Legends of Roman London more

Legends of Roman London by Tony Keen As Neil Gaiman or China Miéville would surely tell you, London is a place of myth, legend, or story. But what are legends? They are the stories we tell ourselves not because we know they are true, but because we want them to be true. of Westminster, London had been becoming the most important city in England, eclipsing Alfred the Great’s capital of Winchester. Winchester was a pre-Roman settlement (as, by the time you read this, I will have explained to members of Corflu); the stories of London’s mythological origins sought to bolster London’s standing by asserting a greater antiquity for that city (at the same time, this helped to assert the ancient origins of the lines of the Kings of England, a propaganda tool against the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor). In the end, Brutus and Lud are fictions, no more real than the sanctified King Lucius – who supposedly founded the first Christian church in London, St Peter’s upon Cornhill, in the second century. Boadicea, or rather Boudicca, was real. But there is no reason to believe that she is buried under Platform 10 of King’s Cross station, her ghost dourly gazing on all the young wizards a quarter of a platform away. That is a recent legend – it can be traced no further back than Lewis Spence’s 1937 book Boadicea: Warrior Queen of the Britons. Nor are Parliament Hill or Hampstead any more likely burial sites. Again, these seek to link London with a great national heroine. But Boudicca probably didn’t think of herself as ‘British’ – ‘Britannia’ was a concept imposed on the island by the Romans – and she burned the citizens of Londinium with as much gusto as she burned the Roman colonists of Colchester. Why, then, should she want to be buried there? One of our sources, Cassius Dio (admittedly over a century after the events) suggests that she was given a lavish burial. If this was true, then it is much more likely that she was buried in her native Suffolk or Norfolk. But at least Boudicca has more claim to be British than Saint Helena, mother of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great. Her descent from British aristocracy is commemorated in the mediaeval church of St Helen’s Bishopgate, tucked away in the shadow of the ‘Gherkin’. But the earliest sources suggest that Helena’s birthplace lay somewhere in modern Turkey. Sometimes, the legends only elaborate slightly upon historical truth. In Brentford, there is a cylindrical monument, now outside the County Court (not its original location). I’ve never visited it myself, but I’m suspect one of the editors of this journal may be familiar with it. The Brentford Monument was set up in 1909, and commemorates four battles in the area – in 1642, 1016, 750-751, and 54 BCE, when Julius Caesar fought the Britons as he crossed the Thames. The Wall of London at Tower Hill. The lower courses up to the fourth tile levelling course (about the level of the viewing platform to the left) are Roman, from c. 200 CE. The remainder is mediaeval, using the Roman wall (by then buried) as foundations. The exposed wall would never have been this tall when in use. London has legendary origins. Brutus, second-generation Trojan immigrant in Italy, was ejected and fled to Britain, where he founded ‘New Troy’, which became known as Trinovantum. Then King Lud – who was eventually buried in Ludgate, to which he gave his name – refortified the settlement, and it became known as Kaerlud, ‘Lud’s Castle’. From there, London. This is the tale Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts in his History of the Kings of Britain. But it’s not supported by any archaeological evidence. The lower Thames valley was certainly not depopulated in the Bronze and Iron Ages; there’s plenty of evidence that the area was farmed. But nothing has been found to conclusively suggest that there was a settlement on the site of London before the Romans arrived in 43 CE. As is often the case, these stories tell us more about when they were written than about the time they purport to describe. Geoffrey wrote in the twelfth century (the journey of Brutus to Britain is found earlier, in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum, written in the ninth century; but he makes no mention of London). Over the previous century, at least since Edward the Confessor built the Palace 28 The Church of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, with the ‘Gherkin’ (the Swiss Re Building) in the background. The church as it survives is mostly fifteenth century, though some elements go back to the twelfth century. The double nave is due to the fact that it was originally two churches next to each other, the one on the left being for the local parish, and the one on the right for a convent on the site. Now, we know Caesar fought Britons as he crossed the Thames, because he tells us so himself in Book V of the Gallic War. But we don’t know for sure that this was at Brentford. There is no mention of a local dignitary, Robertus Rankinus, nor of locals working to produce nylons. (No? Just me? Oh well.) My personal view is that, given his ultimate aim was to attack chieftain Cassivellaunus (surely a royal rather than a personal name) in Colchester, Caesar would have moved along the Thames until he came to the first crossing he could find – and the evidence suggests that the lowest crossing was down the river at Westminster. Caesar knew of no other crossing beyond the one he used, and whilst I can imagine him knowing about Westminster, but not the one up the river at Brentford, I find it less plausible that he would know about Brentford but not Westminster. And then, of course, there’s the London Stone. This once stood on the south side of Cannon Street, when it was described as ‘very tall’, and was a traffic hazard by the mid-eighteenth century. All that remains is a small chunk mounted behind a grille on the north side of Cannon Street, in a building now set to be demolished, but which was once a sports shop and before that the Bank of China. When the building was being renovated for its most recent use, workmen nearly destroyed the Stone, with only the new tenant’s intervention stopping them. There are many theories for what it was: part of a stone circle that stood on Saint Paul’s; or an altar set up by Brutus; or a Roman milestone, perhaps that from which all distances in