The River of London

by Hilaire Belloc

To these two natural conditions must be added two further political ones: first, one must have such a society connected with that market as gives it security, and, secondly, such a society as is organised by its activity and adventure for production or for exchange, or for both.

Now all these four conditions London enjoyed from a very early time. I have pointed out elsewhere, and shall point out again in these pages, the nature of the political security which London has enjoyed for so many centuries. It did not lie in any particularly peaceful character peculiar to the country as a whole, for while London was growing to greatness England was a continual theatre of domestic war. It lay in the great size which the city had attained, coupled with the breadth of its stream, and in its numerical proportion to the general population of which it was the capital. The fact that London was never besieged or sacked depended upon these characters, and they in turn, therefore, guaranteed that local security which is the first political necessity of a great and continuous market.

As to the commercial and productive character of the inhabitants of Britain, it escapes any material analysis. We must postulate it as a constant fact running through the known and recorded centuries of our history, and we may ascribe it according as we more love ease or veracity to whatever cause we feel most flattering or most true. No proof is possible. We can only say in this respect that certain areas of Europe have shown these characters for greater or less periods of time, and that others equally well endowed have not shown them, but have shown other characters perhaps as valuable.

The main fact in this connection is that whether the productive areas of Great Britain were exporting raw material (as during the most active centuries of the Middle Ages, when wool was our chief export), or whether (as later became the case) manufactured articles and coal were the stand-by of our oversea trade; whether we consider the period before or after the development of our carrying trade; whether we are concerned with an industrial or an agricultural England; whether we are observing late centuries in which the English showed a passionate interest in novelty and foreign adventure, or far more numerous early centuries in which they were indifferent to distant voyages—throughout the whole story with all its changes the productive area of the island has always maintained a high standard of wealth in comparison with its neighbours and its aptitude for exchange has always been equally high.

It is a point often neglected that the Norman Conquest, though of course it introduced a new and much more developed culture than Saxon England had possessed, did not find an impoverished land which the newcomers might “develop.” It found an exceedingly wealthy country according to the standards of the time; and the extent and variety of that wealth stands out very clearly in the narrative of contemporaries. Four centuries later, at the end of the Wars of the Roses, foreign observers make precisely the same comment. It is the packed wealth of South England filling its comparatively small area which the foreign envoy notes. We have a striking piece of evidence surviving before our eyes in the number, decoration and amplitude of our churches to which I have already alluded.

To continue the proof after the Tudors would be superfluous. There was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found in the seventeenth century, the close of which we have unhappily seen in our own generation, when the wealth of England was so superior to that of any other rival that the material circumstances of life among the wealthier classes of the country seemed to belong to a different world from that of neighbouring nations, and when the economic supremacy of England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend.

London, then, for all these centuries has enjoyed the two political conditions necessary to the establishment of a chief market, security and a productive area in the hands of a race by its genius inclined to exchange.

There remain the two natural conditions: ease of approach from without and “draining power” from within.

Now when we turn to these natural conditions we find that in the matter of ease of approach the Thames was unrivalled. London was, of course, far from the sea—a point with which I will deal in a moment—but there was no haven north of the Mediterranean which called so readily for commerce upon a large scale. Given the political conditions for a market—security and active powers of production and exchange—the Thames was as good a highway to that market as any that could be found. No vessels until quite modern times had to consider their draught or fear the entry of the river (at least, through channels which the pilots commanded), and once within the inland water a swinging tide was at the service of the ships. There were, within that inland stretch, no obstacles, no high intervening hills to becalm, no narrows or islands.