CHAPTER 57
You Cannot Take the Thames with You
It has always been the river of commerce. The watercress-growers of Gravesend, the biscuit-bakers and store-shippers of Tooley Street, the ship-chandlers of Wapping, the block-makers and rope-makers of Limehouse, all owe their trades to the Thames. The great paintings of its business, with its warehouses, refiners, breweries and builders’ yards, all bear testimony to its power and authority. Its predominance within the city was understood long before the Romans came. Copper and tin were transported along it as early as the third millennium BC; as a result of commerce upon the river the area comprising London acquired, by 1500 BC, supremacy over the region of Wessex. That is perhaps why ceremonial objects were thrown into its waters, where they lay hidden until recent archaeological discoveries.
The city itself owes its character and appearance to the Thames. It was a place of “crowded wharfs and people-pestered shores,” the water continually in motion with “shoals of labouring oars.” The movement and energy of London were the movement of horses and the energy of the river. The Thames brought in a thousand argosies. Venetian galleys and three-masted ships from the Low Countries vied for position by the riverside, while the water itself was crowded with wherries and ferries transporting the citizens from one shore to the other.
The other great commercial value of the Thames lay in its fish, and in the fifteenth century we read of “barbille, fflounders. Roaches. dace. pykes. Tenches,” all caught in nets with baits of cheese and tallow; there were eels and kipper salmon, mullet, lamprey, prawn, smelt, sturgeon and “white bayte.” A vast range of vessels also plied their trades upon the water. Barges and barks sailed beside chalk-boats; they were joined by cocks, or small work boats, by pikers, rush-boats, oyster-boats and ferry-boats, by whelk-boats and tide-boats.
Most Londoners earned their living directly off the river, or by means of the goods which were transported along it. Documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveal a host of Thames employees, from the “conservators” who were in charge of river safety to the “tidemen” whose work on embanking or building upon the river depended upon the state of the tide. There were boatmen and chalkmen, eelmen and baillies, gallymen or garthmen, ferriers and lightermen, hookers and mariners, petermen and palingmen, searchers and shipwrights, shoutmen and piledrivers, trinkers and water-bailiffs and watermen. There are recorded no fewer than forty-nine ways of trapping or catching fish, from nets and weirs to enclosures and wicker-baskets. But there were many other activities such as the erection of dams and barriers, the construction of landing-stages and jetties, the repairing of watergates and causeways, quays and stairs. We may call this the early stage of the Thames when it remained the living centre of the city’s development and trade.
But then it first touched the imagination of poets and chroniclers. It became the river of magnificence, used as a golden highway by princes and diplomats. Barges were “freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk” while other boats were “richly beaten with the arms or badges of their craft”; there were many covered with awnings of silk and silken tapestry, while around them the wherries took their course heavily weighted with merchants or priests or courtiers. This was a time when, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the oars of the London watermen might become entangled in water lilies while they kept stroke “to the tune of flutes” which made “the water which they beat to follow faster.” The Thames has always been associated with song and music, beginning with the watermen’s chant of “Heare and how, rumblelow” or “Row, the boat, Norman, row to thy lemen” dated respectively to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
More formal music, beating not to the ebb and flow of the current but rather to its history, could be heard on diplomatic or nuptial occasions. When in 1540 Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, removed to Westminster by water on their bridal day they were accompanied by “instruments sweetly sounding” in barges “gorgeously garnished with banners, pennons and targets richly covered.” On the previous ceremonial entrance of Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn from Greenwich into London in 1533, “there were trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody.” Her welcome provided one of the richest pageants upon the Thames ever recorded, with the state barge of the mayor leading the procession “adorned by flags and pennons hung with rich tapestries and ornamented on the outside with scutcheons of metal, suspended on cloth of gold and silver.” It was preceded by a flat vessel, rather like a floating stage, upon which “a dragon pranced about furiously, twisting his tail and belching out wildfire.” Here the freedom of the river inspires extravagance as well as music. The barge of the mayor was followed by fifty other barges belonging to the trades and guilds, “all sumptuously decked with silk and arras, and having bands of music on board.” Here commerce makes its own music upon the water, which was itself the conduit of its wealth.
It is clear, however, that the Thames can harbour and accommodate supernatural forces as well as more conventional goods. It was typically described as the colour of silver, the great alchemical agent; the “silver streaming Thames” in Spenser is followed by “the silver-footed Thamesis” in Herrick and the “silver Thames” in Pope. Herrick introduces nymphs and naiads, but his central tone is one of mournful regret upon being forced to abandon the river in leaving London for the country-no more sweet evenings of summer bathing, no more journeys to Richmond, Kingston or Hampton Court, no more departures “and landing here, or safely landing there.” Drayton invokes the “silver Thames” also, and uses the familiar metaphor of a “clearest crystal flood,” where Pope describes “Old Father Thames” whose “shining horns diffused a golden gleam.” It has often been suggested that rivers represent the feminine principle within the general masculine environment of the city, but with the Thames this is emphatically not the case. It is the “Old Father,” perhaps in a somewhat menacing or primeval way equivalent to William Blake’s vision of “Nobodaddy.”
It looked, from a distance, as if it were a forest of masts; there were approximately two thousand ships and boats each day upon the water, as well as three thousand of the then notorious watermen who transported goods and people in every direction. “The Pool of London,” the area between London Bridge and the Tower, was filled to capacity with barges and barks and galleons, while a map of the middle sixteenth century shows boats moored beside the various stairs which were the transportation stops of the capital. Upon this map the streets are depicted as almost devoid of activity while the river is a hive of business; it was a pardonable exaggeration, designed to emphasise the paramount importance of the Thames. There is a London story which is appropriate. One sovereign, more than usually irate about the reluctance of London to subsidise his adventures, threatened to move his court to Winchester or Oxford; the mayor of London replied, “Your Majesty may with ease move yourself, your Court and your Parliament, wheresoever you wish, but the merchants of London have one great consolation-you cannot take the Thames with you.”
When Wenceslaus Hollar arrived in England in December 1636, he travelled to London by barge from Gravesend. He was given lodgings in Arundel House, beside the Thames, so that his first and earliest views were of the river. His sketches and etchings are filled with its breadth and light, while its continual activity spills over upon its banks and embarkation points; the wherries and barges are crowded, seeming to skim the water before the small quiet buildings which line its shores. It is the river which breathes life within his great panorama of the city; the streets and houses seem deserted, as if all London were gathered by the riverside. The names of each wharf are prominently displayed-“Paulus wharfe … Queen hythe … The 3 Cranes … Stiliard … Cole harbour … The Old Swan”-while their stairs and landing-stages are busy with the activity of tiny human figures. The great sheet of bright water is lent depth and interest by the numerous craft, some of which are named; “the Eel Ships” lie among barges carrying vegetable produce, while small boats with two or three passengers voyage from shore to shore. Below London Bridge many great ships are moored while around them teems the marine business of the port. In the right-hand corner of this engraving the figure of a water god, Father Thames, holding an urn from which pour a multitude of fish, completes an image of the river as the source of power and life. Just as its swans were in the pre-Christian era under the protection of Apollo and of Venus, so the river itself lies under divine tutelage. It is of some significance, too, that the classical deity, depicted by Hollar as pointing to the cartouche of “LONDON,” is Mercury who is the god of commerce.