After Hastings William advanced upon the City, and finding his entrance barred, burned Southwark.
The historians commonly attribute this act, which they consider as the burning of a large and important suburb, to a threat of what the Norman would do to London herself, unless the City surrendered. This is the general interpretation of an act which I believe to have been simply the usual practice of William’s soldiers, without orders. They fired the fishermen’s huts because they always set fire to everything. Such was the way of war.
[Illustration: DUKE WILLIAM COMES TO PEVENSEY]
Historians, indeed, seem not to understand the position of London at this time, and the spirit of her citizens.
London, in a word, was not afraid of William. We have seen that the City had been able to beat off six successive sieges by Danes and Northmen; and this within the memory of men over forty. Are we to believe that a city with such a history of defiance and victory was going to surrender because Duke William had won a single battle? Why, King Cnut had won a dozen, yet the town would not surrender. Then, as to the burning of Southwark. That suburb was never more than one line of houses on an embankment and two along a causeway. In times of peace there stood upon the causeway certain inns for the reception of traders and their goods; and on the embankment certain cottages for the fishermen of the Thames and some of the river-side people, the stevedores, lightermen, and wharfmen. The inns were wooden shanties, they were mere shelters; the cottages were mere huts of wattle and daub. In time of war the inns were deserted. If there were no traders there could be no need of inns. William’s soldiers fired these deserted inns, and, at the same time, the thatch of the fishermen’s huts; not with any deep political object, but, as I have said, because they were Norman soldiers, on whose coming the villages burst into spontaneous combustion. As for the fishermen, they looked on, with their families, from a safe position in their boats in the middle of the river. When the soldiers had gone they returned and put on a new thatch. As for the City’s feeling the least alarm because these cottages were burned, nothing could be more absurd. The City looked on from the battlements of her river-wall and shouted defiance. Then William turned and rode away. He had no stomach for a long and doubtful siege of London while the new armies of the English were forming.