Chapter 2

The new city, which speedily rose round the bridge head on the northern side of the river, was of considerable dimensions by the time it is first mentioned--namely, in A.D. 64. This is by Tacitus, who describes it as full of merchants and merchandise. At the same time, except for the pretorium at the bridge head, there were no defences. Anything like a walled town must have been among the islets on the southern side; but, from the character of the Roman remains found in Southwark and St George's Fields, it is probable that the British town there was not of any importance, and answered to Julius Cæsar's contemptuous description: "The Britons call a thick wood, enclosed with a rampart and a ditch, a town." The new Roman fort at the northern end of the bridge, with its suburb of merchants' houses along the Walbrook, is the London of history, and the first we hear about it is that--while Camalodunum was a Roman Colonium, and Verulam a Municipium--London was only a Prefectura. This is the opinion of Pennant; but Tacitus, who first names London as being in existence at all and who lived and wrote about A.D. 90, expressly mentions it as abounding in merchants and business. Dr. Guest was of opinion that the Roman fort was made in A.D. 43. It stood above the outfall of the Walbrook, its western wing being where Cannon Street terminus is now, and its eastern extremity reaching to Mincing Lane. These limits were determined in a paper by Arthur Taylor in _Archæologia_ in 1849, and were confirmed during the building of Cannon Street Station. The road from the bridge divided in East Cheap and passed out towards the spot now called from the Marble Arch, where it joined the old road which the Saxons subsequently named the Watling Street, now Park Lane and Edgware Road, as to one branch; and as to the other, the Ermin Street, which led towards Lincoln. The Roman governor probably lived in his Pretorium, where, at the north-west corner, close to the celebrated London Stone, remains of pavements and buildings have been found. At the south-eastern corner, too, but at a lower level, another pavement, which still exists under the Corn Exchange, may have been part of a bath. There are no remnants of a church or a temple, but some antiquaries fancied they saw relics of a Roman basilica, or judgment hall, among the fragments of masonry removed for the station. There were no burials within the walls, but they begin, even among the pavements and villas, just outside the limits marked by the wall of the Pretorium. That it was defended by the stream of Walbrook on the west, and by a wide fosse on the northern side, seems certain. The Mansion House, in 1738, was built on piles "in a ditch," according to Stukeley. This fosse probably communicated with the Walbrook, and from what Stow says, seems to have had a certain amount of stream through it. "Langborne Ward," he says, "is so called of a long borne of sweete water, which of old time breaking out into Fenchurch streete, ran down the same streete and Lombard streete to the West end of St. Mary Woolnothe's Church, where turning south, and breaking it selfe into many small shares, rilles or streames, it left the name of Shareborne, or south borne lane (as I have read) because it ranne south to the river of Thames."

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Stow's interpretations of names often read like bad jokes, not to say bad puns. We remember his Matfelon, his Sherehog, his Cripplegate and other curiosities of the kind. Sherborn Lane has now disappeared, but there can be little doubt the "burn" or "bourne" was a relic of the fosse of the first Roman London. It divides two wards, so was as ancient as those wards--namely, Cornhill and Langborne; and if there was any stream through it fell into Walbrook, between the parish church of St. Mary on the Woollen Hithe and St. Mary of the Woolchurch Haw. This corner, then near the modern Mansion House, was the north-western corner of the little fort, Dowgate was at the south-western, and Billingsgate at the south-eastern corner, while Mincing Lane, perhaps at Fenchurch Street, completed the rectangle. What formed the defence on this, the eastern side, we have no evidence, but it was probably one of the "shares, rilles, or streames" which so puzzled Stow. The Walbrook was 248 feet wide.

It is evident, then, that the Roman London Bridge was well protected, but the town which grew round it lay open to any attack. Such a contingency was the rebellion of Boadicea, when Suetonius abandoned the bridge fort and open town and held to Verulam and Camalodunum, which had walls. We do not hear anything about the repairs of the bridge when the rebellion was over. It probably, as in so many other places, consisted of a few piers of massive masonry, and great beams, probably wide apart, formed the roadway. The line of coins found in the Thames may have been dropped as offerings to the river-god, or merely by careless passengers. They dated back to republican times, and ended only with the last years of the Roman occupation, long after the introduction of Christianity. It may be mentioned here that in the catalogue of Roach Smith (1854), from which we have borrowed some illustrations, is an account of a box which had perished, but which had contained tiers of iron coins, plated with silver, oxydised together in masses, being obviously base money coined to pass current in Britain in the reign of Claudius, A.D. 41. It was discovered in King William Street, almost the centre of the old fort. Forged _denarii_ of lead or brass formed the larger part of those found in the Thames. The bridge was probably in a line with Botolph Lane, the old London Bridge of Peter of Colechurch being higher up, and the present London Bridge higher again. The Roman Bridge, frequently repaired, and frequently, too, broken down--as when Anlaf, the Dane, sailed up the Thames with his fleet in 993--was finally removed in favour of the nineteen arches and a drawbridge, which subsisted until 1831. (The site of the Roman Bridge is discussed in a paper on "Recent Discoveries in Roman London," in volume lx. of _Archælogia_.)

