Many considerations suggest the likelihood that the first Roman walled city was smaller in extent than it became at a later time. Roach Smith thought that this earlier city was confined to the east side of the Walbrook, the approach from London Bridge forming its centre. The great wall, according to him, was “probably a work of the later days of the Romano-British period.” With this view J. R. Green agrees, and argues that the wall was built in haste under Theodosius, when the attacks of Picts and Saxons made walls necessary for the security of British towns.[76] Henry of Huntingdon, writing early in the twelfth century, tells us that “tradition says that Helen, the illustrious daughter of Britain, surrounded London with the wall which is still standing.”
Gates.—Opposite the entrance to the city by the bridge was the North Gate, called Bishopsgate. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cæsar’s sword “Yellow Death” was buried here with a Briton who had been slain by it. This legend is at least enough to show that the gate was ancient at the beginning of the twelfth century. Bishopsgate is mentioned in Domesday: “The canons of St. Paul’s have ad portam episcopi ten cottages as in the time of King Edward.” Outside the gate the Erming Street stretched away to the north over the moor.
The East Gate—Aldgate (generally written Algate or Alegate)—is mentioned in the foundation charters of Holy Trinity Priory in 1108. Stow says he found it named in a charter given by King Edgar to the Cnihten Gild, but it seems that he founded this on a later legend which professed to recite the terms of such a charter. However, the Saxon Chronicle, giving an account of the dispute between the Confessor and Godwine in 1052, says that some of the Earl’s party gewendon ut æt Æst geate and got them to Eldulfsness (Walton-on-the-Naze). Mr. W. H. Stevenson, in an interesting note on personal names associated with town gates, cites an eleventh-century life of St. Edmund, in which it is called Ealsegate, and suggests that it may be named from one Ealh; the East Gate of Gloucester was called Ailesgate from Æthel.[77] A survey of Holy Trinity precinct made about 1592, and now at Hatfield, gives the plan of the gate as it then existed (possibly in part Roman), and a length of the city wall with its semicircular bastions.[78] Outside this gate the great Roman road reached away to Chelmsford and Colchester.
The principal West Gate is clearly Newgate, as standing opposite the East Gate and at the end of Cheap. Fabyan calls it West Gate. In the Pipe Roll for 1188 it is called Newgate, and it was then already a prison. Earlier in the twelfth century it seems to have been called Chamberlain’s Gate,[79] and this name is probably explained by an entry in Domesday, where it is noted that two cottagers at Holeburn were dependent on the sheriff of Middlesex in the time of the Confessor, and that William the Chamberlain rendered six shillings for his vineyard [there] to the King’s sheriff. That is, the Chamberlain held property outside Newgate in 1086, and the name Chamberlain’s Gate probably goes back as far. An eleventh-century text of a charter dated 889[80] describes a property, “Ceolmundingehaga, not far from Westgetum.” Possibly Coleman Street is named after the same citizen, who may be none other than the Ealdorman of Kent who died in 897. Outside this gate the Roman road ran west, as we have seen, to the Tyburn, beyond which it crossed the Watling Street.
Fig. 22.—From Matthew Paris, 1236.
Ludgate must have been reputed to be very ancient when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote, early in the twelfth century. He speaks of it as “the gate which to this day is called in the British tongue Porth-Lud and in the Saxon Ludesgata.” On it had been “a brazen man,” said to be Cadwaladr. Dr. Rhys thinks that Geoffrey was here using ancient tradition. There is no conclusive reason why the gate should not have preserved a British name and a Roman statue, and at least the legend has a legend’s worth. The next earliest mention I find of it is in the St. Paul’s documents, about the middle of the twelfth century.[81] Ludgate Street without the gate is spoken of not long after. A reference cited by Fabyan, however, probably takes us back to the days of the Conquest (see below, [p. 112]). The Strand, leading from Westminster past St. Clement Danes to Ludgate, must be an ancient street: it may indeed represent the earliest of all paths to London from the passage of the river by the great Watling Street. St. Clement’s Church, as we shall see, is pre-Conquest; Sir H. Ellis, in his introduction to Domesday, says a charter by the Conqueror refers to St. Clement Danes “in the Strand,” but the actual words are not cited (vol. ii. p. 143). A street outside the western walls—“Aldwych”—is frequently mentioned from the twelfth century; it is represented by Wych Street and by Drury Lane; it turned north-west from the Strand and joined the great western highway at St. Giles, where a hospital came to be built in the Middle Ages. Lambard says Ludgate meant, in Saxon, a postern, and this meaning is found in the A.S. dictionaries. Mr. W. H. Stevenson has lately again suggested that this gate is called from a Ludd or Ludda, like Billingsgate from Billing, but on all the evidence we must conclude that the Saxon word for postern must hold the field, especially as the opposite gate in the east wall was called the Postern up to Stow’s time.
