CHAPTER 8

In the Beginning

The history of the Thames is as deep and as dark as that of any sea. It was first merely a ripple in the moving surface of the earth. The stone matrix of the river was first created some 170 million years ago when the great oceans of the Jurassic period carried the seeds of the limestone and the clay that later became the substrata of the Thames; in this period pleiosaurs, and fish with beaks and teeth, swam above the bed which would eventually become the Thames.

The Cretaceous, the next period of the earth’s history after the Jurassic, means “of the nature of chalk” over the next 77 million years the fossils of the oceans laid down the chalk beds of southern England. They are the bases of the riverine landscape. In this period too the great continent of Pangaea (“All the World”) began to break apart, creating the land-masses of America and Europe. A vast floodplain lay where southern England now exists. Above London swam elasmosaurs and mosasaurs, the giants of the deep, until they were destroyed in a global cataclysm marked by what is known as the “K-T Boundary.”

The river first emerges as an observable entity some 30 million years ago, midway through the Cenozoic era in which we still live. The British Isles were connected to the European mainland by a bridge of land, where now the North Sea runs, and the Thames was then a tributary of a much larger river that flowed across Europe. The longest stretch of it is now called the Rhine.

From the evidence of fossil remains it is possible in part to reconstruct the landscape of the earliest Thames; there were palm-trees and laurels, vines and citrus trees, as well as oaks and beeches. There were water-lilies on the surface of the river, as well as long weeds that drifted through the warm water. There was also a new form of plant; grass began to grow. In certain respects it would have been a recognisable, tropical scene. Termites and ants, beetles and spiders, flourished in the humid atmosphere; there were also turtles, and crocodiles, in the Thames as well as lizards that resembled modern iguanas. In the river, too, swam eels and ancestors of the perch and other bony fishes.

The Thames then ran on a much higher course than in its present incarnation. It stretched from Wales and the Bristol Channel across England until it reached the Vale of Aylesbury; it flowed through St. Albans and Chelmsford before passing through Romford and issuing into a great lake somewhere south of Harwich. When the railway line from Romford to Upminster was being built, in the 1890s, the ancient and forgotten channel of the old river was discovered, like the fossil of a once living creature. This lake close to Harwich, and close to the northern end of the land-mass linking Europe and the British Isles, eventually spilled over the watershed that divided the present North Sea from the English Channel.

It was a great and fast-flowing river, a tropical river, a jungle river, to which the ancestors of the horse and the bison, the rhinoceros and the lemur, came to drink. Then the climate began to grow colder. The jungle habitat gave way to temperate forests, to grass plains and prairies. The Thames flowed through all these changes. They represent inconceivable passages of time, far beyond the time of human origin. It is impossible to contemplate the ancientness of the river, only incidentally an aspect of the human world. It still contains shells, sedges and rushes that belong to prehistory.

The climate of the world grew ever colder and at the time of the First Northern Glaciation, some 2.8 million years ago, a north polar ice sheet began to creep southward. The earth was now on the threshold of the human. Hominids, or “ape-men” as they were once known, drank from the river and slept in the trees beside its banks before moving onwards. But the spread of the glaciers had a profound and permanent effect upon the Thames. It was pushed southward, closer and closer to its present course.

The ice eventually halted just north of the Chiltern-Berkshire ridge, and about one quarter of a million years ago the Thames created what is now known as the Thames Valley. The river had also entered the age of humankind. The first dwellers by the Thames came by land from the areas now known as central and western Europe. They are considered to be denizens of the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic era, but this neutral category covers the longest period of human survival in the history of the world—some three times longer than the entire life of Homo sapiens on the planet, and a hundred times longer than the existence of the British Isles as an island. And, even then, the Thames was an ancient river.

The first inhabitants survived for half a million years, having arrived at some point between 500,000 BC and 450,000 BC but much is unknown. Of the people themselves, and of their relation to the river, we understand next to nothing. They are what in German are called geschichtlos, “people without history.” But that is not to say that they were without traditions, stories, songs, ingenuity and enterprise. It is inconceivable, for example, that, over thousands of centuries, they did not learn how to build rafts or coracles—if only to reach the small islands in the middle of the river. The fact that no such boats have survived is meaningless; it is mere good fortune that anything at all from those remote times has been found.

