founded in St. Mary’s Chapel, and endowed; but chantries were founded often in bridge chapels, as we have seen in the case of London Bridge ([p. 217]); and so we must not suppose that “chantry” and “chapel” mean always the same thing. Moreover, in architectural character the chapel belongs to about the time of Edward II, who died in 1327. This was proved by Buckler, and in a charter of about 1358, dated at Wakefield, Edward III settled “£10 per annum on William Kaye and William Bull and their successors for ever to perform Divine Service in a chapel of St. Mary newly built on the bridge at Wakefield.”[94]

Still, the precise date of the foundation is unimportant. Scatcherd ascribes it to a time earlier than 1357, and dwells upon a resemblance between St. Mary’s Chapel at Wakefield and Prior Crawden’s Chapel at Ely, 1321-40; he is “almost persuaded” that they were built by the same great architect, Alan de Walsingham.[95]

I chose the story of this bridge chapel as an instance of the desecration thrust upon old English shrines after the Reformation had let loose the creed of self into sect-making zealotry. In the presence of fine art Puritans were often like starving dogs in the presence of raw meat. Though every mediæval bridge without exception was united to the Church by a Christian symbol, a cross or a crucifix, yet the Puritans were so thorough in their fanaticism that only a bridge here and there was allowed to keep even the stump of a smashed cross. Some broken crosses were handed on to Victoria’s time, but highway boards and their parapet repairs destroyed the stumps one by one, as in the case of Ashford Bridge, Derbyshire. A few years ago the stump of a cross had not yet been stripped from one Derbyshire bridge, the Derwent packhorse bridge, but I dare not say that it still remains. At any moment the vandalism of a “restoration” may remind us that our highway boards ought to be guided and disciplined by independent committees of architects and artists. Their work is far less intelligent than that of the Ponts et Chaussées in France. And so, what with the ravaging hands of our roadway officials, and what with the destructive sanctity of Puritans, our old bridges and their religious adjuncts have suffered long and much and continually. Many bridge chapels have been destroyed, as at Cromford, Doncaster, Ludlow, Bideford, Richmond (Yorks), Leeds, Newcastle, Barnard Castle, Durham (on the Elvet Bridge), Catterick, Bridgenorth, Bristol, Wallingford, Bedford (St. Thomas’s Chapel, Bunyan’s gaol), and Droitwich, where the high road passed through the chapel, and separated the congregation from the reading-desk and from the pulpit! What a relic of old wayfaring life! Yet it was cleared away as hateful to progress.

A small oratory remains on the bridge at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. It is not quite on the same lines as the original structure, for in the seventeenth century its roofing was altered into a sort of dome built with stone. It is a “housing,” a tiny place for a passing prayer, not a chapel; and this class of bridge oratory has become so uncommon that I doubt whether another exists. As Mr. Emanuel Green has said, it “is now perhaps unique,” and “should be carefully preserved.”[96] In recent times neither reverence nor care has been bestowed on this oratory. After the Reformation it was profaned, as a matter of course. For a long time it was used as a “lock-up,” and in 1887 it was a powder magazine!

Its pyramidal roof is crowned with a tall finial, which in its turn carries a pretty wind vane; and in the wind vane we find the emblem of St. Nicholas—a gudgeon. The townsfolk used to be known as Bradford gudgeon, and those of them who had been shut up in the little prison on the bridge were said to have been “under the fish and over the water.”[97]

At St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, called Slepe in “Domesday Book,” and Asleep to-day, there is another degraded oratory, a bigger one, with an apsidal termination eastward. Its original parapet has been torn down, and a brick house of two storeys adds greatly to its height. Derby also has a bridge chapel, whose history may be studied in the works of the Rev. Dr. Cox; but I am more interested in the oratory on Rotherham Bridge, Yorkshire. Here, as at Wakefield, the chapel stands on a small island, the upper part is corbelled out on each side, and the end against the bridge is carried by a half-arch. The plan is a rectangle about 30 ft. by 14 ft., while at Wakefield the external width is 20 ft. and the total length about 45 ft. During many years Rotherham Chapel was almost as beautiful as the masterpiece at Wakefield; and even now, after infinite ill-usage, there is charm in the embattled parapet graced with pinnacles.

GOTHIC BRIDGE AT BARNARD CASTLE, YORKSHIRE

We hear of this chapel for the first time in the will of one John Bokyns, who in 1483 left three and fourpence “to the fabric of the chapel to be built on Rotherham Bridge.” There seems to have been no endowment, as this chapel was unnamed by the Commissioners of Henry VIII. In 1681 she was turned into an almshouse, she was a prison in 1778, and also in 1831; but at last she became more reputable as a warehouse. May we hope that her lost window tracery will be renewed, and will she ever be restored to the service of the Church? Her degradation has lasted far too long, certainly, but it is not easy to collect money for church restoration. If our golf fanatics took the matter in hand and made an appeal to the public, their popularity would bring in subscriptions.

From a standpoint of historic social life this irreverence to ancient bridge chapels cannot be anything less than horrible, because the earlier England owed all her best qualities to that faith which preceded Protestantism, and which passed without much injury through the terrible alembics of mediæval war and of social egotism. In Shakespeare himself we find a product of the spectacular display which the old Church had encouraged by her festivals; and it is certain also that Shakespeare could not have been a dramatic poet if the Puritanism of his time had been a leading motive-power of public life, and not merely a writer of unpopular books. No pontist should fail to read the early Puritan scribblers, who give in a frenzy of caricature much valuable social history, without a knowledge of which the sixteenth century cannot be understood. Their language is graphic, and so violent that it takes one’s breath away; but in all reprints, as in those of the New Shakespeare Society, it is kept away from the general reader by the dismal pedantry which copies the freakish spelling of sixteenth-century books.

Let me give, with modernised spelling, an abridged extract from an Elizabethan Puritan, Phillip Stubbes, whose “Anatomy of Abuses” has come at last into the history of historians. My aim is to show three things: a spirit of fierce intolerance not yet popular enough to close the theatres of London, but foolish enough to wreck shrines and to take pride in a very bad system of supposed moral teaching. It was the earlier Cromwell who appointed Sir William Bassett, Knight, to the holy office of shrine destroyer and image breaker; and Bassett, whose humour was killed by zealotry, regarded as sinful things even the baths at Buxton, for he locked them up and sealed them, “that none shall enter to wash ... until your lordship’s pleasure be further known.” Into this novel sanctity Phillip Stubbes poured his abundant venom. Being at heart a thorough Puritan, it never occurred to him that it would be better to educate human nature than to take away from it the discipline of temptation. As in earlier times the better minds and characters had sneaked away from life into nunneries and monasteries, so Phillip Stubbes wished mankind to be a recluse, a hermit, separated by stern laws from everything that folly could abuse. Because minstrels and mimics sang many a lewd song, as do fools to-day, Stubbes raged against all itinerant clowns, buffoons, and singers, and demanded that they should be put down; by no other means could men be taught to value a little decency and self-respect. His language runs thus:—

“Such drunken sockets and bawdy parasites range the country, rhyming and singing unclean, corrupt and filthy songs, in taverns, ale-houses, inns, and other public assemblies.... Every town, city, and country is full of these minstrels to pipe up a dance to the devil.... But some of them will reply, and say, ‘What, sir! we have licences from justices of the peace to pipe and use our minstrelsy to our best commodity.’ Cursed be those licences which license any man to get his living with the destruction of many thousands! But have you a licence from the archjustice of peace, Christ Jesus? If you have not ... then may you, as rogues, extravagants, and stragglers from the heavenly country, be arrested of the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus, and be punished with eternal death, notwithstanding your pretended licences from earthly men....”

Briefly, the people had degraded their singers, just as to-day they degrade those Sunday newspapers which have the widest circulation; yet Stubbes believed that the people could be saved from themselves if their victims were condemned to everlasting punishment by “the high justice of peace, Christ Jesus.” In like manner the people were to be improved somehow by the destruction of old votive shrines, or by the desecration of the bridge chapels in which for ages the pilgrims of England had solaced their long journeys. Henry VIII himself, in 1510, is said to have made a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham, barefooted, and carrying a rich necklace—a light but expensive gift that did not add to his fatigue. Erasmus visited the same great shrine and kissed the relics, and all at once the Virgin nodded at him, owing to the indiscretion of a priest who pulled some strings. In the fourteenth century thirty-eight shrines drew pilgrims to Norfolk; for illness rambled from place to place, feeding a superstitious piety, and praying for that relief which doctors in their wild ignorance could not give. The shrines of Europe were the only physicians that the sick dared to trust.

GOTHIC BRIDGE WITH SHRINES AT ELCHE IN SPAIN

Many a pilgrim visited the Pont St. Bénézet at Avignon, and legend speaks also of miracles; the good friar was buried in his bridge chapel, and during his life he healed the sick and the maimed. I know not why legend should say these things, since Bénézet did quite enough good work by building his noble structure over the Rhône, a terrible river. A Roman bridge had occupied the same spot, so that Bénézet may have used some of the Roman foundations. His work, in any case, was done with unusual rapidity, being finished in eight years (1177-1185).[98] In Brangwyn’s glorious picture of the Pont St. Bénézet one romantic feature is the friar-architect’s tomb, the venerable Chapel of St. Nicholas; and historians dwell upon the fact that never once has the chapel been injured by floods or by wars. All has been wrecked except the four arches dominated by the shrine of St. Bénézet. Pope Clement VI (1342-1352) had to rebuild four arches; in 1395, during a fierce attack on the palace of the Popes, the bridge was cut by the Catalans and Aragonese, who destroyed an arch; and this breach was not repaired with stone till the year 1418. The masonry was not good, for in 1602 the arch gave way and caused the loss of three others. Disaster followed disaster, two arches falling in 1633 and two in the winter of 1670. Turn to the Sieur Tassin’s “Plans et Profils des principales Villes et Lieux considérables de France,” issued in 1652, and you will find a view of Saint Bénézet’s Bridge, with two arches missing on Barthelasse Island, and three on the great arm of the Rhône. As a rule such gaps were bridged with timber, because a French bridge cut in war could not be repaired until permission had been gained from the foe who had done the damage. This curious fact in mediæval history I take from Viollet-le-Duc; and it may help to explain why the masterpiece of St. Bénézet was allowed to perish.

Bénézet constructed twenty-one[99] arches, and the line of his bridge made an elbow pointing upstream, beyond Barthelasse Island, on the Villeneuve branch of the Rhône. Two ideas governed this angular disposition: first, to thrust into the river a tremendous wedge of arcaded stonework to resist floods; next to thwart an attack by cavalry and infantry; since a bridge with a bend in it would be more difficult to storm than a level and straight footway. In Spain there are several bridges of this angular sort, notably a very long one over the Pisuerga at Torquemada; and in Corsica also there is a fine example, but in caricature, the bridge over the Tavignano being shaped like a Z. Bénézet made another concession to tactical defence: his bridge was only 4 metres 90 wide, including the thickness of the parapets, so it was very narrow in proportion to the nine hundred metres of its length. Just a few soldiers in a line could have walked along it from end to end; and wheeled traffic must have been hindered, for at one point—face to face with the chapel—the roadway dwindled to half its breadth. Even in times when carts and chariots were long and narrow, a journey across this bridge on a market day must have been an adventure.

This cramped road over the Rhône was the only permanent way connecting the Papal territory of Avignon and the French territory of Languedoc. Many troubles arose on this account, and France never rested till she had gained control over the Pont Saint-Bénézet and Avignon. A century after Bénézet’s death the King of France put up a bullying fortress on the right bank, and closed the Villeneuve entrance whenever he liked. For about fifty years Avignon took no steps to counterbalance this attack on her liberties; then a Bastille was built on her side of the river, and now the Pont Saint-Bénézet was nearly as martial as the Bridge of Saintes ([p. 300]) or as the Pont d’Orléans, which from October 12, 1428, to the arrival of Jeanne d’Arc on April 29, 1429, aided Gaucour to baffle the earls of Salisbury and Suffolk. In the eighth year of the fifteenth century the contention between France and Avignon reached a crisis, not at all an infrequent thing in their history; but this crisis of 1408 unseated the Papacy at Avignon, and expelled Benedict XIII, bringing to an end a religious domination which had lasted in the city for ninety-nine years.

It is clear from this brief record of events that the Pont St. Bénézet, like many another great bridge of the Middle Ages, had but a poor chance of becoming social and useful. Instead of being an open road to the democratic spirit and the growth of trade, she kept watch and ward incessantly, and aided the misruling class to nourish their egotisms without any care at all for the common weal. It said very little for the half-sense of ordinary men that they in their millions were unable to defend themselves against a tiny class of despots. The people were like leaves on forest trees, that fluttered ineffectually as soon as a gale began to blow. For the ounces of brain in each human skull have never been of any real worth until genius has taken control of them, for good or for ill. More than one insect has had a brain more fertile than that of the average man. Thus the cerebral ganglia of the ant, though not so large as a quarter of a small pin’s head, have evolved a marvellous routine of life, which includes the making of bridges and the boring of tunnels under running water. Ants were civil engineers long before men had constructed their first tunnels and drains. Have you ever tried to imagine what would have happened in the world of primitive men if every atom in every ounce of human brain had been as fertile as the cerebral ganglia of the ant? A civilization no worse than our own might have been evolved by the year 100,000 B.C., if not earlier.

From time to time, however, amid the congealed blood that lay so thick over the mediæval history of France, some true social justice did shine out, here and there. A few French nobles built communal bridges, and set the Law to keep them for ever from the tyrannies of a superior class that found in ordinary men neither the intelligence of ants nor the discipline that united wolves into formidable packs. The people being too silly to defend their own rights, these few good nobles tried to foresee all dangers, but their legal documents were rarely strong enough to resist their incessant foes, the stupidity of the mob and the gradual encroachments of military leaders. When Eudes, Count of Chartres, built a bridge at Tours, as an act of piety that would benefit his soul, he decreed that its public value for all time was to be as free from all restraints as a church. At an earlier time, in a deed of 998, William the Great, Duke of Aquitaine, went so far as to forbid pour toujours a collection of tolls on the Pont Royal. He did not realise that his populace would cease to value the bridge as soon as they got the freedom of it for nothing. Again, in France during the Middle Ages no bridge could be fortified without permission from its founder or founders. This was a rule or law, and yet it must have been broken hundreds of times, for what bridge of any importance did not become a fortified work, a genuine stronghold?

OLD BRIDGE OVER THE BORNE AT ESPALY, NEAR LE PUY IN FRANCE; BEHIND THE CROIX DE LA PAILLE, A ROCK OF VOLCANIC BRECCIA, WITH HOUSES, AND WITH RUINS OF A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY CASTLE

One form or custom of the Middle Ages tried to encompass bloodshed with the glamour of religious fervour. After the battle of Towton, for example, a chapel was built on the stricken field by the Yorkists as a memorial to the souls of their dead. And a famous chapel on the Ouse Bridge at York is said to have been erected after a stiff fight between the citizens and a Scotchman named John Comyn. The fray happened on the bridge itself, in 1168, or thereabouts, and John Comyn lost several of his followers. Then came some negotiations, in the course of which it was agreed that the city should erect a chapel on the spot, and find priests to celebrate mass for the souls of the dead. Another story relates that in 1153, when Saint William was restored to the See of York, a vast crowd assembled on a timber bridge that crossed the Ouse, so eager were the citizens to welcome their prelate, who in 1147 had been deprived of office after a reign of three years. In the hustle and excitement of the home-coming, the bridge gave way, and many persons fell into the river, but no one perished because William prayed and his prayer was answered. To commemorate this miracle a chapel was built on the new bridge. This legend may have some truth in it, for the chapel was dedicated to Saint William; and perhaps the other legend about John Comyn is not entirely mythical.

