OFFA BEING INVESTED WITH SPURS
Nero MS., D. 1.
There is another argument—or an illustration—in favour of the antiquity of some church, rude or not, upon this place. I advance it as an illustration, though to myself it appears to be an argument. I mean the long list of relics possessed by the Abbey at the Dedication of the year 1065. We are not concerned with the question whether the relics were genuine or not, but merely with the fact that they were preserved by the monks as having been the gifts of various benefactors—Sebert, Offa, Athelstan, Edgar, Ethelred, Cnut, Queen Emma, and Edward himself. A church of small importance and of recent building would not dare to parade such pretensions. It takes time even for pretences to gain credence and for legends to grow. The relics ascribed to Sebert and Offa could easily have been carried away on occasion of attack. As for the nature of these sacred fragments, it is pleasant to read of sand and earth brought from Mount Sinai and Olivet; of the beam which supported the holy manger; of a piece of the holy manger; of frankincense presented by the Magi; of the seat on which our Lord was presented at the Temple; of portions of the holy cross presented by four kings at different times; of bones and vestments belonging to Apostles and Martyrs and the Virgin Mary, and saints without number, whose very names are now forgotten. In the cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle you may see just such a collection as that which the monks of St. Peter displayed before the reverent and uncritical eyes of the Confessor. We may remember that in the ninth and tenth centuries the rage for pilgrimising extended over the whole of Western Europe; pilgrims crowded every road, they marched in armies, and they returned laden with treasures—water from the Jordan, sand from Sinai, clods of earth from Gethsemane, and bones and bits of sacred wood without number. When Peter the Hermit arose to preach, it was but putting a match to a pile ready to be fired. But for such a list as that preserved by history, there was need of time as well as of credulity.
Roman Britain, we have said, was Christian for at least a hundred and fifty years. Therefore it would be nothing out of the way or unusual to find monastic buildings on Thorney in the fourth century. There was as yet no Benedictine Rule. St. Martin of Tours introduced the Egyptian Rule into Gaul—whence it was taken over to England and to Ireland. It was a simple Rule, resembling that of the Essenes. No one had any property; all things were in common; the only art allowed to be practised was that of writing. The older monks devoted their whole time to prayer; they took their meals together—bread and herbs with salt—and, except for common prayer and common meals, they rarely left their cells; these were at first simple huts constructed of clay and bunches of reeds; their churches were of wood; they shaved their heads to the line of the ears; they wore leather jerkins, probably because these lasted longer than cloth of any kind; many of them wore hair shirts. The wooden church became a stone church; the huts became cells built about a cloister; next, the cells themselves were abolished, and a common dormitory was substituted.
All this evidence very clearly, in my opinion, points to the main fact that Thorney was occupied by the Romans because it was a busy and crowded station on the high road of British trade.
I have dwelt at some length upon this subject, because the theory of the earlier antiquity of a town at Thorney, if it can be proved, brings the foundation of London to a comparatively recent period, though it still leaves us in the dark as to the date.
We have various records as to this trade. We need not suppose that Himilco visited and described the island, but we must not hastily reject the evidence of Pytheas, whose travels took place about the middle of the fourth century B.C. Pytheas coasted round Gaul, landed on the shores of Brittany, and worked up the Channel till he came to a place called “Cantion,” which is perhaps Dover, and perhaps the North Foreland. Here he landed, and here he stayed for some time, namely, during the whole of the summer. He found that a great deal of wheat was raised in the fields; that it was threshed in covered barns instead of unroofed floors as in the south of France; that the climate was cloudy and wet; that the longest day was nineteen hours, and that on the shortest day the sun does not rise more than three cubits above the horizon; that there were cultivated fruits, a great abundance of some domestic animals and a scarcity of others; that the people fed on millet, vegetables, roots, and fruit; and that they made a drink of honey and wheat—a kind of beer.
The next traveller in Britain of whom an account remains was Posidonius, about a hundred years before Christ. He described the tin mines in Cornwall. He says that the tin is made up into slabs shaped like knuckle-bones, and carried to an island named Ictis, “lying in front of Britain”—another account makes this island six days’ sail from Cornwall. The channel between Ictis and Britain was dry at low tide, when the tin was carried over. It was then taken across to Gaul, and carried across the country by thirty days’ journey to Marseilles. The estuary between Thanet and Kent, now silted up, was formerly open for ships at high tide, and fordable at low tide.
The following is the account given by Avienus, a writer of the fourth century (quoted in Charles I. Elton’sOrigins of English History):—
“Beneath this promontory spreads the vast Œstrymnian gulf, in which rise out of the sea the islands Œstrymnides, scattered with wide intervals, rich in metal of tin and lead. The people are proud, clever, and active, and all engaged in incessant cares of commerce. They furrow the wide rough strait, and the ocean abounding in sea-monsters, with a new species of boat. For they know not how to frame keels with pine or maple, as others use, nor to construct their curved barks with fir; but, strange to tell, they always equip their vessels with skins joined together, and often traverse the salt sea in a hide of leather. It is two days’ sail from hence to the Sacred Island, as the ancients called it, which spreads a wide space of turf in the midst of the waters, and is inhabited by the Hibernian people. Near to this again is the broad island of Albion.”