Such, then, was Roman London during the greater part of the Roman occupation of Britain--as it is still, a city of suburbs.

Of the date of the building of the wall we have no certainty. A recent writer finds fault with my cautious statement in _Historic London_ that "in 350 London had no wall," and would substitute 360. The wall was certainly built about that time or a little later, but may have been begun long before. It is evident that such a piece of work was not completed in a single year, even under the Roman Emperors. Perhaps--it is too easy to form theories--Constantine (Stow says _Helena_) projected it and left it to be finished by his successors. It had been completed by the reign of Theodosius, about A.D. 368.

The course of the new wall, according to Stow, was from the Tower to Aldgate, thence to Bishopsgate, and from Bishopsgate to Aldersgate, with a postern at Cripplegate. Next came Newgate, and Ludgate was towards the Fleet--the wall ending at the Thames. The whole length was two miles and a half and 608 feet. Stow did not know that several of the gates he named--Aldgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, and Ludgate--were not Roman. Nor did he know that Ludgate means a postern, and Crepulgeat a covered way, both these gates being probably of late construction, though possibly of the time of Alfred. The exact site of the wall and the two landward gates seems to be indicated by the old ward boundaries, but modern investigators have neglected them. There was another Roman settlement, namely, at Westminster, where the abbey stands on the site of some older buildings. Roman concrete forms the foundation of the older part of the church and the dark cloisters. The pavement of a dwelling was found under the nave, and a sarcophagus, bearing a rudely carved cross, showed that the town was not walled. The Romans possibly built here on account of the ford, and we may be sure that at times, when the only bridge was under repair or unfinished, the crossing here for the ancient road, which the Saxons named the Watling Street, was found convenient. There is mention of the buildings on Thorney in a charter at the British Museum (Kemble, D.L.V.), apparently a thirteenth century forgery, but of interest as showing that a tradition survived. King Eadgar is made to say that a temple of abomination had been destroyed to make way for the church of St. Peter. Such a temple, if one existed, was more probably Saxon than Roman.

As to the houses and buildings of Roman London within the walls we know very little. Sir W. Tite enumerated a large number of mosaic pavements, some of them of considerable size, and scattered over a wide area, but apparently not marking any fine or magnificent public buildings. Stukeley made a plan showing where, in his opinion at least, remains of such buildings should be found; but, to put it briefly, remains of the kind have been conspicuous by their absence on his eight sites. Stukeley is, in fact, a very untrustworthy authority. He thought, with Stow, that Algate, the mediæval name, meant Oldgate, or, as Stow wrote it, Ealdgate, whereas it was in reality one of the latest. The name probably denoted a gate open to all without toll.

The remains of the wall, which still or lately existed, have been carefully examined by Mr. Norman, of the Society of Antiquaries, and Mr. Francis Reader. Their account of various excavations is in volume lx. of _Archæologia_, and illustrated by a series of plans, sections, and other drawings by Mr. Reader, who seems to have proved that the marsh on which Moorfield was laid out in 1605 did not exist in the early Roman time, but was caused by the building of the wall.

III.--SAXON LONDON

If we know but little about Roman London, we know still less, if possible, about Saxon London. So far as it was inhabited at all, it was the capital of the kings of Essex, and is so described in a very few documents. On this account it was an episcopal see. How the Saxons became possessed of it we do not know. Probably Stow's account may be accepted as the most likely:--

"This citie of London having beene destroyed and brent by the Danes and other pagan ennemies about the yere of Christ 839, was by Alfred King of the West Saxons, in the yere 886, repayred and honorably restored and made againe habitable."

That Stow's account is according to the best authorities will be apparent to any reader of Green's _Conquest of England_. In chapter iv. he describes the condition of London and the neighbouring kingdom of the East Saxons--"A tract which included not only the modern shire that bears their name, but our Middlesex and Hertfordshire, and whose centre or 'mother-city' was London." He goes on to point out that at the time of Alfred's great campaigns against the Danes, London had played but little part in English history: "Indeed," he affirms, "for nearly half a century after its conquest by the East Saxons, it wholly disappears from our view." Its position, he goes on to show, was sure eventually to draw in both trade and population, but the Danish war arrested progress.