One thing is certain: that in Norman times a stone bridge was built at York and graced with a fine chapel. Between 1215 and 1256 it was reconstructed by Archbishop Walter de Gray, who preserved some portions of the Norman chapel. More than three centuries later, in 1564, two arches were destroyed by a flood, with twelve houses that stood upon them; and for nearly two years the bridge remained in a ruined state. Then the broken arches were rebuilt in the thirteenth-century style. Among the contributors to this work was Lady Jane Hall, whose donation was recorded on a brass plate on the north side of the bridge. The inscription was quaint:—

William Watson, Lord Mayor, An. Dom. 1566.
Lady Jane Hall to: here the works of faith doth shew;
By giving a hundred pounds this bridge to renew.

On the west side of Ouse Bridge there were several houses, which flanked the Chapel of Saint William. At the Reformation the chapel contained several chantries, the original grants of which are still among the records of the city. After the Reformation, of course, these pious endowments were confiscated, and the beautiful little building was turned into an exchange where the York Society of Hamburg Merchants assembled every morning to transact business. At last, in 1810, the chapel was removed. Some parts of it were excellent work in the Early English style, while the porch and a stone screen were enriched with cable and chevron ornaments, characteristic of Norman work. A few etchings of these charming details were published in Cave’s “Antiquities of York” (1813).

At the east side of Ouse Bridge stood the old gaol for debtors, built in the sixteenth century. It lasted till 1724, when it was purchased by the city and the ainstey, and a better place was built, by assessment, as a free prison. The old bridge was condemned as dangerous in 1808, and on December 10, 1810, the foundation-stone of a new bridge was laid.[100]

Among my thousands of notes and papers I have a good article on ancient bridge chapels written in 1882 by the late S. Wayland Kershaw, F.S.A., of Lambeth Palace Library. Mr. Kershaw made a study of old Rochester Bridge and its chapel, which stood on the main road to the Continent, close to the great cathedral, whose main architects were Bishops Ernulph and Gundulph. These bishops favoured the bridge, partly because it brought pilgrims to the shrine at Rochester, and partly because it was a kindness to all wayfarers. “The Crusader on his way to the East, the stately cardinal and foreign prince, the wayworn pilgrim, and the merchant-voyager would form but a few of the passengers ... who would say a passing prayer at the Bridge Chapel of All Souls.”[101] Rochester Bridge in mediæval times was closely linked to the history of the cathedral. The first bridge was constructed of wood, and, according to Prior Ernulph’s testimony, it existed before 1215. In Vol. VII of “Archæologia,” the Society of Antiquaries published a plan of this ancient timber bridge, with a most valuable description. At the east end there was a tower of wood, with strong defensive gates, which may have resembled the timber fortifications with which the Romans barred their wooden bridges. In 1281, according to Kilburne’s “Survey of Kent,” the earliest bridge at Rochester was borne down by the Medway after a severe winter; and there is no mention of another bridge till the year 1387, when Sir John Cobham and Sir R. Knolles put up “a fair bridge of stone.” Such was the slack and lethargic citizenship of Rochester. About 1800 years after the Pons Sublicius was thrown across the Tiber, a common timber bridge was carried over the Medway in an effort of progress. As for the belated stone bridge, the charter of its foundation is preserved in the Bishops’ Registers, and a transcript of it is given in Thorpe’s “Custumale Roffense.” Philipott, in his “Kent Surveyed,” 1659, says that the chapel on Rochester Bridge was founded in 1399 by John de Cobham, and dedicated to the Holy Trinity, but called at its first institution All Souls’ Chapel, because prayers and orisons were to be offered up there for the health of all Christian souls. Two earlier writers—Fabyan in 1406, and Grafton in 1409—attribute the finishing of the chapel to Sir R. Knolles, Knight.[102] Another chapel, a small one, was built on the stone quay at the Strood end of the bridge, its founder being Gilbert de Glanville, Bishop of Rochester (1185-1215). “We learn that Queen Isabella, when she came to Strood in 1357, entered the Chapel of St. Mary, and offered an oblation of six and eightpence in honour of the eleven thousand virgins.” Gracious! This army of fair saints inspired a very wee act of devotional charity. There is reason to believe that the larger chapel was not closed by legal dissolution, but passed out of use when pilgrims became afraid to anger their Protestant neighbours; for in the nineteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign Thorpe wrote as follows in his “Custumale Roffense”:—

“The Queen’s Attorney-General sued the wardens of the bridge for £513, being the amount of £18 per annum for twenty-eight years and a half, the last past, which sum was at that time presumed to be forfeited and due to the Queen by virtue of the Act 1, Ed. VI, for dissolving charities. It not appearing to the jury that any service had been performed here, nor a stipend paid to any chaplain or chantry priest for officiating here, for five years next before the passing that Act, a verdict was given for the Wardens.”

In 1882, when Mr. Kershaw wrote his paper, the Chapel of All Souls was roofless, and nearly hidden by new buildings. Its width was about fifteen feet, and its length about forty feet. Windows were pierced in the north and south walls, and two of them were filled with brickwork or with masonry. In the south wall were traces of a piscina, and some ornamental details had been saved from the general wreckage.

Much more might be written on bridge chapels and crosses, but this monograph is only a brief introduction to a vast subject, and we must pass on to the other topics after noting two points more. Both concern the sanctification of bridges by means of religious emblems. It seems quite certain that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were most favourable to wayside crosses. By then very popular saints had been added to the old shrines, and the custom of making pilgrimages was tormented by fewer dangers, as a rule. Many a cross was a simple thing of wood fixed in a stone base, and sometimes it carried at top a small wind vane or weathercock. Many crosses were raised to commemorate historical events, while others were put up by sinners who wished to announce their repentance. Here and there a beautiful cross became celebrated. For example, the Belle Croix on the old bridge at Orléans was a nobly modelled crucifix of bronze that stood up high from the buttress of the middle pier; its pedestal was ornamented with low-reliefs representing the Holy Virgin, St. Peter, St. Paul, St. James, St. Stephen, and the bishops St. Aignan and St. Euverte. As we have seen ([p. 230]), the centre of a mediæval bridge was marked invariably by a cross. To-day, on the Continent, this old religious custom gives grace to a few bridges, and I value a large photograph of Trier Bridge over the Moselle, where the Virgin is enniched above the middle buttress, and where a crucifix, flanked by two columns, rises above the parapet.

Yet we must not rush to the conclusion that this old sacred custom had its original source in the Christian religion. At first it may have belonged to a faith in evil spirits, whose power for mischief may have seemed to be increased by every roadway that enabled them to pass over running water. I have by my side the photograph of a steep bridge in Western China, at Shih-Chuan, and here below the middle of the parapet is a small image of stone representing a tutelary god! To me it is a curious little bit of rude sculpture, all head and stomach and truncated thighs. Its position on the bridge corresponds with that of the cross on mediæval parapets—a fact of great interest.[103] Brangwyn depicts, in a very brilliant pen-drawing, a Chinese bridge larger and finer than the one at Shih-Chuan, but there is no image, so I set great store by the evidence of idolatry in the smaller bridge.

STAIRCASE BRIDGE IN CHINA

Again, the province of Sichuan (pronounced Sit-you-on), in Western China, preserves another ancient custom. When a flood threatens to overwhelm a bridge, and particularly a bamboo suspension bridge, which is a common thing in the mountains, “the local official and the people throw a living pig into the river, to stay the rising water: the pig disappears, and the flood goes on.”[104]

This dire superstition is far more primitive than the idol fastened below the parapet of a Chinese bridge; and so, perhaps, we find in these things a parent emotion and its improved offspring. Perhaps: for Superstition rests on dark foundations; we know not precisely where it fades into a belief that is genuinely kinder.

III

We pass on to some important topics that worry a writer because they cannot be arranged in a neat scheme. Some of them are technical, but everybody will be able to understand their bearing on the main subject. We have seen that fords gave place to bridges very slowly, even in some neighbourhoods where the Church was exceedingly active, as at Rochester.[105] Can you explain why? There were a good many reasons, and among them is the fact that it was a long time before bridges won a good reputation among the people. Wood being abundant everywhere, they were timber bridges at first, and rudely built; many of them were carried away by storms, as Matthew Paris related in the thirteenth century. So people set their hearts on the greater safety of stone bridges; but money was difficult to collect, and stonework cost a great deal more than timber; and no bridge could be built until permission had been gained from the King, often after tedious negotiations. Further, the lands through which rivers flowed were owned at times by rival noblemen, who put a veto on the project, either in a spirit of perverse antagonism or because a stone bridge might benefit one landlord more than another. And it was easy for the stronger man to explain his antagonism in a reasonable manner, for he could say that the cofferdams used in grounding piers diverted rivers from their channels, causing inundations. This objection seems to have been raised pretty often, as many piers were grounded in a very primitive fashion, just by throwing down stones and cement till a bed of masonry rose above water-level.

In the Ballad of Abingdon Bridge, written by Richard Fannande Iremonger in the thirty-sixth year of Henry VI (1458), we find most of the difficulties that attended mediæval bridge-building. Till the fourth year of Henry V (1417) the townsfolk of Abingdon and Culham had nothing but a ford, which could not be passed after a storm of rain or after a thaw. Yet Abingdon lived under the shadow of a great monastery, and roads were constructed from her streets to the ancient or Roman highways. Not even a timber bridge preceded the charming stone one that charity built in 1417, the very year in which Henry V sailed from England with 16,000 men and ravaged Normandy. But in the Middle Ages most people regarded bridges as we in our ignorance regard hospitals, as useful and necessary things to be supported by charitable doles, and not by district rates. To beg is a degradation, no matter what the cause may be, and many a small town could have built for itself a bridge but for the ruling custom that taught it to be a mendicant. Culham and Abingdon waited a very long time before almsgiving got rid of their dangerous ford. The Abbot gave his aid, and Geoffrey Barber paid a thousand marks to the workmen, and Sir Peris Besillis, Knight, provided the stone, and “the gode lorde of Abendon left of his londe, for the breed [breadth] of the bridge, twenty-four fote large”:—

It was a greet socour of erthe and of sonde,

And yet he abated the rent of the barge.

An C. Pownde, and xvˡⁱ was truly payed

By the hondes of John Huchyns and Banbery also,

For the waye and the barge, thus it must be sayed.

But I am happy to add that “the Commons of Abendon” had to do something for themselves. It was “set all in one assent that all the brekynges of the brige the town bere schulde.” In other words, charity had produced a free town bridge, leaving the inhabitants to pay for its upkeep.

During the building of this pretty structure an unsuccessful attempt was made to ground the piers while eleven men baled water from the river. Then a dam was built, and trenches were dug to prevent the water from overflowing the dam. This I gather from the ballad, but the wording is not at all graphic in any technical matter.[106] We are not told why cofferdams[107] were not tried. In the Middle Ages cofferdams were known as brandryths or brandereths; by this name they are mentioned in the Contract Deed for the building of Catterick Bridge over the Swale, A.D. 1421; and they were large enough to obstruct most rivers, for they had to surround enormous piers, and the thickness of their sides was never less than from four to six feet. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that during the construction of Old London Bridge, between 1176 and 1209, the Thames “was turned another way about by a trench,” which, according to Stow, began east near “Rotherhithe, as is supposed, and ended in the west about Patricksey, now termed Battersea.” In those days no embankments controlled the Thames at London; wide shores, littered with the odds and ends of a waterside life, were playgrounds for the ebb and flow of the tidal waters; and the main purpose of the “trench” or canal was to lessen the risk of floods while the huge piers were being founded. Stow’s words give us to understand that all the water in the Thames “was turned another way about”; a very important feat of civil engineering. Perhaps the purpose of the canal was not so thorough; perhaps it drew from the river sufficient water to lower its normal level by several feet and to diminish the force of the tidal current. In any case, however, Stow’s evidence has great interest.

One of Brangwyn’s animated drawings, the Pont des Consuls at Montauban, comes in here to illustrate the many troubles of mediæval bridge-building. In 1144, when Montauban passed from an unknown village into a known town, its patron or founder, Alphonse Jourdain, Count of Toulouse, commanded that a bridge should be made at once, and that the little township should keep it in repair; but, somehow, for many generations, nothing was done. Sometimes poverty was pleaded as an excuse, and sometimes the Albigeois wars were blamed; but at last, in 1264, the good men of Montauban ventured on a little action. Indeed, they stretched themselves yawningly, and said that a bridge over the Tarn would be a boon indeed. Their ferry was a slow nuisance, we may presume, and their trade ought to be increased by better communications. For twenty-seven years they repeated these truisms; then, in 1291, they bought the island of Castillons or of Pissotte to serve as a foundation for several piers. Tired by this unwonted exertion, Montauban wished to take a long holiday, but Philip the Fair came forward and asserted himself as a king. A bridge over the Tarn must be built! It should have three fortified towers, one at each end, the other in the middle; and these towers were to be garrisoned by royal troops, so that no harm should happen to the king’s authority. In order to collect money for the bridge-building a tax was to be levied on all visitors to Montauban, and two consuls were to overseer the work. His Majesty chose Mathieu de Verdun, a citizen, and Étienne de Ferrières, who was keeper of the town. They seemed to be honest men, but funds collected for the bridge were used for other purposes, and I know not if this action was justified. It was in 1304 that Philip the Fair gave his instructions, and the bridge was not finished till 1335. Still, the dilatory township had achieved a very fine work of art, noble in design and very well constructed.

It is a brick bridge, 250 m.[108] 50 cm. in length. The bricks are excellent in quality, and measure 50 centimetres in thickness, 40 centimetres in length, and 28 centimetres in width. The roadway is nearly flat, and its height above the level of the Tarn is 18 metres. There are seven pointed arches with an average span of 22 metres; and the six piers armed with cutwaters at both sides are 8 m. 55 cm. in thickness. Note how the spandrils are pierced with high arched bays to facilitate the passage of water during floods. These relief arches were copied from Roman models. As for the defensive towers they exist no longer, but the strongest one kept watch and ward over the entrance across the river; it was square in shape, and its summit was a crenellated platform fringed with machicolations. The other end tower—the one on the town side—was also square in form, while the central defence was triangular. It stood on the middle buttress on the side looking downstream, and the lower part of it was used as a chapel dedicated to St. Catherine. A flight of winding steps went down to a postern, cut through the buttress a little above water-level; and at the other side of the pier, just below the arched bay, was an instrument of torture, a see-saw that carried an iron cage in which blasphemers were ducked in the river.

The Pont des Consuls has one quality that Englishmen ought to study with the greatest care; it is in scale with a great river. To build a vast bridge for a little township was in part a just tribute to the beauty of a noble site, and in part a prophetic compliment paid to the future history of Montauban. How differently we have acted in our London bridges! We have disgraced the Thames with the Railway Viaduct from Charing Cross, for instance, and neither Waterloo nor London Bridge does justice to the size of our Nation-City. There are three or four good bridges on the Thames, notably those at Maidenhead and Richmond, but they are nothing more than delicate works of refined engineering. Not one is inspired by awe, the only feeling that can bring home to our minds the wondrous grey antiquity of the Thames and the immensity of London. So we have feared to be great in the historic symbolism of bridge-building, unlike the citizens of Montauban, who were lifted far above their indolence by a brave inspiration as ample as was the Tarn after a flood.

