The Historical Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc
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sufficiently cuts off what is west from what is east of it to make every one upon the western side avoid the difficulty of a journey to Calais and seek some approach of his own to reach England; and south-western England is enough of a unity to demand also a secondary port of its own, whence it may seek the shore of the Continent and escape upon favourable occasions the long journey eastward to the Straits.
Let us consider these points in detail.
The estuary of the Seine was not only an obvious outlet, but it gave an opportunity for the early ships to creep under the protection of a windward shore. From the very heart of the country, from Rouen, and even from Pont de l'Arche, sea-going vessels could go down the stream with a strong tide helping them. They would have calm water as far as the point of Barfleur so long as the wind was south of west, and no danger save the reef of Calvados. Moreover, the trend of the land led them northward in the direction which they knew they had to follow if they were ultimately to find the English coast.
When this defence and indication failed the early sailor, at the corner of the Cotentin, where the land turns west again, he could find the little harbour of Barfleur whence to set out; he was there protected from the outer sea by reefs, and possessed, what was important to him, an excellent shore for beaching. He was sheltered even thus far from the prevailing winds.
Nor was this all. This coast was backed by bold high land, from three hundred feet near the coast to five hundred further inland, and marks of that kind, valuable as they still are, were a necessity to the early navigator. Such land would guide him home if his adventure failed, and it is worth while noticing, in the case of a man to whom all this was a great adventure, the sense of security with which the high hills upon the horizon furnished him in clear weather.
He set out then, and for the first few hours—in theory for close upon twenty-seven miles, and practically for more than twenty of the fifty-three he had to traverse—the French coast was still in sight on such days as could tempt him to cross the sea.
Now, by a happy accident, some of the highest land in the south of England stands dominating the narrowest part of this approach from France. Our Downs in Sussex are commonly receded from the sea-coast; from Brighton westward, their slope up from it is gentle, their escarpment is on the further side, and they are often veiled by the reek of the land. All the way from Beachy Head nothing gives a true mark until you get to this high headland of St. Catherine's Point, which overlooks the narrowest part of the passage.
One must have sailed across here to know how powerful is that hill. It stands steep up out of the sea, it is twice as high as Beachy Head, more than half as high again as Dover Cliff, and though it is but steep turf and not white chalk, it stands up so against the light looking southward, that one may see it at not much less than thirty miles distance as one runs northward so, with the westerly wind just aft of the beam and making for the land. Even in a haze it will stand above the mist and indicate the shore with its head so lifted as to show quite plain in the clearer sky. All this argument will be evident to those who know what a land-fall means. Even to-day, with the compass and the chart, it is the method of all our fishermen in the narrow seas to make some light or foreland, rather than to lay down a course; the violence and the changes of the channel current make it a surer method than any reckoning. In the first days a land-fall was everything. Every memory or relic of primitive navigation shows it a feeling-out for the high, conspicuous blue cloud, which, when you have fixed it once above the horizon, stands permanent and constant, turning at last into no cloud, but an evidence of human things after the emptiness of the sea.
The high land then, of itself, all but bridged the gap. In pure theory one might just catch sight of a fire on the top of St. Catherine's before one had seen the last of a similar flare upon the hills of the Cotentin, and in actual practice, in clear weather, it is but a very short run of fifteen miles or so from the last sight of the French coast to the making of St. Catherine's upon the horizon before one.
These considerations, then, the guide and protection of the Cotentin coast, the inlet of the Seine, the narrowing of the sea, the high land upon either side, would of themselves suffice to point this passage out as a natural way from the Continent to England. Were a man asked to-day where he would rather cross west of Etaples, he would answer, I think, 'from Cherbourg to the Wight'; and very many times, before writing was known or a record kept, men must have run easily through a long summer day, taking it in two tides, losing the land for but a quarter of their voyage, and confident that if evening overtook them, a beacon on St. Catherine's would light the northern horizon, even though half their journey remained to do.
I say this alone would prove the age of the route, but there is something which clinches the argument, and that is what we saw to be so important in the case of Kent—'The Choice of Entry.' How the tides of the narrow seas and the uncertain winds made imperative a choice of entries to the land I have already shown in my discussion of the Straits, and I need not repeat my arguments.
It is enough to remark that in this case of the Second Crossing, conscious human design could hardly have improved the conditions afforded by the Wight.
Behind it is a vast sheltered sheet of water, in shape a tripod, one of the arms of which, five miles in length by nearly one in breadth, is absolutely landlocked and safe in all weathers, while the other two are so commonly smooth and so well provided with refuge at Yarmouth, Lymington, New Town, the Medina, Portsmouth, and the Hamble as to form a kind of large harbour with subsidiary harbours attached.
To this great refuge two entries are provided, each aided by a strong tide, each narrow enough to break the outer sea, but not so narrow as to present grave dangers to small craft.
Supposing a man approaching St. Catherines's Point from the south. The wind fails him, and he is compelled by the tide to drift to the east or to the west; at an equal distance from the point either way he will find an entry into the inland water. Suppose a sudden change in the direction of the wind or in its intensity makes him run before it, from any direction but that of the north (which in itself would provide him with a windward shore) he could make one of the two entries of which I speak. It is true that a nasty shelf and overfalls follow a portion of the shore opposite Ventnor, but, like the reefs of the Cotentin, they do not run so far out as to affect my argument.
There are hardly any conditions under which, after his passage from the Continent, the early sailor would have found it impossible to make either the Needles channel or Spithead. It is a perfect harbour, and though it has but lately recovered its ancient importance, the inland waters, known as the Solent, Southampton Water, and Spithead were certainly, after the Straits, the chief landing-places of these islands. Porchester, Brading, Cowes perhaps, and Bittern certainly, show what the Romans made of the opportunity. All the recorded history of England is full of that group of harbours and that little inland sea, and before history began, to strike the island here was to be nearest to Salisbury Plain and to find the cross-roads of all the British communications close at hand; the tracks to the east, to the west, to the Midlands were all equally accessible.
Finally, it must be noted that the deepest invasion of the land made here is made by the submerged valley of Southampton Water, and the continuation of that valley inward is the valley of the Itchen. The inland town to which the port corresponded (just as we found Canterbury corresponding to the Kentish harbours) is Winchester.
Thus it was that Winchester grew to be the most important place in south England. How early we do not know, but certainly deeper than even tradition or popular song can go it gathered round itself the first functions of leadership. It was possessed of a sanctity which it has not wholly lost. It preserves, from its very decay, a full suggestion of its limitless age. Its trees, its plan, and the accent of the spoken language in its streets are old. It maintains the irregularities and accretions in building which are, as it were, the outer shell of antiquity in a city. Its parallels in Europe can hardly show so complete a conservation. Rheims is a great and wealthy town. The Gaulish shrine of 'the Virgin that should bear a Son' still supports from beneath the ground the high altar of Chartres. The sacred well of a forgotten heathendom still supports with its roof the choir of Winchester.1 But Chartres is alive, the same woman is still worshipped there; the memory of Winchester is held close in a rigidity