Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts

by W. R. Lethaby

Where Christian merchants come and go.”

Tristram, c. 1175.

[3]. The substance of this chapter was read at the Society of Antiquaries about 1917, but it has not been printed before.

FIRST BRITISH CITIES.—Ancient cities were not planted down by an act of will, they sprang up on lines of communication as centres of control and commerce. On a geological map it appears that a chalk belt passes from Kent to Hampshire towards the south bank of the Thames. From the north bank another wide belt diverges to the north-east. The backbones of these chalk regions are the North Downs of Kent and the Chiltern Hills; they contain between them a long triangle of gravel drift and marsh flats through which the Thames flows to the sea. These downs, as we know to-day, when we find ourselves on them, are pre-eminently walking grounds, and they must have been the prehistoric ways of communication. “Primitive man traversed the ranges lengthways: in the valleys were forests almost impenetrable, whereas the backbone of each ridge would stand bald above the ocean of trees.” The oldest roads were “Ridge-ways.” On the high Wiltshire downs at, or near, a point where the southern system of downs converge, stands Stonehenge, and I cannot doubt that it was in some way conceived as being a centre and “capital” of the country. The Gauls recognised such a centre, or “omphalos,” near Chartres. Since writing this, I find that Sir C. Oman has said, “Britain must have had some focus corresponding to that for Gaul; possibly among the prehistoric monuments of Salisbury Plain.” Stonehenge, I may say in passing, is a monument of wrought stone set out with precision, and I cannot see how it can be earlier than about 500-700 B.C.

The ancient trackway along the Chilterns, known as the Ickneld Way, reached the Thames near Wallingford. Travellers going south and east from this point struck across the narrow space of low broken ground between the two chalk ranges by a short linking road. Silchester, the capital of an important Brito-Belgic tribe, lies on or near the course of such a road in a corn-bearing region. Silchester was the key of the old road system over the Thames fords. It is known to have been one of three most important pre-Roman British centres, and we may, I think, look on it as the first British city.

The British city of Verulamium lay to the south of the Ickneld Way, in the same great triangle between the two chalk regions which is here much wider. The rise of this centre suggests that a road linking the two chalk ranges had been found across the river valley much lower than Silchester. The later Roman Watling Street, directed straight on Verulam, formed such a link, and there are many reasons which suggests that some underlying British trackway must have been the cause why Verulam became important. Later, again, Colchester came to be the chief city. Possibly it was favoured as being more remote when the Romans should make an attack. It seems to have been named after the Celtic war-god, and this may be significant. (In Roman days as in mediæval, there was probably a ferry from Gravesend to Tilbury for direct access to Colchester from Kent. This seems to be suggested by the Peutinger roadmap.)

Origin of London.—By origin I mean the beginning of a development which led to the establishment of a port and commercial town. Doubtless the site may have been occupied by some dwellers in the Stone Age. For many centuries before the Roman conquest Britain had been in commercial relations with the Continent. Just before the conquest Verulam was the capital of the leading Celtic kingdom. This Brito-Belgic kingdom had its southern boundary along the Thames and its eastern at the Lea, and these are still boundaries of Middlesex. If this kingdom, with its capital some twenty miles inland, had any sea-borne trade, its port must have been on or near the site of London. It is even probable that this port was the cause of the pre-eminence of the little kingdom to which it belonged. The port was to Verulam what the Piræus was to Athens, Ostia to Rome, Dover to Canterbury, and Southampton to Winchester. London was doubtless the source of the wealth of King Cymbeline, and we might very well look on him as the founder.

Dr. Guest argued that London was founded as a Roman camp at the time of the Claudian conquest; but it is now agreed that the name is Celtic; and it must not be forgotten that London is and always was a port. When we first hear of London only seventeen years after the Claudian conquest, it was already, as Tacitus says, famous for the number of its merchants, and this must imply that it was a principal port. Dr. Haverfield, while admitting that the name is Celtic, went on to say: “The name Londinium, the place of Londinos, witnesses at most to nothing more than one wigwam or one barn.” This “at most” can only mean that every town presumably begins with one building; in London, however, the building is not likely to have been a barn amid the bare gravels, but rather a boatman’s house. Further evidence for the existence of a pre-Roman town is brought out by the large number of Celtic objects found on the site and in the neighbourhood, but they have never been properly catalogued as a group. Dr. Haverfield allowed that three pieces of imported Samian ware in the British Museum might belong to the period A.D. 10-40. “We might then conclude that through the influx of Roman traders London had been noted as a suitable trading centre a few years previous to the Roman conquest; but the minute dating of these potsherds is not easy, and we must leave the question of pre-Roman London unsettled. Either there was no pre-Roman London, or it was an undeveloped settlement, which may have been on the south bank of the Thames” (Journ. Rom. Studies, vol. i. p. 146). The evidence of such early imports is greatly strengthened by other discoveries at Silchester. Mr. May, speaking of the early “Samian” ware, says: “The Silchester examples are of much significance. Together with the contemporary Belgic imitations they prove that the inhabitants of the capital of the Atrebati were importing costly luxuries in considerable quantities from Italy and Northern Gaul at the beginning of the Christian era.” Early Belgic pottery has been found in London as well as “Samian,” and there is in the British Museum a wine jar of an early type found in Southwark. Some British pottery was doubtless made in Londinium itself before the Roman conquest. Mr. Lambert has described specimens of coarse wares in Archæologia. Of one of these he writes: “Bead-rimmed pot, coarse grey ware, irregularly burnt. A pre-Roman type, surviving into the Roman period.” He dates it A.D. 50-80, I suppose thinking that it cannot have really been pre-Roman.