LE PONT DES CONSULS OVER THE TARN AT MONTAUBAN IN FRANCE, FOURTEENTH CENTURY

In 1823-4, when George Rennie designed New London Bridge, London was probably two hundred times as big as was Montauban in the fourteenth century; and certainly the Thames was not inferior to the Tarn as a historic inspiration. Yet Rennie failed to understand the importance of being large in scale. In less than fifty years his work was “insufficiently wide for the traffic”;[109] and since then, on a good many occasions, we have been asked to disfigure London Bridge with overhanging footpaths. “London can well afford to pay for new bridges, but can by no means afford to part with a single object of real beauty.”[109] For Rennie’s bridge, despite all errors of scale, has points of charming interest. Her roadway has a graceful curvature that delights the eye, her arches have an excellent shape, and the variation in their size could not well be bettered.[110] Later we shall see ([p. 325]) that much money was ill-spent on hammer-dressing the whole external face of the masonry; but an engineer with a very weak feeling for scale was afraid to use either scabbled stone or stone with a rough-axed facing. Rennie learnt all that he could learn by studying fine models of style, such as the Roman bridge at Rimini, but his own equipment as an artist was terrene.

Would that we had in England an old bridge equal to the Pont des Consuls! Would that old London Bridge had been delivered down to our sixpences and shillings! Yet I suppose we must consider ourselves lucky in the fact that historic bridges in Great Britain, though much inferior to those on the Continent, are fairly numerous in districts where there has been but little increase of traffic. We possess three bridges with defensive gateways (Stirling, Warkworth, and the Monnow Bridge at Monmouth); five with chapels, or with relics of chapels (St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, Derby, Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, Wakefield, Rotherham); and many good specimens exist of bridges with angular recesses built out from parapets and forming part of the piers.[111] These recesses were designed not only as shelter places for wayfarers, but because they lessened the cost of production, inasmuch as they gave width to narrow footways; and so their value in an old bridge is very similar to that of bay-windows in cottage rooms.

Very often the modern engineer has misunderstood their origin, and, regarding them as decorations, he has used safety recesses to ornament his wide bridges, just as he has put battlements on iron parapets and stuck machicolations on defenceless gateways. Brangwyn has drawn for us three or four big Gothic bridges with safety recesses. Among them is a fine structure over the Main at Würzburg, in Bavaria; there are eight arches, and the length is 650 ft. This bridge dates from the year 1474, but his adornment with statues of saints belongs to later times. Indeed, the architecture and decoration take us from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1607, when the spirit of the Renaissance was active and generative.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE MAIN AT WÜRZBURG IN BAVARIA (1474-1607)

Here is an old defensive bridge that does not resemble a common man-at-arms: in him there is a fine courtesy, as of a knight long used to the etiquette of tournaments; but yet the technical inspiration is rather inferior to that in his great rival, the Moselle Bridge at Coblentz, built in 1344, by the Elector Baudouin, and charmed with a mellow grace that imparts a rare distinction to the vigour of fourteen bold arches. The Moselle Bridge is 1100 ft. long, or ninety-five longer than London Bridge. There is but one fault, and this one fault belongs to the Middle Ages: the ten piers obstruct the river too much, and two or three of them might have been omitted without harm to any strategic consideration.

In the Middle Ages almost everything was looked at from the standpoints of attack and defence. Bridges as well as soldiers needed armour, so their gateways and towers were built in a military fashion, and at times curious traps were devised along the footways. For example, consult the “Pacata Hibernia,” and you will find an engraving of Askeaton Bridge, [112] with a sort of hangman’s trapdoor at each end of the footway. In 1586, or thereabouts, Askeaton Bridge had another peculiarity: a castle stood close to it on an island in the river; and between the castle and the bridge was a fortified platform with two gateways.

It happened often, in mediæval times, that one arch was a drawbridge. Take Old London Bridge as an example. One of her twenty arches—the thirteenth from the City end—was a toll-gate for merchant shipping, and a drawbridge to gap off enemies from the town. It served this latter purpose in 1553, when Sir Thomas Wyatt and his insurgents tried to enter London. Everybody knew which was the movable arch, because it was connected in all popular talk with the tower that rose beside it, a terrible and gruesome tower, for on its summit executioners displayed the heads of decapitated persons, who ranged from common bandits to the great Sir Thomas More.

Some defensive bridges in Old England had an important look as late as the reign of George III. This applies to the Welsh Bridge at Shrewsbury, which had a noble tower at the entrance that looked towards Wales. Perhaps it belonged to the reign of Edward I, as a statue of Llewellyn was placed over one of the arches. At the present time our fortified bridges are minor specimens. The “auld brig” over the Forth at Stirling, once “the key of the Highlands,” is the most interesting architecturally. He still retains a defensive gateway at each end, and his four arches, now closed to traffic, have a bold and pleasant rhythm. They date from the last years of the fourteenth century. From this century also Warkworth Bridge comes to us; it is a smaller structure, with a triangular recess at each side, projecting from the parapet into the central pier. The gate-tower is at some little distance from the abutment; it has a low and narrow archway under which carters swear unhopefully, believing that their wagons will stick fast. A person who was present on the occasion told M. J. J. Jusserand that a gipsy’s caravan, not long ago, was stopped at the tower on Warkworth Bridge, and waited there while the pavement was being hollowed out to make the passage deep enough for a safe journey.

The pier midstream is triangular, and almost as sharp as an arrow-head. This shape is very common in mediæval cutwaters, but it belongs to a technical routine which cannot be regarded as practical. Floods cannot eddy around the flat surfaces of a triangle; they are cut into waves that soon break with an increasing force against the piers and spandrils. On the other hand, when a cutwater is shaped like a Gothic drop arch, or like a tierce-point arch, it meets the current with a much bolder wedge of stone, whose curved sides are better playgrounds for water in spate. Cutwaters of this improved sort are uncommon in mediæval bridges, but some are to be found in French work of the Limousin.

Viollet-le-Duc was the first critic who called attention to this technical matter, and no pontist should fail to note how cutwaters are designed. For example, in a bird’s-eye view of the bridge at Avignon the buttressed piers jut out on each side beyond the narrow footway, looking like boats that support a long line of planks; and I have no doubt that Saint Bénézet had in mind this figure of boats when he planned his roadway over “the arrowy Rhône.” It is far from my wish to compare the little Warkworth Bridge with this French masterpiece, but let us note in its cutwaters a similar character.

Again, when you remember that Warkworth Bridge belongs to the fourteenth century, do you not expect to find in it the pointed vault, whose lighter grace is among the most beautiful things both in Eastern and in mediæval architecture? Yet the two ribbed arches are segments of circles. For many a generation Northern England has been famed for three things—a long-headed thrift, a discontent that is said to be a Radical in politics, and a stubborn hatred for any new knowledge that attacks the dull mimicry of customs. It is to Lancashire, for instance, that you must go if you wish to study in old packhorse bridges the retention of Romanesque forms. A considerable number are described popularly as Roman bridges, probably because they are found on the old pilgrim ways, which, after the Reformation, were scorned as Roman Catholic.

For some reason or other Northern England welcomed in bridges the bluff economy of ribbed arches, while neglecting the more gracious thrift of Early English or pointed vaults. These are easier to build because they need lighter centres or arched scaffolds, and their thrust being less powerful than that of round-headed arches, they require less bulk in the piers. Some writers say that pointed arches interfere with sailing-boats, but this depends on the size of their spans. At Montauban there is room enough for ordinary boat traffic under the Pont des Consuls.

The Pont Valentré at Cahors has ogivale arches, and in one fine drawing Brangwyn studies the technique of their construction. For instance, the embattled piers are triangular, and each of them is pierced transversely by a bay or passage, which is put on a level with the springing of every arch. Below this bay are three holes; and another line of holes runs across the under surface of the arch beneath the springing.[113] Now, these holes and the bays have a great technical interest, they remind us how the Pont Valentré was built in the thirteenth century. With their help simple scaffolds were erected. The first step was to thrust fir saplings through the holes in a pier till they jutted out on each side; then they were covered with planks and used as footbridges by the workmen, and also as resting-places for barrow-loads of dressed stone, which were lifted up by movable cranes. The service of the masons was effected through the bay in a pier, and the centring of every arch was fixed in those other holes which Brangwyn has represented in his vivacious water-colour.

Not more than two arches were built at the same time. At any moment, in those rude, warfaring periods, work might be interrupted by strife, and its progress was so very slow that it took from ten to thirty years to bring a bridge to completion, usually after a continuous fight against money troubles. Many a hint on economy was borrowed from the Romans, whose enterprise was far in advance of their current cash. Piers that look marvels of solid masonry may be nothing more than shells filled with beaten earth and gravel; and those passages through the piers at Cahors have one thing in common with the relief arches that pierce the spandrils of the Pont des Consuls at Montauban: they enabled the builders to be thrifty.

PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS-SUR-LOT A FORTIFIED BRIDGE, THIRTEENTH CENTURY

In a Persian bridge (on the way between Resht, on the Caspian Sea, and Teheran, the capital) thrift hollowed the spandrils into chambers, some of which were used by travellers. This bridge carried a rough highway over the Kâredj River, which runs down from the Elburz Mountains between Kasvîn and Teheran, and disappears in a gravelly plain. In 1874 the Kâredj Bridge was studied in measured drawings by J. Romilly Allen, and eighteen years later (November 19, 1892) the drawings were published in “The Builder,” with a most valuable description. Let us linger for a few minutes over Romilly Allen’s research, as the technique of old Persian bridge-builders has points in common both with Gothic methods and with modern practice also. Some mediæval spandrils are hollow, for example; and a very noted French architect of the eighteenth century, Perronet, not only left empty spaces behind the haunches[114] of an arch, but made tunnels in piers, after the manner used by Pope Sextus IV in the Ponte Sisto. And the bridge of Glasgow over the Clyde has tunnelled piers, so this technical detail has a long and entertaining history.

In the Kâredj Bridge, then, the builders had to solve three or four difficulties that strained the usual penury of Persian finance. The river itself must have been a constant trouble while the bridge was being constructed. A rapid mountain torrent with precipitous rocky banks, it pours through a gorge of rock, and at one spot only it forms a good foundation for a wide pier; but this spot has a situation that divides the bridge into inharmonious parts, making symmetry impossible. Allen’s drawing shows both arches, one with a span of 23 ft., the other with a span of 72 ft. 9 in.; and between them is a vast pier not less than 31 ft. 9 in. wide. Forty-six feet separate the highest point of the parapet from water-level; and from water-level to the peak of the big pointed vault is thirty-seven feet. In width the bridge measures thirty feet across the outside of its parapets, and twenty-six feet across the roadway, so there is room for a great deal more wheeled traffic than Persia has yet developed along her dusty trade routes.

From this description it is evident that the builders had a stiff job. Timber for centring has ever been scarce in Persia[115]; so in Persian bridge-building the usual plan is to set up a light scaffold just strong enough to bear its own weight and a few rings of brickwork. After a single rib of bricks has been made, other bricks are dabbed against the first set, more being added at the abutment ends than in the centre of an arch; and so, as the work goes on, the arch grows to be self-supporting, like a cantilever bridge. When the middle part of the span has been covered over, the remaining courses at each side are completed with bricks set at right angles to the others. In looking upward at the under surface of a Persian vault a pontist sees that the courses of brick go in two directions, one parallel to the central axis of the bridge and another at right angles. Such is the Persian method of building a brick arch; its main object is to evade, without too much risk, the cost of heavy centring, timber being so difficult to get and so expensive to carry about.[115]

In the four bridges that Romilly Allen studied, between Resht and Teheran, the building was brickwork, and the bricks were rather like Roman tiles; they measured 10 in. by 10 in. by 2½ in. At Kâredj the mortar joints were about ¾ in. thick, so that twenty-four courses of bricks with their mortar joints built a wall about 6 ft. 2 in. high. At the thinnest part of the big arch there were only three bricks, giving a thickness of 2 ft. 6 in.; further on there were five bricks, and two more were added at the abutments, where the walls were 7 ft. 6 in. thick. Here is much economy, for thick joints of mortar are not praiseworthy ([p. 175]); and thrift is very noticeable in other details of the workmanship. Beneath the roadway were two chambers with pointed barrel vaults, which were built partly to relieve the haunches of the big arch, and partly to save materials. On one side of the arch the chamber was about 12 ft. high; its length, varying with the curve of the voussoirs, and extending across the abutment, ranged from 27 ft. to 49 ft. On the pier side of the big arch the chamber was not so long, but its height was 12 ft.; and the pier itself was chambered in its upper part and pierced below with a Tudor-like arch about 14 ft. wide and 11 ft. 6 in. high. The chamber above had a cone-shaped roof, and at each side of it were three square-headed windows that measured 3 ft. 6 in. wide by 6 ft. high. I am speaking in the past tense, for I know not whether this bridge is still in use; but now we will return to the present tense in a short quotation from Romilly Allen:—

“This chamber appears to be ... a temporary living-room for travellers. It ... communicates with the cells above the haunches of the arch by an opening 4 ft. 6 in. high. The inner room is probably intended to afford sleeping accommodation. The living-room is approached by a staircase in the thickness of the wall leading up from the top of the pier. The Persian name for an upper chamber of this kind is ‘bala-khana,’ literally ‘a house up above.’”[116]

Perhaps the finest bridge in Persia is the far-famed Ali Verdi Khan at Isfahan.

Ali Verdi Khan was the general of Shah Abbas, and his bridge, if not the greatest in the world, has no rival that excels it in stateliness. As Lord Curzon has said, it alone is worth a visit to Isfahan to see. I know it in photographs only, and in written descriptions, but I feel its beauty and magnificence. In many respects it resembles the Pul-i-Khaju ([p. 213]), but it is a great deal longer, and no pavilions rise above its tiers of arches. To my mind the pavilions of the Pul-i-Khaju have an architectural value that cannot be rated at too high a level. So I miss their grace in the Ali Verdi Khan, though this noble structure ought not to be criticised—except in an ashamed whisper.

THE BRIDGE OF ALI VERDI KHAN OVER THE ZENDEH RUD AT ISFAHAN, PERSIA

There is a gateway at the north end, so we must place the Ali Verdi Khan among the minor defensive bridges. A paved ramp or causeway leads from a great avenue to the gateway; and then a visitor has 388 yards to walk before he reaches the far end. The main road is paved, and its width is thirty feet. Upon each side is a gallery, or covered arcade, two and a half feet wide, which is pierced through the outer wall of the bridge from one end to the other; it communicates with the main road by frequent arches, it opens by similar arches—over ninety in number—on to the river view, and here and there it expands into large chambers, as we see in Brangwyn’s pen-drawing. The chambers used to be decorated with “not too proper paintings,” done in the time of Abbas II. At both entrances the Ali Verdi Khan is flanked by round towers, and staircases in the towers go up to a fine platform which in earlier times was a favourite promenade; but now it is disfigured by telegraph poles, the modern spirit everywhere having an unrivalled vulgarity.[117] “Similar staircases, cut in the basements of the towers, and also at regular intervals in the main piers, conduct from the road level to a lower storey, where, but little elevated above the bed of the river, a vaulted passage runs along the entire length of the bridge, through arches pierced in the central piers, crossing the channel of the river by huge stepping-stones planted in its bed. Colonel Johnson gives the dimensions of these transverse arches as ten feet span and nine feet high; and of the main arches (thirty-three in number) which they bisect, as twenty feet span and fifteen feet high, separated by piers eleven feet thick. There is thus a triple promenade on this remarkable bridge—the vaulted passage below, the roadway and lateral galleries above, and the open footpath at the top of all. I should add that the upper part of the bridge is of brick, the piers and towers are of stone.”[118]

There is no European structure akin to this, but for a long time Rothenburg on the Tauber has been famous for a two-storeyed bridge; also we know that some modern commercial bridges have an upper road and a lower one, like the High Level Bridge at Newcastle. In every case the idea was suggested by the Roman practice of building aqueducts in tiers.

