Thank you for returning to the Eagles of Mercia Chronicles. I hope you’ve enjoyed this faster-paced, more violent second book. Icel is a wonderful character to write about.
And now for some history. The name of Londonia for Lundenwic and Londinium is taken from Citadel of the Saxons by Rory Naismith, an enticing idea of combining the two separate settlements that we now know as London at a specific period in time, and easy to distinguish from the more distinct entities of Saxon Lundenwic and Roman Londinium. It’s long been accepted that London as we know it has changed significantly since the Roman and Saxon days. Londinium, the premier Roman site in England, was a vast sprawl behind substantial stone walls, although the walls weren’t built first. They were constructed between the 180s and 220s, whereas the earliest timbers on the site so far found date to AD47. As such, Londinium was not initially built as a defensive settlement but rather as a place for the Roman occupation of Britain to showcase all that it had to offer to the often unruly and ungrateful tribes of Britain.
The ruin that was Londinium was not what the area’s traders needed when they came to redevelop the settlement in the seventh century. The walls of Londinium would have still been largely intact, making it difficult to get to the River Thames, which was crucial for their waterborne trading network, which extended over vast distances, to succeed. Instead, and skipping over the River Fleet (now subterranean, and therefore a ‘lost’ river of London), they made their home further west, and Lundenwic, the clue is in the ending of the name ‘wic’ meaning market, first came into prominence.
Of course, Londinium remained, as did much of its walls. So, at this period, it would have held an appeal for military conquerors, even if the true wealth was in the trading ambitions of those living in Lundenwic and, of course, in the status of holding it. Rory Naismith informs that Lundenwic was half as big as Roman Londinium in terms of area covered, at 60 ha, and at its height had 7,000 inhabitants, a far cry from the anticipated 25,000–30,000 who had occupied Roman Londinium at its peak. Interestingly, another factor that prevented Londinium from being reused during the Saxon period could have been the extent of stone remains – these would have hampered those who wished to build with wood, as the Saxons did.
The idea of having Icel walking through these ruins, which would have been ancient even in the 830s, was too good an opportunity to miss, although it’s not as easy as I thought it might be to piece together what Londinium might have been like. It doesn’t help that my geographical knowledge of London is poor.
Recent archaeological finds imply that Roman Londinium went through many phases of development, and it’s intriguing to consider what might have remained visible in the 830s. The roads may have long since disappeared, the areas close to the river, the Walbrook, might have become boggy, and there would have been a general sense of abandonment. I can’t help thinking it would have been an eerie place – too vast for any Saxon force to hold competently and perhaps echoing with the sound of all those who once lived there. What must the Saxons have thought of this settlement? Did they genuinely believe, as it’s written, that it was the ‘ancient works of giants’?
Both of these settlements were firmly Mercian holdings at this point. The king of Wessex was making his ambitions clear by trying to hold on to them once King Wiglaf was once more king of Mercia. The settlement of Southwark, which would have been on Wessex land, does not seem to be in use at this specific time – in fact, the Roman bridge connecting Roman Londinium to Southwark might have been gone by as early as the fourth century.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) has little to say about what happened during AD830, other than to praise King Ecgberht for his success against the Welsh kingdoms, a success that I’ve made a failure because I can’t determine any change that shows these Welsh kingdoms were subject to another. There was no love lost between Mercia and Wessex, and their unease with one another had endured for at least a century before these events occurred.
The word toforans. I was going to use the word ‘toff’, but wary of it being a 1930s invention, I dug a little deeper and discovered that while toff might be related to the word toffee-nosed, it could also be much older. Toforans means superior in Old English.
For those who don’t share my love of Saxon coinage and the mints, the Saxons did have coinage. These were often stamped with the king’s head (and I do mean stamped). Finds of coins provide much-needed information about what was happening in the Saxon kingdoms at this time, which the written record has either glossed over, or failed to mention. A recent discovery of a coin showing Ludica’s head (the king of Mercia before Wiglaf) has confirmed that he did indeed rule Mercia for some time. These finds constantly and consistently rewrite much that’s known from the scanty written record. But, at the time, the kings of Saxon kingdoms tended to have control over the mints. The fact that King Ecgberht was unwilling to relinquish his hold on the mint inside Lundenwic might reveal that he had no mint of his own, or that Mercian coinage was simply the most respected – perhaps like the British pound or the US dollar these days – it was deemed to be more stable. King Ecgberht also had coins produced there that proclaimed him as king of Mercia. I imagine that riled King Wiglaf no end.
My decision to have Icel escape and return through a drainage channel is based on a trip I made to Roman Corbridge nearly fifteen years ago, when my two small children (at the time) took great delight in crawling through the hypocaust system, much to the unease of many. If they could do it, then so too could Icel. And, in fact, if you visit the Roman Corbridge website, there is indeed a photo of a small child doing just that. Not much changes.
Icel will return, soon. Thank you for reading.