London above bridge is an inland city, the English capital; below bridge it is a great seaport. In a description of England, published in 1753, I find this: “That part of the Thames, which is properly the harbour, is called the Pool, and begins at the turning out of Limehouse Reach and extends to the Custom House quays. In this compass I had the curiosity to count the ships, and I have found about 2000 sail of all sorts of vessels that really go to sea.” In a twelfth-century rhyme on English towns are the words, “London for ships most.” Bede describes London as a great ship port. The city is placed just where the Thames widened into an estuary. At Battersea the river was little wider two thousand years ago than at present; it overflowed wide spaces of marsh about Westminster and again contracted by London. Her high ground came close to the water on the north, and on the Southwark side there was only a narrow margin of low ground. Directly to the east of London was the low land called in the Middle Ages “Wapping Marsh” (Middlesex Feet of Fines). In the Pepys collection at Cambridge I have seen an engraved plan of “Lands by Wall or Wapping Marsh, 1683: seven acres of land in which the millponds and ditches did all over dispersedly lie.” Stow tells of Limehouse marshes being “drowned.” Before the lower Thames was embanked the river must have been two or three miles wide, at every tide, a little below London, where the considerable little river, the Lea, runs into it. The higher ground of the site of London is in the angle formed by the Thames and Lea, and is the extremity of the northern hills, Highgate and Islington. From the hills several streams flowed through deeply excavated beds into the Thames. The most considerable of these was the Fleet; the smaller Walbrook intersected the site of the city. Conyers in his MS. at the British Museum noted how the Fleet was embanked in 1675 with material taken from old St. Paul’s, “to narrow-in the spreading breadth of Fleet River.... The waters overflowed these parts in the old times.” The general topographical conditions were well observed by Drayton in Polyolbion—The city was built on a rising bank of gravel and sand, surrounded by lower ground: the tide flowing up the Lea and Fleet prevented the town from growing too long: to the north and south of the Thames were ranges of hills: “And such a road for ships scarce all the world commands.”

Way to the Port.—The men who first came to the site of London must have come from the higher ground of Islington and Highgate; they did not cross the Lea or the Fleet. Before some engineering was done the natural way was from the direction of Verulam. Now, an ancient road lies along this course from St. Albans to Aldersgate. As it approaches London it passes between the Walbrook and the Fleet, pointing towards what the old tablet near St. Paul’s says is the highest land in the city. The Walbrook where it fell into the Thames must have had steep clean gravel banks containing a tidal inlet—a perfect landing-place where small ancient ships could be brought alongside. This creek, afterwards known as Dowgate, must have been the original port of London. Along the old road wine, pottery and bronzes were carried into the interior, and corn was brought for export. Dowgate is known as a port for foreign ships from Saxon days (Round’s Commune of London). It is especially interesting to find from Stow that in the fifteenth century the Abbot of St. Albans had a quay by Dowgate. (Old writers supposed that “Dow” represented the British word for water; recent scholars equate it with Dove; but even so there is the curious analogy with Dover and such like place-names.) The Roman gates of London, of course, opened on important routes, and “the street from Aldersgate to Islington” is mentioned in the twelfth century (Middlesex Feet of Fines). Stow says: “From the further end of Aldersgate Street straight north to the Bar is called Goswell Street. Beyond leaving the Charterhouse on the left hand the way stretcheth up towards Iseldon.” Again on the old woodcut, usually called Aggas’s map, the street out of Aldersgate is inscribed “the way to St. Albans.” That excellent old book, John Nelson’s History of Islington, carries the account of this road forward, and he thought that it was Roman. He quotes a passage from Norden, to the effect that it passed east of Highgate through Tollington Lane to Crouch End, Hornsey Park, Muswell Hill, etc. “Tolentone,” he points out, is mentioned in Domesday. This road is laid down on old maps. Recent modifications at Islington may be made out by comparing maps given by Nelson and by Lewis in 1842.