IV

And now let us give all our attention to the more military bridges. Brangwyn has studied them with the utmost care and interest; there are but few variations of the war-bridge that his art has not yet represented. Let us see, then, what his research has found.

1. This bridge from Bhutan has the same technique as the cantilever bridges of Kurdistan ([p. 74]); but the gateway towers mark an advance. They are militant works, partly because they control the traffic, and partly because they are open below the eaves for archery and for other defensive warfare. Brangwyn suggests that gateway towers of this kind may have been brought to India by Darius Hystaspes (512 B.C.) or by Alexander the Great (327 B.C.). On this point there is no evidence. On the other hand, there seems to be no doubt that the timber gateways on Roman bridges in England, as in Gaul, were prepared for defence, though their main use was to limit the freedom of a public thoroughfare, invariably after sunset, and during the day in times of unrest. This was the first aim of defensive bridges, so the gateway towers in Bhutan are suggestive things to study. They are too light in structure to give us an idea of the bold and stern gateways built by the Romans with newly-felled trees; but yet they help us to realise vaguely what every young civilization must have done when it learnt from a free use of bridges that foes as well as friends were eager to pass without danger across rivers.

PRIMITIVE TIMBER BRIDGE IN BHUTAN, INDIA

Again, the earliest defensive bridges had another point in common with the primitive carpentry of Bhutan: they were made with tree-trunks resting on supports, and, when necessary, a part of their footways could be removed. Diodorus Siculus wrote a flaming account of a great bridge built by Semiramis over the Euphrates, rather more than two thousand years before the birth of Christ. After making due allowance for the frolicsome legends with which ancient history is enlivened, there are things worth noting in the enthusiasm of Diodorus. Herodotus attributed the same bridge not to Semiramis but to Nitocris, so evidence can be drawn from two authors. Pontists gather from the evidence that stone piers were connected by planks, which were taken up at night, just as the central part of a bridge in Bhutan could be removed as a military precaution. Diodorus draws entertaining pictures, and tries to prove that bridge-building was far advanced twenty centuries before our era began. If Semiramis collected architects and craftsmen from all the known civilizations, until at last she had at her beck and call a great host of capable servants, it is not surprising that she was able to build a fine bridge as well as to enlarge Babylon. The piers were grounded in deep water; their ends were protected by triangular buttresses; their stones were clamped together with thick bars of iron, which were soldered into the stones with molten lead. As for the superstructure, it was thirty feet wide, and all of wood—cedar, and cypress, and palm tree. In all this, probably, there is some exaggeration, but a famous bridge did exist at Babylon, and a combination of timber with stone piers was the most logical development from the simplest natural bridges—the fallen tree and the bridge of stepping-stones. Also it is likely enough that metal clamps were employed; iron was in vogue, and by using it in stonework under water an architect would feel less mistrustful of his cement and less anxious about the risks of floods. Further, it is quite probable that the entrance at each side was protected by a sort of drawbridge, because the times were lawless. Semiramis herself was put to death by her son Ninyas, and Ninyas in his turn was murdered.[119]

An important timber bridge with stone piers belongs to a handicraft more advanced than that in the bridges of Bhutan; it comes between the primitive inspiration of the Bhutan carpenters and the simplest arched bridges with plain gateway towers. It has not yet vanished from Europe, for a Gothic example exists at Thouars, in Deux-Sèvres, France, according to a photograph sold by Neurdein, of Paris. Another example crosses the Guadalaviar above Albarracin, in Aragon; and let us remember also that the tree bridge resting on stone piers has influenced some metal viaducts, such as Runcorn Bridge, near Liverpool, dating from 1868. In principle the construction is the same, timber being displaced by metal. At the end of its approach arches, where the metalwork begins, Runcorn Bridge has two gateways, each with twin turrets, and a great display of battlements and of machicolations. Although this make-believe of war has a farcical bad taste, like the assumed erudition that keeps dummy books in a library, yet Runcorn Bridge has a well-defined interest: it mimics a phase of military architecture which was evolved from such carpentry as to-day we find in Bhutan.

DEFENSIVE BRIDGE AT SOSPEL

2. Gateway Bridge at Sospel, in the Italy of France. This drawing illustrates very well the transition from the primitive bridges of Bhutan to a simple arched bridge guarded by a gatehouse of control. It is a poor little house, its architecture being less intelligent than that in the Bhutan gateway towers. In these there is cleverness enough to prove that the bridge represents a stale old custom which has lagged behind the advance of handicraft, whereas the bridge at Sospel is far in advance of the tawdry little gatehouse. A span separates the gatehouse from the town, and the roadway is not on the same level above both arches.

AT NARNI IN ITALY: THIRTEENTH CENTURY

3. A Broken War-Bridge of the Thirteenth Century, Repaired with Timber.

A very valuable illustration, and for several reasons. The gatehouse with its pointed archway is unusually tall; and the machicolated box below the slightly gabled roof is unique in my experience. The holes above this defensive work are partly for ventilation and partly for crossbowmen, whose fire would “puncture” an attack on the right entrance of the bridge. There is but one arrow-hole on the first storey, and I should not care to shoot through it while molten lead or boiling oil came sizzling down in two streams from that machicolated box. I do not know why the gate-tower was made so very high, but suppose that its engineer wished to build a place of vantage from which the movements of an attack could be seen afar off, beyond the entrance gates. In any case it failed to save four of the arches from gunpowder wars; and note the restoration! Could anything speak to us more clearly of the primitive bridge with stone piers united by rough timbering?

WAR-BRIDGE OVER THE GAV-DE-PAU AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE

4. The War-Bridge at Orthez.

In the wizard country of the French Pyrenees there are some very notable bridges, such as the Pont Napoléon, near Saint-Sauveur, the Pont d’Espagne, beyond Cauterets, and the Vieux Pont at Orthez. To study these three works, side by side, is to learn that modern bridge-building has achieved in stone a few great works as daring as any that the Middle Ages produced. The Pont d’Orthez has a graceful distinction, and for nearly six hundred years it has borne the formidable spates of the Gav-de-Pau. In the tierce-point arches, and particularly in the largest one, there is good drawing; the spandrils are relieved from dullness in a simple and effective manner that gives support to the base of the parapet; perhaps the roadway dips too much on the left-hand side, and the fortified tower is too slim to be in scale with the broad pier from which it ascends. Add twelve inches of width to the side face, and see how different the tower looks! In fact, Brangwyn has done this instinctively, as I find by comparing his vigorous pen-sketch from nature with my photographs. The tower has but one machicolation, it guards the base of the pier from boat attacks and scaling ladders; but the spy-holes below the roof served many purposes, including those for which machicolations were invented. A vaulted passage conducts the road through the tower; it is lighted on the far side by an opening called the Priests’ Window, because the priests and monks of Orthez jumped through it into the river, driven to this act by the orders of Gabriel de Montgomery. Such is the legend, and there’s not a word of history in its drama. For the rest, Orthez has seen no war since the great combat of February 27, 1814, when Wellington prepared the way for the battle of Toulouse by defeating the French, under Soult.

But this old bridge, with all its charm and interest, is eclipsed as a work of art by the Pont Napoléon, whose gigantic arch, in a very noble curve, spans the rocky and precipitous gorge of the Pas de l’Échelle, along which the furious Gave de Gavarnie pursues a foam-bubbled race against time, sixty-seven metres below the bridge. Here is a masterpiece that rivals the Puente Nuevo at Ronda, thrown across the tremendous chasm of the Guadalvia.[120]

5. The Monnow Bridge at Monmouth.

WAR-BRIDGE AT MONMOUTH

This bluff old gate-tower is a bolder specimen of mediæval work than the smaller one at Warkworth. We are lucky indeed to possess a war-bridge which has suffered so little from time and trade and highway officials. If you compare it with the Brangwyn water-colour of Parthenay Bridge, over the Thouet, you will be better able to put the Monnow Bridge in its proper place as a work of defensive art. The French tower is far and away superior: it has scale and dignity: it is a work of architecture as well as an instrument of war. At Monmouth, how different is the technical inspiration! Not a trace of good design saves the gate-tower from being no more than a weapon for ruthless men. A Peace Society could publish the Monnow Bridge as a fact to prove that slaughtering wars have been more vulgar even than the cruel battles of finance. It is the undefensive parts of this bridge that I admire. The ribbed arches are good ([p. 93]), and in them a slight tentative effort has been made to free the ring of voussoirs from the oscillation sent down through the spandrils when a great weight passes along the footway. “A slight tentative effort,” I repeat, because the archstones have not been made independent from the spandrils.

6. To find arches of this kind we must return to the Pont Valentré at Cahors, which dates from the middle of the thirteenth century. In this noble bridge the voussoirs of all the arches look isolated from the spandrils, as they are rimmed and “extra-dossed.” It was the Romans who invented the “extra-dossed” arch, and they proved that by separating archstones from the spandrils a bridge was relieved from much wear and tear. On the other hand, when archstones are unequal, when they are thicker in their haunches than at the crown, oscillation goes along the full length of a bridge, fatiguing the piers, and causing at times a noticeable shiver, as in the Llanrwst Bridge, designed by Inigo Jones.[121] Even Perronet forgot this effect of repercussion when he built his bridge in the Place de la Concorde at Paris; and ever afterwards he clamped the headers with iron to the interior archstones, as if iron fastened into stone could never become a destructive agent.

The architect of Valentré Bridge was wiser than Perronet, every arch in his work being an elastic bow that moves between two piers without conveying its oscillation beyond these supports. To our modern eyes, no doubt, there are too many arches across the River Lot at Cahors, but this defect seemed necessary in the Middle Ages, and for two reasons. It was regarded as a defensive precaution, because narrow arches were easier to protect from the roadway when an enemy tried to assemble boats under a bridge; and since in the frequent wars of those days a bridge had often to be cut as a final resource against defeat, it was essential that the destruction of one arch should not upset another by the withdrawal of a counterbalancing thrust from one side of a pier. Many piers of a large size were looked upon as particularly needful when the greater lateral thrust of round arches had to be considered in its relation to a bridge cut in a single place. Also, as we have seen ([p. 264]), bridges in the Middle Ages were built very slowly, and as war at any moment might stop the masons, piers were regarded as abutments and made very strong.

This much is known, but none can say why piers were built unreasonably large. Frequent inundations from obstructed rivers were as evidently harmful as weak piers that floods overthrew; and the genius that solved so many problems in church architecture ought to have shown in bridges a riper discretion. Often piers and arches were of the same width—a waste of labour and material, as well as of space in the waterway. Even the Romans, though their piers were less bulky, impeded the current of rivers with too much stone; and to save their work from the floods which they provoked, they built relief bays for spate water above that part of their piers where adequate resistance had been obtained against the lateral thrust of heavy arches.

In the Valentré at Cahors the architect scorned the aid of relief bays, and grew five vast piers from the river-bed; not a courteous thing to do, seeing that the word river in French is a lady-word, “La rivière”—the very sound of it is a sweet compliment to the youthful waywardness of running water. Yet French bridge-masters have sinned against rivers as frequently as we English. If the Valentré had one pier less, how ample and noble the design would be! Even now the design is so virile, so masculine, that we ought to speak of this bridge as we do of a great soldier. The feeble word “it” does not belong to the Pont Valentré. “He” and “him” and “his” are the right pronouns. According to many writers he is the finest military bridge in the world, but comparisons are difficult and risky: they are affected too much by a writer’s moods. One thing is certain—that the Valentré has no superior in his own line. His most celebrated rivals, two bridges at Toledo, in Spain, have a feminine grace; they are too courtly to be typical soldiers. There is another Spanish bridge that ranks high as a fortified work: it dates from the fourteenth century, and, in sixteen pointed arches, crosses the Duero at Zamora. Brangwyn prefers the Toledo bridges, the Alcántara and the Puente de San Martin, because they are lofty as well as spacious, while Zamora Bridge is long and low, like a good many Spanish bridges, both Roman and mediæval.[122]

THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO, SHOWING THE MOORISH GATEWAY TOWER AT THE TOWN END OF THE BRIDGE

7. The Alcántara at Toledo. From every point of view this bridge makes a good picture, but I like her best when she is seen from a level only a little below the footway. Then I look down at the upward flight of her architecture, and watch how a luminous patterning of shadow enriches the suave yet austere masonry. Somehow I think of a courtly abbess whose half-smile is a discipline feared by everybody. In no other way can I describe the technical inspiration that makes this bridge very uncommon. Looking down again, I see that the Spanish masons—or shall we call them Hispano-Moresque?—were as thrifty as the Frenchmen at Cahors; across the breadth of the bigger arch, and below the springing, there are seven holes, from which the centring was scaffolded. Technically the arches are inferior to those of the Pont Valentré, because their rings are not sufficiently rimmed and extra-dossed, so they lie too close into the body of the spandrils. The pier is designed very well, it has a distinction of its own and forms on each side of the roadway a narrowing shelter-place with four angles. Lower down, near the Moorish adaptation from a Roman triumphal arch, a long recess carried by five brackets varies the line of each parapet, in which there is no pretension, no swagger, no balustraded bombast. On the town side the bridge is guarded by a Moorish gate-tower, while across the river is a gateway dating from the time of Charles the Fifth.

A Roman bridge crossed the Tagus at this great spot, and was repaired in 687 by the Visigoths, but in 871 it disappeared, I know not how or why. Then a bridge was built by Halaf, son of Mahomet Alameri, Alcalde of Toledo, but Halaf obeyed a command from Almansor Aboaarmir Mahomet, son of Abihamir, Alquazil of Amir Almomenin Hixem. I hope you like these names and titles? They are given by George Edmund Street, [123] who quotes from Cean Bermudez; and so with confidence we may add Halaf Alameri to the few early bridge-masters who are known to us by name.

For 340 years no accident seems to have happened to Alameri’s work. Then in 1211 a part of the bridge fell into the river; and six years later, during its restoration, Enrique I had a gate-tower set up by Matheo Paradiso, a military architect with too angelic a name. Forty-one years passed, and then the bridge was renewed once more, this time by the King D. Alonso, who put the following inscription on a piece of marble above the point of the arch: “In the year 1258 from the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ was the great deluge of water, that began before the month of August, and lasted until Thursday the 26th of December; and in most lands the fall of rain did much damage, especially in Spain, where most of the bridges fell; and among them was demolished a great part of that bridge of Toledo which Halaf, son of Mahomet Alameri, ... had made ... in the time of the Moors, 387 years before this time; and now the King D. Alonso, son of the noble King D. Ferrando, and of the Queen Doña Beatriz, who reigned in Castile, has had it repaired and renovated; and it was finished in the eighth year of his reign, in the year of the Incarnation 1258.”

Even then some of Alameri’s work remained, but I fear that it all vanished in 1380, when Archbishop Pedro Tenorio, a kinsman of Don Juan, and a great pontist, became patron of the Toledo bridges and gave to the Alcántara the appearance that we know, apart from the fortified gateways, which were either altered or built by Andres Manrique, A.D. 1484.

