KEVIN FLUDE
Once upon a time someone knew who founded London. In the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth1 said that that someone was the Trojan King Brutus – descendent of Aeneas, slayer of the indigenous race of Giants, who built London as Trinovantum (New Troy) in what we would now call the Bronze Age. Geoffrey peopled the city with a glorious host of kings, descendants of Brutus such as King Cole, King Leir, King Belinus. King Lud, for example, was said to have renamed Trinovantum ‘Lud’s Dun’ or London.
DOUBTS AS TO the trustworthiness of Geoffrey began to creep in as early as the sixteenth century, but even archaeologists in the twentieth century were fantasising about a London that was old when the Romans came.
Merchants from Gaul sailed up the Thames in small ships, and made fast at these harbours to trade in the mineral products of the island long before Caesar planned to gain new glory and acquire the wealth he had heard of.2
The heroic archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler3 put the evidence together to deny the existence of a pre-Roman London as early as 1928, and excavations in post-Blitz and post-big-bang London confirmed the lack of any credible evidence for a pre-Roman city. Closer reading of Julius Caesar’s4 account of his crossing of the Thames in 54 BC show no reference to an existing city. So the founder of Londinium is more likely to have been a Roman.
When I discovered what the enemy’s plans were, I led the army to the River Thames and the Territory of Cassivellaunus. There is only one place where the river can be forded, and even there with difficulty. When we reached it, I noticed large enemy forces drawn up on the opposite bank. The bank had also been fortified with sharp stakes fixed along it, and, as I discovered from prisoners and deserters, similar stakes had been driven into the river bed and were concealed beneath the water.
I immediately gave orders for the cavalry to go ahead and the legions to follow them. As the infantry crossed, only their heads were above the water, but they pressed on with such speed and determination that both infantry and cavalry were able to attack together. The enemy, unable to stand up to this combined force, abandoned the river bank and took to flight.
… In the meantime the Trinovantes sent a deputation to me. They are perhaps the strongest tribe (civitas) in the southeast of Britain, and it was from them that young Mandubracius had come to me in Gaul to put himself under my protection, having had to flee for his life after his father, the king of the tribe, was killed by Cassivellaunus.
There is, however, one lingering piece of evidence in favour of a pre-Roman London – linguists insist that the name Londinium is pre-Roman in origin. Previous suggestions of the meaning of the name such as Lake Side Town, Lud’s Castle, Londinos’s settlement, have not survived scrutiny. More recently, Richard Coates5 has suggested the original name was Plowonida – or ‘settlement by the wide-flowing river’. Plowonida must have been a small settlement (insofar as nothing significant archaeologically has yet been found) and whoever was the founder of that settlement will, barring a miracle, never be known.
WHERE TO READ THIS
City Wall St Alphage High Walk. If you turn left when you leave the Museum of London and walk along the High Walk, past the Pizza Express, after about 200 yards, on your right you will find St Alphage Church – ruined since the Blitz, and once part of a monastery. Turn left again, and by some steps you will see a huge section of Roman wall complete with battlements. The battlements are brick and date to the 1470s. Here you can get a true idea of why London was such a formidable place crucial to all military disputes in England.
Deprived of their prehistoric city, twentieth-century archaeologists placed the foundation of the city in the context of the Roman conquest of AD 43. Aulus Plautius, general in charge of the invasion of Britain, had successfully established the bridgehead, and was forced to await the arrival of the Emperor Claudius to partake in the military glory. Archaeologists assumed he occupied his troops by building a bridge across the River Thames at its lowest bridging point and establishing an advanced military supply base on the north bank. London was thus a military foundation, and Aulus Plautius a credible founder of Londinium.
A new generation of archaeologists, following the Second World War, was prepared to reconsider the evidence and found that the likely foundation date was not AD 43 but some few years later, and so London, they believed, was more likely to be a civilian foundation. During the excavation of No. 1 Poultry6 in the 1990s a wooden drain beside the main road was found and dated accurately by tree-ring dating to AD 47 – the likely date of the layout of the new Roman city. The founder then was an unknown official or trader in the governorship of Publius Ostorius Scapula (AD 47–52).