the province were measured (unlikely – there was a monument in the Forum Romanum in Rome from which all distances in the empire were measured, but I know of no evidence that this was repeated in the provinces); or part of the Roman Governor’s Palace that stood where Cannon Street station stands now (except that many, myself included, no longer believe in the Governor’s Palace, though clearly there were some high-status buildings there); or a Saxon pagan monument or Christian Cross. And those are the sane theories; pretty soon you get to the ideas that it’s on a ley line, that it is the stone from which Arthur drew Excalibur, or that the rest of it is still buried under the pavement on the other side of the road (myself, I think the remainder has been destroyed, broken up and taken away as souvenirs in the eighteenth century). The trouble with all the theories is, there’s no evidence for its existence prior to 1188. This is one of those occasions when no attempt to explain it is truly satisfactory. I don’t think it’s Roman, but I don’t think it’s pre-Roman either. The only thing that is certain is that, being made from non-local limestone, it’s a high status monument of some kind. If you get there early enough, before 4 PM, see if you can get into the crypt of the church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower, the church that faces the Tower of London across the plaza where the tourists buy their tickets. Down there, you will find the Undercroft Museum, full of antiquities. The tessellated Roman pavement to your left belongs to an original Roman building that stood on the site. The one you walk on is also Roman, but has come from elsewhere, as have most of the antiquities, derived from some antiquarian’s collection. There is also a model of Roman London, made in 1928. On top of Ludgate Hill this model shows a temple. This is the Temple of Diana, supposedly under St Paul’s Cathedral. Another legend. Sir Christopher Wren, like many of his contemporaries in élite British society, a good antiquarian, looked for the Temple as he was working on the new cathedral. He found nothing. This legend seems to emerge at the beginning of the seventeenth century, though it has roots that go back a bit earlier. It is always possible that there was a temple on top of one of London’s two hills – it seems a reasonable place to have some prominent civic building. But there’s no evidence, and until archaeologists are allowed to remove St Paul’s, there won’t be. People are still making legends about Roman London. Some want to believe that there was a major Celtic cult centre on the River Walbrook, obliterated by the Romans. It’s certainly 29 possible that dedications were made – they seem to have been made in rivers across Britain. But London exists because, once the River Thames became more important as a communications route to the Continent than as a barrier between political states, it made sense to have a port city at the point where the roads, crossing the Thames at Westminster, met the high point of tidal activity (rising water levels mean that the Thames is now tidal up to Richmond). And the city is in its precise location not because of anything on the north bank, but because the island of Southwark, permanently rising above the tidal marshes above it, provided one of the few points at which a bridge could be secured on the south side of the Thames. Others argue that Roman London had a special status, as a possession of the emperor himself, outside the control of the provincial governor. This is argued on such grounds as the size of the basilica (town hall); London has the biggest north of the Alps, and there’s no justification for this size. But my feeling is that the size is dictated by decisions made during its construction. In what is a pattern found elsewhere in the empire, the basilica was to form one side of the new Forum; and the size of the new Forum was dictated by the decision to build it around the old Forum, and to keep the latter in use until the very last moment, when the new Forum was complete, and only then demolish it. We tell each other these stories, and the stories about ghostly legionaries seen in the sewers, their feet resting in mid-air, on what was the Roman ground level, because we don’t know as much about Roman London as we’d like, and we can’t see much of it. There are a few bits on display, such as the large chunk of the Roman Wall that can be seen at Tower Hill. But London is not like Rome or Athens – antiquity is not part of the fabric of the modern city. Nevertheless, you can still see bits here and there. The south-west corner of the Roman fort (the reason, it turns out, for the strange kink in the line of the Roman and Mediaeval City Wall around Cripplegate) can be seen in Noble Street, having been excavated in the 1940s by the Luftwaffe. A plaque on what was once Marks & Spencer but is now financial offices marks the location of the basilica, which with the Forum underlay what is now Leadenhall Market (one of the things that you find out about London is how the same areas have the same use through the eras). But don’t get fooled by the ‘Roman Bath’ in Strand Lane – it’s almost certainly Tudor. The strangest relic of Roman London is in the porch of St Magnus the Martyr church on Thames Street. This was where the mediaeval, and before that the Roman, London Bridge crossed the Thames. Hidden away, neglected, spattered with pigeon crap, there was for many years a Roman timber. This had been found in 1931, when the wharves of Roman London were excavated, when a building on King William Street was torn down. (The building, incidentally, had been the surface level entrance to King William Street Tube station, original northern terminus of the City and South London Railway. The replacement, Regis House, only lasted until the 1980s, when new excavations were possible.) When I led a group of students there in summer 2009, the timber had gone, removed into the church, where they are deciding what to do with it. It is now back, on a slightly better base, and with the worst of the pigeon crap removed. The timber from the wharves on Fish Street Hill, now in the court of the church of St Magnus the Martyr. Date c. 75 CE. London is a place of myths and legends and history, and little nooks and crannies that hide things you may never have known were there. You should explore them some time. TONY KEEN 30