8. Brangwyn has sketched the other great bridge at Toledo, the Puente de San Martin, a better work of art than the Alcántara. Here the style is far more masculine, and there is no wide expanse of barren wall such as we find in the Alcántara below the bracketed recesses. The five arches vary much in size, no doubt, but yet they harmonise very well, and the most important one is heroic in scale, being not less than 140 Spanish ft. wide and 95 ft. high. As for the piers, each has a character of its own: they have but one thing in common—bulk enough not only to resist floods, but to be in keeping with a defile of rocks. There are two gateways, and one of them has Moorish ornament and a Moorish battlement.

A SPANISH WAR-BRIDGE—THE BRIDGE OF ST. MARTIN, TOLEDO. ITS HISTORY SEEMS TO DATE FROM 1212, BUT IN THE XIV CENTURY IT WAS REBUILT BY ARCHBISHOP PEDRO TENORIO

The Puente de San Martin seems to date from the year 1212. In 1368 he met with an accident that destroyed the big arch. Shortly afterwards, about 1380, Archbishop Tenorio began the restoration, aided by a careless architect. One day, in fact, the architect perceived that his new arch would fall down as soon as the centring was removed. Panic-stricken, he went home and consulted his wife, who happened to be a forerunner of the Suffragettes. What could be done to save her husband’s reputation? She could set fire to the scaffolding; and when the arch fell Toledo was quite awed by the accident. All the usual things were said about the terrible destruction that flames could do in a brilliant hour; and then the architect was asked to renew what the fire had ruined. This time he did his work admirably, and his wife was too much elated by his complete success, for she gave discretion to the winds and told the tale of her incendiarism. If Pedro Tenorio had punished her by claiming payment for the new work from her husband, Toledo would have been amused, perhaps; but the good Archbishop had learnt too much in confessionals to expect very much from human nature. He seems to have done nothing more than congratulate his architect on the wife’s devotion.[124]

THE RABOT AT GHENT: A FORTIFIED LOCK

9. Defensive Bridges in Flemish Towns. They represent the manly, swaggering burghers who were not clever enough to keep their liberties. The Pont des Trous at Tournai, for instance, guarded at each end by a huge round tower, has more to say to us about the turbulent old Flemish pride than have many chapters written by good historians. It is a bridge enlivened by art, yet blinded by an excess of warlike caution. There are three good pointed vaults, each with a double ring of moulded voussoirs; and there are two piers equally well designed; but the parapet rises into a high rampart pierced with nine arrow slits, and the ungainly towers have such flat summits that they appear to be roofless.[125] At Courtrai, on the other hand, we find the Pont de Broel, whose tall round towers have conical roofs lighted in a playful way by dormer windows, and graced with long weather-vanes. The Pont de Broel is a small bridge with three round arches, it looks very trivial between its formidable guardians. Both towers are encircled by machicolations, whose snarling teeth make an unpleasant girdle almost a third way down the walls. Between them and the roof are many small openings, defensive windows let us call them; and beneath the machicolations some other windows keep watch, with a proper respect of scaling ladders. We pass on to Ghent, where fifty-eight bridges span the canals, and connect the thirteen islands into which the brave old city is divided. In 1488, after Frederick III, Emperor of Germany, with his son Maximilian, had raised the siege of Ghent, the victorious burghers began at once to build the famous Rabot Forts, which included a defended lock. Brangwyn represents the Rabot lock and its bold defensive towers. These have two points of interest. They do justice to the character of mediæval Ghent, being bluff, stern, fanciful, ambitious, but short-sighted; and they seem to be copied from the Holsten Gate at Lübeck, built by this Hanseatic and republican city as a protection against frequent attacks from Denmark.

10. Covered Defensive Bridges of Timber. In these the protection has been of three sorts: against the weather, against riots, and against primitive weapons. Thus the covered bridges of Sumatra, made with bamboo and boards, are sunshades in bridge-building; and this applies to the roofed timber bridges in Western China. Some of these are carried over important rivers on stone piers, their roofing is decorative, and even to-day they would be useful in a time of unrest, especially to women and children. As for the Swiss variety of covered timber bridge, it seems to date from the period of lake-dwellings. But, whatever its lineage may have been, it is very ancient. Throughout the Middle Ages it was valued in war as well as in winter, when its footway was always free from snow. Often there was but a narrow space for light and air between the overhanging roof and the balustrade of heavy planks. It is not surprising that Swiss timber bridges were to mediæval archers and crossbowman what Hougomont was to Napoleon’s troops. On the other hand, it is surprising that these primitive structures are still as popular among the Swiss as they ever were. The most remarkable specimens are at Lucerne. In Brangwyn’s vivid pen-drawing we see the Todentanzbrücke, which is decorated with thirty pictures of the Dance of the Dead, by Meglinger.

TODENTANZBRÜCKE AT LUCERNE IN SWITZERLAND

As for the Kapellbrucke, also at Lucerne, it dates from 1303, and its length is 324 metres. It crosses the mouth of the river Reuss, that flows impetuously under it in a limpid torrent. The timbers that support the roof are ornamented with 254 scenes from the history of Switzerland.

PONT SAINT-ESPRIT

11. Pont Saint-Esprit, over the Rhône, below the confluence of the Ardèche. This bridge, like the Pont Valentré, is a masculine structure, so we must speak not of “it” but of “him.” Always there is a point of sex to be considered in architectural inspiration. Some bridges are women, either high-born or low-born; others are common soldiers; a few are great men of action, like the Roman Alcántara in Cáceres; while many have no distinctive sex, and we need pronouns with which to describe their character. If we speak of a neutral bridge as “it” we say nothing at all; but if we could refer to it as “itshe” or “ithe,” then we could show in one word which sexual qualities predominate. In old English bridges it is the neutral type that holds the field, very often in the “itshe” class. We have nothing to place side by side with the Pont Valentré and the Pont Saint-Esprit. Even Old London Bridge was a heroine, not a hero. A certain weakness germinated in the past of England, and influenced several phases of art and architecture. It is from this weakness, which seems to be racial, that modern England has grown by the score feeble artists limp with sentiment, and feebler faddists troubled with “nerves.” Whenever I see one of our little old ballad bridges—an “itshe” or an “ithe”—I say to myself, “Here is modern England in embryo; here is the beginning of a weak sentiment which in course of time will sap the vigour of our race.”

So the Pont Saint-Esprit is to my mind something more than a noble achievement in manly bridge-building; he marks for me also a startling difference between the undergrowth of the French character and the undergrowth of the English genius. We are beginning to realise in our own sports and games, as in boxing and in football, a truth which has long been known to students of French art, namely, that although the surface of the French character has boiled swiftly, like scum over jam, yet no other people have had in equal measure the self-belief that triumphs over frequent disaster, and the intrepid hope that gives ample pinions to the imagination. Study the churches of France in their historical sequence from their Romanesque period to the last phases of Gothic; contrast their varied charm with the almost incessant wars that devastated the country; and then lift your hat to the greatness attained by the French genius in times, not of crisis only, but often of catastrophe. We have reason to be very proud of our own churches, but they do not equal the French when they are studied side by side from large photographs. The unhappier country was the more adventurous builder, notwithstanding the virile influence brought to England by French Cistercian monks and by such bridgemasters as Isembert. This fact is galling to our patriotism, but yet it helps us to appreciate those Englishmen of genius who have risen far above the many littlenesses which English public opinion has been overapt to approve both in art and in architecture.

Again, there are three geographical reasons why the Pont Saint-Esprit is very notable: he crosses the Rhône, one of the most treacherous rivers in Europe; he belongs to the Department of Gard, where historical bridges have been famed since the times of the Romans; and he is in the district of Uzès, where we find the Pont Saint-Nicolas, on the road to Nîmes, a lofty bridge of the thirteenth century, with a beautiful distinction, built by the Priory of Saint-Nicolas-Campagnac.

Now these two bridges, so different in technical inspiration, yet so alike in thorough scholarship, mark a very important time of transition in French architecture. The Pont Saint-Esprit was designed and built by the Frères pontifes, or Pontist Brothers, but already the good example set by these friars was followed with enthusiasm by a great many laymen, whose guilds were competing against the religious corporations. Sooner or later, inevitably, civil work of every sort would have to pass under the sway of laic schools and masters; but the people of France were superstitious in their fondness for the Pontist Brothers, whose ferry-boats had saved a great many lives, whose bridges were famous everywhere, whose hospitals lodged and fed pilgrims, and whose white dress was in harmony with their good work and their good conduct. So the public was very far from pleased when a bridge of importance was built without help from the Pontist Brothers. For this reason, and no other, the Pont Saint-Cloud was called un pont maudit, and its construction was attributed to the Devil. Still, the Pontist Brothers had to go. During the thirteenth century their public value as bridge-builders grew weaker and weaker, until at last their competition against the trade guilds could be regarded no longer as a political offence.[126] It says much for them that their last undertaking, the Pont Saint-Esprit, was in most respects their best achievement: a fact which time itself has recognised by keeping this bridge in use to the present day.

THE PONTE NOMENTANO, A MEDIÆVAL WAR-BRIDGE IN THE CAMPAGNA, THREE MILES FROM ROME. IT SPANS THE WILLOW-FRINGED ANIO, A SACRED RIVER IN ITALIAN LEGEND

The Pont Saint-Esprit was commissioned by the Abbey of Cluny, and in 1265 the Pontist Brothers began to found the piers, after discussing their plans with Jean de Tessanges, Abbot of Cluny. Now, an earlier work of the Pontist Brothers, the Pont Saint-Bénézet at Avignon, was eighty years old in 1265, and his behaviour in the Rhône must have been a subject of interest to the successors of Bénézet. I conclude, then, that the Pont Saint-Esprit may be looked upon as a technical criticism of the earlier bridge, and it approves in all respects the work of St. Bénézet. Both bridges have relief arches for spate water, and when they are examined in bird’s-eye views, both have an elbow opposed to the current of the Rhône, and each suggests the image of a bridge of boats to which already I have drawn attention ([p. 262]). This image is rather more pronounced in the case of the earlier bridge, for the length of Bénézet’s piers, in the direction of the current, is enormous, being not less than thirty metres.

For the rest, the Pont Saint-Esprit seems to have an enchanted size, his most confident historians giving neither the same dimensions nor the same number of arches. Men with tape measures have grown tired of their job, seemingly; and even in photographs some arches are omitted while others are blurred by distance. On my table is an excellent photograph: it takes in just a bit of the metal arch which, about fifty years ago, displaced two of the old arches and made a passage for boats. From this point to the elbow upstream, there are eleven arches; beyond the elbow there are six more, and the bridge is not complete. This is all the camera can do. According to Viollet-le-Duc, there are twenty-two arches in a length of about 1000 metres; the roadway is five metres wide. Larousse tells me, on the other hand, that the length is 738 metres, the width 5 metres 40, the number of arches twenty-six; and another great work of reference, published also by Larousse, gives 919 metres for the length, and says that among the twenty-five arches there are nineteen ancient ones. We ought to admire the variegated self-confidence of historians.

But the main point is evident enough: the Pont Saint-Esprit is one of the longest stone bridges in the world. And the construction is truly marvellous. This was proved when a pier was pulled up to make room for the iron arch. The labour required was astounding, so excellent was the cemented masonry. But, of course, the bridge has passed through a good many changes to keep him in touch with the increase of traffic. In the seventeenth century he was still closed at both ends by strong gateways, while on the town side was a quite important defence of the fourteenth century, afterwards embodied in the citadel by which the river was guarded above-bridge. These defensive works have all gone, but their effect can be studied in “La Topographie de la Gaule,” where an engraving gives a good idea of their appearance.

12. Ponte Nomentano in the Campagna, three miles from Rome. This, no doubt, is the most romantic of all the fortified bridges that Brangwyn has painted. Both bridge and castle are mediæval, but they rise over the willow-frilled Anio, a river haunted by myths which to the ancients were sacred truths. It was in the Anio that Rhea Silvia passed from the brief hours of her mortality into the life of a goddess; and to this river Silvia confided her two children, Romulus and Remus, the twin Moses of Roman story, who were carried in their cradle to the Tiber, where other waters bore them on and on till at last they came to land under the fig tree at the foot of the Palatine hill. What a delightful legend to be whispered by the current of the prattling Anio below the uncouth stones of the Nomentano! What other war-bridge has been united to such a gracious myth?

And history as well as legend has been busy on the banks of the Anio. Into this river the ashes of Marius were thrown by the adherents of Sulla; and beyond the bridge, on the right bank, west of the Via Nomentana, is a very famous hillside, the Mons Sacer, to which the plebeians retreated, as to a fortified place, when they asserted their right to tame the patricians. Their first great strike, or secession, occupied four months in the year 549 B.C., when four thousand of them encamped on the friendly hill, leaving the crops unharvested, and the city without a garrison. Mount Sacer became sacred to the People of Rome, and to the historic sense it is the Hill of Liberty, sanctified by the first brave ideals of a democratic justice. Yet in recent times vulgarians have taken hold of Mount Sacer, and have carted it away by the ton to be used as building material.

As for the Ponte Nomentano, he is nothing more than a burly soldier, a common man-at-arms. The mediæval engineer was uninspired by an enchanted site, and gave the whole of his attention to the pronged battlements. He had no feeling for proportion, and no liking for a stern eloquence of line such as we find in the noble castle of Chenonceaux, a masterpiece of the French Renaissance, whose long wing is carried by a bridge of five round arches, and whose turreted portion is pierced by a single arcade.

13. The bridges of Laroque, near Cahors, on the river Lot. In this rapid sketch Brangwyn represents a riverside Gibraltar upon which an ancient village stands, partly on bridges. Its value in “the good old times” as a stronghold fortified by Nature is patent, and the watch-towers have an unsleeping alertness that looks out upon the world through one eye or window. I should like to know who built the first bridge at Laroque. There is a Romanesque form in the arch drawn by Brangwyn, and the Romans were active in the neighbourhood. Over the Lot at Divona, now called Cahors, they built a bridge, which perished some years ago in a local storm of party feeling. To imagine Rome with a Gibraltar on the Lot is a great pleasure.

LAROQUE ON THE RIVER LOT, NEAR CAHORS, A SORT OF INLAND GIBRALTAR; A PART OF THE VILLAGE IS BUILT ON BRIDGES THROWN ACROSS CHASMS IN THE ROCKS

Before we pass on from the defensive bridges, I should like to give you a picture of the famous old bridge at Saintes, in France, that lasted to the year 1843, when it was destroyed. I know not why I use the silly word “it,” for the bridge of Saintes was an exceedingly martial structure that united all the main phases of military art—the primitive, the Roman, and the mediæval. Let me give an abridged description from Viollet-le-Duc’s “Dictionnaire raisonnée d’Architecture”:—

“The first gate appeared on the right shore of the Charente, on the side of the Faubourg des Dames; next came the Roman arch, [127] the upper part of which was crenellated during the Middle Ages; next on the side of the town stood a tower of oval plan, through which the road lay; the town gates with flanking towers closed the end of the bridge. From the first gate to the Roman arch the bridge was of wood, as was also the case between the great tower and the town gates, so that by the removal of this part of the roadway all communication could be cut off between the town and the tower, as well as between the bridge and the Faubourg; moreover, the parapets were crenellated, so that the garrison of the town at any moment could stop all navigation.”

