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
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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 'tide-men' 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 intro-duces
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'.
Extract from “LONDON The Biography”, by Peter Ackroyd. Published by Vintage, 2001.
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