The nature of the Roman city was not spelled out by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the thirteen century, but he believed the line of British kings continued unabated, interrupted only by occasional Roman re-invasions. Later historians, steeped in the British Empire, thought differently; they saw the Romans as kindred spirits to the British Imperialists, and the Ancient Britons they saw as barbarians. Londinium was cloaked in the spirit of Roman civilisation and recast as a provincial example of the ‘Glory that was Rome’. At its centre was the Roman town hall and market – the Forum, surrounded by Roman palaces and villas, temples and bath houses, theatres and amphitheatres, its citizens as educated Romans, proud to be Roman. The native Britons were absent from this picture – either Romanised, enslaved or ignored, as illustrated by this Roman writing tablet found in London in which the Latin named Rufus is referred to as the son of the Briton Callisunus7:
Rufus, son of Callisunus, sends greeting to Epillicus, and all his fellows. I believe you know that I am well. If you have made the list please send it. Do look after everything carefully so that you turn the girl into cash.
Archaeologists duly found most of the missing Roman buildings: the Forum by the Lloyds building; bathhouses at Cheapside and Huggin Hill; temples and religious arches dotted around the town; an amphitheatre underneath the Guildhall; and a pattern of development that fitted into the Roman paradigm – no London before the Romans, an increase of Roman stone-built buildings as the Roman province developed, and an abrupt halt to the city when the Romans left. Maintaining town life in London seemed to need the civilising influence of the Romans, the narrative suggested, the Britons were incapable of it themselves.
As the baby-boomer archaeological generation matured, attitudes and discoveries changed the picture. In the 1970s developer madness led to a boom of archaeologists rescuing history from the jaws of the JCB. A surprising series of discoveries were made that revealed a wholly unexpected phase of early Roman timber-built construction, which reversed the perceived flow of development. The analysis of stone buildings was shown to give a false picture of Roman London. The early timber buildings demonstrated that Roman London had grown almost explosively in the first hundred years, despite the destruction of the city in the Boudiccan revolt of AD 60–61. By AD 140 it was at its height, and it then began a long decline, punctuated by short-term recoveries, into oblivion.8 The evidence could be interpreted to suggest that town life did not sit comfortably with the native economy – it only boomed in the initial period when the Romans ‘gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares, and good houses’9.
Up close – Roman Origins of London
In the crypt of Wren’s St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street is a small museum and some archaeological remains. Here you will see fragments of a Roman structure with tessellated floor, cut by early church foundations. Archaeologically there is nothing to link the Roman remains with the later church, although fifth-century pottery has been found here. But sit here and enjoy the unscientific speculation that nearby St Bride’s Well was a holy well dedicated to the Celtic goddess of fertility Brigantia, that this became an late Roman Church and was dedicated to St Brigid of Kildare, the patron saint of brides, in the Saxon period. Wouldn’t it be nice?
Archaeologist Neil Faulkner10 sees the Romans as robber barons failing to impose their ways on the British, and he sees the building of massive town halls and Roman city centres as being huge white elephants. In London, for example, the symbol of Roman Imperium the Forum11 appears to have been in a sorry state before being pulled down shortly after AD 300. By AD 400 no new Roman coinage was being circulated, the town centres were in terminal decay, Roman industries destroyed and Londinium, renamed Augusta, empty of citizens. London disappears from the historic record for nearly 200 years; archaeologically it disappeared for 400 years.
For historians since Geoffrey of Monmouth, this was an Armageddon – a descent into anarchy, barbarity, illiteracy, paganism, plague and genocide – the Dark Ages, when the Ancient Britons were all but exterminated by the Anglo-Saxons.
