Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Geoffrey of monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1138) depicts a River Thames that is both the best river in all Britain, an obedient vessel for the various war plans of the inhabitants, and a conduit for prophecy—a kind of litmus test on the wrath or pleasure of God.¹ Geoffrey's work not only initiates future narrative traditions and cultural mythologies but also provides insight into how twelfth-century inhabitants of the British Isles experienced their home environment. In particular, his descriptions of the Thames offer fleeting but nonetheless revelatory glimpses into Anglo-Norman conceptions of both the cultural space and material place the river occupied in medieval England. Geoffrey achieves this effect by engaging with Thamesian space in two very distinct ways: early in the Historia he "stretches out" the material reality of the Thames's riparian zone from London to its dissolution into the sea.² In this version of the river, the Thames is both predictable and benevolent, something it rarely was off the page. On the other hand, in "The Prophecies of Merlin," in Book VII of the Historia, Geoffrey takes the familiar local space of the river and rewrites it as a symbolic space and divine emissary. This Thames is treacherous and wild. Both versions of Geoffrey's Thames suggest an awareness of the river as a natural body that operated outside the scope of human control, no matter how much [End Page 389] its human neighbors might wish otherwise. Ultimately, I argue, Geoffrey's treatment of the river reveals a desire to contain or explain away the reality of its unruly power by investing its more destructive and unpredictable aspects with symbolic importance (rather than random chance) so that Thamesian disasters might have both a reason and a remedy. By dividing the river into benevolent local place and ferocious symbolic space, Geoffrey's narrative attempts to account for the stark, lived reality of a river that was both London's greatest asset and the biggest threat to the city's continued survival.

The River Thames has a well documented history of flooding from an early date as a result of both natural events (storms, high tides), and human attempts to contain and reshape it (land in the riparian zone of the river was routinely "reclaimed" for farming and housing, with limited success). According to the findings of the archaeological excavation of the Rose and Globe theatre sites, the area just across from the city of London (the Bankside) was "prone to flooding and silt accumulation" because of its position on the inside curve of the river.³ As Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller note, there is documented evidence that this area was flood-prone—at times, on a large scale—since the early medieval period: their excavations confirm "some very destructive inundations" in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the area, as well as consistent seasonal flooding of the Thames throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁴ The elaborate manor homes built along the shores of the London Thames stood on marshland that had been reclaimed from the river: "[a] sequence of earthen banks or walls was constructed along the riverside, advancing the riverfront over a period of time with the land being dragged by ditches."⁵ Bowsher and Miller speculate that these bank reclamations began very early, possibly as far back as the eleventh century; certainly they show up in payments as far back as bishops' pipe rolls (accounts) survive, and these accounts date to 1208/9. The earliest extant royal commissions "to review and repair" the banks on the south side of the Thames date to 1295.⁶ In his study of [End Page 390] the medieval Thames, James A. Galloway pushes the date back further, noting, "Storm surges have been the greatest natural hazard faced by communities around the Thames estuary and tidal river during the past millennium. The potential danger they posed increased with the reclamation of large tracts of marshland between the tenth and thirteenth centuries."⁷ Galloway adds that in addition to several medieval suburbs of London being constructed on...