East London

by Walter Besant

6. Roman buildings are found behind the wall in Essex. To this point I will return immediately.

7. No settlement or building or cultivation whatever was possible beside the river anywhere near London until the wall had been built.

8. Are we to believe that a city possessing a large trade, attracting many foreign merchants, would have continued to stand in the midst of a vast malarious swamp?

9. Indications have been found of an older wall, consisting of trunks of trees laid beside each other, the interstices crammed with small branches. Such a rude wall might be effective in keeping back the great body of water.

10. In order to arrive at the civilization represented by a large foreign trade and a trading city there must have been many years of communication and intercourse. In fact, I see no reason why London should not have existed as a trading-place for centuries after Thorney was practically deserted, having ferries instead of a bridge, and centuries before the coming of the Romans.

These considerations show the conclusion to which I have arrived. For centuries there had been a constant intercourse between the Gauls and the southern Britons; trading centers had been established, notably in Thorney Island, at Southampton, at Lymne, which was afterward an important Roman station, and at Dover. When the ships began to sail up the Thames the superior position of London was discovered, and that port quickly took over the greater part of the trade by the Thorney route. When London grew, it became important to reclaim the malarious marsh and the wasted miles of mud. Some kind of embankment, perhaps that old kind with trunks of trees, was constructed. At first they put up the wall on the opposite side, which the Saxons afterward called the South Work (Southwark), meaning the river wall and not a wall of fortification; then they pushed out branches on the north side and they carried the wall gradually, not all at once, but taking years, even centuries, over the work, down the Thames, along the Essex shores and round the mud islands, but the last not till modern times.

At the end of the Essex wall there is an instructive place at which to consider its probable date.

It is a very lovely and deserted place, about a mile and a half from a picturesque little village, five or six miles from a railway station, called Bradwell—I suppose the meaning of the name is the broad wall. When the visitor reaches the seashore he finds the wall running along, a fine and massive earthwork; but behind the wall, and evidently built after the wall, there are the earthworks of a Roman fortress; you can still trace the ramparts after all these years though the interior is now plowed up; this was one of the forts by means of which the count of the Saxon shore (Comes littoris Saxonici) kept the country safe from the pirates, always on the watch for the chance of a descent; his ships patrolled the narrow seas, but always, up the creeks and rivers, all the way from Ostend to Norway, lay the pirate,—Saxon, Dane, Viking,—watching, waiting, ready to cross over if those police ships relaxed their watchfulness, ready to harry and to murder. You may stand on the wall, where the Roman sentinel kept watch; you may strain your eyes for a sight of the pirate fleet, fifty ships strong and every ship stout, clinker built, sixty feet long and carrying a hundred men. As soon as the Romans took their ships away they did come, and they came to stay, and as soon as the Saxons forgot their old science of navigation the Danes came, and after the Danes, or with them, the men of Norway. Long after this Roman fortress had been deserted and forgotten, so that to the people it was nothing more than a collection of mounds round which clung some vague tradition of terror, a person, whose very name is now unknown, built here a chapel dedicated to St. Peter; the chapel, still called St. Peter’s on the Wall, is now a barn. Ruined chapel, ruined fortress, both stand beside the wall, which still fulfils its purpose and keeps out the waters from the lowlands within.

Why do I mention this chapel? What has it to do with East London? Well, consider two or three facts in connection with this chapel. If you walk along the wall you presently come to a little village church; it is called the Church of West Thurrock; the church, like that old chapel of St. Peter, stands beside, or on, the wall; it is a venerable church; it has its venerable churchyard; it is filled with the graves of rustics brought here to lie in peace for a thousand years and more. And there is no village, or hamlet, or farm, or anything within sight. It was built beside the wall. Again, they built two churches at least, beside, or on, the wall of London City, not to speak of the churches built at five gates of the City; they built a hermitage beside the wall at Wapping; another by the city wall at Aldgate; on London Bridge they built a chapel; on the wall in Essex, as we have seen, they built a chapel. I see in all these churches and chapels built beside, or on, a wall, so many chapels erected for prayers for the preservation of the wall; at West Thurrock the people of the farmhouses made the chapel their parish church, and so it has continued to the present day. But it was originally a chapel on the wall, intended to consecrate and protect the wall. Perhaps there are others along the wall, but I do not know of any.

I have said that it is possible that the wall stands upon the site of earlier attempts to rescue the land and to keep out the water. For instance, when the excavations were made for the foundation of the new London Bridge, three separate sets of piles for rescuing more and more of the foreshore were laid bare, and lower down the river, as I have said, the workmen found, in repairing the wall, a very curious arrangement of trunks of trees laid one upon the other, with branches and brushwood between, evidently part of a wooden work meant for a dam or tidal wall.