V

A brief introduction to the history of bridges has so many difficulties that I creep through my work, a few hundred words in a long day. To try to plant an oak tree in a thimble would be more difficult, I suppose, but gleaning here and there over vast fields brings trouble enough to any writer. I go through scores of photographs, and turn over great piles of notes, and seek for a topic that is not too technical for the general reader, but that touches a really important phase in the evolution of bridge-building. There is a species of bridge to which the arches at Laroque belong; it may be called either freakish or very exceptional. Let me give a few examples.

There is one at Crowland, a curious three-branched structure which for many a year stood at the confluence of the Catwater drain and two streamlets, the Welland and the Nyne. To-day no water flows under this bridge, and common little modern houses do not make pretty pictures when they are framed by the arches. There are three pointed arches, with their abutments at the angles of an equilateral triangle; they meet in the middle, and form three roadways and three watercourses. They have three stone ribs apiece, and the nine ribs meet in the centre I note, too, that these arches were built not by a bridgeman, but by a mason skilled in church work, for their rings are moulded elaborately as in Gothic windows and doorways. As for the style of architecture, it is not older than the beginning of the fourteenth century; but a much earlier bridge at Crowland, probably of wood, was famed for its triangular shape, and mentioned in a charter of the year 943, when Edmund was King.

At the south-west entrance of Crowland Bridge, beyond the five steps, there is a rough-hewn statue that represents a crowned and bearded figure seated up high against the parapet walls, in an attitude of sorrow, with arms folded (and perhaps they may be bound together) over a long robe. Time has frayed and scarred this uncouth sculpture, but not without leaving some mellow lines and planes. The archæology of guesswork has called this effigy by various names, such as Ethelbald, and Saint Guthlac, and Henry II, but I prefer to look upon it as a simple Pietà chiselled by a mason who had been trained to do enniched figures for church decoration—work without detail, to make at a distance a broad effect. This conjecture is in accord with the ecclesiastical moulding of the archstones, and with the mediæval custom that united bridges to Christianity by means of sacred emblems. Crowland Abbey ruled over the district, so one of the Abbots may have built the bridge; and perhaps the pointed arches, three in number, with their triple ribs, and their three pathways, and the three streams of water, may have been intended as symbols of the Trinity. If so,—and there is nothing in this view to clash with the spirit of the Mediæval Church,—then a Pietà turned toward the west would be the most beautiful symbol of that Light which went down with the sun, and then rose again through the dark into the dusk, and through the dusk into a dawn where faith for ever dwells. On the other hand, if the crowned figure represents a mere earthly king, I know not why Ethelbald should be chosen, for his reign of two years was not a creative time and he died in 860, just eighty-three years before Crowland’s triangular bridge was alluded to in the charter of the year 943. Alfred, Edward the Elder, and Athelstan—these kings in succession were nearer to the charter, and their longer reigns were more notable than the short hours of Ethelbald. Alfred we should prefer, of course, but he has been passed over by the busy minds that have weaved around Crowland Bridge so many cobwebs of the study and so much haze of idle conjecture. My own views are conjectures also, but they are taken partly from the bridge itself and partly from the care and affection that the Church during the Middle Ages bestowed on bridge-building.

And now a technical matter ought to be considered in its bearing on the arches of Crowland Bridge. At a time when bridges were protected by the Church, their arches were affected by changes of style in ecclesiastical windows and doorways; but, of course, whatever shape was given to them, they were treated differently from doorways and windows, for these had to bear only a downward thrust, while bridges had to withstand five trials: their own “spring,” the vibration caused by wheeled traffic, the lateral pressure of flowing water, the disturbance of gravity by immersion, and blows from drifting ice and timber. With these problems to be solved, bridgemen set no store by moulded archstones, a kickshaw of style. Sometimes they built the ring of an arch with two or three sets of voussoirs, [128] but their aim was practical, not ornamental; they wished to give greater resistance to their work, and not merely to spend time and money on a decorative effect. So when we find in the arches of Crowland Bridge such moulded handicraft as was used in church decoration, we may surmise that the architect and his masons were not bridge-builders, and that they worked only for the light foot-traffic of a village.

It is worth noting that in the year 1752 a French architect named Beffara took a hint from Crowland Bridge, and then achieved fame with a daring structure built near Ardres, in the Pas-de-Calais. There are four branches to this bridge, and they carry roads over two canals that intersect at right angles. One canal goes from Saint-Ouen to Calais and the other from Ardres to Gravelines. Beffara’s work is placed by Larousse among the fifty-four most notable bridges in the world, and this honour it seems to merit; but Frenchmen in their vanity have tried to make it into a pretentious bridge by giving to it a braggart name—Le Sans-Pareil. Gracious! It is fit for a café or for a battleship, in whose nomenclature bravado and bombast rule as customs. Poor Beffara! “Le Sans-Pareil,” like “Titanic” or like “Dreadnought,” defies the powers of Nature, inviting them to do their worst; and what good omen can there be in such bantam cockiness?

For a long time the old bridge at Bâle, over the Rhine, remarkable for its length and for its beautiful site, was not only freakish but exceedingly insolent. At one end, on the side of greater Bâle, was a tower decorated with a grotesque head called Laellenkoenig, which, in answer to the working of a clock, put out its tongue and rolled insulting eyes at the opposite bank. Eight or ten times an hour this abusive pantomime was repeated, and it never failed to anger little Bâle, which had the pugnacious vanity of a small organism. I do not know how many duels were fought, but at last a touch of Rabelaisian humour suggested a mechanical revenge, far more regular in its action than were fights and punctured bodies. A tall post was set up by the inhabitants of Bâle junior, and on the top of it stood a hateful statue that affected to turn its back on the enemy with a shameless movement.

It is risky at the present time to say that a bridge has certain old characters: change is so rapid that no pontist can keep in touch with its vagaries; but I believe the old bridge at Bâle is alive, and that it keeps in use the Gothic tower, a triangular defence of red sandstone erected on the middle pier, and devoted now to a thermometer, a barometer, and a table of weights and measures. Laellenkoenig has gone, of course, and Bâle junior has grown much bigger and less techy.

The Bridge of Sighs, at Venice, must be included among the exceptional bridges, being equally celebrated in history and in art. Who can say how many times she has been etched and painted and engraved? She is not very important as a work of architecture, yet artists are drawn towards her invariably, and seldom do they fail to make her impressive. Brangwyn loves the Bridge of Sighs, and does her much more than justice in one of his finest etchings. There is something trivial in her Renaissance ornament, and her proportions are not great, being only two metres wide and six high; on the other hand, her abutments are famous buildings, the ducal palace and the State prison. It is from the second storey of the palace that we enter the gloom of her covered passage, concerning which a Frenchman writes as follows: “On pourrait presque le comparer, en agrandissant les proportions, à nos fourgons d’armée.”

It is said that only a prisoner here and there went over this bridge more than once—in his compulsory walk from a dungeon in the prison to the Council of the Ten. Those who awaited their trial in the dungeons were looked upon as already condemned; their appearance before the Ten was a formality, at least in public opinion; and for this reason the dark corridor across the canal was called the Bridge of Sighs.

Among the bridges of the fourteenth century there are two that history has set down as very exceptional. One of them is a covered bridge over the Ticino at Pavia, erected under the care of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Professor Fleeming Jenkin says of it: “This bridge, which still exists, has seven pointed brick arches, each 70 ft. in span and 64 ft. in height; the depth of the arch ring at the crown is 5 ft. 6 in. The tympanum is pierced; the bricks used in the arches are formed to suit their position, and are hollow in the middle to diminish the weight. The roof of the roadway is carried by a hundred rough granite columns.”

This neat description is accurate, but in it the bridge is not visualised. Would that we had a Brangwyn sketch! I have by my side an engraving of the bridge, and the effect of the design is that of an open-work frieze. Each gracefully pointed arch is a repetition of the other six; the piers also are uniform and graceful, being all 16 ft. 3 in. wide; and all the spandrils are pierced in the same triangular fashion. The point of each triangle is turned downwards, its sides are the inner surfaces of two arch rings, and its base, turned upwards, and gracefully arched with seventeen long bricks, helps to support the parapet. On this parapet at equal intervals rise the hundred granite columns by which the covered roadway is carried. So the design is a clever feat not merely of repetitive decoration, but of repeating solids and voids that oppose each other in a harmony of contrasts; for the empty spandrils in their form oppose the leaf-shaped openings made by the arches, and all the curved solids of the bridge are foiled in a rugged manner by the upright columns, as well as by the long horizontal lines of the covered roadway. In the contrast between cold granite and warm brick there is colour also, and it suits the pulsating light and heat of Italy.

As for the second bridge of the fourteenth century, which architects regard as very uncommon, it exists in drawings only, for it was destroyed by Carmagnola. Its founder was a duke of Milan, Bernabò Visconti, and it crossed the Adda at Trezzo. According to Hann and Hosking, it had “a single arch of granite, very well constructed of stones in two courses, the innermost 3¼ ft. thick in the direction of the radius, the outermost 9 in., the span at low water 251 ft.; the river rises sometimes 13 ft.” The radius of the arch was 133 ft. A span of 251 ft. in a stone bridge was a noble achievement. It is the largest that I remember. The Grosvenor Bridge at Chester has a span of 200 ft., just thirty yards wider than the central arch of Trajan’s Bridge over the Tagus. New London Bridge in her finest arch attains a span of 152 ft., beating Waterloo Bridge by nearly eleven yards. Two French bridges of the eighteenth century—the Pont de Lavaur and the Pont de Gignac—have spans of 160 ft.; and let me refer you also to the Pont de Neuilly-sur-Seine ([p. 338]).

Many uncommon bridges have been attributed to the Chinese, and I know not what to say about some of them. Let me quote from Marco Polo, giving also the excellent notes written by his editor Colonel Yule. In the twenty-seventh chapter of his travels Marco Polo speaks “of the river named Pulisangan, and of the bridge over it.” This river, whose name is written variously, is believed to be the Hoen-ho of the Jesuits’ map, which, uniting with another stream from the north-west, forms the Pe-ho or White River. When Marco Polo comes to the Pulisangan[129] he finds “a very handsome bridge of stone, perhaps unequalled by another in the world.” “Its length is three hundred paces, and its width eight paces; so that ten men can ride abreast without inconvenience.[130] It has twenty-four arches, supported by twenty-five piers erected in the water, all of serpentine stone, and built with great skill. On each side, and from one extremity to the other, there is a handsome parapet, formed of marble slabs and pillars arranged in a masterly style. At the commencement of the ascent the bridge is something wider than at the summit, but from the part where the ascent terminates, the sides run in straight lines and parallel to each other.[131] Upon the upper level there is a massive and lofty column, resting upon a tortoise of marble, and having near its base a large figure of a lion, with a lion also on the top.[132] Towards the slope of the bridge there is another handsome column or pillar, with its lion, at the distance of a pace and a half from the former; and all the spaces between one pillar and another, throughout the whole length of the bridge, are filled up with slabs of marble, curiously sculptured, and mortised into the next adjoining pillars, which are, in like manner, a pace and a half asunder, and equally surmounted with lions, [133] forming altogether a beautiful spectacle. These parapets serve to prevent accidents, that might otherwise happen to passengers. What has been said applies to the descent as well as to the ascent of the bridge.”[134]

I do not understand why this description is considered very difficult to understand. It depicts a gabled bridge with a flat top, not an uncommon form of bridge in China, I believe. The footway ascends to the beginning of the middle arch, where it becomes flat and level; it continues so for the full width of the arch, and then it descends toward the abutment across the river. With this picture in mind it is easy to decorate the bridge over the Pulisangan, or Hoen-ho, with the accessories described by Marco Polo. The parapets have coping stones of sculptured marble, and pillars are carefully set along the parapets at an equal distance from each other. These pillars are of two sorts. Those above the flat part of the roadway, where the parapets also are horizontal, are tall and massive. On each side, at the brow of the ascent, there is a tall pillar upon the summit of which is a stone lion; and in the middle of each parapet, on this level part of the road, there is a taller and heavier column, whose pedestal is a marble tortoise, and whose summit carries a symbolic lion. Another lion is placed near the tortoise, perhaps on a ledge of stone corbelled out from the parapet. As for the parapets that slope up from the abutments to the point where they become level, or horizontal, they, too, have their emblematic lions carried by pillars, and these ornaments, in accordance with the logic of design, are much smaller than those on the summit of the steep bridge. For the rest, Marco Polo speaks of twenty-four arches and of twenty-five piers; and if we give to the arches an average span of fifty-two feet, and to the piers an average width of thirteen feet, we get a bridge 1573 ft. long, or seventy-three feet longer than the five hundred yards suggested by Colonel Yule. Viewed in this way, apart from the vague glamour of enthusiastic words, there is nothing extravagant in Marco Polo’s description.

Many writers have been astonished by another Chinese bridge, called the Bridge of Cho-gan, in the province of Shen-si. Its great arch is said to have had an unrivalled span. I am told that it was built with huge blocks of stone, cut into voussoirs, the joints of which converged towards a common centre, as in our own bridges. This may be true, though in photographs of Chinese bridges which I have seen the voussoirs do not resemble ours; not only are they much longer, they are much narrower also, and recall to my memory a good description written by Barrow, whose impressions of China are invaluable to students. Barrow speaks of archstones from five to ten feet long, and says that each stone “is cut so as to form a segment of the arch.” “There is no keystone” when an arch is built in this manner. Again, “ribs of wood fitted to the convexity of the arch are bolted through the stones by iron bars, fixed in the solid part of the bridge”; sometimes no wood is employed, and then “the curved stones are mortised into long transverse blocks of stone.” It would be ridiculous to speak of this technical method as one that employs voussoirs, since the arch ring is built with a few segmental stones and without a keystone; and possibly the Bridge of Cho-gan was constructed in this fashion. A drawing of it is given in Kircher’s “La Chine Illustrée”—or, rather, in Dalquié’s translation of Kircher’s book, published in 1670 at Amsterdam. It is not a geometrical drawing, and the dimensions are given in Chinese measures, which do not help us to love Kircher and Dalquié. M. Degrand is baffled by these measures;[135] but he admits that the Bridge of Cho-gan must have been a grandiose structure dating from a very remote time.

Gauthey speaks with admiration of the “Pont de Fo-Cheu sur le Min”—a bridge not less than 7935 metres long by 19 metres 50 wide, with a hundred arches, all semicircular, and thirty-nine metres in their average span. The piers were nearly as broad, and their height was thirty-nine metres. Here is a bridge that Dean Swift ought to have put into his pictures of Brobdingnag. Gauthey seems to have faith in it, while M. Degrand has doubts. He says: “Even if we admit that there is no flagrant exaggeration in the documents from which the account of this bridge is taken, the workmanship in its general character, as shown in the drawing given by Gauthey, has a near resemblance to that in Roman bridges, and ought not to be assigned to a period earlier than theirs.” Gauthey describes the decorative treatment. Under the parapet of white marble ran a line of consoles; the piers were surmounted by figures of lions in black marble, cut from blocks seven metres long; and above each twentieth arch the footway was guarded by a gateway, un arc de triomphe.

For the rest, as I wanted to learn something more about this bridge of a hundred vast arches over the Min at Fo-Cheu, I wrote to the Rev. O. M. Jackson, whose kind help I have already acknowledged ([p. 248]). There is a river Min in Sichuan, but no news of such a bridge has reached Mr. Jackson, though he has worked in Western China for more than twenty years, and has travelled on foot over a very wide area in the province of Sichuan. Again, Mr. Jackson does not recognise the spelling “Fo-Cheu,” but refers me to the city of Fu Chow in the coast province of Fukien. One day, perhaps, research will bring me in touch with the colossal masterpiece described by Gauthey, though at present I am baffled by the variety of geographical names that travellers have given to the bridges of China. Still, the Chinese have been great bridge-builders, and some of their stone arches have been very high and very wide. Perhaps the one described by Kircher may have been as wide as Trezzo Bridge, over the Adda, with its wonderful span of 251 feet.

