Our ordinary evening promenade at King’s Peddington is on the old and curiously curved stone pier. This pier is half a breakwater and half a quay: it forms and protects the little artificial harbour, round three of whose sides it bends quaintly in an irregular semicircle. The top of the outer barrier (on which we walk) is not flat, but slopes gradually downward and outward, so as to throw off the breakers in heavy weather; and when the stones are wet with clammy spray it is by no means easy always to keep one’s footing without sliding quietly off into the sea on the outer side. To say the truth, the pier was never meant for a promenade: this high external barrier was intended merely to break the force of the waves; while the quay itself runs round the inside of the protecting semicircle at a lower level, so as entirely to cut off all view of the sea, restricting one’s prospect to the tiny harbour and the three or four coasting colliers which happen to be unloading there. But when King’s Peddington pier was first designed, the notion of promenading had never entered into anybody’s head: for it was originally built in the reign of Edward I.; and though it has since been remodelled many times over, it still preserves the main features of its primitive construction. So the old pier is really a memorial of the greatest revolution which ever affected the fate of Churnside and of England generally.
One is often tempted to wonder why historians who are so minute and explicit about the changes in the mere external form of our social structure — who tell us so much and at such length about the glorious Reformation and the glorious Revolution and the signing of Magna Charta — should have usually passed over almost in silence the vast and all-affecting changes which at various times have come across the whole inner nature of the social structure itself. To a simple-minded Churnside antiquary, living remote from Courts and Parliaments, and wholly without curiosity as to Queen Elizabeth’s ruffs or King George’s periwigs, it would seem that the history of King’s Peddington and of Britain since the English settlement fell naturally into three great epochs of paramount importance. The first is the epoch when the whole country was entirely agricultural, and when every manor or every village was self-contained and self-supporting; and during this period there was no trade worth speaking of. The second is the epoch when the country began to export raw material to the more civilised Continent, and to receive in exchange Southern products and manufactured goods; and during this period England was in a position analogous to that of Australia or of the Western States, and local collecting and distributing centres or commercial towns sprang up at wide intervals among the agricultural tracts. The third is the epoch when England began to manufacture and export finished goods instead of raw material, and to import raw material instead of finished goods; and during this period the towns rise into prominence, the industrial class become the most important element of the population, and the whole social life of the community is utterly reversed. Compared with these momentous revolutions, a mere change of abstract religious opinions or of central administrative system sinks for the mind of the Churnside antiquary into complete insignificance. For that reason, the old stone pier, which marks and dates the beginning of the great industrial movement, must always be to every enlightened historian of King’s Peddington a critical turning-point in the long annals of the parish.
The pier, in fact, shows us at once that by Edward’s time Churnside had cast off its old local isolation, and had begun to enter into the general current of European life. There was growing up a need for foreign products. The Norman gentlemen who owned the manors required tapestry, and Oriental steel, and better wine than that of the Gloucestershire vineyards; their wives needed velvets, and silk robes, and Rouen fashions, and Southern headgear. The churches and abbeys wanted glass, and incense, and vestments, and paintings, and Italian carvings. Ever since the Norman Conquest had dissevered England from the barbaric Scandinavian North, and bound it up with the civilised Romance South, trade in such articles had been going on to some extent; and though it was still carried on solely for the benefit of the governing few, political or ecclesiastical — for the Court, the knightly class, and the clergy — yet it had already begun to produce some little increase in the mercantile element of towns like London, Winchester, Exeter, and Norwich — where, indeed, large numbers of Norman artisans and traders had settled down after the conquest as a sort of commercial aristocracy. When Peddington pier was built, however, things had got a little beyond this first stage; and one can see easily enough why Edward’s reign should have been a natural time for the further development of the nascent industrial and commercial spirit. Of course the history books, with their ordinary love of personalities, have an easy ready-made personal explanation to offer:— “King Edward greatly encouraged trade, and induced Flemish weavers to settle in England.” But behind King Edward and his Flemings lay the nation, and the reason why the nation was now prepared to enter upon a commercial life is pretty clear. The Norman peace, the strong hands of William and Henry had put a stop to the old Danish plundering and the old English local anarchy. At the same time, the final separation from Normandy had turned the Norman and Angevin aristocracy into settled English landed proprietors, living on their own estates, and no longer engaged as of old in constant Continental warfare. Thus on the one hand population and wealth had increased during the long period of comparative peace; while, on the other hand, the class in whose hands wealth was entirely concentrated were left at home, and so compelled to spend their wealth where they gathered it. Here, then, we come upon the true mediæval England, the England of great castles and splendid abbeys, of merchant republics and special privileges, of a tinsel feudal chivalry and of abject peasant degradation. This was the England which first largely needed a foreign trade to supply those Southern luxuries and artistic products never dreamt of by the ruder old English thanes or Danish earls under Cnut or Edward the Confessor. And in this way it became practicable to ship bales of wool and tallow and hides from King’s Peddington for Flanders, France, and Italy; and to import in return wine from Bordeaux, silk mercery from Rouen, and textile fabrics from the rising cities of the Flemish industrial belt.
The way in which King’s Peddington came to be selected as a port for the new traffic is in itself sufficiently significant. For it was in the fourth of Edward I. that Peddington became a Royal manor. It had been sold by the descendants of Walter the Breton to the Bishop of Sarum, who exchanged it with the King for Walbury Eccles, Wilts. Ever since that period the town has borne its present title of King’s Peddington. But the change of master did much more than merely alter the name of the place: it changed the little village at the mouth of the Churn from a group of huts round the manor and the church into a Royal borough. Edward determined to make his new possession a port. He planned the original stone pier, and enclosed with it a harbour of the first class, as harbours then went, capable of holding a couple of dozen coasting vessels for the Rouen and Bordeaux trade. The town must clearly have been built at once on a fixed administrative pattern, and peopled with merchants, chapmen, sailors, and craftsmen by a regularly planned migration; for its walls are mentioned in the town charter, as are also its four chief streets, and its merchant guild and its craftsmen. Two burgesses were summoned to Parliament to the King at Westminster, and were fined for non-attendance under Edward’s son. The borough was also held answerable for four ships for the king’s wars; and it had to pay a pretty heavy tax for its privileges. This high-handed, regal way of manufacturing a commercial centre is thoroughly indicative of the first stage of industrialism, before it has yet begun to emancipate itself from rigid governmental control.