The last major glaciation came to an end approximately twelve thousand years ago, after an ice-bound age of a thousand years. The more temperate climate attracted new settlers, as well as the elk and reindeer for which they hunted. This was the age in which hippos wallowed in Trafalgar Square, and elephants roamed down the Strand. In fact it represents a significant period in the history of the Thames, since from the arrival of Mesolithic settlers in 10,000 BC there has been an unbroken process of occupation and settlement in the Thames Valley.

The new arrivals first crossed by land, before the floods united the North Sea and the Channel. There were many different groups, and tribes of various identities, but the preponderant element beside the Thames was that of the fair-haired Maglemosians or “marsh people” first discovered in north-western Europe. They survived in small settlements perched on the gravel banks of the river, living predominantly by hunting and fishing. They manufactured fish-hooks, and bark “floats” for their nets. But their signature lay in the manufacture of stone microliths, or small flints used as blades or points for spears. They cut back the birch and the pine to make large clearings, and they domesticated dogs for hunting or defence; the bones of fish and beavers, of pigs and wild-cats, of birds and badgers, have been found in profusion. They had spears and axes made of bone or antler; they were adept in the carving of wood and the stretching of leather. They made their dwellings, for example, by placing animal hide over a wooden cage of birch saplings. The hearth was in the centre of the hut. It is the pattern of the first houses by the Thames.

And they constructed boats, which benefited from advances in the technology of stone tools. The earliest boats of which archaeologists have knowledge were crafted in the Mesolithic period. They were canoes dug out of single tree-trunks; the trunks would have been cut and burnt to the requisite size and depth. One found in the river at Shepperton was some 18 feet (5.4 m) in length, and might have carried three or four people. The adze marks, where the wood had been shaped and fashioned, are still just discernible. Other boats, found on the river-bed of the Thames at Bourne End, were more than 25 feet (7.6 m) in length with a beam of almost 3¹/²feet (1.05 m). Seats had been carved out of the solid wood. The people may also have constructed coracles, with animal hide stretched over a frame of young willow branches, that were lighter and more manoeuvrable in the shallows. We may assume, then, that the Thames had become a navigable river. It was the beginning of a great change. Once the tribes had realised that the wind could carry them further and faster than their own unaided efforts, they could see further than the limits of their own physical labour. They had begun the slow rise to freedom. We can be sure, also, that the Thames had a powerful symbolic potential. It was an emblem of life and movement. It may be that the whole history of reverence and celebration associated with the river, from the baptisms of the twelfth century to the regattas of the twentieth century, is an atavistic remembrance of these earliest times of occupation.

That spirit of river worship was more carefully formalised by the time of the next settlers, who arrived in the region of the Thames in approximately 3,500 BC. Their age has become known as that of the Neolithic, and covered almost two thousand years of human history. In this relatively short period, however, human beings left an enduring presence upon the landscape of the Thames Valley. They came to areas that had already been extensively settled before them, and seem to have taken up a pattern of farming and woodland clearance. It was the beginning of the farming life that endured, relatively unchanged, until the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact the Neolithic field-patterns of Maidenhead were not finally erased until the 1960s.

The earliest phase of Neolithic occupation in the Thames Valley is marked by steadily changing modes of work and activity. In place of the microlith and the pointed spear are found sickles, polished stone axes and querns. Pottery appears for the first time. Bows were fashioned from the wood of the yew; the arrows were of wood, and tipped with flint. It was the same type of longbow, some 5 feet (1.5 m) in height, that was used by the archers at Agincourt. Its survival over thousands of years is another sign of continuity and sheer force of habit as the prime factors in human existence. We should not assume any sudden emergence of new artefacts but, rather, a slow evolution that would not even have been noticeable at the time of change.

There have been discovered more than eighty Neolithic settlements in the course of the Middle Thames alone, and we can assume that the banks of the river were occupied at various advantageous sites from source to sea. The people lived in huts and congregated in small, perhaps temporary, villages from which the wisps of smoke would have been seen for miles around. They grew crops but, more importantly, they reared stock; they grazed pigs in the woodland, oxen and sheep on the grassland, both of which types of land were plentiful by the river. There is very little evidence of Neolithic dwellings themselves, however, only the remains of post-holes or ditches as the tokens of human habitation. There are deposits of flint, of course, and the traces of wheat, barley and beans.

In recent years the piles of a wooden structure have been found beside the river, where Runnymede Bridge now stands, and they have been deciphered as the remnants of a Neolithic wharf on both sides of the bank which was later superseded by a Bronze Age construction. If the interpretation is correct, then the Thames in the Neolithic and in the Bronze Ages was an important highway for transport and commerce. It is significant, too, that the course of the river was approximately that which survives still.