My favourite bridge in the class of exceptional merit is the Ponte della Trinità over the Arno at Florence, designed in 1566 by the architect of the Pitti Palace, Bartolomeo Ammanati, a devoted admirer of Michelangelo. Both in science and in art the Ponte della Trinità is complete as an original success. Its vaulting—I ought to say his vaulting, for in this bridge the male qualities of genius are much stronger than the female—his vaulting, then, if not the most scientific in the world, is not excelled by any other work either ancient or modern. There are three arches, and their curves are cycloids; the rise from the springing level is only a trifle more than one-sixth of the span. How Ammanati managed to get his effect of perfect balance and symmetry is a question very hard to answer, for there is a considerable difference between the width of his arches, the central one being 96 ft. in span, and the others 86 ft. and 88 ft. This fact has been established by measured drawings, but do you notice it out of doors, in the magic of this beautiful bridge? The piers are simple and excellent. Their width, twenty-six feet, is not too much for the spates of a freakish river, nor too heavy for the bridge as a linear composition; on the upstream side they have stern cutwaters, good foils in a piece of architecture that blends an alert grace with a supple vigour. Another point worth noting is the gradient of a roadway that starts out from low abutments. Ammanati was bent upon being a friend to the traffic of Florence, and with the help of his cycloid arches he kept the road on a mild curve. To-day this good point attracts little attention, as most of us forget that steep bridges were in vogue till late in the eighteenth century.

A Victorian pontist, William Hosking, endeavoured to prove that Ammanati made one mistake in the Ponte della Trinità. It seemed to Hosking that the piers were too bulky, so he cut them down in a sketch and spoilt the whole bridge by altering the proportions. Architects told him so, but Hosking crowed over his little sketch and published it with pride, as you will find by turning to his “Architectural Treatise on Bridge Building”—a valuable work from other standpoints.

VI

The great work of Ammanati sets thought in movement on bridge decoration, and I wish to offer some hints on this subject, not for the purpose of finding rules, but in order that a public debate may be invited. Rules would be very useful if they could be formulated, but in bridge decoration national sentiment and personal feeling have been exceedingly active; no writer, then, can do more than offer suggestions from his own point of view.

Less than twenty years ago a debate on this subject would not have been easy, for good books on the technical history of bridges were uncommon, and photographs of fine examples were far more difficult to get than they are now. English books on bridges are still formidably dull; to read them is perhaps as troublesome as hill climbing on a foggy day; but the fear of being “ploughed” in a stiff examination helps young men to be intrepid. In France, on the other hand, the public is served very well by literary pontists. M. Charles Béranger, for instance, from his Librairie Polytechnique in Paris, is publishing a series of thorough books on bridges, as useful to us as they are to French students. Already eight volumes have been issued. They include:—

1. “Ponts en Maçonnerie.” Par E. Degrand, Inspecteur-Général des Ponts et Chaussées, et Jean Résal, Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées. Two volumes, illustrated; 40 francs.

2. “Ponts Métalliques.” Par M. Pascal, Ingénieur. One volume; 15 francs; illustrated.

3. “Croquis de Ponts Métalliques.” Par Jules Gaudard, Ingénieur Civil et Professeur Honoraire de l’Université de Lausanne. Profusely illustrated; 20 francs.

4. “Cours de Ponts Métalliques.” Par Jean Résal. Vol. I, 375 illustrations; 20 francs.

5. “Manuel Théorique et Pratique du Constructeur en Ciment Armé.” Par MM. N. de Tédesco et V. Forestier. One volume, 242 illustrations; 20 francs.

6. “Études sur les Ponts en Pierre remarquables par leur Décoration.” Par F. De Dartein, Inspecteur-Général des Ponts et Chaussées en Retraite, etc. Vol. I, “Ponts Français antérieurs au Dix-Huitième Siècle”; not yet published. “Vol. II, Ponts Français du Dix-Huitième Siècle—Centre”; published. Vol. III, “Ponts Français du Dix-Huitième Siècle—Languedoc”; published. Vol. IV, Bourgogne; published. Vol. V, “Ponts Étrangers antérieurs au XIX siècle—Italiens, Espagnols et Anglais”; not yet published. Price, 25 francs the volume.

For this work M. De Dartein has made exact measured drawings from sixty-eight bridges, and each example has a great historic interest. The author has taken a line of his own, dwelling on the ornament of bridges, their decoration; several of his volumes are long overdue, but in his earnest study of the eighteenth century we see what he admires in French design. M. De Dartein is thoughtful and thorough, but I wish some photographs had been added to the illustrations, because measured drawings give only the dry bones of architecture.

How to decorate a bridge is a question beset with so many problems, some practical, and others æsthetic, that it ought to be debated at an international congress of engineers and architects and artists. There are persons who think that M. De Dartein will say the last word on his important theme; but it is enough for me to believe that his material and his personal taste will be invaluable, presenting facts and provoking discussion. He lingers too often over details of trivial ornament, which increase the cost of production without doing any good at all to the architecture. In other words, M. De Dartein speaks too often as an engineer.

The qualities of a great bridge should make their appeal in stern lines, in ample proportions, in a scale that befits not the site alone but the site and its history; for all fine architecture dwells with the fugitive generations as a lasting citizen; it is an epitome of racial character alembicated by genius. Bridges cannot be fine when they are dwarfed by their environments, or when they are too big to be in harmony with the externals of their setting. This, no doubt, is a staring truism, yet it is unseen by most modern engineers, whose metal monsters are often as wrongly placed in a gentle landscape as a giant from Brobdingnag would be at Lilliput. On the other hand, can you explain why the Roman bridge at Alcántara is tremendous art? Is it not because he is in scale with the rocky gorge of the Tagus? This virile bridge completes a grand site, and finds in the site his own completion.

THE PONT NEUF AT PARIS, BUILT IN 1604; IT HAS BEEN MUCH ALTERED SINCE THE RENAISSANCE

Still, it cannot be said that Roman bridges were always free from redundant ornament. There were times when pomp exerted a bad influence; and later ages borrowed oddments of Roman decoration that weakened in many countries the aspect of bridges. It is from such Roman work as the Pont du Gard, where no detail was called for, and where the architect’s aim was to be unpretentious, that we learn never to worry a bridge with embellishments. To construct ornament is very often an easy accomplishment of bad taste, while to ornament construction is a very difficult problem of self-restraint in art, because judgment tells us that a great design carried out in simple and thorough masonry is in itself ornamental, if not complete. Applied decoration is almost certain to harm it, just as a human face is disfigured by sticking-plaster.

For example, turn to Frank Brangwyn’s drawing of the Pont Neuf at Paris, and note under the parapet the well-spaced brackets. Each bracket is decorated with a mask. Why? Simpler and shorter brackets would have been more in keeping with the architecture, as these long ones overlap the keystones—a serious blunder. Partly to hide a ring of voussoirs is to blur the whole structural beauty of an arch. It is like covering the eyes with blue spectacles. And there are other mistakes of scale in the Pont Neuf. No fewer than six piers are crowded into the Seine, as if inundations were amusements to be liked very much. But the spirit of Renaissance art was overapt to be finikin. In a fine bridge at Chatsworth, for instance, a charming effect is troubled by a too expensive parapet; and statues are lodged on pedestals above the cutwaters. Why? Is the cutwater of a bridge a convenient spot for the display of sculpture? As many persons fear in talk a sudden silence made by thought, so many architects in their revisions fear the plain spaces left in their designs by a creative inspiration. Then in a hurry they add some “ornament” such as we find at Chatsworth, or in Gauthey’s Pont de Navilly on the Doubs. In this bridge narrow spandrils are choked with an overturned vase surrounded by an ornament of bulrushes, and over each cutwater there is a huge stone shaped like an egg and garlanded. I decline to speak in technical terms because the folly of using superfluous “ornament” is hidden by words that look erudite. Was it an admiration for Moses that caused Gauthey to put bulrushes on a bridge? And did he suppose that they suggested water and adventure? As for those huge eggs of stone, if they came from some bird five or six times as big as an ostrich, I should like to see them in a museum of natural history, but without their ornamental wreaths.

In brief, are you attracted by any phase of modern bridge-building that copies the decorations of civic architecture, displaying columns, pilasters, niches, balustrades, battlements, towers, turrets, pinnacles, or any other finery that serves no organic purpose in the life of a contemporary bridge? Myself, I hate such a strumpet of a bridge as the Hoogesluis at Amsterdam, with her ornate spandrils, and her embossed masonry, and her balustraded parapet surmounted by a row of obelisks around which lamps are bracketed. Also I hate such a suspension bridge as the one at Conway Castle, where the metal rods that support the roadway pass through a brace of turrets on each of the embattled gateways. The effect is not only comic but ludicrous. No engineer with any sense would have put a metal viaduct within a few yards of Conway Castle. Or, if a metal suspension had been forced upon him by his employers, he would have made in a modern style a very simple and stern design. Instead, we have two vulgar gateways rudely copied from Conway Castle, and then lacerated by five metal rods that cut through each of the four turrets. I am reminded of an absurd railway bridge at Cologne, whose parapets are—or were—flanked by small turrets, and whose gateway has—or had—two high towers formidably armed with make-believe battlements and machicolations. Such futile pretension is a public insult; it implies that laymen have no common sense at all in their attitude to “feats of engineering.”

But it is not the modern bridge alone that provokes criticism in this matter of decorative art. Some ancient and famous bridges are hard nuts to crack as soon as we pass from their structural fitness to their ornamentation. As an example I may choose the Ponte Sant’ Angelo at Rome, which has been copied feebly by the Schloss Brücke at Berlin. Originally the Sant’ Angelo was the Pons Ælius, built by Hadrian (A.D. 13) face to face with his mausoleum, to-day the castle of Saint Angelo. In the seventeenth century new parapets were added to the bridge, and ten colossal statues by Bernini were put up on pedestals along the parapets. Around these statues many a controversy has raged, and I am not surprised. In my photographs there is a small lamp-standard between each pair of huge figures; even the lights of Rome have to twinkle below the decorations. The bridge looks burdened rather than adorned; it is neither wide enough nor high enough to be used as a gallery for sculpture modelled on a large scale. That a great effort was made by an artist of power is evident, but the artist worked for his own ambition, and not for the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. He had no conception of the fact that the bridge and its environment were so good that they could not be improved by huge “embellishments.” Yet there are writers who say, “Yes, no doubt, Bernini’s bouncing figures are theatrical, but, after all, their general effect is grandiose.” The truth is, every great city needs a Parliament of Taste where questions of civic art could be debated publicly, with help from lantern slides. No writer can hope to do much in his defence of art. Indeed, books are studied so infrequently that they cannot draw public attention to the larger problems of architecture and decoration; whereas free debates in a Parliament of Taste, centring always around object-lessons, might restore to art the life of a great citizen.

In this matter we owe much to Hosking, the Victorian pontist, who cried out against the blunders made in the ornamentation of bridges. As early as 1842 he told the truth boldly, declaring that the most eminent civil engineers, in their efforts to take hints from street buildings, had failed to produce anything but meanness or absurdity, or a combination of both. Hosking had faith in three simple principles:—

1. That bridges, in the combination of their leading lines, should be bold and simple;

2. That their passage over dangerous places ought to be a secure highway; and,

3. That in stone bridges far too much money had been wasted on the high finish of exterior surfaces. In very ponderous language Hosking said:—

“It may be fairly questioned whether Waterloo and London bridges would not have been finer objects had the masonry of their external faces been merely rough-axed, or even left scabbled, instead of being fair hammer-dressed; and certainly many thousands of pounds might have been saved in the execution of Waterloo Bridge, and a much better result produced, by the omission of the coupled columns and their immediate accessories, and by the use of a plain parapet of a more reasonable height, instead of the high, the enormously expensive, and absurdly ugly balustraded enclosures which now aid the columns and their projected entablatures to deform a splendid structure.”

This Puritan outlook appeals to me, for I believe that good bridges should be as sternly efficient as were the Ironsides of Cromwell’s army. Their beauty is a thing apart from any cavalier-like finery of dressing ornament. It shows that all the parts of a bridge are co-ordinated with fine judgment, and that each part is in nice accord with its own work and with the great office which the bridge as a whole has to fulfil daily.

When the railway viaduct at Ludgate Hill was finished, there was a public outcry because of its gaunt and shabby ugliness; but Londoners were appeased as soon as some “decorative” metalwork was nailed upon the parapets. This “ornament,” a trumpery makeshift, was supposed to have given merit to an imbecile design that disgraced the main road to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As things of this sort are allowed to happen in the heart of our great city, who can have confidence in civic authorities? What chance is there that new projects for bridges will be considered intelligently?

In 1815, when Rennie began his bridge over the Thames at Southwark, neither the Government nor the City of London employed him; it was a Company that approved his designs, and financed the undertaking. At an expense of £800,000, three bad arches of cast-iron were put up from “elegant” stone piers and abutments; yet London was charmed by “a great feat of engineering,” partly because 5780 tons of ironwork had been employed, and partly because the central arch had a span of 240 ft. From 1819 to November 8, 1864, the Company was a toll gatherer on their industrial bridge; then the toll was done away with, and the Company received from the City an industrial compensation. Here is a financial adventure which might have been undertaken to benefit a small township which had in its neighbourhood some new ironworks and collieries. Still more farcical was the public lottery that helped to collect money for the building of the first Westminster Bridge, between 1738 and 1750. Even now, after many lessons from past follies, London has made more than one muddle over the project of St. Paul’s Bridge. Not even the Tower Bridge, with all its blatant defects, has enabled the City to be alert and clever as a pontist.

A more absurd structure than the Tower Bridge was never thrown across a strategic river. What would be the use of those ornate towers if the suspended roadway connecting them to the banksides were cut by a shell or by a falling bomb? And what anachronism could be sillier than that which has united the principle of metal suspension to an architecture cribbed partly from the Middle Ages, and partly from the French Renaissance? The many small windows, the peaked roofing, the absurdly impudent little turrets, the biscuit-like aspect of the meretricious masonry, the desperate effort to be “artistic” at any cost: all this, you know, is at standing odds with the contemporary parts of the unhistoric bridge, parts huge in scale, but so commercial that there is not a vestige of military forethought anywhere. It is mere perishable bulk.

THE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON

FOOTNOTES:

[82] See the Statute of Winchester, A.D. 1285, and Statute 2, Richard II, A.D. 1378; see also the Rolls of Parliament. Among the most dangerous rogues were many lawless barons and their retinues, against whom the Law protested vainly. In A.D. 1138 we find them mentioned by the “Gesta Stephani,” and till late in the fifteenth century the partisans of nobles were feared on the roads. But for them the Wars of the Roses would have been less horrible, and wayfaring life would have been less barbarously at odds with those Christian virtues which were proclaimed everywhere by great symbols of religion: manor churches, hopeful cathedrals, vast monasteries, wayside chapels and shrines, and quiet homes whispering with the prayers of gentle nuns. Brutal strife among Christians had made the world into a new Garden of Gethsemane over which the Spirit of Christ brooded and wept.