"To London the war brought all but ruin; so violent, in fact, was the shock to its life that its very bishoprick seemed for a time to cease to exist. The Roman walls must have been broken and ruined, for we hear of no resistance such as that which in later days made the city England's main bulwark against northern attack."

Asser, in his _Life of Alfred_, tells us plainly enough of the condition of the space within the ruined walls. It must have been that of Pevensey now, or of Silchester before the grass grew over it. Alfred, he says, "restauravit et habitabilem fecit." "To make a town habitable" implies that it was uninhabited; "to restore it" implies that at some previous period it had been what the great king then made it once more. How long this condition of desolation prevailed within the Roman wall we have no information. Unfortunately no successful attempt has been made to discriminate between the Roman masonry, that of Alfred, and that of the successive mediæval repairs, in the recent examinations of what is left of the wall.

It is well to keep the few chronological facts before us in trying to judge of the influence of the events of 457 on what was left of Roman London. These facts may be briefly stated. In 369 London was Augusta of the Romans. In 457, or ninety-eight years--practically a century--later, the Saxons caught the Britons of London at the ford over the Cray, in Kent, fifteen miles down the Thames, and slew 4,000 of them, the rest flying "in great terror to London." The chronicle does not tell us whether the Saxons entered the city then or not. Judging by analogy, they did enter it then or soon after, and slew the Britons that were left from the slaughter at Crayford. The Britons had certainly ceased out of London when we hear of it again. They had so utterly perished that not a single Celtic or Roman local name was left, except the two already mentioned--Thames and London. There is absolute silence in the chronicle. This ominous silence lasts from 457 to 609. We have, therefore, a hundred years from the departure of the Romans to the battle of Crayford, and 152 years more to the next mention of London; in all 250 years during which there is only one thing certain--namely, that owing to some cause, the British and Roman languages ceased altogether to be spoken or even remembered, and together with them the Roman religion. The change is complete, as well it might be in that long time--as long as between the death of Charles I. and the accession of Edward VII. This blank in the history is all the more marked because no inscriptions have survived. We have a few--very few--examples of writing before the Romans left. We have not a line, not a letter, during those 250 years, and when we find anything again, the writers are Anglo-Saxon--the language is entirely changed, so entirely that not even one local name survives.

It may be necessary to note here that some excellent authorities, finding certain traces of Roman law and customs existing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have formed the opinion that such laws were relics of the Roman occupation. It would be interesting if we could accept this view, just as if, for example, we could say that Paternoster Row was so named by the Romans. But, as I shall have to point out a little further, the origin of such usages is obvious without any recourse to the revival of laws dead and buried centuries before; if, indeed, they ever existed among people whose very language had wholly died out and been forgotten. It is, to say the least, unlikely that a continuity should exist in this respect, while the language in which it must have been preserved, orally, if not in records, died out and left not a trace even in a local name.

I had written so far when I received Mr. Gomme's very interesting volume on the Governance of London. I greatly regret to say I cannot make his views fit with most of the facts I have endeavoured to put into chronological order above. For example, Roman London, when walled, was a Christian city. When the Saxons had held it from about 457 to 609, it was, we know, a heathen city, and twice afterwards returned to the worship of Woden and Thor. Is this compatible with the survival of a Roman constitution? Or, again, is there any London custom or law which might not have come to it from the cities of Flanders and Gaul more easily than after the changes and chances of two or three centuries? This is not the place to discuss these and other similar questions, and I for one will be extremely glad if Mr. Gomme can prove his point in the face of so much which seems to tell against him.

The East Saxons, it is pretty certain, made but little use of London. We only hear of it when the King of Kent, Ethelbert, set up Sebert, his sister's son, as King of Essex, and having become Christian himself, sent Mellitus, a Roman priest, to preach to Sebert and his people, making him Bishop of London. So much we learn from the _Chronicle_ under the year 609. Next, in Beda, we read that Ethelbert furthermore built the church of St. Paul in London for Mellitus, "where he and his successors should have their episcopal see." Beda also tells us that the Metropolis of the East Saxons is London; so that when we, at the present day, speak of it as the Metropolis, we mean it is the chief ecclesiastical city of Essex; which shows the absurdity of a phrase very common at the present day. Sebert lived till 616 or later, but there is no distinct mention of his life in London. His supposed burial, whether in St. Paul's or at Westminster, belongs to monkish legendary lore, and cannot be discussed as serious history. When his three sons turned back from Christianity they were attacked and slain by the men of Wessex, who seem to have acquired an ascendancy over the East Saxons which they retained till the Danish wars and the settlement of Alfred.

