Not only was this great centre of supply nourished by the Thames immune from such isolation, but it could also furnish stores of provision, remounts, and all that was necessary for a medieval army in quantities more than sufficient for the restoration or recruitment of such a force; hence we find London perpetually turning the scale during six centuries of fighting, and it is almost true to say that he who has London ultimately wins the war. It was the size of London, and in particular its value as a recruiting centre, which checked Charles I. after Edgehill. London made the fortune of Simon de Montfort; London appears to have remounted the Barons in the most critical moment of the campaign of Magna Charta; and London was the necessary pivot upon which William the Conqueror was compelled to hinge all his work of pacification after Hastings. Indeed, the position of London could not be better illustrated than in this early example, where the Norman found it impossible or inadvisable to attempt a direct attack upon it, was compelled to isolate it temporarily by sweeping a line of devastation around it, and made it his first care to recognise its customs and pre-eminence in the kingdom. With the conclusion of this brief survey of the part which the Lower Thames and London as the creation of the Lower Thames has played in the history of warfare I must close this Essay. I would close it, as I began it, by the qualification that all those material causes which are the delight of one who traces out the effects of historical geography are but half the story. Of the spirit of place and of the human motive without which such mere topography would be meaningless, I have said little or nothing in this consideration of the River of London building up London through two thousand years; but that is because this business of the soul in any historical matter must be separately treated, and that in a spirit always alien, and sometimes antagonistic, to the chain of material cause and effect. Nevertheless, it is the soul of London and of London River which has driven forward the story of both of them together, much more than any material limits within which that soul was compelled to act. And that is why to-day overlying the vestiges--often now completely hidden--of the original material framework, London and the River rather control that framework and what were once the necessary condition of port and market and crossing place than are controlled by them. FOOTNOTES: [5] The reader should be warned that this famous action has been ascribed by modern pedantry to all manner of other places and sites. For my part I will trust our ancestors, the tradition of the place, and the obvious strategies of the Roman Road. [6] Or Milton Creek out of the Swale. So Professor Oman will have it in his book upon _England Before the Conquest_. But he gives no proof. Milton on the Thames itself would have seemed a much safer and more accessible base.