For some post-modern archaeologists it was nothing of the sort. They believe that the Roman civilisation was a thin veneer on a robust British society (Frances Pryor12 for one sees a continuity of society from prehistory well into the medieval period), and see the Anglo-Saxon invasion hypothesis as much exaggerated. Some believe the decline of London has been exaggerated as cemeteries around London do not confirm the decline in population, and the shrinking urban area depends on a particular interpretation of a horizon called the ‘Dark Earth’ as a result of decline. The final abandonment of Londinium in AD 410 meant little more than that the robber barons had gone and the Britons would now pay tax to someone who lived more locally. The Saxons did not wipe out the natives, they integrated with them. But the lack of coins, formal pottery industries and the decline of towns means that dating evidence is so difficult to come by that an agreed narrative on what actually happened in the post-Roman period has not yet fully emerged. Reputable scholars advance diametrically opposed opinions – ranging from the full-blown disaster scenario to a complacently patriotic view that nothing much changed behind the comings and goings of Romans, Anglos, Saxons and Jutes.13
But within the walled city of Londinium, archaeologists found that nothing much happened until the ninth century, when town life revived. However, history tells us that St Paul’s was founded in AD 604 and that London was the chief town of the Saxon Kingdom of Essex. These two facts could not be reconciled until the 1980s when archaeologists suddenly realised that a series of excavations in the Aldwych and Covent Garden area which revealed Saxon period ‘farms’ had in fact discovered a previously unsuspected urban centre – Saxon London14 – or Lundenwic as it was known. For unknown reasons, Londinium had died and a new city with a similar name revived 200 years later a mile or two to the west of the old city. This new unwalled city was attacked by Vikings in the ninth century and the people moved back behind the safety of the old Londinium defences – possibly when King Alfred instituted his policy of defence in depth behind walled Boroughs.
So archaeologists, through dint of repeated excavations on hundreds of sites, have revealed completely unknown ‘facts’ about London, creating a revolution in our understanding of the city. Londinium was founded first as a city by the Romans in AD 47, and probably named after a small pre-Roman settlement called Plowonida. Lundenwic was then refounded in the sixth century around the Aldwych, and moved back into the city in the ninth century as Lundenburgh, where it has remained ever since, and is still known as the City of London.
The remaining mystery is what happened in those 200 years from AD 400 to AD 600? In 2006, archaeologists working at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square found a burial site of a man – radio carbon dating suggested he was buried in 410 AD making him a contemporary of the real St Martin. Nearby was a brick kiln. Also found was a piece of pottery of a type used by early Saxons dating to about AD 500, and nearby in St Martin’s Lane are further early Saxon remains. Was the man the last Roman Londoner and did the pot belong to the first Saxon? Was this a cemetery that served both Roman Londinium and Saxon Lundenwic – was there a Roman settlement around St Martins, which survived the end of Roman London and which formed the heart of the new Saxon settlement? Putting aside romantic speculation, the 200-year gap is beginning to be closed.
1. Geoffrey of Monmouth (trans. Lewis Thorpe), The History of The Kings of Britain, Penguin Books, 1966
2. S R James, London Triumphant, The Studio Publications, London 1944
3. R Merrifield, London City of the Romans, Batsford, 1983
4. Julius Caesar (ed. Anne & Peter Wiseman), The Battle for Gaul, Chatto and Windus Ltd, London 1989
5. Richard Coates, ‘A New Explanation of the Name of London’, Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 96:2 (1998), pp. 203–29
6. Peter Rowsome, Heart of the City, Museum of London, 2000
7. P. Marsden, Roman London, Thames and Hudson, 1980
8. Kevin Flude and Paul Herbert, Citisights Guide to London, Author’s Choice Press, 2000
9. Tacitus (trans H. Mattingly), The Agricola & The Germania, Penguin Books, 1948
10. Neil Faulkner, The Decline And Fall of Roman Britain, Tempus, 2000
11. G. Milne (ed.), From Roman Basilica to Medieval Market, Museum of London, 1992
12. Francis Pryor, Britain A.D., Harper Perennial, 2004
13. Bryan Ward Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, Oxford University Press, 2005
14. A. Vince, Saxon London, Batsford, 1990