When we next hear of a bishop, he is a missionary from the West Saxons. The brother of the great Chad, the bishop of the Mercians, Cedd, is invited to preach to the heathen East Saxons by Oswy, King of Northumbria. We may take Oswy as godfather of the East Saxon king, Sigebert; but there are many names with little certainty in the few contemporary records. In the confusion Sigebert is murdered, and of his successor we know nothing. He may have reigned at Kingsbury or at Tilbury, where--not in London--Cedd preached: at Colchester or at St. Albans. Then there comes a story of "simony," in which the influence of Worcester is again apparent. Then, at last, we have some documentary evidence. The kings, or kinglets, of Essex were usually two in number. At this time they were Sebbi and his colleague, Sighere, and they both witness a gift made by their cousin Hothilred to Barking Abbey. The document is printed by Kemble in _Codex Diplomaticus_ (vol. i.), and is dated by him in 692 or 693. After this date again the East Saxons--there is not a word about London--become pagans. Sighere and his people of the "East Saxon province" are mentioned by Beda. The subjects of Sebbi remain steadfast, and if we care to guess they will probably be found to have belonged to the "Middlesaxon province." It is mentioned in a document relating to Twickenham, which is described as in that part of the province, and is signed by Swaebred, King of the East Saxons, under the sanction of Coenred, King of Mercia.

The same year that Hothilred gave his land to Barking, the great legendary benefactor of that nunnery died. This was Erkenwald, Abbot of Chertsey, who had become Bishop of London in 675. Two years before, in 673, there is a distinct mention of a church in London. The Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated a bishop of Dunwich "in the city of London." The next mention is by Beda, who tells us of the appointment of Erkenwald, and immediately after of the death of King Sebbi and his burial "in the church of the blessed apostle of the Gentiles."

It thus appears likely that both Erkenwald and Sebbi lived in London. It does not follow that Erkenwald built or rebuilt Bishopsgate. Newgate was in existence under the name of Westgate very soon after. As it opened near the church, it is surely more likely that Erkenwald rebuilt it than the northern gate; but the history of this bishop is so overlaid with monkish legend that we do not require any guesswork.

In the same way Offa, King of Essex, son of Sighere, is constantly confused with Offa, the great King of Mercia. That one of the two had a house in London is very likely, and is noticed by Matthew Paris. But it is curious that the great Offa's biographers wholly omit to mention London. There were some half-dozen kings of the East Saxons after the abdication of Offa, of Essex, and there is some confusion among them and among the Saxon "dukes" after the submission to Egbert in 823, when we may suppose the Kinglets of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex assumed the lower title.

Now, at last, we come to a document which throws light on the condition of London before the Danish war, and the passage quoted from Green's _Conquest of England_. This is a grant by Burhed, or Burgred, King of Mercia, afterwards styled Duke, who married a sister of Alfred, and no doubt abdicated the royal title when Egbert became king. In it Burgred gives to Bishop Alhun, of Worcester, a piece of land--"a little cabbage garden," as it may be translated--"in vico Lundoniæ; hoc est ubi nominatur Ceolmundingchaga," in the street of London where it is called the enclosure of Ceolmund, "qui est non longe from Uestgetum positus," which is not far from Westgate. We observe the scribe's ignorance of the Latin of "from," and his presumption that those who read the grant would be at least equally ignorant. This grant throws light on the condition of London before the great Danish inroad. There is no building of note along the principal thoroughfare between the modern Newgate and Coleman's enclosure, now, we may safely assume, represented by some part of Coleman Street. Moreover, such an enclosure was possible. Also the ground was occupied by a market garden. There is nothing about a Roman city. There is nothing about a government, municipal or otherwise; there is a king--not of London or of Essex, but of Mercia; and there is a bishop, but he is bishop of Worcester. The date is in full--April 18th, 857. Several other charters occur in which London is named more or less distinctly, and it is evident that the old desolation, if not quite at an end, was at least a circumstance worthy of remark. More than one of these documents speak of the port and of ships resorting to it, and we see the meaning of Green's allusion to the fact that, while London up to that time--namely, the end of the eighth century--had played but little part in English history, its position made it sure to draw both trade and population. Then came the great Danish invasion, the reign and victories of Alfred, the repair of the wall and a new London, England's main bulwark against foreign invasion.