CHAPTER 17

The Leveller

Water is the greatest of equalisers. It is well enough known that water seeks an even level, but this is more than a metaphor. Throughout its history it has been understood that the river is free to all people. In the Magna Carta, sealed by the banks of the Thames, the great rivers of the English kingdom were granted to all men and women alike. A parliamentary committee of the nineteenth century declared the Thames to be “an ancient and free highway” with the attendant right of the public “to move boats over any and every part of the river through which the Thames water flows.” The monarch does not own the river, despite many tendentious claims to the contrary, any more than the Corporation of London owns that part of the river that flows through the city. In truth the river belongs to no one.

The water of the Thames was available both to rich and poor, whether for bathing or for cleansing, for cooking or for drinking; the need for it was so universal that it was deemed to be common to all. A pamphlet of 1600 quotes with approval the Muslim belief that “no money nor fee should be exacted for the use of water which God had freelie bestowed on poor and rich.” In the same period the Thames provided the setting for the festivals that united the people of the city. The food of the Thames fed everyone. The riverside was also the home of rich and poor, with palaces and hovels almost literally side by side. As Sir William D’Avenant described the northern bank of the Thames in 1656, “Here a lord, there a dyer, and places of the worst kind between both.” In his early drawings of the river Turner contrasts the baroque architecture along the river-banks with the neighbouring waterworks and coal-barges. The river actively worked against hierarchy and division of all kinds, particularly because water is a dissolving and unifying element. The Thames also provided work, and profit, for the diverse people along its banks. At the height of the boating “craze” of the late nineteenth century, the locks and weirs saw the close congregation of lords and cockneys; this resulted in what one observer called “spontaneous gaiety,” as if the values of the ordinary world had for a moment been turned upside down. It is this innate egalitarianism that explains the “water language” of the boatmen conventionally directed against their ostensibly richer or more socially superior passengers.

Thus we have the association of the Thames with various levelling movements. In the late fourteenth century the rebellion of Jack Straw, against the exactions of Richard II and the poll tax, was largely instigated by the disaffection of the Thames fishermen along the estuary in villages such as Mucking and Vantage. The first riots broke out in Fobbing, and the county history of Essex records that “the portion of the country most implicated [in the revolt] was along the Thames shore.” The river was involved in much of the violent action. There were rebel uprisings in Barking and at Dartford, and there were incendiary riots in Gravesend. One contingent of rebels marched from Blackheath to Southwark and to Lambeth where they stormed the archbishop’s palace. The river seems to call forth the defenders of liberty. In the same riverine spirit the bargemen of the Thames were once known as the “Sons of Liberty,” albeit in an ironical sense.

In the fifteenth century the sect of the Lollards, opposed to hierarchical tenets as well as the corruption of the established Church, was strongly represented in the Thames Valley. They were well established, for example, at Marlow and at Faringdon, at Abingdon and at Buscot. They were also active in the vicinity of Oxford. The Lollard rebellion of 1431 was in fact crushed at Abingdon itself, where they could expect the most loyal support, but Lollard ideas were still retained in the regions around the river. The Baptists emerged most powerfully, for example, in old Lollard strongholds. The connection of the Baptist movement with the river itself, not least in the ritual of immersion, suggests how much the presence of the Thames can be felt in the espousal of egalitarian creeds.

The Levellers, the sixteenth-century group of republicans and democrats who emerged in the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, congregated in the church of St. Mary, by the banks of the river at Putney, in 1647. It was here that they engaged in the “Putney Debates” and put forward an “Agreement of the People” or new social contract. Then, two years later, Walton-on-Thames became the setting for the experiment in living conducted by the Diggers under the inspiration of Gerrard Winstanley; they proclaimed themselves to be “the true Levellers,” and proceeded to cultivate the common ground of St. George’s Hill. They espoused a primitive form of communism derived from the principles of Magna Carta. So the Thames runs through all of these levelling proceedings. For a short time in the 1990s a village was established by the river at Battersea, named “Land and Freedom,” dedicated to the principles of communal equality and ecological rectitude; it was following an ancient calling.

You can feel “free” on the river. Indeed the Thames itself seems to encourage some dissolution of the identity. It encourages various forms of communal revelry, such as the “frost fairs” that were conducted on the frozen river during various preternaturally cold episodes. All classes and sections of London society congregated on the river during these unnatural episodes:

Straight comes an arch wag, a young son of a whore,

And lays the squire’s head where his heels were before.

Class distinctions seem to disappear in the process of going upon the river, even in its frozen state, and through the centuries the Thames was an emblem of liberty. All the divisions and distinctions of dry land are washed away and erased. As Richard Jefferies says in The Modern Thames (1885), “on the river people do as they choose, and there does not seem to be any law at all—or at least there is no authority to enforce it, if it exists.” The bargemen, for example, knew no law. They deemed themselves to be as free as the river gypsies. The various pilferers and smugglers who used the river as the focus of their activities genuinely believed that they were doing no wrong. That is why the establishment of the river police provoked such outrage. It is still considered somewhat offensive to ask someone, on the river, to desist from one activity or another. Some of the greatest radical enterprises of English history, in particular the sailors’ revolt or “Nore mutiny” of 1797 and the dockers’ strike of 1889, have taken place upon the Thames. The river is the zone of liberty.