[83] There seems to be only one exception to this rule. I refer to some Chinese bridges of the thirteenth century, mentioned by Marco Polo in his account of the city Sin-din-fu, now called Ching-tu-fu, situated on the western side of the province of Se-chuen, of which it is the capital. Marco Polo says: “The city is watered by many considerable streams, which, descending from the distant mountains, surround and pass through it in a variety of directions. Some of these rivers are half a mile in width, others are two hundred paces, and very deep, over which are built several large and handsome stone bridges, eight paces in breadth, their length being greater or less according to the size of the stream. From one extremity to the other there is a row of marble pillars on each side, which support the roof; for here the bridges have very handsome roofs, constructed of wood, ornamented with paintings of a red colour, and covered with tiles. Throughout the whole length also there are neat apartments and shops, where all sorts of trades are carried on. One of the buildings, larger than the rest, is occupied by the officers who collect the duties upon provisions and merchandise, and a toll from persons who pass the bridge. In this way, it is said, his Majesty receives daily the sum of a hundred besants of gold.” According to the Latin editions of Marco Polo, the booths or shops were set up in the morning and removed from the bridge at night. If so, then the width of these bridges, described by Marco as “eight paces,” must have been more than twenty-four feet, since booths would have obstructed such narrow footways. Marco Polo’s great editor, Colonel Yule, interpreting the description of another bridge, proves that the “paces” must be geometric.

[84] Degrand, in his “Ponts en Maçonnerie,” gives a reproduction of Palladio’s drawing, which represents an imperial scheme, far and away better than Antonio da Ponte’s.

[85] The Bridge of Ali Verdi Khan.

[86] Lord Curzon’s book on Persia.

[87] British Museum, the MS. 16 F. ii, Fol. 73. The little picture is drawn from nature; a bad reproduction of it appears in M. Jusserand’s good book on “English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages.”

[88] J. J. Jusserand, p. 49. See also in Stow.

[89] This was finished in 1014; in 1136 it was burnt down, and in 1176 Colechurch started upon his brave enterprise.

[90] Viollet-le-Duc writes as follows (vol. 6, p. 410): “Dans les villes, on profitait souvent des arches de pont pour établir des moulins, et même alors les ponts et moulins, bâtis en bois, ne formaient qu’une seule et même construction. Avant 1835, il existait encore à Meaux, en Brie, un pont de ce genre entièrement en bois ainsi que les moulins y attenant; cet ensemble datait de la fin du xvᵉ siècle....”

[91] Alas! The Great War has done much harm to the Pont du Marché at Meaux. To-day (September 26, 1914) I saw a photograph of its crippled condition. One arch at least is ruined, and mended roughly with timbering.

[92] See “The Builder,” November 22, 1890.

[93] There has been much disputation over the origin of St. Mary’s Chapel, and I refer you to the following books: 1. “Remarks on Wayside Chapels,” by two architects, J. C. and C. Buckler, 8vo, Oxford, 1843. This book was approved by Parker, an excellent recommendation. 2. “A Dissertation on Ancient Bridges and Bridge Chapels,” by Norrison Scatcherd, 1828. 3. “The Chapel of King Edward III on Wakefield Bridge,” by Norrison Scatcherd, 1843. In the earlier treatise the chapel is attributed to the reign of Edward IV. Scatcherd belongs to an old school of polemical swashbucklers, but what he says is worth attention, though difficult to follow. 4. “The Histories of York.”

[94] Camden’s “Britannia,” Ed. Gough, Vol. III, London, 1789, pp. 38-9.

[95] St. Mary’s Chapel was illustrated by Toms, after George Fleming, 1743; by Lodge, in Thoresby’s “Ducatus”; by Cawthorne, about 1800; and by “The Builder,” November 22, 1890.

[96] “Bath Old Bridge and the Chapel Thereon,” by Emanuel Green, F.S.A., F.R.S.L., p. 143, British Archæological Association.

[97] “The Builder,” August 20, 1887.

[98] These dates I take from the catalogue of historic monuments issued by the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts. Some writers give the dates as 1178 and 1188.

[99] According to Degrand; some other writers say nineteen. The largest spans were a little more than thirty-three metres; but even in these the size varied somewhat.

[100] See Allen’s “History of the County of York,” 1832. P. Atkinson was the architect of the new bridge, and his work went on till March, 1810. As for the old Ouse Bridge, good views of it will be found in the “Antiquarian Itinerary,” Vol. I, 1815; the “Antiquarian Cabinet,” Vol. III, 1817; and the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” ninth edition. Let us take a glance at one of the pictures. On the west end of the bridge is a tall building carried by two pointed arches and crowned with a small steeple. It is the great Council Chamber, with a prison for felons beneath it, according to the “Antiquarian Cabinet.” We cross the river and find at the other side the gaol which was rebuilt in 1724. Two small arches on this side of the bridge balance those that arcade the Council Chamber, and in the middle is a graceful pointed arch with a span of 81 feet. The spandrils are relieved by a well-marked string-course, the parapets are fringed with railings and graced in the centre with two finials, which displace the mediæval cross.

[101] See Mr. Kershaw’s article, “The Builder,” April 29, 1882, p. 531.

[102] In Vol. X of the “Archæologia Cantiana” an inventory is given of the possessions of the chapel in the year 1549.

[103] The photograph belongs to the London Missionary Society. The bridge itself has points of interest quite apart from the idol. There is a single arch of a horseshoe form with long and narrow archstones. The shelving parapets are decorated with small knobs of stone, and they do not rise to a gable point, like those in the Spanish variety of gabled bridge; there is a flat space at the summit, and below the middle of it the small idol is placed.

[104] From information sent to me by the Rev. O. M. Jackson, who for more than twenty years has worked as a missionary in Western China.

[105] Take the dates of a few important bridges in Lancashire. Time of King John, Lancaster Bridge; 1225, Preston; 1305, Warrington; 1365, Salford; 1372, Stockport; and 1490, Garstang Bridge. The first Lancashire bridges were but narrow structures for foot and horse. Some had very high single arches, and those with from four to six spans were steep and lofty; they seemed to fly away from spates.

[106] On the other hand, there is a good social picture, showing that workmen in those days fed very well, though they could not afford to subscribe to the building of a bridge:—

Wives went out to wite [know] how they wrought;

Five score in a flock, it was a fayre syght.

In broad clothes bright white bread they brought,

Cheese and chickens clerelych a dyght [prepared].

[107] Cofferdams are embankments which surround the site so as to exclude water from it. “They are formed in general by driving two rows of piles round the site so as to enclose between them a watertight wall of clay puddle; in depths of less than three or four feet, where there is little current, a simple clay dam may be used. In greater depths, the timber walls consist of guide piles at intervals, with some form of sheet piling between them; in extreme depths the timber walls may be composed of stout piles driven in side by side all round. The dam must be sufficiently strong to bear the pressure of the water against the outside when the space enclosed has been pumped dry.... The ‘Cours de Ponts,’ at the School of the Ponts et Chaussées, states that a cofferdam need never be made of greater thickness than from four to six feet, as the interior can always be sufficiently stayed inside. This method of founding is now seldom practised; it is costly and causes great obstruction in the stream.”—Professor Fleeming Jenkin.

[108] A metre = 1·093633 yards, or 39·37079 inches; a centimetre = 0·39371 inch.

[109] Professor Fleeming Jenkin, Ninth Edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica.”

[110] The centre arch has a span of 152 ft., and rises 29 ft. 6 in. above Trinity highwater mark; the arches on each side of the centre have a span of 140 ft., and the abutment arches 130 ft. Total length, 1005 ft.; width from outside to outside, 56 ft.; height above low water, 60 ft. Centre piers, 24 ft. thick. Materials: the exterior stones are granite, the interior, half Bramley Fall and half from Painshaw, Derbyshire.

[111] For example, King John’s Bridge at Tewkesbury; Barden Bridge and Burnsall Bridge in Wharfedale; the Old Dee Bridge at Chester; Huntingdon, Bridgenorth, Baslow, Froggall, Brecon, and Llangollen. There are many others.

[112] This valuable reference was brought to my notice by Mr. H. T. Crofton, an able pontist, who sent me his notes on bridges, asking me to cull from them whatever information my own research had missed. A hobby is the only altruism.

[113] Springing. The plane of demarcation between the ring and the abutment is called the “springing” of an arch. A “ring” is the compressed arc of materials known as archstones or voussoirs; and the “springing” marks the place where a ring starts out on its upward curve from a pier or from an abutment.

[114] The haunches of an arch are those parts that lie midway between the springing and the crown: the crown being the summit of a ring.

[115] “The Builder,” November 19, 1892, p. 394.

[116] “The Builder,” November 19, 1892, p. 394.

[117] If Cæsar’s bones were found they would be sold at Christie’s to a tradesman millionaire.

[118] Lord Curzon’s “Persia and the Persian Question,” 1892, Vol. II, pp. 45-6.

[119] According to some writers, the earliest known arches of handicraft—pointed, and round, and even elliptical—are Babylonian, but I do not care to be so dogmatic. Dates very often are as elusive as dreams. But the influence of Babylon was, doubtless, very great on the traditions of the building arts; perhaps we find it even in the elliptic vault of Chosroes’ great hall at Selucia-Ctesiphon. This vault, dating from the sixth century A.D., was a forerunner of St. Bénézet’s elliptic arch ([p. 81]).

[120] Brangwyn has drawn for the édition de luxe the bridge at Ronda, which dates from 1761. Its architect, José Martin Aldeguela, was even more unfortunate than were Peter Colechurch and the good Saint Bénézet; these masters died before their work was complete, while poor Aldeguela fell from his bridge and was dashed to pieces. Two other bridges, one Moorish and one Roman, cross the chasm at Ronda, but at the upper end where the depth is less prodigious; so their architects had easier problems to solve, and yet they did not equal in any respect the heroic inspiration of Aldeguela. Mr. Edgar Wigram has said that although Ronda Bridge owes much of its effect to its extraordinary site, yet an extraordinary piece of architecture is necessary to command the site; it is the triumph of genius over nature that we feel both at Ronda and in the Pont Napoléon.

[121] The middle arch of 58 ft. span, 17 ft. rise, and 14 ft. in width across the soffit, has archstones which are only 18 ins. deep, and they vary in thickness from 5 to 16 ins.: many of them are 8 and 9 ins. Sometimes there are two headers to answer a course of common archstones; and sometimes two courses of archstones answer one header. The piers are 10 ft. thick, and the middle arch springs about 3 ft. above the river’s bed. A steep road over the bridge diminishes the weight upon the side arches; but Telford believed that if the spandrils had been hollowed the road could have been made with an easy gradient of 1 in 24. The workmanship is very light, and it appears to be stable, though a shivering bridge inspires no more confidence than a stammering man. In 1803, owing to a defect in the foundation of the western abutment, one of the side arches fell, yet the others remained uninjured while the broken one was being rebuilt. So the bridge in the proportion of all its parts must have been very well balanced, despite its quivering alertness and lightness.

[122] Roman examples: the two bridges at Mérida, and the bridge of Salamanca. Mediæval examples: Tudela, Tordesillas, Talavera, Zaragoza, Castro Gonzalo, and El Burgo, near Coruña, the scene of a good fight in Drake’s expedition of 1589.

[123] “Gothic Architecture in Spain,” 1865, p. 211.

[124] See George Edmund Street, whose valuable book on Spain ought to be studied side by side with those by Ford and Edgar Wigram.

[125] I am reading my proof sheets on the 10th September, 1914, so it is necessary to add that the Pont des Trous at Tournai has renewed its military value, aiding the Belgians in their heroic efforts against that avalanche of inhumanity, the German Army.

[126] The religious order of Pontist Brothers came to France from Italy. It was called the order of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, and its chief resided at Lucca. From about the year 1286 the French brothers had a great hospice in Paris, built on the site now occupied by the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas and the deaf and dumb asylum. In the fourteenth century the order confined its attention to the care of pilgrims, and at last—in 1459—it was suppressed by Pope Pius II.

[127] The triumphal arch of Germanicus, dating from the time of Tiberius. It is extant at Saintes; but when it was reconstructed after its removal from the bridge it suffered much from a mixture of new stones with the old. It is an arch with two passages 38 ft. high.

[128] There are many old arches with two or three sets of voussoirs. Over the Loire, at Brives-Charensac, there is a Roman specimen with two rings, now a ruined bridge. Some English examples: the Jolly Miller’s Bridge over the Dee, Chester; Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts, the round arches; Bideford, Devon, twenty arches, built in the fourteenth century with help from indulgences sanctioned by Grandison, Bishop of Exeter; Lostwithiel, Llangollen, Fountains Abbey, Bishop’s Bridge at Norwich, West Rasen, Lincolnshire; Eamont Bridge, Penrith, a triple ring of archstones; Higherford Bridge, near Colne, reputed to be Roman, a wrong attribution, I believe; St. Neots, the most important arch is very interesting; and the Abbot’s Bridge at Bury St. Edmunds. This one is Early English, and its three remarkable arches give us a parallel to the ecclesiastical workmanship in the arches at Crowland. The piers also and the buttresses are unsecular.

[129] It may be remarked that in the Persian language the words pul-y-sangi signify the “stone bridge,” and it is not improbable that the western people in the service of the Emperor may have given this appellation to the place where a bridge of great celebrity was thrown over the river, which is here applied to the river itself. It will be found to occur in Elphinstone’s “Account of Caubul,” p. 429, and in Ouseley’s “Ibn Haukul,” p. 277.—Colonel Yule.

[130] Ten horsemen could not draw up abreast in a space less than thirty feet, and might probably require forty when in motion. The paces here spoken of must therefore be geometric; and upon this calculation the bridge would be five hundred yards in length.—Colonel Yule.

[131] By P. Magalhanes, who particularly notices this description, our author is understood to speak here of the perfect level of the surface, and not of the straightness of the sides: “Aux deux extremités,” he translates, “il est plus large qu’au haut de la montée: mais quand on a achevé de monter, on le trouve plat et de niveau comme s’il avoit esté tiré à la linge” (“Nouv. Relat.,” p. 14). But the words, “uguale per longo come se fosse tirato per linea,” seem rather to refer to the general parallelism of the sides, although at the ends they diverged, as is the case with almost all bridges.—Colonel Yule.

[132] The ideas of the symbolic lion and of the tortoise are borrowed by the Chinese from the singa and the Kûrma of Hindu mythology.

[133] It is difficult to understand from the words of the text ... the position of these larger columns with regard to other parts of the bridge; but it seems to be meant, that in the line of the parapet or balustrade, which was formed of alternate slabs of marble and pillars, there was in the middle (or over the centre arch or pier) a column of a size much larger than the rest, having a tortoise for its base or pedestal; and it may be presumed, although not so expressed, that there was a similar column in the balustrade on the opposite side.... One of the Jesuit missionaries who mentions a bridge which he had crossed in this part of the province, says, “Les gardefous en sont de marbre; on conte de chaque côté cent quarante-huit poteaux avec des lionceaux au-dessus ... et aux deux bouts du pont quatre éléphans accroupis.”—Colonel Yule.

[134] Notwithstanding any partial difficulties in the description, or seeming objections to the credibility of the account given of this magnificent bridge, there is unquestionable authority for the existence of one similar to it in all the essential circumstances, and as nearly about the situation mentioned as can be ascertained from the conciseness of the itinerary, so lately as the seventeenth century. It may well, however, be supposed that in the lapse of four hundred years material changes must have taken place, in consequence of accidents, repairs, and perhaps removals.—Colonel Yule.

[135] “Ponts en Maçonnerie.”

CANAL BRIDGE IN VENICE